Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and MeaningMeeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science. |
From inside the book
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... ment , recognition , and loving attention , is not a state that can be achieved once and for all . There are no solutions ; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting , each intra - action , so that we ...
... ment . Frayn argues that since there is no way in principle to get around the limits of our knowledge , and we are therefore forever blocked from having any knowledge about someone's motives , it is not possible to make any objective ...
... ment is that we have no ground to make such a determination . ) Significantly , the journalist Thomas Powers's rendition is based on the discredited thesis of the Swiss - German journalist Robert Jungk . Initially published in German ...
... ment between Bohr and Heisenberg concerning Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.14 The nature of the difference between their views is not clearly laid out in the play , but it can be summarized as follows : For Bohr , what is at issue ...
... ment . Indeed , I argue that diffraction is not merely about differences , and certainly not differences in any absolute sense , but about the entangled nature of differences that matter . Significantly , difference is tied up with ...
Contents
Part II Intraactions Matter | 95 |
Part III Entanglements and Reconfigurations | 187 |
Notes | 405 |
References | 477 |
Index | 493 |