Karen Barad's theory of agential realism - does it stand on solid scientific ground or is it quantum quackery? [closed]

Question

Before you vote to close this question as off-topic, please note that while my interest in the topic lies on the metaphysical guesswork, my question here is specifically about Karen Barad's scientific work as theoretical physicist and their credibility as a scholar of quantum mechanics.

I accidentally stumbled over the term "agential realism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agential_realism) and at first it just hit me like usual quantum quackery paired with a lot of unnecessarily complicated phrasing. The statement that

Barad's work has generally been received more positively within feminist technoscience than within mainstream science, technology and society studies (STS)

certainly just added to that and (at the risk of getting hate for saying this) Barad in most notes being referred to simply as "feminist theorist" doesn't do much in my mind to help their credibility as a physicist. However, in this case I'd like some help with this assessment, since Barad seems to have at least a PhD in theoretical physics and some of the statements I've read align well with my own interpretations of quantum mechanics (in particular that apparent wave-function collapse is the subjective experience of the quantum system that runs/implements/produces an observer's consciousness getting entangled with the quantum system containing the observed events), hence my curiosity got piqued.

I'm not a physics major - I have an engineering degree - but I do consider myself quite well read for a layman on the topics of cosmology and quantum phenomena and aside of the beauty of understanding the hard science, I'm also very interested in the philosophical and metaphysical guesswork about reality and consciousness performed by renowned theoretical physicists (such as David Deutsch, whom I admire).

So I'm trying to figure out whether it may be worth digging some more and getting their book "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction" - but all the good reviews seem to come from people who have interest in Barad as a "feminist theorist who happens to be a theoretical physicist" and I didn't find reviews of their work as "theoretical physicist who happens to be a feminist theorist". I'm not interested in feminist theory at all, but also don't want to dismiss their physics work just based on the fact that feminist theory is their primary focus. Since I find Barad's writing style also somewhat exhausting, I thought I'd ask here for help to assess their scientific standing before wasting too much time and energy on it in case it's nonsense.

So my question is, does Barad's work in general have a solid standing in regards of theoretical physics (and particularly quantum mechanics) or is this solely something of interest for feminist philosophers or is it even just plain quantum quackery? Are there any facts that quite clearly point in one direction?

Answer 1

I have upvoted the question and will not vote to close; my reasoning will be intertwined with my answer as follows.

I self-identify as a recovering ex-engineer with an avid interest in physics and one of my guilty pleasures is disabusing philosophers of any notions that there are deep connections between, for example, cinema criticism and quantum mechanics or situational ethics and general relativity.

But when philosophers start slinging physics jargon about in the interests of demonstrating those "connections" it gets hard for people like you to evaluate their claims if you yourself are not a trained physicist. So I naturally sympathize with you. What is a layperson to do?

Having spent a fair amount of time trying to make sense out of such nonsense, I have concluded that that time was wasted, and there are ways of preventing such waste based on the presence of certain key words, terms of philosophical art, and stylistic flourishes that tell you right away that what is being advanced is safely ignorable. I'll list a few of them here.

First: technoscience. This is invented jargon used to lump together into one convenient target all types of hard science built on mathematics, in preparation for critical evaluation by someone who can't balance their checkbook.

Second: feminist theory. This is a branch of philosophy (admittedly as legitimate as any other branch) which has no relevance at all to the world of physics. When used in a physics context either to describe an author's qualifications or the content of a discussion of physics, it is a surefire warning flag that what follows will be not even irrelevant.

Third: STS. This term of art refers not to the content of physics but to high-level commentary on things like how it is taught, who gets to teach it, what its relationship to society might be, who pays the bills, and who reaps the benefits. It's sort of like "physics lite" since there's no math in it and is therefore a common topic for philosophers to philosophize about- in particular when it comes to assessing the societal impact of engineering, which is often confused with "science" and "physics" in those assessments. Again, it's just as legitimate as any other field of philosophic inquiry but when mixed with explorations of QM, relativity, cosmology, astrophysics or the Standard Model, it's another warning flag, like "WARNING: ROUGH ROAD NEXT 10 MILES".

Finally: impenetrable prose. It is quite common for writers of such treatises as we are discussing here to heavily lard their product with invented jargon, convoluted sentence structure containing convoluted reasoning, unexplained references to the work of other authors, and densely circuitous and strained logic. Key here is that it's easy to assert that something is profound if it is hard to understand.

This may seem to be a jaded assessment by a deep skeptic, that that's because I am jaded, and deeply skeptical. So, know you are not alone, and I hope this helps.

PS You'll know right away if a philosopher's work in the field of physics has a solid standing when other physics practitioners begin citing it within the technical literature.