Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Darlene McCoy
Karen Barad
FMST 80K
13 April 2011
Week 2 Readings
            Reading Karen’s introduction to her book before watching Copenhagen was incredibly beneficial to my understanding of the film. She does a great job of pointing out inconsistencies, or points of interest, and I liked how she explained the encompassing themes of the film. It was very useful to know some background on the film – though I knew quite a bit about Bohr and Heisenberg before due to an earlier physics class – because it really isn’t the easiest thing to pick up on. Knowing that there was going to be three separate and different interpretations of what happened at Copenhagen helped me keep up with the film. In the film, the uncertainty principle is explained, but in a way that is more difficult to understand, so it was nice to have an explanation I could read again and again in front of my face.
            The other reading for this week, the piece by Stephen Jay Gould, should have probably surprised me, but it didn’t. I feel like I’ve always just assumed that racism leaked into all aspects of human life and culture. I don’t understand how people could believe other people are less than them unless more than just the idea that “They look different” was circulating around. Of course the white man would “prove” that he is superior to the black biologically. As Gould points out, though, all of the scientists he discusses, especially Morton, do not try in the least to cover their tracks. That surprised me. They were so blatantly racist! It also surprised me that Ben Franklin believed that the black man was less than the white – I had already known that some of the others mentioned were of that thought, but not Ben Franklin! It was quite surprising, indeed.

No comments: