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La recherche du sens a été le souci majeur du questionnement humain. Que dire des sens de l’ultime ? Question totalement épineuse car elle touche à une pensée de l’extrême. Où se décideraient les champs de réflexion sur la question de l’ultime : dans la pensée métaphysique, religieuse, dans la pensée scientifique ? Ou bien parce que touchant à une limite extrême ouvre sur un espace nouveau ? Poétique celui-là ne tenant compte ni de la réalité des faits, ni de la véracité des convictions, ni de l’exactitude de ce qu’on affirme, ni de la justesse de ce qu’on croit être ou ne pas être. Tout est balayé pour faire place à une autre réflexion. Nouvelle celle-là, du moins différente.

Tom Stoppard is an outstanding playwright, embellishing his plays with scientific and philosophical approaches and presenting complicated, mysterious plots to the reader. He bases the plot of his postmodern play, Hapgood (1988), on quantum theory and draws an analogy between Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminism, termed “The Uncertainty Principle”, and international espionage. Thus, he constructs the complicated relationship between the particle and the whole throughout the play to depict the relativistic and deceptive relationship between sex and gender. Focusing on the title character of the play, the present study proposes that the play represents the fluid and indeterminate nature of gender and identity within the context of espionage and indeterminism. Hapgood, who is a mother, a lover and a successful master agent in a man-dominated British secret service, navigates between “masculinity” and “femininity” during a day. Moreover, she metamorphoses into her twin, who is entirely different from her, except for their identical faces, to entrap the mole in the office. The study consults Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and fluidity to indicate the unpredictable and uncertain nature of ‘gender identity’, which formulates itself through performances in social relations and trespasses the heterosexual matrix. It juxtaposes the Butlerian approach with the Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory pertaining to the confusing relationship between gender, the body and identity. The Butlerian analysis of the play reveals that particularly the modern way of life makes women transgress the Cartesian dichotomies of sex/gender, masculine/feminine and man/woman through the fluidity of their roles even during a single day and makes it difficult to find out who is really who.

The paper considers the quantization of gas volume transfers along a hypothetical pipe. The volume of gas is represented by two probability distributions in temporal and velocity form. The known model of optimal in the sense of filling information quantization is applied to quantization of material objects. There is a constant size gap between quanta. Technological aspects of formation of quanta are not considered. On the basis of the carried out minimum cost study the advantage of velocity quantization over time quantization for a number of selected quanta is determined. A normal probability distribution is taken as the initial distribution of the gas volume. The results of the article can be applied to any material and information processes. The main purpose in future research is recommended for any complex network processes, analysis and synthesis of their quality.

Transition-state theory is one of the most successful theories in chemistry. Not only does it provide a simple formula for computing the rate of a reaction but it defines our understanding of how a chemical reaction occurs – by overcoming an energy barrier. However, the theory is based on classical assumptions and ignores several quantum effects which can be important for certain reactions, particularly those involving hydrogen transfer at low temperatures. We are developing a more general quantum version of transition-state theory which reveals how quantum tunnelling and nonadiabatic effects can strongly affect the rate.

The world science describes tends to have a very strange look. We can’t see atoms or force fields, nor are they imaginable within visualizable categories, so neither can we even imagine what the world must be like according to recent physical theories. That tension, between what science depicts as reality and how things appear to us, though it is more striking now, has been with us since modern science began. It can be addressed, and perhaps alleviated by inquiring into how science represents nature. In general, representation is selective, the selection is of what is relevant to the purpose at hand, and success may even require distortion. From this point of view, the constraint on science, that it must ‘save the phenomena’, takes on a new form. The question to be faced is how the perspectival character of the appearances (that is, contents of measurement outcomes) can be related to the hidden structure that the sciences postulate. In the competing interpretations of quantum mechanics we can see how certain traditional ideals and constraints are left behind. Specifically, Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics offers a probative example of the freedom of scientific representation.