Along, Across, and Against the Grain: On Spectral Densities and Margins of Play

How can the fertility of the vacuum be measured? How do you get from nothing to something and back again? And how does the transition from virtual to real and then again from real to virtual work?

The wood fiber does not decide whether it breaks, but only where and how it does it. What would it mean if this also applied to the apparent emptiness of the vacuum? Based on the vacuum fluctuations of quanta — the fleeting changes in the amount of energy at a point in space — this round of talks brings together three different thinkers to identify different states and conditions for ways of becoming. In an interplay between philosophy, quantum physics and radical black thinking, they ask what structures possibilities, how something takes on a fixed form, and how individuality can be understood in relation to a common reason.

The discussion participants approach these questions from their own perspectives. Cécile Malaspina reads the medieval thinker Duns Scotus and his ideas of individuality (haecceitas), a common nature (natura communis) and the univocity of being (univocitas entis). She investigates this different understanding of reality and asks whether quantum mechanics today proves Scotus' buried insights right by presenting some fundamental scientific assumptions about individuality that date back to the 14th century and have shaped scientific thinking ever since.

Sha Xin Wie investigates how a (being) state develops over time through non-discrete topological dynamical systems — as a result of which possibility conditions no longer represent individual “fixed” positions or recurring loops, but rather flow through an extended field of possibilities.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi sets aside the polymetric, polyphonic and polyrhythmic sound world of the black radical tradition of quantum mechanics — and thus reveals an alternative repertoire of mood techniques that keep things in relation without subjecting them to reduction.

This keynote conversation grew out of a practice of thinking together, which is the main hallmark of the Indetermincay Group. It also reflects ongoing discussions with the other members of the group, Alicia Juarrero, Yagmur Denizhan and Sonia de Jager.

Following the discussion, the audience is invited to continue exploring open questions and ideas about quantum acoustics in the Pause on Quantum Matter lounge and reading area (Ceija Stojka Foyer in the entrance area of the auditorium).