File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-10-10.144, message 15


From: Goodchild P <p.goodchild-AT-ucsm.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: quantum physics
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 96 18:24:00 BST



Hi,

(why the fuck am I poking my nose in here?)

Guattari's (its reads like his style) remark on WP 129:

>"Heisenberg's demon measures exactly an objective state of affairs that
>leaves the respective position of two of its particles outside of the field
>of its actualization, the number of independent variables being reduced and
>the values of the coordinates having the same probability." P.129 wp

seems to me like a passing comment.  Certainly, with DandG's division of 
knowledge, they are not trying to make an intervention in physics.  It's an 
interesting conceptual combination of relativity and quantum mechanics - 
held together in the concept of 'reference'.

But I do have problems getting my head round their philosophy of science, 
although it does have interesting possibilities - and it seems to me to come 
down to this: scientists do not, as a whole, confine their thought to a 
plane of reference constituted by relations between functives and variables. 
 Instead, there seems to me to be vast amounts of metaphysics in science 
(and Hawking and others have some very bad theology) which is inseparable 
>from it - indeed, it is necessary for applying (or referring) the Maths to 
something.  (Only a devout DandGer could do without it - by relying on 
philosophy.)  And the metaphysics will determine which theory, paradigm, and 
functives dominate - so the phenomenalism of the Copenhagen school is both a 
metaphysical postulate, and therefore subject to philosophical critique, and 
an application of Maths.

So this is a swipe at Bohr.

But there are ontological approaches to Heisenberg, of course, such as 
Penrose's exposition of a standard view, and Stapp, without going as far as 
Bohm or Laszlo, into a different kind of metaphysics.  I think Prigogine and 
Stengers are the route that Guattari is following.  Nevertheless, to speak 
of partial observers is a kind of move that is relevant to physics as well 
as philosophy.

How well can the divisions between science, philosophy, and art specified in 
WIP be maintained?

And if they do break down, might Deleuze's 'physics of intensive quantities' 
have immense relevance for contemporary science - as a much more 
sophisticated version of Bohm (who unashamedly wandered into a kind of 
popular philosophy)?  So does the quote express a transcendental critique, a 
hope for a science purified of uncritical metaphysics, now content with the 
'truth of the relative'?

I've had some ideas in this direction myself, although I never get time to 
develop them, and then Ervin Laszlo (The Creative Cosmos) got there first 
with many of them.

Why did I ever give up physics for theology?

Please let me know what you think about all this - do DandG interfere in 
physics, or not?

Phil


   

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