in quantum physics, Heisenberg's demon does not express the impossibility of measuring both the speed and the position of a particle on the grounds of a subjective interference of the measure with the measured, but it 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. ...Perspectivism, or scientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative, that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders according to the values it extracts from them in its system of coordinates ...
The differences within physics between wave and particle theories of matter, the indeterminacy principle discovered by Heisenberg, Einstein's relativity theory, all are accommodations to the impossibility of arriving at a unified field theory, one in which the ``anomaly'' of difference for a theory which posits identity may be resolved without challenging the presuppositions of science itself.For further development of these ideas, see Aronowitz (1988a, 524-525, 533).
I may perhaps here remind you of the extent to which in certain societies the roles of men and women are reversed, not only regarding domestic and social duties but also regarding behaviour and mentality. Even if many of us, in such a situation, might perhaps at first shrink from admitting the possibility that it is entirely a caprice of fate that the people concerned have their specific culture and not ours, and we not theirs instead of our own, it is clear that even the slightest suspicion in this respect implies a betrayal of the national complacency inherent in any human culture resting in itself.
Instead of a simple ``either/or'' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither ``either/or'', nor ``both/and'' nor even ``neither/nor'', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either.See also McCarthy (1992) for a thought-provoking analysis that raises disturbing questions about the ``complicity'' between (nonrelativistic) quantum physics and deconstruction.
theory)
can be seen to assert its own unreliability
and thereby to undermine its own affirmations.
Since then, my work has shifted to other questions,
mostly connected with phase transitions;
but subtle homologies between the two fields can be discerned,
notably the theme of discontinuity
(see Notes 22 and
81 below).
For further examples of deconstruction in quantum field theory,
see Merz and Knorr Cetina (1994).
line.
Linear causality assumes that the relation of cause and effect can be expressed as a function of temporal succession. Owing to recent developments in quantum mechanics, we can postulate that it is possible to know the effects of absent causes; that is, speaking metaphorically, effects may anticipate causes so that our perception of them may precede the physical occurrence of a ``cause.'' The hypothesis that challenges our conventional conception of linear time and causality and that asserts the possibility of time's reversal also raises the question of the degree to which the concept of ``time's arrow'' is inherent in all scientific theory. If these experiments are successful, the conclusions about the way time as ``clock-time'' has been constituted historically will be open to question. We will have ``proved'' by means of experiment what has long been suspected by philosophers, literary and social critics: that time is, in part, a conventional construction, its segmentation into hours and minutes a product of the need for industrial discipline, for rational organization of social labor in the early bourgeois epoch.The theoretical analyses of Greenberger et al. (1989,1990) and Mermin (1990,1993) provide a striking example of this phenomenon; see Maudlin (1994) for a detailed analysis of the implications for concepts of causality and temporality. An experimental test, extending the work of Aspect et al. (1982), will likely be forthcoming within the next few years.
How can one decide whether an observation made in a train about the behaviour of a falling stone can be made to coincide with the observation made of the same falling stone from the embankment? If there are only one, or even two, frames of reference, no solution can be found since the man in the train claims he observes a straight line and the man on the embankment a parabola. ...In the end, as Latour wittily but accurately observes, special relativity boils down to the proposition thatEinstein's solution is to consider three actors: one in the train, one on the embankment and a third one, the author [enunciator] or one of its representants, who tries to superimpose the coded observations sent back by the two others. ...
[W]ithout the enunciator's position (hidden in Einstein's account), and without the notion of centres of calculation, Einstein's own technical argument is ununderstandable ...
[pp. 10-11 and 35, emphasis in original]
more frames of reference with less privilege can be accessed, reduced, accumulated and combined, observers can be delegated to a few more places in the infinitely large (the cosmos) and the infinitely small (electrons), and the readings they send will be understandable. His [Einstein's] book could well be titled: `New Instructions for Bringing Back Long-Distance Scientific Travellers'. [pp. 22-23]Latour's critical analysis of Einstein's logic provides an eminently accessible introduction to special relativity for non-scientists.
in a universe dominated by photons, gravitons, and neutrinos, that is, in the very early universe, the theory of special relativity suggests that any distinction between before and after is impossible. For a particle traveling at the speed of light, or one traversing a distance that is in the order of the Planck length, all events are simultaneous.However, I cannot agree with Argyros' conclusion that Derridean deconstruction is therefore inapplicable to the hermeneutics of early-universe cosmology: Argyros' argument to this effect is based on an impermissibly totalizing use of special relativity (in technical terms, ``light-cone coordinates'') in a context where general relativity is inescapable. (For a similar but less innocent error, see Note 40 below.)
In contemporary physics and astrophysics ...a particle has a sort of elementary memory and consequently a temporal filter. This is why contemporary physicists tend to think that time emanates from matter itself, and that it is not an entity outside or inside the universe whose function it would be to gather all different times into universal history. It is only in certain regions that such - only partial - syntheses could be detected. There would on this view be areas of determinism where complexity is increasing.Furthermore, Michel Serres (1992, 89-91) has noted that chaos theory (Gleick 1987) and percolation theory (Stauffer 1985) have contested the traditional linear concept of time:
Time does not always flow along a line ...or a plane, but along an extraordinarily complex manifold, as if it showed stopping points, ruptures, sinks [puits], funnels of overwhelming acceleration [cheminées d'accélération foudroyante], rips, lacunae, all sown randomly ...These multiple insights into the nature of time, provided by different branches of physics, are a further illustration of the complementarity principle.Time flows in a turbulent and chaotic manner; it percolates. [Translation mine. Note that in the theory of dynamical systems, ``puits'' is a technical term meaning ``sink'', i.e. the opposite of ``source''.]
Right-wing critics Gross and Levitt (1994, 79) have ridiculed this statement, willfully misinterpreting it as an assertion about special relativity, in which the Einsteinian constant c (the speed of light in vacuum) is of course constant. No reader conversant with modern physics - except an ideologically biased one - could fail to understand Derrida's unequivocal reference to general relativity.
The Newtonian break has ushered scientific enterprise into a world where sense perception is worth little, a world which can lead to the annihilation of the very stakes of physics' object: the matter (whatever the predicates) of the universe and of the bodies that constitute it. In this very science, moreover [d'ailleurs], cleavages exist: quantum theory/field theory, mechanics of solids/dynamics of fluids, for example. But the imperceptibility of the matter under study often brings with it the paradoxical privilege of solidity in discoveries and a delay, even an abandoning of the analysis of the infinity [l'in-fini] of the fields of force.I have here corrected the translation of ``d'ailleurs'', which means ``moreover'' or ``besides'' (not ``however'').