Scientific Perception and Defamiliarization
Scientific scales and relationships can make familiar experience newly perceptible.
Scientific inquiry reveals processes and scales that ordinary perception can overlook. Molecular processes underlie a gesture; geological time lies within a landscape seen for a moment. Such shifts can make the familiar newly strange.
Form can also renew attention. Readers may follow branching, recurrence, or broken symmetry before recognizing the scientific source. Images, sound, rhythm, and visible arrangements can convey beauty and feeling without prior technical knowledge.
An unfamiliar term should offer something to imagine or feel; an unusual form should reward following it. Commentary provides another entry into the work while leaving room for readers’ different memories and interpretations.
Web reading edition adapted from Part I, section 3.5, of the revised English manuscript of Schrödinger’s Cat.