The New York Times reviewed Strings, the new play by Carole Buggé that opened last week at the 78th Street Lab Theater in Manhattan.  Anita Gates called its premise "amusing if slightly strained": a train ride conversation that exposes a love triangle among three scientists, two cosmologists and a particle physicist.  I have yet to see the play but I'm looking forward to it.  Shveta and I intended to go last Saturday night, but I made the mistake of waiting until the morning of the performance to book reservations.  Needless to say, the show was sold out that night and we've been obliged to wait until the first week in January.  Once I see Strings, look for my two cents here.

Peter Woit, a mathematician at my alma mater, Columbia University, mentioned Scriblerus Press and our upcoming string theory anthology in the December 16th entry of his widely read blog Not Even Wrong.  Professor Woit just published a book called Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.  I have yet to read it but it's sitting on my bookshelf, along with Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, which critiques string theory from a different angle.  It too sits on my bookshelf.  I've got a chapter of the thesis due in a couple weeks so I've had to be somewhat tactical in my reading choices lately.  But I plan to tackle a stack of popularizations and science fiction that makes use of string theory in February.  In the meantime, I've been up to my eyeballs in theories of intertextuality, and the likes of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and N. Katherine Hayles.

Of late, string theory has been the poster child of choice in the ongoing debate within the certain philosophical circles concerning the boundary between science and pseudo-science.  While an interesting and arguably valuable controversy, it is only tangentially relevant to my research.  I'm not so concerned about weighing in on the debate over string theory's status as science.  Rather, I'm looking at how string theory imagery gets adapted by popular culture.  Lately, I've been trying to hone my methodology and develop a useful frame of reference and set of theoretical tools for analyzing a key transaction, namely, the leap of imagery from popularizations to particular literary texts.

One idea I've been ruminating on is what I can only call a curious phenomenon in the adaptation of scientific tropes in literature.  It’s a kind of reverse Comtean positivism.  Auguste Comte, the nineteenth century French philosopher, is considered the father of sociology and coiner of the term ‘positivism’.  He argued that civilization progresses through three fundamental stages of development: from religion to metaphysics to positivism, an empirically based inquiry into and command over the natural world.  Each stage has a political complement.  What I’m seeing in the adaptation of string theory is a kind of reverse process where the ostensibly positivist theory (at least in terms of its mathematical rigour and prospect of experimental validation) gets transformed into a kind of metaphysics in popularizations that, in its fictive adaptation, ultimately becomes religion-like.  I mean religion here in a loose sense more in keeping with it etymological roots: as a kind of communal re-reading and social binding.  This reversal clearly undermines the Comtean (and Enlightenment) notion of historical progress.  I would take a more Serres-like stance and argue that the so-called ‘primitive’ and the ‘modern’, along with everything in between, co-exist simultaneously within a contemporary temporality.  Historical time in this sense has not so much a linear arc but is multiplist.

Clearly, it’s still a rough idea that needs much more thought.  Oh, by the way, check out this interesting movie clip--it's a virtual microscope that zooms down to the Planck scale, the realm of strings.

Comments (1)

po wow: ... Bienvenue à GameSavor à l'achat po wow 1 August 04, 2010

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