Clara Janés. La poética cuántica o la física de la poesía

Este texto plantea la situación de las dos culturas elaborada por Charles Percy Snow en su conferencia de 1959 y elabora sobre la noción de la transdisciplinariedad como acercamiento metodológico a la poesía de Clara Janés, haciendo hincapié en la física como su referente analógico más frecuente. Los poemarios de Janés giran en torno a dos alternativas, la física clásica y sus certezas, causalidad y determinismo, por un lado, y la incertidumbre, indeterminismo e irreversibilidad de la física cuántica, por otro, alternativas articuladas en el texto en torno a las figuras de Erwin Schrödinger con el determinismo de su función de onda y Niels Bohr, arquitecto de la cuántica y de su principio de la complementariedad. El recurso poético de esta autora es mantenerse en el estado flotante de la paradoja cuántica para sostener el potencial creativo y evitar el colapso que, como sucede con la observación en la física cuántica, causaría la preferencia por una de las opciones.

A Feral Atlas for the Anthropocene: An Interview with Anna L. Tsing

Anna L. Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tsing’s work brings together many different contexts relevant to the natural sciences, environmentalism, political economy, anthropology, and philosophy (to name a few). Tsing was awarded a Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark to explore many different manifestations and ways of thinking about the Anthropocene. This interview focuses on a project called Feral Atlas, a transdisciplinary project that examines the effects of human infrastructure projects and the “feral life” that has taken shape as a result. The conversation took place via Skype in July of 2019, with Jesse in Saskatchewan, Canada, and Anna in California, USA.

Thinking with the world – to explore the becoming of phenomena

This article discusses how it is possible to think with the world in educational research. How can this thinking with the world generate knowledge about the becoming of phenomena? To answer this question this paper undertakes a diffractive reading of selected texts from Niels Bohr, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres. This diffractive reading reveals that the world becomes with itself contributing to an internal principle or an inner self-differentiation. This means that all phenomena can be understood as related to the world in one way or another. This paper contends that the researcher body is important to investigations of the becoming of phenomena with the world, therefore a haptic sensorium is developed as a means to visualize bodily affects and to recognize limit values to the world, for example, background noise. The article concludes with a discussion about creating knowledge of this process as a rhizome. The article attempts to illustrate that thinking with the world can generate new knowledge to understand the becoming of phenomena, which can contribute to the development of educational research.

A seismologist's beginnings: Inge Lehmann's experiences during the 1910s and '20s as a woman in science

Celebrated for her 1936 discovery of the Earth’s inner core, seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888–1993) has often been portrayed as a trailblazing female scientist, unwilling to accept discrimination in her pursuit of an academic profession. Yet, a close reading of her experiences suggests that Lehmann faced severe restrictions early on in her career. Only by being pragmatic about her situation did she successfully establish herself as a professional scientist. Having attended a progressive co-educational school before studying mathematics at the University of Copenhagen, Lehmann had little direct experience of gender discrimination. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she entered Cambridge University in 1911, along with Niels Bohr, but found herself unprepared for the gendered social segregation practiced there. Exhausted from overwork, Lehman abandoned her studies and returned to Denmark. Over the next six years, she came to understand how severely her gender limited her career options. In 1918, Inge Lehman returned to the University of Copenhagen to complete her studies, and became a teaching assistant for a professor of actuarial science in 1923. Because her chances for obtaining a scientific post at the university were slim, she joined Professor Niels Erik Nørlund in his efforts to reform the Danish Geodetic Service. In 1928, Professor Nørlund rewarded Lehmann's voluntary change of academic discipline from mathematics to seismology by appoint her as Director of the Seismology Department.

THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN SECURITY BEFORE THE 1994 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT. INQUIRY INTO ITS EVOLUTION DURING THE COLD WAR

It is usually considered that the concept of human security was introduced by the United Nations Development Programme with the publication in 1994 of the Human Development Report. Such a perspective on the emergence of this concept denies its existence during the Cold War and places its point of origin in the aftermath of that confrontation. However, there is also the opinion that human security was a term used during the Cold War, but that the meaning then attached to it lacks any relevancy for the meaning it has in the 1994 Human Development Report. This article contributes to the assessment of the viability of these different opinions by first exploring the use of the concept of human security by Niels Bohr in an open letter from 1950, and by Sithu U Thant, in a statement made in 1971, and secondly by comparing the meaning they gave to it with its meaning from the 1994 Human Development Report. It is concluded that both Bohr and U Thant operated with a concept of human security narrower in scope than the concept of human security which is to be found in the 1994 Human Development Report and, based on this finding, that the evolution of this concept started long before 1994.

