This article examines the history of European knowledge production back to medieval Scholasticism. My focus is on the emergence of dynamics (the motions and forces of bodies) as the prevailing concern of physics. This privileging of motion in European epistemology over the past five centuries marks a stark shift from Scholastic knowledge, which privileged form as the underlying causal impetus of the world (as opposed to motion). I trace several forking paths in the history of science in which alternate epistemic paradigms could have come to prominence over dynamics. Specifically, I look at the thinking of the 14th century Scholastic Nicole Oresme, the 15th century thinker Nicholas of Cusa, the 17th century polymath Blaise Pascal, and the transition from hydrodynamics to thermodynamics at the beginning of the 19th century. I conclude this counterfactual history with a brief overview of Constructor Theory—a paradigm being developed today that could offer an alternative to energy (dynamics) as the starting point for our knowledge of the universe. I point to the close relationship between the development of European knowledge production and the dominant socioeconomic assumptions of colonial-capitalist society.
SScott Schwartz
- Joined Apr 16, 2020
Essay Abstract
This essay explores the entwined histories of temperature, probability, and energy in an effort to challenge foundational assumptions in physics. I argue that uncertainty, unpredictability, and uncomputability are the inevitable result of an approach to knowledge production reliant on probability.
Author Bio
Scott W. Schwartz is an anthropologist and lecturer with the City University of New York. His work focuses on the material culture of knowledge production, specifically the practices, politics, and history of quantification.