Quantum Anthropologies

Quantum Anthropologies
Author: Vicki Kirby
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2013-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822394448

In Quantum Anthropologies, the renowned feminist theorist Vicki Kirby contends that some of the most provocative aspects of deconstruction have yet to be explored. Deconstruction’s implications have been curtailed by the assumption that issues of textuality and representation are specific to the domain of culture. Revisiting Derrida’s claim that there is “no outside of text,” Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction developed since the linguistic turn have inadvertently reproduced the very binaries they intended to question, such as those between nature and culture, matter and ideation, and fact and value. Through new readings of Derrida, Husserl, Saussure, Butler, Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty, Kirby exposes the limitations of theories that regard culture as a second-order system that cannot access—much less be—nature, body, and materiality. She suggests ways of reconceiving language and culture to enable a more materially implicated outcome, one that keeps alive the more counterintuitive and challenging aspects of poststructural criticism. By demonstrating how fields, including cybernetics, biology, forensics, mathematics, and physics, can be conceptualized in deconstructive terms, Kirby fundamentally rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.

Quantum Anthropology

Quantum Anthropology
Author: Radek Trnka
Publisher: Charles University Karolinum Press: Prague
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2016-10-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8024635267

The book offers a fresh look on man, cultures, and societies built on the current advances in the fields of quantum mechanics, quantum philosophy, and quantum consciousness. The authors have developed an inspiring theoretical framework transcending the boundaries of particular disciplines in social sciences and the humanities. Quantum anthropology is a perspective, studying man, culture, and humanity while taking into account the quantum nature of our reality. This framework redefines current anthropological theory in a new light, and provides an interdisciplinary overlap reaching to psychology, sociology, and consciousness studies. Contents 1. Introduction: Why Quantum Anthropology? 2. Empirical and Nonempirical Reality 3. Appearance, Frames, Intra-Acting Agencies, and Observer Effect 4. Emergence of Man and Culture 5. Fields, Groups, Cultures, and Social Complexity 6. Man as Embodiment 7. Collective Consciousness and Collective Unconscious in Anthropology 8. Life Trajectories of Man, Cultures and Societies 9. Death and Final Collapses of Cultures and Societies 10. Language, Collapse of Wave Function, and Deconstruction 11. Myth and Entanglement 12. Ritual, Observer Effect, and Collective Consciousness 13. Conclusions and Future Directions

Quantum Anthropology

Quantum Anthropology
Author: Radek Trnka
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8024634708

The book offers a fresh look on man, cultures, and societies built on the current advances in the fields of quantum mechanics, quantum philosophy, and quantum consciousness. The authors have developed an inspiring theoretical framework transcending the boundaries of particular disciplines in social sciences and the humanities. Quantum anthropology is a perspective, studying man, culture, and humanity while taking into account the quantum nature of our reality. This framework redefines current anthropological theory in a new light, and provides an interdisciplinary overlap reaching to psychology, sociology, and consciousness studies.

Introduction to Quantum Information Science

Introduction to Quantum Information Science
Author: Vlatko Vedral
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2006-09-28
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0199215707

In addition to treating quantum communication, entanglement and algorithms, this book also addresses a number of miscellaneous topics, such as Maxwell's demon, Landauer's erasure, the Bekenstein bound and Caratheodory's treatment of the Second law of thermodyanmics.

Quantum Mind and Social Science

Quantum Mind and Social Science
Author: Alexander Wendt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2015-04-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107082544

A unique contribution to the understanding of social science, showing the implications of quantum physics for the nature of human society.

Beyond Weird

Beyond Weird
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022655838X

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seem obvious or right at all—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.

