last night in Kassel

Now killing a bit of time in Oslo Airport, which is quite beautiful. The only other time I was here, I was a 23-year-old on a train, so this is my first time in the airport. The architects used a few “Viking lodge” effects in a very humane way that makes arriving passengers feel like they’ve entered the land of timber and adventure. And of course, Norway always jumps out at you as being rich and clean. I was in Stavanger 4 years ago, just not in Oslo for over two decades; Looking forward to this.

This is also my first free moment to talk a bit about last night. The conversation with Zeilinger was fascinating– both the public discussion itself, and the informal conversations I had with him before and after the event about where he thinks physics is heading. Since that was informal and off the record, I’ll stick to the things he said in public.

On paper, Zeilinger and I might look like polar opposites. He’s an anti-realist in physics who thinks realism is the stumbling block to imaginative progress; I’m a realist in philosophy who thinks that anti-realism is the stumbling block to imaginative progress.

However, it also turns out that he finds the relational interpretation of quantum theory to be untenable, and when discussing superposition emphasizes the fact that this involves isolating certain properties of a thing from its relational context.

There are probably still plenty of disagreements, of course. For example, certain aspects of object-oriented philosophy would still probably look to him too much like a “hidden variables” theory of the Bohmian sort. But there’s room for discussion there, and you can have a good conversation with Zeilinger.

They also do Friday night poetry readings at an upstairs bar in the Hauptbahnhof (which despite the name, is no longer really the Hauptbahnhof, but services mostly or entirely slow regional trains; Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, a bit further out from the city center, is where the high-speed trains go).

For a train station bar it was surprisingly bohemian; only the bongo drums were missing. I started the evening with 20 minutes or so of poems from the Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl and the Japanese haikuist Issa. They’re a nice emotional contrast: Trakl grim and lurid as can be, and Issa utterly whimsical. As an organizing principle, I used only Trakl poems that referred to poppies (mixed in with simulated Trakl poems referring to poppies, from the Trakl emulator that I’ve mentioned on this blog before). As for Issa, I did about 30 haikus referring to fireflies and 30 referring to Buddha. It was a smart, hip young artsy crowd with a good sense of humor. After I finished, it was open mike time. Despite being extremely tired, it was so fun that I stayed till the bitter end at 2 AM.

My only regret was not having another week or so available to hang out at Documenta.