ABSTRACT
Of all the worlds in which we might expect to discover signs of postmodern life, those of science and technology seem the least probable. Even those feedlines from science into culture that seem the most suited to postmodernity's climate, such as the renowned uncertainties of quantum physics, stem not from narratives, but from nature. If postmodernism is simply, as Fredric Jameson has it, a cultural affair, then the sciences, reading only the book of nature, are surely unaffected by any postmodern 'loss of reality'- they never lost their way in the dead ends and labyrinths of the library of Babel. With postmodernism insisting, with Heidegger, that 'where word breaks off, no thing may be'- that beyond signs independent of speakers, beyond text, narrative, or discourse, there is nothing-it remains difficult to consider tectonic plate movements and earthquakes as self-contained texts or discourses. So, with postmodern narrative in ruins, still reeling under the gravity of its collapse, could science simply step in to show, with mathematical precision, why stories have never been a substitute for formulae and experiment in matters of reality? Nature, as Francis Bacon put it at the dawn of modern science, does not yield her secrets to the incantations of the poets or the bookish disputations of philosophers; the experimental sciences must force them from her. Moreover, with the postmodern 'empire of signs' leaving reality the victim of a crime so perfect, as Jean Baudrillard says, that even its corpse has disappeared, science and technology step onto the scene: what if this crime were a side-show, and the real is elsewhere?
