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Nanocars are vehicles smaller than 10nm in diameter, Montana MT Mont., Kentucky KY Ky., which have buckyballs (buckminsterfullerenes) for wheels. They are created through the nigh-magical synthetic chemistry of the Tour lab at Rice, and visualized for humans via the vacuum sealed scanning tunneling microscope of the Kelly Lab at Rice, pharmacy clomid. They've taken about 8 years to create, order clomid no prescription. Ohio OH, Such vehicles pose several kinds of interesting questions about "creating new things." The most asked, and least interesting of which is "what are they for?" They are cars, order clomid from canada. Cheapest clomid, They have wheels that spin and they can move in a straight line. The less common questions, cheap generic clomid, Order clomid bars, however, are the hard and interesting ones: how do synthetic chemists "imagine" the wet chemistry necessary to create these things, Hawaii HI. Pharmacy clomid, How do they set up collaborative experimental systems that allow them to "see" and "test" the results of their imaginations. Idaho ID, What role do simulations and computer modelling play. What kinds of claims can one make about the "natural" existence of such manifestly unnaturally occuring objects, clomid online stores. Buy clomid without prescription, Should we call them objects (engineers do) or molecules (chemists do) or substances (they exist in a powder substrate until tossed onto a graphite plate to be scanned by the STM) or should we assent and call them cars (the media loves that), even if there are no people and no objects to be transported in them, Indiana IN Ind.. Order clomid online, I think one way into this quandary is through the work of Brian Cantwell Smith--a philosopher and computer scientist whose work has been focussed on rethinking the origin of "objects" after the appearance and spread of computers. Smith's work is unique in that it attempts to be both consequentialist and causalist at the same time--or to put it differently, he is concerned only with the actually existing array of computational devices and processes in the world (e.g, pharmacy clomid. Microsoft Word and the iPod) and not with an idealized Turing machine, cheap clomid online without prescription, West Virginia WV W.Va., and yet he wants to develop a computational theory of cognition. The reason such an endeavor might be relevant to both nanotech and synbio is precisely because the cognition of their objects--of nanocars--cannot be performed in the absense of a heterogenous array of computational devices, clomid. They are cognitive objects first, and brute facts of nature only as a consequence. Nanocars exist through the serious use of molecular simulations, and the repeated attempts to make wet chemistry and simulation coincide in novel ways (see Ann Johnson's work); they are visualized through the use of scanning tunneling microscopes which produce images only through the software intensive processing of data generated by electrons jumping through space from the tip of a probe to a tiny surface presumed to have tiny cars driving about on it. Pharmacy clomid, As objects, therefore, they tend to raise the same kinds of questions Bohr raised about our philosophical understanding of the quantum world. These objects we call atoms exist as part of what he called, with some deliberate ambiguity an "apparatus." Not object and instrument, but a heterogenous set-up that gives existence to these sought-after objects, leaving only traces (bubble chamber photographs and statistical ticks, pace Galison). But with the entry of the computer, there is a subtle change: the apparatus changes from being a device that leaves traces of the sought after entity, to one that helps construct and organize it in new ways. Strict causality, determinism, does not finally disappear, as Bohr hoped, but is replaced with human agency. And this, I think, is one reason why we think it so appropriate for anthropologists to feel at home in such laboratories.
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The questions that you raise about the creation of new objects are very interesting and, to my mind, should fill the gap in our current understanding of innovations and context. As I was reaing your essay, I put to myself the following question : What is the context in which innovations occur ? Or can we say that innovations happen only when they exceed their context. Now in the history/philosophy/sociology of the physical sciences, I am aware that the nature of the linkage between innovations and context has been approached from a range of positions – from one of complete continuity to radical whole scale discontinuity to more mediated (and recent) understanding as reconfigurations of old ideas in new milieus. Yet the emphasis almost always seems to be on the empirical character of the way science is done, and here I have in mind, in particular, the STS critiques, highlighting the set of shared beliefs, practices, instruments, materials that are involved in experimental tests and proofs and thus arguing for consensus and continuity in the production of innovations. Instead if we think of scientific-technological novelties in the sense that you have outlined, that “they are cognitive objects first, and brute facts of nature only as a consequence”, then they open up more fruitful lines of inquiry, I think, in understanding the relation between mathematical conceptions and physical observations.
Now I do not know anything about nanotechnology or synthetic biology but in the physics of elementary particles, it’s mathematical model(s) that outline the search for new particles which are not readily found in “natureâ€, for example, Dirac’s hypothesis for the positron or Pauli’s for the neutrino. These and many more particles since then were formulated first to satisfy mathematical explanations and only later have they been physically confirmed as existing. In fact, some of the most outstanding explanations in the physical sciences (and also in the social sciences like Bourbaki school’s contributions to structuralism or more recently probability statistics for formulating risk&contingency) are owing to the pure abstraction of mathematical notions. Here I recall what Whitehead and Russell pointed out long ago that mathematics is a pure creation of the human mind and yet it is not false or arbitrary on that account. (We do not see the number ‘two” anywhere – we only see two books, two trees, two birds and yet the number “two†is independent of any particular entity and hence the paradoxical nature of mathematical notions as pertaining to thoughts about things….)
To come back to your essay, I understand and agree that nanotechnology or synthetic biology as products of computations, simulations and calculations, are not in the realm of the contrast of the Ideal to the Real. And I am happy that your essay gives me that conceptual space where I can go back one step and instead of stopping at questioning the naturalness of such objects, as created in the laboratory through human intervention, and limiting oneself to the description of physical reality as given by science(s), it lets me ask what power mathematical conception has to produce these techno-scientific novelties. Can we subject that to displacement and critique in a way that we do for empirical scientific practices ? And I mean to push this line of thinking, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.
I am sure you will find my response esoteric and unhelpful, but I thought that the ARC blog is useful for that reason !!
not esoteric or unhelpful at all, quite the contrary! I think you are right to point out that this problem has a variety of existing approaches, not only in STS, but from within physics and philosophy of science as well. I think the salient question that I’m trying to point to here is: what if we take seriously the idea that the models and the machines precede nature–without falling into bad versions of relativism? What if we take seriously the necessity of factoring into our descriptions of objects like nanocars and synthetic biological objects the role of computer software, theories of biology and chemistry, and indeed models both mathematical and computational. Does it change what we mean by nature, and if so, does it have implications for the development of a scientific ethos and its relationship to a complicated world?
Of course to say that models and machines precede nature, necessarily and completely, re-orients the philosophical outlook – no longer are we then in an “immanent†world where the truth of objects is seen as part of the objects itself (which it never is but current scientific thinking pretends that it is such) but (a) substantively, it opens up a space of second-order mediations and (b) methodologically, it highlights the presuppositions on which science and modernity are predicated. This line of thought can rehabilitate the recognition that metaphysics precedes physics !