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For those of you in Portland, Maine or thereabouts--I'm presenting a paper on Thursday afternoon at this year's SLSA conference. Here are the details: SLSA ’07: CODE
Biological and algorithmic, protector of secrets and porthole to mysteries, universal and singular, code is an invitation to thought. Code can be “wet” (genetic, organic, human), “dry” (digital, mathematical, logical), something in-between, neither, or both (linguistic, symbolic, religious, moral, legal). Code is the meeting ground of strange bedfellows, the cipherer and decipherer, the domain of law and its subversion, communication and privacy. Code is about patterns, sequences, systems, translations, substitutions. It can bind, trick, and free. Modern technologies are affording us more and more keys to unlock nature’s code and more opportunities to manipulate it.
SLSA ’07 features two plenary sessions and twelve regular sessions with up to seven concurrent panels. The conference will be held in Portland, Maine, USA MAP . The first session will begin at 4pm on Thursday, 1 November, 2007. The wrap-up session ends at 1pm on Sunday, 4 November.
Plenary Speakers
N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles
Brian Massumi, Université de Montréal
The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts fosters the multi-disciplinary study of the relations among literature and language, the arts, science, medicine, and technology. My paper: Session 02 | Thursday, 1 November | 5.45 – 7.15 02.h Somerset | Rhetoric of Science “Substantiating Strings: String Theory Popularizations and the Domestication of the Planck Scale”
Invented in the late sixties, string theory has grown to dominate the field of theoretical physics by promising to reconcile Einstein’s general relativity, which describes the realm of the very large, with quantum theory, that of the very small. It posits the string as the basic constituent of both matter and energy: a tiny open or closed filament vibrating in multiple dimensions, whose tension determines the type of subatomic particle it manifests. The scale of the string is 10-33 centimeters, the Planck scale, a realm well beyond the capacity of contemporary particle collider technologies to plumb. Thus lacking in prospects for experimental validation, string theory currently stakes its legitimacy on its mathematical consistency. Simultaneously, since the late eighties, string theory popularizations—nonfiction texts authored primarily by string theorists themselves—have come out with increasing regularity. These popularizations aim to explain the theory to a lay audience, in part by introducing its key concepts stripped free of the constituting mathematics. Paradoxically then, since popularizations omit precisely the content that would grant the theory whatever scientific authority it hopes to claim, popularizations effectively present not physics but metaphysics, an imaginary that must resort to literary techniques to legitimize its objectivity. This paper will examine three examples of string images from popularizations and the strategies the texts employ to substantiate them. Using concepts from Gaston Bachelard and Michèle Le Doeuff, I argue that these string theory popularizations substantiate the string as an object through its contextualization within what I call a ‘domesticated mesocosm’, an imagined space that juxtaposes micro- and macrocosms by analogy through graspable objects on human scales, objects laden with affect. As such, these string theory popularizations transform the utterly alien into something approachably familiar.
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