Trying to Understand: Meeting the Universe Halfway

by Karen Barad

Chapter 1

A failure to identify the objective referent Dante treads the road of representing, His forest is not neccessarily our own. Represent, no. I challenge you to refer: interfere, Intra-fere, experiment, hone in on a referent -- the objective referent we are seeking. So pushy, my word 'interfere' - even inside - 'Intra-fere'. May I criticize? Not really. Shall 'critical' be rehabilitated to mean - something that doesn't judge, but points to action, describes the string that ropes in. Realism is often saddled with essentialism Realism of entities uses the representers belief that entities are individual - original particular separate with determined properties like constant font-size. Entity has font-size of 14 pixels, That E may differ as screens change, This E at .75 em or three-quarters of what the reader chooses to read, forms a relationship within the phenomena of page. Real, inside our phenomena, is relational. 'Words" and "things" are not taken for granted, their correspondence is no matching game where winning is 'truth' without a neccessary asterisk *according to the game. After Structuralism, things and words allow ignoring the winning when the game's truth is not the truth we are seeking.

Chapter 2

Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies, and Entanglements That Matter

Newtonian physics is a great approximation of the material world, but quantum mechanics works for all. The world is not all billiard balls, rolling predictably from cues, vectored off to pre-determined pockets. Newton's light reflects. We see it in the mirror. Through some raindrops, it refracts. Oh, let's just use diffraction from dawn to civil twilight. October 2023 sunlight from the moon reversed. Moon rolled between us downing tree leaf shadows' crescents over lapping suns.

2a.Diffractions:

See the differences that matter

Differences Diffract Contingencies Entangle Relations that matter Reflect mirrors Represents As i accurately predict, You are not talking about my B.L.M.* If i was grammatical Would I believe it? 'Just put a sensor there And you know its momentum' Any sensor of momentum** Reports movement. that's it and Position can not be in movement. If you sense momentum, no way you have position. Reflect what you've memorized. Diffract is what our eye does, reports differences between what's seen and the brain's stored knowledge.

* Bureau of Land Management

** momentum = speed * mass

Chapter 3:

Quantum Physics and the Nature of Knowledge and Reality

Diffracting is uncertain or indetermined The first sounds better We went with No. 1 No. 2 is more accurate - but not a real word for Scrabble purposes. Undetermined. Not determinable. There is a reality - it's not uncertain. It's just not in the bag. Art is the solution, when I learn something? Realism not representation Not positivist or deterministic As is. As we live with it. B. Maniac : Androids return asking why? Why was I made? you are sure they say Stop asking the creator, I say, Do what improves the world, caring for others is not the only goal. Love not the only answer. Remember the squishing ball In cartoons, Wiley Coyote's resilience? Both are phenomena Their colors and stripes, position Or Momentum soaked in action. 1. Being a realist, I know that coyote 2. is a drawing 3. by a cartoonist 4. who calls his repeated figure by a name C. Causality It is hardly reasonable to endow nature with volition in the ordinary sense while on the other hand, it is certainly not possible for the observer to influence the events which may appear under the conditions he or she has arranged - Niels Bohr Nature does not have volition; Observers prayers or shadows do not determine results.

Chapter 4: Agential Realism

How Material-Discursive Practices Matter

Not the images I, the art major, was required to draw in physics lab. Rather, apparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time, but iteratively reconfigure space-time-matter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming. Not popular science. Spacetimematter is only a word I can imagine in German. Living well is not just being kind; If you can't be nice, offer your husband's time. Apparatuses divide the world between matter and what doesn't matter. Like a snapshot, on repeat Actor responds to the differences. Outside intra-actions of actors Words are indeterminate. Matter is an actor in its own becoming. Objectivity becomes possible when agent separates while Being with the apparatus inside - And not drawn with a outline. The results are reproducible. Agency is doing or being in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices — iterative reconfiguring of topological manifolds of space time matter relations -- through the dynamics of intra-activity. Agency is about changing possibilities of change entailed in reconfiguring material discursive apparatus of bodily production, including the boundary articulations and exclusions that are marked by those practices in the enactment of a causal structure. p. 178 Doing amid (whatever) Is real, as the what, when, where Only doing improves eyes' sight. To know differences, arrange And wait to see what to do next. Matters not who or what but that It does x. The results are reproducible.

