Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-002
N. Kompa
My aim in this paper is to investigate the epistemic functions metaphors might perform. According to a traditionally influential idea metaphors have, at best, ornamental value; they are poetic or rhetorical devices, used to please or even sway people. Current research in philosophy, linguistics and psychology shows the need for a refined picture of what purposes metaphors might serve. Expressions are commonly used metaphorically in order to conceptualize abstract and mental phenomena. The expressions thereby employed are often taken from the realm of sense experience; we feel blue, or complain about someone being cold, and so on. Yet even in the natural sciences metaphors have added epistemic value. They direct our attention to phenomena that we did not hitherto notice, make us think thoughts that we did not think before, etc. More specifically, I will claim that metaphors have heuristic, exploratory and explanatory value. Nonetheless, some metaphors are more successful than others. I will close by advancing various criteria for metaphorical success and failure. Metaphor, it seems, is a matter of teaching an old word new tricks. (Nelson Goodman)
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Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-fm
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110481112-fm","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112-fm","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167138,"journal":{"name":"Physics and Literature","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131718765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-018
I. McGovern
A Mystic Dream of 4 is the title of my verse biography of the 19th century Irish mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton. This paper presents the thinking behind the making of the book, illustrated by a brief selection of the sonnets therein, hopefully finding some resonance with the themes of the Bridges Conference. William Rowan Hamilton (1805-65) is Ireland’s most celebrated mathematician; indeed, he is arguably the greatest mathematician of his time; in evidence of that, when the National Academy of Sciences elected its first foreign members in 1864, Hamilton’s name was top of the list! He had made significant contributions in a number of areas, many of which bore greater fruit in the following century (for example, ask any physical sciences graduate about the ‘H’ in the Schrödinger wave equation!). Equally significant, at least for our purposes here, he was also a poet! In this paper, I will discuss the making of a book: A title like A Mystic Dream of 4 [5] might suggest elements of spirituality, Freudian psychology and number theory; while all of these are present to some degree, it is in fact a verse-biography, as the subtitle reveals: A sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton. But the first word of the title of this paper, ‘Making’, is no mere description of the business at hand, ‘to make’ deriving from ancient Greek as poiesis, the root of the word poetry. In the tradition of ‘bad poets borrow, good poets steal’, A Mystic Dream of 4 is lifted from one of Hamilton’s own poems, called The Tetractys [2]:
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Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-020
{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110481112-020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112-020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167138,"journal":{"name":"Physics and Literature","volume":"191 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131554769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-006
W. Thielmann
: This chapter explores concept formation in physics from a linguist ’ s point of view. After some preliminary reflections on conceptual structures, the chapter attempts to demonstrate that the key concept of modern physics is the body concept as introduced by Galileo. In stark contrast to the concepts we usu-ally possess, the body concept is an operational concept, i.e. a concept the purpose of which is the levelling of ontological differences. Employing operational concepts in the natural sciences shifts the line of inquiry from how natural things are to how we can manipulate them. The answers we get to such questions are – even though they involve nature – not about nature, but about our interaction with nature. If we continue forgetting about the role of human agents in scientific inquiry, physics may, however, prevail at the very bottom of the epistemological well at which Eugene Wigner marvelled at the “ the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics ” .
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Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-009
A. Plotnitsky
: The aim of this paper is to explore the radically new relationships among reality, temporality, and probability, and the corresponding revision of these concepts themselves, that emerged in the wake of the introduction of quantum mechanics in 1925 – 1926. I argue, however, that an analogous understanding of these concepts and their relationships had begun to emerge in literature, as a response to Kant ’ s philosophy, with the Romantics, such as Kleist and Hölderlin in Germany and Shelley and Keats in England, and has gradually developed throughout the history of literature and later on in philosophy. This understanding became especially pronounced in modernist literature, under the direct impact of quantum theory. Musil ’ s The Man Without Qualities serves as the main modernist example of this understanding in this paper. and the developments and the intended statement, the living of the calculable
{"title":"The Paradoxical Interplay of Exactitude and Indefiniteness","authors":"A. Plotnitsky","doi":"10.1515/9783110481112-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112-009","url":null,"abstract":": The aim of this paper is to explore the radically new relationships among reality, temporality, and probability, and the corresponding revision of these concepts themselves, that emerged in the wake of the introduction of quantum mechanics in 1925 – 1926. I argue, however, that an analogous understanding of these concepts and their relationships had begun to emerge in literature, as a response to Kant ’ s philosophy, with the Romantics, such as Kleist and Hölderlin in Germany and Shelley and Keats in England, and has gradually developed throughout the history of literature and later on in philosophy. This understanding became especially pronounced in modernist literature, under the direct impact of quantum theory. Musil ’ s The Man Without Qualities serves as the main modernist example of this understanding in this paper. and the developments and the intended statement, the living of the calculable","PeriodicalId":167138,"journal":{"name":"Physics and Literature","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114301438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-019
{"title":"Author and Editor Directory","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110481112-019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112-019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167138,"journal":{"name":"Physics and Literature","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117061932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-017
L. Kasper
: At first glance, physics and literature could not be more opposite: un-equivocal terms, definitions and objectivity on the one side. Ambiguity, feelings and subjectivity on the other side. Both physics and literature also gain different social acknowledgment. While our society and economy are based on scientific and technical knowledge, it is to this day still no problem not to know the second law of thermodynamics (as C. P. Snow remarked about 50 years ago). Not knowing Shakespeare ’ s works, on the other hand, would be extremely embarrassing. What narrative-based learning for in physics subjective and literary form of access to structure of for those people who have with a purely formal
{"title":"Narrating Science – Physics for Non-physicists","authors":"L. Kasper","doi":"10.1515/9783110481112-017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112-017","url":null,"abstract":": At first glance, physics and literature could not be more opposite: un-equivocal terms, definitions and objectivity on the one side. Ambiguity, feelings and subjectivity on the other side. Both physics and literature also gain different social acknowledgment. While our society and economy are based on scientific and technical knowledge, it is to this day still no problem not to know the second law of thermodynamics (as C. P. Snow remarked about 50 years ago). Not knowing Shakespeare ’ s works, on the other hand, would be extremely embarrassing. What narrative-based learning for in physics subjective and literary form of access to structure of for those people who have with a purely formal","PeriodicalId":167138,"journal":{"name":"Physics and Literature","volume":"237 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123678429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1515/9783110481112-016
Clemens Özelt
: The paper examines dialogues and reflections on dialogues by Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin at the beginning and the end of the Weimar Republic, analyzing the aesthetics and the history of the genre in its sociohistorical context. The results can be outlined in the following four theses: of proper don about the economy, about takes as was, and centu-ries no what this grandiose, festive, wonderful piece of furniture really
{"title":"Establishing Evidence through a Shift in Viewpoint","authors":"Clemens Özelt","doi":"10.1515/9783110481112-016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112-016","url":null,"abstract":": The paper examines dialogues and reflections on dialogues by Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin at the beginning and the end of the Weimar Republic, analyzing the aesthetics and the history of the genre in its sociohistorical context. The results can be outlined in the following four theses: of proper don about the economy, about takes as was, and centu-ries no what this grandiose, festive, wonderful piece of furniture really","PeriodicalId":167138,"journal":{"name":"Physics and Literature","volume":"180 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121611616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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