Darbagel Delingus

Darlene McCoy
Karen Barad
FMST 80K
6 June 2011
The Supernova's Entanglement with Philosophy, Physics, and the World
    The lights in the sky have fascinated human kind ever since they had the capability to tilt their heads up toward the heavens and see them. They were once believed to be messages of the Gods by early priests, who then declared that their interpretations of the stars were divine. Since then, the stars have always been recorded, and among those recordings lay an enormous flux in luminosity from one area in the night sky. This gigantic flux in luminosity, recorded by Chinese astronomers in 185 CE, is the first supernovae on record. A supernova is the final event in a star's life: it is a massive explosion that reduces the star to a mere fraction of its original mass in a few seconds. A supernova releases an enormous amount of radiation, even as much as the sun is expected to over its entire life, at 10% the speed of light. The radiation drives a shock wave through the surrounding space, and the shock wave sweeps up the expanding gas and dust from the star, then leaves it behind as a supernova remnant.  The explosion is so bright that it can possibly outshine an entire galaxy, thus making mankind wonder as to why one section of their sky is incredibly bright for some amount of months. Through they wondered, it took almost 2,000 years for the term "Supernovae" to be coined by Fritz Zwicky. How is it that this image of a star exploding materialized in the human mind? How did history, science, people, and the world have to intra-act for supernovae to exist as they do today?
    Astronomy began with the Gods, and it took some time for human thought to disassociate the stars with them. The common masses believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, as they were taught by the Bible. They also believed that the universe was centered around the Earth due to the work of Claudius Ptolemaeus, an astronomer from Egypt, who published the treatise Almgest, which explained the universe as celestial bodies revolving around Earth, which remained at rest in the center of the universe. This geocentric model of the universe was not called into question until the Renaissance, when Nicolas Copernicus looked to the skies himself, and challenged all that people thought they knew about the world and its workings. He published his ground-breaking book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres shortly before he died due to either fear of religious persecution or the philosophical or scientific rejection of his idea of a heliocentric model of the universe. In his book, Copernicus appeals to the Pope, and tries to explain why he would question the teachings of the Bible:
Occasioned by this [the disagreements] I also began to think of the motion of the earth, and although the idea seemed absurd, still as others before me had been permitted to assume certain circles [the epicycles and loops] in order to explain the motions of the stars, I believed it would readily be permitted me to try whether on the assumption of some motion of the earth better explanations of the revolutions of the heavenly spheres might be found. . . . When the motions of the other planets are referred to circulation of the earth and are computer for the revolution of each star, not only do the phenomena necessarily follow thereform, but the order and magnitude of the stars and all their orbs and the heavens itself are so connected that in no part can everything be transposed without confusion to the rest and to the whole universe. (Motz, Llyod, Weaver, 63)
    Nicolas' intra-actions with prior knowledge allowed him to build new knowledge, and bring about a new way of thinking about the universe. Though he did not have physical objects to deem as apparatus at the time, Copernicus had his mind to make agential cuts -- he included some of the work of his predecessors, but not all of it. He chose to exclude prior knowledge to create new knowledge. The cost to make new knowledge was the work of his predecessors that did not continue to be regarded as fact after his work was published. Copernicus' work also cost him peace of mind, for he was far too afraid to publish his work until he thought it was definitive and true.
    Copernicus' work was taken up by Tycho Brahe, who attempted to create a model to appease science and religion. He did not readily accept Copernicus' model, so he created a model of the universe with the Earth at the center of the universe, with the Sun revolving around it, and the planets revolving around the Sun. Tycho was also one of the first men to observe a supernova. He noticed an incredibly luminous star in the sky in 1572 and watched as it eventually returned to the brightness of the other stars. Tycho was indeed brilliant, but because he rejected Copernicus' heliocentric model, he could not progress scientific knowledge as far as his mind would allow. Instead, his assistant, Johannes Kepler, became the man to be revered for his progress in figuring out the workings of the world.    