Chapter 5. Getting Real (Bohr Explains Quantum Physics)

Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality

“The feeling of volition and the demand for causality are equally indispensable elements in the relation between subject and object which forms the core of the problem of knowledge“ -- Niels Bohr

An egg is fried. When we eat it, and savor taste We are not considering parents. We hardly think of its vitality Or the reason it arrived here. We judge the method of cooking The smell, texture, somewhat its color Hoping there is no sound to hear But the mmmm of umami, no bitterness, sweet as freshness is. If my egg is zapped of its vitality. I have no concern for how it tastes, but still care about volition and causality. Some feminist statement startles me and I scoff outloud. My sister says 'what?' 'My book, I say. She can only imagine it was her.

: Smith and Kats (93) warn against uncritical embrace of spatial metaphors, particularly when many of the spatial metaphors that feminist and other theorist rely on are rooted in a modernist representation of space as absolute. Presenting a very interesting sketch of the history of its modernist conception, they argue that “this space is quite literally the space of capitalist, patriarchy, and racist imperialism“. Footnote 2 of next chapter.

Chapter 6: Spacetime re(con)figuring

Wore the cloak of woven jute Projecting against the force Of metaphors. My space is not absolute but real without a doubt, to my entangled ones.

Chapter 7

Specific material configurations give definition to the notion of the property in question Results from object, interacting with measuring device produces determinant values for the corresponding (measured) quantity, leaving the complementary quantities indetermined. Upon measurement, we find a definitive value for the quantity measured; Superpositions represent indeterminate states of being. Mixtures are often described statistically, maybe 50% or 90% this and that, Probability is not connected with quantum indeterminacy. Statistics mark our ignorance. Each particle has properties that are determinant properties, but we may be uncertain about the values of the particular properties for any given particle. Interference is an objective mark of a superposition. An entanglement is a generalization of a superposition to the case of more than one particle. Superposition is potential to being in more than one state. Like addition of amplitudes. A2. Shall we stop saying Force = MA. Billiard balls still bump together, eyes anticipate a new position, momentum as expected - unless cue ball is made of feathers. Impact could be exchange of momentums but we don't see balls as heroes With powers of hand shaking Or the assholery of taking all the acceleration. Classical terms have force of years of culture. New ones have not yet been mined sufficiently. B. Bohr saves objectivity Humans are parts of nature Creating names like naturals Humans are special envoys Sent out to secure the grounds Of objectivity in their own language. C. Rasputin Goes to Palestine Entanglement shows superposition exists. Not the mixture of Russian pilgrims with the residents of Paletine - separate entities - but the pilgrims entwine in community where with or without Rasputin: The possibility - the probability -- of more than one position exists. The mystic himself interacts with relics and holy sites - so Newtonian. Classical. When the truth of what you say Cannot be determined We must reinvent the measuring apparatuses or call it false. The measure of fiction is the expansion of imagination created: f_(i) = m * imagination Work = fiction times displacement Power is work over time. Is there a wave function for the universe? The world cannot be measured quantumly Because we cannot observe outside it Nyet, ney, ney. The observer is always already part of the experiment.

Chapter 8

Becoming, Mattering

In 2024 the nano technology market is 68 billion dollars. “Studies estimate that the world nano technology annual market could reach more" than 1 trillion dollars by 2019. “In 2004 George Bush signed a 3.7 billion dollar nano technology funding package." - Footnote 18

Apendix A

Notes on the Poem: Cascade Experiment by Alice Fulton: “With its ethical-OT-epistemic attention to our responsibilities, not only for what we know, but for what may come to be. A cascade in Fulton's sense is not a serial chain of consequences, an inevitability set in motion by some initial act, but an iterative reconfiguring of possibilities entailed in our passional advances towards the universe.“ --Barad Nov 5, 2024 Read the poem again and ask me what I think, at 7p.m.

Prologue

At the time of drawing a series of screws I made a chamber wherein all My notes to a book called “Epistemology” Were suspended, colored, made material. The problem of unknowing something you know If it's remembered or recorded wrong That will become irrelevant When the apparatus is remade And what you knew and know again Generates more imagination Imagination = potential * (E *(f{verifability/t})) Though, thought is not faster than the speed of light

When we Cease to Understand the World

Notes on Verdure Terrible

Verdure Terrible - the original Spanish title P82. Came to believe dreams were not proper to human beings, but missives from an external entity, he called Lavie who sent them to allow us to recognize our true identities 1. For more than two decades, he kept a log of his evenings, the key to dreams which allowed him to understand the dreamers nature 2. La rêveiur n'est autre que Dieu 3. Next year could you? Write a novel of my Philosophie But as fiction coming from the mouths Of poor dead Werner Heisenburg or My paranoid niece or bipolar Friend with no analytical ability Or my artist husband. Its relationship to the truth Is irrelevant, Readers want to know god; you, to feel the wonder of mathematics