Site Visit: Donostia International Physics Center
Mestizajes Programme Special Seminar by Amy Catanzano: Quantum Poetics: Language and Reality in Physics and Poetry
San Sebastián, Spain
Amy Catanzano and Gustavo A. Schwartz, Donostia International Physics Center, Spain 2016
May 24-29, 2016
Visit Description
At the invitation of scientist and writer Gustavo A. Schwartz, I visited the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and its innovative Mestizajes Programme, a transdisciplinary initiative across literature, art, and science that Schwartz founded and directs. I gave a poetry reading and talk to an audience of scientists at DIPC on how language and reality function in both physics and poetry. The visit also provided opportunities to brainstorm with Schwartz and literary scholar Víctor Bermúdez on approaches to my upcoming contribution to their edited collection, #Nodes: Entangling Science and Humanities. Asked to contribute to the node-chapter on Chaos and Complexity, I spoke with them about definitions of chaos and complexity, predictive and deterministic systems, chance operations, circuitry, and more. In the following months, I wrote a poem, which is part of a larger project, Borealis: Time Signatures, for #Nodes. I also developed an accompanying essay that discusses the poem in relation to quantum mechanics, Alice Fulton on John Holland, N. Katherine Hayles on chaos, higher-dimensional tesseracts, Lucretius’ notion of clinamen, and Emily Grosholz on Bas van Fraassen. A response to these contributions by Schwartz is included in the publication, which has editions in English and Spanish.