Arlen J. Hansen

Bio: Arlen J. Hansen is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Einstein & Theory of relativity. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 3 citations.

The Dice of God: Einstein, Heisenberg, and Robert Coover

Abstract: The Fifth Solvay Conference, in Brussels in 1927, was a watershed in the history of modern physics. It separated the old revolutionaries from the young. There was Einstein, the inspiration of them all, the man who had upended the world by his startling discoveries twenty years earlier. Maintaining that classical mechanics could not explain the behavior of electromagnetic and light phenomena, Einstein had posited a relativistic mechanics and had confirmed it with his own application of non-Euclidean geometry. Newton's mechanics works here, Einstein said in effect, but not there, pointing to the electromagnetic phenomena addressed by Maxwell's theories. So, in one sense, Einstein's work in relativity was conservative: it salvaged much of Newton's theory by discovering the limits of its applicability. It may not be surprising, therefore, to find Einstein on the conservative side of the watershed in 1927. The young Turks, on the other side, clustered around the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr. Sometimes referred to as the Copenhagen group, Bohr, Max Born, and a young German, Werner Heisenberg, proposed some profoundly radical ideas-some inconceivable ideas which challenged the human imagination. The point of contention between Einstein and the Copenhagen group lay in the fact that quantum theory as developed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and others provides knowledge that is probabilistic. In Physics and Beyond Heisenberg recalls that "Einstein would not admit that it was impossible, even in principle, to discover all the partial facts needed for a complete description of a physical process" (New York, 1971, p. 80; hereafter PAB). Just prior to the 1927 conference Heisenberg had shown that knowing the location of an electron to a given degree of precision

The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State

Abstract: This essay explores what the author terms the “game theory narrative,” a cultural narrative that gained prominence in American culture in the early years of the Cold War. For many Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s, game theory was a way for scientists, in collusion with the US government, to prevent nuclear exchange by conceptualizing the Cold War as a game, and by playing this game according to specific rational strategies. The first part of the essay describes how the game theory narrative popularized the idea that the rationality of pure mathematics could be applied to manage some major threats of the Cold War—the menace of an unknown enemy and the specter of an accidental nuclear exchange. The following sections explore how this narrative was both exemplified and criticized by a variety of creative works and other artifacts of Cold War culture.

"It is written" : representations of determinism in contemporary popular science writing and contemporary British fiction

Abstract: The writing of this thesis was supported by a Doctoral grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and I gratefully acknowledge that support here. A Mellon-Sawyer Risk Dissertation Fellowship from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) supported the completion of this thesis.

“God Damn It, You’ve Got to Be Kind”: War and Altruism in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut

Abstract: World War II is a central component in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels; he uses the topic of war to advocate altruism. As stated in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Vonnegut understands that it is pointless to write an antiwar book because wars are “as easy to stop as glaciers,” yet, arguably, many of his novels still impart an antiwar message.