Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for his quantum model of the atom, which marks the beginning of his seminal contributions to the development of the quantum theory. Crucially, however, in a stunning reversal of his intellectual forefather’s s…Bohr’s break with Newton, Descartes, and Democritus is based not in “mere idle philosophical reflection” but on new empirical findings in the domain of atomic physics that came to light during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Boh…Questioning the basis of the Newtonian tradition, Bohr refuses to take for granted the delineation of the “object” and the “agencies of observation” and makes the constitution of this “inside” boundary the centerpiece of his analysis. In pa…
Isaac Newton
scientist · 11 mentions across 7 readings
In this course
Newton appears primarily as a historical foil in these readings, representing the classical mechanistic worldview—atomistic, deterministic, organized by "reason and order"—that quantum physics fundamentally displaced in the early twentieth century. His Cartesian-Newtonian framework of discrete particles and universal laws serves as the intellectual foundation against which Bohr's quantum indeterminacy is positioned, allowing the course materials to frame the shift from classical to quantum mechanics as a rupture with determinism itself. This genealogy matters to "Pandaemonium Architecture" because it establishes how scientific revolutions reshape the conceptual ground for thinking about order, control, and uncertainty in systems—concerns central to AI and cybernetics.
Mentioned in 7 readings
Even in the first half of the 20th century, astronomers had to be content with the uniformity of nature argument confirmed by spectroscopy. In an article in Science in 1920, the American astronomer W. W. Campbell (a great opponent of Lowell…their inherent right to expand westward and seize territory from the Native Americans, the word can and must be dissociated from that historical event. In fact, the concept of “destiny” has often been used in the context of theological disc…
Even if the origins of the Internet device are today well known, it is not
uncalled for to highlight once again their political meaning. The Internet is a
war machine invented to be like the highway system, which was also
designed by the Am…The contemporary history of economic discourse must be looked at from the angle of this increasing problem of information. From the crisis of 1929 to 1945, economists' attention was focused on questions of anticipation, uncertainty regardin…
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Niels Bohr 3René Descartes 2Aristotle 1Claudius Ptolemy 1Dante Alighieri 1Galileo Galilei 1Harlow Shapley 1Johannes Kepler 1Nicolaus Copernicus 1Plato 1Gilbert Simondon 1Henri Bergson 1Norbert Wiener 1Adam Smith 1Friedrich von Hayek 1John von Neumann 1Karl Marx 1Oskar Morgenstern 1Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1Bertrand Russell 1Brigitte Bardot 1Carl Friedrich Gauss 1Gottlob Frege 1Paul Halmos 1Democritus 1Helge Kragh 1Percival Lowell 1William Wallace Campbell 1