    Kepler, in looking over Brahe's work and doing some of his own, discovered that the planetary obit of Mars was off by about eight minutes of arc. After some computations, he deemed that Mars' orbit was off by eight minutes not due to an error in observation made by Brahe, but because the orbits of the planets are elliptical, not circular. This discovery, also known as Kepler's first law of planetary motion, broke through scientific thought at the time and did away with the idea of the planets having circular orbits. He also discovered that there had to be some force in the universe propelling the planets to move as they were, which lead to the most famous light-bulb moment of all time. (Motz, Llyod, Weaver 69-89).
    That light-bulb moment would be none other than the moment an apple fell on Isaac Newton's head. Newton formed his theory of gravity from this minor incident, and then changed the scientific world forever. Newton might not have formed his theory of gravity if Kepler did not propose the idea of some force holding the universe together, but because he did, gravity is a force that no man in the scientific world would willingly question today. The intra-action of their knowledge allowed Newton to be in the right place and mindset to have the breakthrough that he did. Furthermore, that breakthrough solidified more questionable science from the past, meaning Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and helped materialize man's conception of the universe and its workings.
    Without Isaac Newton's theory of gravity and the creation of calculus by his hand, more modern scientists would have never gotten the chance to think about how to contend with Newton's strict determinism. They would not have even had the apparatus, calculus, to make cuts that determined the new scientific laws each man set forth. If Einstein did not have the correct tools to formulate his Theory of Relativity, he might not have at all, but because he was blessed with the earlier intra-actions of the history of physics and astronomy, he was able to cut out from the knowledge formulating in his head the speed of light, which is quite the necessary component in measuring supernovae.
    In 1803, Thomas Young performed a two slit experiment that changed the way people thought about physics forever (Barad 98). He found that if diffracted one way, a particle would behave as a wave, and if diffracted in another way, it would behave as a particle. Because of this experiment, other scientists began to study light diffraction more in depth, and discovered how to create lasers, and how to record light visible and invisible to the human eye. Light diffraction is fundamental in understanding how supernovae are measured.
    The key way astronomers measure supernovae in the present time is through technology known as optical interferometry. Supernovae are not local phenomenon -- they are light years away -- and so the naked human eye cannot hope to measure one. Technology today, even, has just barley gotten to the point where stars outside of the Milky Way Galaxy can be measured using telescopes. Optical interferometry works much as Young's diffraction experiment did -- there are just some additional steps in order to ensure accuracy. On each side of the apparatus, a telescope collects light from whichever source is the current subject of interest. The light is then propagated by mirrors into an area where it is combined into a beam. The beam is further propagated by mirrors into what is called a delay line, which accommodates for the Earth's rotation. Then, the light is sent to a beam-splitter, and depending on the phase relationship of the waves, differing amounts of energy will be transmitted or reflected at the site of the beam splitting. Then, single-pixel detectors can measure the energy on both sides (Monnier 810-816). From those recordings, computers can generate images of supernovae, and scientists can use the energy measurements to determine an array of characteristics of the star of which the energy came from. Thus, because humans have a visual stimulant and scientific data proving a supernova's existence, the idea of a supernova materializes in the human mind as an object. Yet, it seems now that the word object seems like such a funny way to describe a supernova. The intra-actions of the world and its inhabitants in a certain way at certain times that allowed the supernova to materialize in the human mind are not so common as to simply label them as things that just exist. Supernovae only exist due to the material-discursive pratices that brought about the technology to cut them from their apparatuses into something that has meaning and matters.  How could they simply be describes as objects, then? Is it not phenomenal that the world worked in a certain way to create a concept in the human mind?
    What if all objects in the world were thought of as phenomena? How would a different epistemological look on the world change it? Supernovae were also only brought into the human mind by the practices that were not included in their development. By looking at the past and conceptualization of supernovae, the entirety of the history of physics becomes incredibly entangled. But for those physics to take place, other science, other ideas, other people, had to be excluded. Science is generally seen as wholly objective, but even in sciences that do not directly affect different types of people, purely physical sciences, there are ideas that are excluded, there are ideas that have been lost, and not all of them have been in the name of science alone, for which human can truly say that he is entirely objective in his work? What has that exclusion cost the world?