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Ok, first off…I’m really all over the place with this one! WARNING!

Well first of all, why does everything that physics is boil down to gosh darn quantum mechanics? Is quantum mechanics really the only place where soul meets body, in a sense, or physics meets the social sciences? Sometimes I feel bad that, it seems like science is getting a lot of crap (excuse my words) for trying to define itself outside of theory and to develop some overlying definition. Isn’t that what everyone does in life anyway? Well, except for those philosophers who believe that the only thing we know for sure is that we know nothing at all!

I have to admit that I wasn’t too enthralled by Keller’s article. Probably the only part of Keller’s article that opened my eyes was when she talks about the idea that the act of observing automatically manipulates the results of any experiment.

“many authors have suggested that it is the act of observation which ‘causes’ the collapse of the wave function, thus inviting further debate about what is in the act of observation that triggers this reduction. Wigner (1975) has gone so far as to assert that it is the very act of knowing that exerts what is now perceived as a physical effect on the system, forcing it into a state with definite position, momentum, or spin.” (Page 146)

Thinking about this concept made me what to experiment with its application in other contexts. Keller seems to pay a lot of attention to the idea of the worlds of natural science and social science into the same framework. I felt like this is nothing new, I guess. For example, we use the scientific method even in writing creative essays!

Harding’s assumption that scientists only truth is their own, but don’t we all believe that the only truth is the truth that we as individuals believe? (maybe that was confusing) What I basically meant is the idea that there is some sort of “centrism” that is definitely abundant in the science community, or at least an obsession of an ultimate truth, but I feel like if we were to look at what Keller wrote, it almost seems like we could say that there is no ultimate truth except for the truth that we have deemed true, because our world is manipulated. We are perpetually observing to understand.

-Alex