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What Is Real? (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

by Giorgio Agamben

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Eighty years ago, Ettore Majorana, a brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, disappeared under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. How is it possible that the most talented physicist of his generation vanished without leaving a trace? It has long been speculated that Majorana decided to abandon physics, disappearing because he had precociously realized that nuclear fission would inevitably lead to the atomic bomb. This book advances a different hypothesis. Through a careful analysis of Majorana's article "The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences," which shows how in quantum physics reality is dissolved into probability, and in dialogue with Simone Weil's considerations on the topic, Giorgio Agamben suggests that, by disappearing into thin air, Majorana turned his very person into an exemplary cipher of the status of the real in our probabilistic universe. In so doing, the physicist posed a question to science that is still awaiting an answer: What is Real?… (more)
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attratta dal sottotitolo (La scomparsa di Majorana) l'ho afferrato al volo prima di natale in libreria. Pensavo fosse un libro di cronaca, analisi e investigazione di uno dei grandi misteri italici. Invece dopo poche pagine ho capito che mi trovavo in un saggio di filosofia teoretica, ai confini con la fisica! In preda alla disperazione l'ho gettato sul comò dei "perennemente in attesa di lettura", poi oggi, presa da un moto d'orgoglio, poiché so di avere solide basi per quel che concerne la filosofia, mi sono detta che pur se non so un'accidente di fisica potevo leggerlo. E così ho fatto. In sostanza è una sorta di corollario al libro di Sciascia, che conoscevo, con un interessante excursus su come in quei tempi l'affermazione della fisica quantistica potesse mandare in crisi i fisici classici.
  ShanaPat | Jul 1, 2017 |
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Eighty years ago, Ettore Majorana, a brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, disappeared under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. How is it possible that the most talented physicist of his generation vanished without leaving a trace? It has long been speculated that Majorana decided to abandon physics, disappearing because he had precociously realized that nuclear fission would inevitably lead to the atomic bomb. This book advances a different hypothesis. Through a careful analysis of Majorana's article "The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences," which shows how in quantum physics reality is dissolved into probability, and in dialogue with Simone Weil's considerations on the topic, Giorgio Agamben suggests that, by disappearing into thin air, Majorana turned his very person into an exemplary cipher of the status of the real in our probabilistic universe. In so doing, the physicist posed a question to science that is still awaiting an answer: What is Real?

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