On Sat, 4 May 1996, D Hugh-Jones wrote:
> On Thu, 2 May 1996, Quetzil Castaneda wrote:
>
> >
> > actually the reality of the bomb
> > that destroyed that city was its bomb-iness, if you will.
>
> Chr*st on a b*ke. Well it's lucky you weren't on the atomic programme
> isn't it? 'How do you see the problem of constructing Fat Man, Professor
> Castaneda?'
> 'Simple Sir. We just make it bomby.'
>
Maybe Quetzil's being a bit cheeky, but he has a point.
To conceive of making an A-bomb one needs to have thought of the idea of
dropping explosive things on top of each other, to have some idea of how
to deliver it, and to know that if you get enough U235 together it will
explode. In principle you don't need a lot of quantum theory, though in
this case because U235 was so dispersed it would have been extremely
unlikely to have discovered this property by accident. (Though it seems
probable that Australian aborigines, in there own terms, have known for
thousands of years of some of the health problems caused by radiation.)
A simpler example would be gunpowder, which was used long before we had
theories about oxygen and combustion.
As I recall, quarks weren't "discovered" until after the bombs had been
built, so that "knowledge" was apparently not necessary.
The quark thing happens to be part of the current explanation of how the
bombs worked, but it is an extreme Abstraction from what actually
happened, and from those activities which are taken to be experiments to
prove the existence of quarks.
(Yes, I am conflating ontology and epistemology, but I haven't worked out
yet how to explain why. And I am using the shorthand of talking about
things which I know only through discourse as if they were "real".
And I am not interpreting Foucault. At least in Archeology of Knowledge,
he seems to believe that physical sciences do have a grasp on reality,
while social sciences are still in a primitive stage - and as you can see
I can't agree with that - I suspect he didn't know much about physical
sciences.)
Jim