The Phenomenal Atlases

Physicists study the physical world on spatial, temporal and complexity scales inaccessible through ordinary human perception. How is it then possible for a person to form an understanding of physics at these scales? The Phenomenal Atlases is a framework that approaches this question by integrating artistic and intellectual methodology, informed by the history of science, theories of embodied cognition, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology. My goal is to understand the subjective, internal representations of physics concepts used by practicing physicists and to explore their impact on their collective research efforts.

More precisely, the driving question of my inquiry is, How does a physicist, a living, breathing organism whose primary knowledge is rooted in the interaction of its body with the physical world, ground their understanding of physics of the imperceptible?  In relation to the field as a whole, we can also ask, To what extent, and how, does a physicist’s research methodology (theoretical, experimental, or computational) shape the features of the mental models they use to perform their work?  Conversely, To what extent and how do a physicist’s mental models affect the way they approach a research problem?  And finally, How do physicists’ mental models and the corresponding collectively-accepted representations inform one another and impact physics research?

 

“Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the ‘there is’ which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body — not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts. Further, associated bodies must be brought forward along with my body — the “others,”  not merely as my congeners, as the zoologists says, but the others who haunt me and when I haunt; the ”others” along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal every haunted those beings of his own species, locale, or habitat.” [1]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

[1]. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind.” Translated by Carleton Dalery. The primacy of perception: and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history, and politics. Ed. James M. Edie. 1964. Northwestern University Press.

 

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