Before Quanta: A New Literary History of Embodiment (BSECS 2025 PANEL)
Date: 8th Jan 2025 to 10th Jan 2025
Venue: Pembroke College, Oxford
What does it mean to observe the world from within? How might we account for subjective experience in our conceptions of scientific fact? If we read the world as the “reciprocal reflection of perspectives,” as theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli urges us to do, how will our definitions of objectivity change? This panel invites papers that examine the central questions of quantum mechanics in the context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when our original empiricist frameworks took emphatic shape.