Week 1: Stereotypes and Uncertainty

October 4, 2007 at 6:55 pm · Filed under Lis Evans and tagged: Asawa, Heisenberg

What was one of the similarities between the mad-scientist and starving artist stereotypes?

Both of these stereotypes discussed in lecture were predominantly male. In today’s society, there does exist a greater barrier for women to become established engineers and scientists. I understand this from a socio-historical context, with women traditionally staying at home to raise families, however, I wonder if men or women are better suited for one of the two cultures. That is, is there something wired in our brains that makes the male population generally better at computational tasks or are women more typically in tune with guaging emotional response? One example of a woman artist who worked at home and even had her children help with her projects is Ruth Asawa, who studied at Black Mountain College, where she was taught and collaborated with many other great minded artists.

What is the Uncertainty Principle?

A principle that states that two complementary parametric measurements, for example position and momentum or energy and time cannot both be known to infinite accuracy; the more you know about one, the less you know about the other. This had major implications for quantum mechanics. However the influence of this scientific break-through had implications in the philosophical world too, highlighting the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty, even despite the fact that we may have very precise tools and methods to check our accuracy. Uncertainty is intrinsic.

Links:

http://www.ruthasawa.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College

http://www.media.mit.edu/

http://www.asci.org/

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1530177

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