Description
Martin H. Krieger, who was trained as a physicist at Columbia University, has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the National Humanities Center. He is author of Marginalism and Discontinuity: Tools for the Crafts of Knowledge and Decision (1989), Constitutions of Matter: Mathematically Modeling the Most Everyday of Physical Phenomena (1996), and Doing Mathematics: Convention, Subject, Calculation, Analogy (2003). He is on the faculty of the University of Southern California, and has taught at Berkeley, Minnesota, MIT, and Michigan. Preface Degrees of Freedom; A Note to the Reader; A Note for the Scholars; This Second Edition; Acknowledgments 1. The Division of Labor: The Factory Nature as a Factory; Handles and Stories. What Everyday Walls Must Do; Walls for a Factory; Walls as Providential. Particles, Objects, and Workers; What Particles Must Be Like; Intuitions of Walls and Particles. What Fields Must Be Like. 2. Taking Apart and Putting Together: The Clockworks, The Calculus, and the Computer The Right Degrees of Freedom; The Clockworks and The Calculus. Parts Are Strategies; Independence and Randomness; Dependence, Spreadsheets, and Differential Equations; Additivity and The Calculus; Disjoint Functionality and Interpretability: Bureaucracy, Flow Processing Plants, and Object-Oriented Programming; Sequence and Procedure. Parts Are Commitments. 3. Freedom and Necessity: Family and Kinship Recapitulation and Prospect; Kinship, Exchange, and Plenitude; Systematics in the Field; The Problem of “Quite Rarely”; Markets and Fetishes; Taking the Rules Seriously; Structure and System. 4. The Vacuum and The Creation: Setting a Stage So Far, an Epitome; Sweeping Up the Vacuum; Symmetry and Order. The Empty Stage; Of Nothing, Something, and the Vacuum. Setting Up the Stage; Ideologies for a Vacuum; The Dialectic of Finding a Good Vacuum; The Analogy of Substance, Once More. Fluctuations in a Vacuum. Annealing the World. 5. Handles, Probes, and Tools: A Rhetoric of Nature A Craft of Science; Some Handles onto the World (Particles, Crystals, Gasses; Analogy; Phase Transitions; Knowledge Is Handling). Probes; Objectivity and Inelasticity; Probes and Handles. Tools and Toolkits; A Physicist’s Toolkit; So Far. 6. Production Machinery: Mathematics for Analysis and Description Philosophical Analysis and Phenomenological Description; Machinery and Production Processes; Naming and Modeling the World; Demonstrations and Proofs as Strategies of Explanation; Understanding “The Physics”; Analogy and Syzygy; The Mathematics and The Physics 7. An Epitome Notes Index
