Developments in contemporary physics are having a great impact on recent scholarly endeavour in the humanities. In demonstrating that reality eludes traditional conceptions of representation, physics is instituting a reappraisal of our conceptions of how we describe the Universe. Overturning established notions of reality founded on a Cartesian doctrine of objectivity, quantum physics is said to prefigure postmodern metaphysics, effecting a convergence of contemporary thought in which the key themes are ?indeterminacy?, ?uncertainty?, and ?unknowability.? Having reached its empirical limits, physics presents us with the limits of our power to represent the world. Current physics is encountering its own ?event horizon? of knowledge which suggests that access to the real may be forever denied. Post-empirical physics in speculative mode is said to be undifferentiable from philosophy and aesthetics. Dominated by references to the unattainable and the unknowable, theories of everything dissolve the distinction between invention and discovery at the quantum scale and between the natural and the supernatural at the cosmological level. Trading in issues of limits and limitlessness, theoretical physics is operating at the extremes of metaphysical inquiry, disclosing themes of unity and fragmentation which revive tensions between the whole and the parts that have historically preoccupied all philosophical inquiry. This thesis argues that the representational problems encountered by physics can be more effectively mounted in aesthetic terms. Specifically, twentieth century physics embodies an implicit and unacknowledged aesthetic of the sublime within its discourse. The combination of the rational and the mystical, of science and metaphysics, of explanation and speculation which characterises contemporary physics offers partial presentations of a totality which, as a totality, is unpresentable. Dealing in entities and concepts which defy the imagination, physics attempts to encompass a whole which we are unable to comprehend as a whole at the level of the senses but which we can comprehend as an Idea of reason, thus enabling us to experience the sublime. The problem of articulation is now intrinsic to any scientific view of reality and the requirement for physicists to forego their ?customary demands for a visualisable description of nature? necessitates strategies by which to present the unpresentable. In occasioning imaginative representations which strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience, descriptions of the quantum realm disclose an aesthetic appraisal of the sublimity of nature which revives the Romanticist link between nature and aesthetics first established by Kant in the Critique of Judgement. Thus, physics can be located within the framework of the Kantian sublime. Adopting a theoretical approach grounded in hermeneutics, I extend the discussion of the sublime from its usual preoccupation with the visual arts to argue that the encounter with the unpresentable in physics is enforcing a shift to the poetic within the discourse analogous to the transition from representation to poiesis in Romantic aesthetics. Mystical interpretations of quantum mechanics, in particular, connect with the aesthetics of transcendence wherein natural science intersects with religion through the aesthetic perception of the infinite in the finite. In identifying knowledge of nature with the Absolute the discourse of physics is characterised by themes of ekstasis and transcendence which I conclude disclose a moral imperative which is embodied in the aesthetic judgement of the sublime. Hence, as a symbol of the mind?s relation to a transcendent order, physics, displacing art, enters the field opened up by the aesthetics of the sublime. / thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2002.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/173349 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Greig, Ian |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | © 2002 Ian Greig |
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