The Quantum Rose

The Quantum Rose
Author: Catherine Asaro
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504090780

Winner of the Nebula Award, this science fiction adventure “features sound characterization, straightforward plotting, abundant world building detail, and almost as much humor” (Booklist). As the young ruler of a destitute province burdened by obsolete technology, Kamoj Argali must marry to save her people from starvation. She has managed to make peace with her betrothal to the arrogant leader of a wealthy neighboring province. Then Havyrl Lionstar, a mysterious visitor to their land, steps in to claim Kamoj as his wife, sowing chaos in their lives. In this science fictional retelling of a classic folk tale, Havryl appears as a beast to Kamoj’s people. But what is the truth behind his strange, erratic behavior? In dealing with the upheavals he brings to their world, Kamoj discovers that the universe is much larger than she ever understood. This new edition contains a revised, expanded version of the essay that appeared in the original book, in which Catherine Asaro explains how she found inspiration for The Quantum Rose while earning her doctorate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where she studied the quantum theory of scattering processes. “A freestanding page-turner as a romance, with a hard science fiction framework.” —Publishers Weekly “Bolsters [Asaro’s] reputation for skillfully putting classic romance elements in an sf setting.” —Booklist “Fans of futuristic romance will revel in the delights of a top notch romantic adventure set against an impeccably crafted, richly imagined background.” —Romantic Times “Sturdy and absorbing.” —Kirkus Reviews “Asaro plants herself firmly into that grand SF tradition of future history franchises favored by luminaries like Heinlen, Asimov, Herbert, Anderson, Dickson, Niven, Cherryh, and BaxterBaxter.” —Paul Di Filippo, Locus

Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education

Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education
Author: Catherine Milne
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2019-04-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030019748

In this book various scholars explore the material in science and science education and its role in scientific practice, such as those practices that are key to the curriculum focuses of science education programs in a number of countries. As a construct, culture can be understood as material and social practice. This definition is useful for informing researchers' nuanced explorations of the nature of science and inclusive decisions about the practice of science education (Sewell, 1999). As fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning, cultures are contradictory, contested, and weakly bounded. The notion of culture as material social practices leads researchers to accept that material practice is as important as conceptual development (social practice). However, in education and science education there is a tendency to ignore material practice and to focus on social practice with language as the arbiter of such social practice. Often material practice, such as those associated with scientific instruments and other apparatus, is ignored with instruments understood as "inscription devices", conduits for language rather than sources of material culture in which scientists share “material other than words” (Baird, 2004, p. 7) when they communicate new knowledge and realities. While we do not ignore the role of language in science, we agree with Barad (2003) that perhaps language has too much power and with that power there seems a concomitant loss of interest in exploring how matter and machines (instruments) contribute to both ontology and epistemology in science and science education.

Quantum Philosophy

Quantum Philosophy
Author: Roland Omnès
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2002-02-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1400822866

In this magisterial work, Roland Omnès takes us from the academies of ancient Greece to the laboratories of modern science as he seeks to do no less than rebuild the foundations of the philosophy of knowledge. One of the world's leading quantum physicists, Omnès reviews the history and recent development of mathematics, logic, and the physical sciences to show that current work in quantum theory offers new answers to questions that have puzzled philosophers for centuries: Is the world ultimately intelligible? Are all events caused? Do objects have definitive locations? Omnès addresses these profound questions with vigorous arguments and clear, colorful writing, aiming not just to advance scholarship but to enlighten readers with no background in science or philosophy. The book opens with an insightful and sweeping account of the main developments in science and the philosophy of knowledge from the pre-Socratic era to the nineteenth century. Omnès then traces the emergence in modern thought of a fracture between our intuitive, commonsense views of the world and the abstract and--for most people--incomprehensible world portrayed by advanced physics, math, and logic. He argues that the fracture appeared because the insights of Einstein and Bohr, the logical advances of Frege, Russell, and Gödel, and the necessary mathematics of infinity of Cantor and Hilbert cannot be fully expressed by words or images only. Quantum mechanics played an important role in this development, as it seemed to undermine intuitive notions of intelligibility, locality, and causality. However, Omnès argues that common sense and quantum mechanics are not as incompatible as many have thought. In fact, he makes the provocative argument that the "consistent-histories" approach to quantum mechanics, developed over the past fifteen years, places common sense (slightly reappraised and circumscribed) on a firm scientific and philosophical footing for the first time. In doing so, it provides what philosophers have sought through the ages: a sure foundation for human knowledge. Quantum Philosophy is a profound work of contemporary science and philosophy and an eloquent history of the long struggle to understand the nature of the world and of knowledge itself.

Telling Flesh

Telling Flesh
Author: Vicki Kirby
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2014-04-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135206104

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.