A second occasion of disquiet is the complexity
JBML thln 89b (Martin):
OF THE ESSENTIAL GOAL ~
introducing a highly abstract and technical aspect of contemporary physics in a manner sufficiently comprehensible to non-specialists that it may be used as evocative metaphor in the wider context of human experience.
The first part of this goal, translating the physics into English, is made difficult by the compactness and efficiency of its indigenous ma-thematical language, which naturally unpacks into irritatingly wordy prose that can obscure its own meaning.
The second part, extracting from this language a useful vocabulary for the discussion of time in human experience, runs a contrary risk - the historic tendency to endow scientific ideas with exaggerated authority, in matters outside their natural context and domain of ap-plication. Social Darwinism and the mechanistic view imposed on the world by enlightenment thinkers, eager to duplicate the success of Newton's mechanics, have long been textbook examples of the perversion of scientific principle (a formal summary of causal relation-ships among highly abstracted representations of simple inanimate objects) into a crude interpretation of social behavior. Even today, despite Marx's ancient warning about the likely origin of "the ruling ideas," the present day temptation to reduce all human experience to microbiology & quantum mechanics is apparently immune to postmodern skepticism, even among many new age thinkers. But my borrowing from biological science, characterizing an idea as "immune" to skepticism or "resistant" to change, has no greater force than using the language of art to describe an experience as impressionistic or surreal.
For this reason I repeatedly emphasized that discoveries regarding the temporal subtleties of elementary particle interactions may have the power to undermine the existing moral imperative to view time as one-dimensional, and may encourage a wider reconsideration of traditional and intuitive conceptions of time, but do not imply that people can or must behave like elementary particles, temporally, or otherwise.
OF THE ESSENTIAL GOAL ~
introducing a highly abstract and technical aspect of contemporary physics in a manner sufficiently comprehensible to non-specialists that it may be used as evocative metaphor in the wider context of human experience.
The first part of this goal, translating the physics into English, is made difficult by the compactness and efficiency of its indigenous ma-thematical language, which naturally unpacks into irritatingly wordy prose that can obscure its own meaning.
The second part, extracting from this language a useful vocabulary for the discussion of time in human experience, runs a contrary risk - the historic tendency to endow scientific ideas with exaggerated authority, in matters outside their natural context and domain of ap-plication. Social Darwinism and the mechanistic view imposed on the world by enlightenment thinkers, eager to duplicate the success of Newton's mechanics, have long been textbook examples of the perversion of scientific principle (a formal summary of causal relation-ships among highly abstracted representations of simple inanimate objects) into a crude interpretation of social behavior. Even today, despite Marx's ancient warning about the likely origin of "the ruling ideas," the present day temptation to reduce all human experience to microbiology & quantum mechanics is apparently immune to postmodern skepticism, even among many new age thinkers. But my borrowing from biological science, characterizing an idea as "immune" to skepticism or "resistant" to change, has no greater force than using the language of art to describe an experience as impressionistic or surreal.
For this reason I repeatedly emphasized that discoveries regarding the temporal subtleties of elementary particle interactions may have the power to undermine the existing moral imperative to view time as one-dimensional, and may encourage a wider reconsideration of traditional and intuitive conceptions of time, but do not imply that people can or must behave like elementary particles, temporally, or otherwise.
14 mrt 2013 - bewerkt op 17 mrt 2013
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