ABSTRACT
This chapter is the first in the ethnography section in which those elements were applied in an interpretation of a science subject, namely honours quantum physics. The scene arranges itself around a plain, rectangular tutorial room with its long side facing north. Quantum theory explains the behaviour and make-up of matter and energy at the sub-atomic and atomic level. This is, in Simon's words, 'the vision of logic where everyday intuition, and classical mechanics, breaks down'. The language of physics is foreign to the author and highly specialised, and the area is bounded by key, or what is sometimes called 'threshold', concepts of energy, mass, field, wave and particle. The first is a theory of a harmonic oscillator, an 'archetypal object' in quantum physics, says Simon, which was studied in third year, and which, he points out, will be returned to again and again in hundreds of applications during the course of their studies.