The Fundamental Discussion between Newton, Maxwell, Bohr and Einstein

Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein lived in fundamentally different time frames. Newton in the 16th century, Maxwell in the 18th century, Bohr in the 20th century and Einstein was physically living in the 20th century but he was his time far ahead and with his concept of a “curved space-time continuum” more connected to the 21st century. An interesting question would be: “Who would win the fundamental discussion about the interaction between “Gravity and Light” comparing the 4 fundamentally different time-frames? Newton, Maxwell, Bohr or Einstein? Newton with the fundamental “3rd law of equilibrium between the forces (force-densities)”. Maxwell who had built the “Mathematical Foundation for Electrodynamics”, Bohr (together with Heisenberg) who overruled Einstein during the 5th Solvay Conference in 1927 with the fundamental concept of “Quantum Mechanical Probability” or Einstein (his time-frame far ahead) who postulated a “Curved Space-Time Continuum” within a gravitational field. It is still the question who was right? Newton, Maxwell, Bohr or Einstein? This article will discuss the interaction between “Gravity and Light” based on a deductive discussion based on the fundamental arguments and way of thinking within that corresponding time-frame.

Peeling graphite layer by layer reveals the charge exchange dynamics of ions inside a solid

Over seventy years ago, Niels Bohr described how the charge state of an atomic ion moving through a solid changes dynamically as a result of electron capture and loss processes, eventually resulting in an equilibrium charge state. Although obvious, this process has so far eluded direct experimental observation. By peeling a solid, such as graphite, layer by layer, and studying the transmission of highly charged ions through single-, bi- and trilayer graphene, we can now observe dynamical changes in ion charge states with monolayer precision. In addition we present a first-principles approach based on the virtual photon model for interparticle energy transfer to corroborate our findings. Our model that uses a Gaussian shaped dynamic polarisability rather than a spatial delta function is a major step in providing a self-consistent description for interparticle de-excitation processes at the limit of small separations.

Einstein’s Local Realism vs. Bohr’s Instrumental Anti-Realism: The Debate Between Two Titans in the Quantum Theory Arena

The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the historical debate between materialism and idealism, in the field of Philosophy, extends, in new clothes, to the field of Quantum Physics characterized by realism and anti-realism. For this, we opted for a debate, also historical, between the realism of Albert Einstein, for whom reality exists regardless of the existence of the knowing subject, and Niels Bohr, for whom we do not have access to the ultimate reality of the matter, unless conditioning it to the existence of an observer endowed with rationality, position adopted in the Interpretation of Complementarity (1927) – posture that was expanded in 1935 when Bohr assumed a “relationalist” conception, according to which the quantum state is defined by the relationship between the quantum object and the entire measuring device. This is an extremely important debate, as it further consolidates the results of nascent Quantum Mechanics, guaranteeing Bohr the leadership of the orthodoxy based on the interpretation of complementarity. Here, when dealing with Quantum Theory, we will not make any distinction between the terms Quantum Physics, Quantum Theory or Quantum Mechanics. The entire discussion will be held under the name “Quantum Theory”. Theory that tries to analyze and describe the behavior of physical systems of reduced dimensions, close to the sizes of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. We hope that the reader will appreciate the genius of these two titans in this field of Physics when they magnificently formulate the arguments that support the object of their defenses.

Einstein’s Local Realism vs. Bohr’s Instrumental Anti-Realism: The Debate Between Two Titans in the Quantum Theory Arena

The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the historical debate between materialism and idealism, in the field of Philosophy, extends, in new clothes, to the field of Quantum Physics characterized by realism and anti-realism. For this, we opted for a debate, also historical, between the realism of Albert Einstein, for whom reality exists regardless of the existence of the knowing subject, and Niels Bohr, for whom we do not have access to the ultimate reality of the matter, unless conditioning it to the existence of an observer endowed with rationality, position adopted in the Interpretation of Complementarity (1927) – posture that was expanded in 1935 when Bohr assumed a “relationalist” conception, according to which the quantum state is defined by the relationship between the quantum object and the entire measuring device. This is an extremely important debate, as it further consolidates the results of nascent Quantum Mechanics, guaranteeing Bohr the leadership of the orthodoxy based on the interpretation of complementarity. Here, when dealing with Quantum Theory, we will not make any distinction between the terms Quantum Physics, Quantum Theory or Quantum Mechanics. The entire discussion will be held under the name “Quantum Theory”. Theory that tries to analyze and describe the behavior of physical systems of reduced dimensions, close to the sizes of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. We hope that the reader will appreciate the genius of these two titans in this field of Physics when they magnificently formulate the arguments that support the object of their defenses.

Narrative Quantum Cosmology in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen

Twentieth-century drama has made the stage a site for reflecting on science. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, considered by many as one of the most striking contributions to “science plays,” portrays the elusive yet crucial short meeting of the two pillars of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in the autumn of 1941. The play employs ‘real’ scientists as characters that recurrently refer to and explain their scientific ideas such as uncertainty and complementarity, recognized as the Copenhagen Interpretation. Adopting the approach of possible worlds theory, this article analyses the concept of ‘possible worlds’ as projected in Copenhagen in light of the idea that physics itself has proposed a proliferation of parallel universes (multiverse). In fact, our main thesis is that the play offers an alternate history and brings about a myriad of counterfactuals that are tested as “drafts.”