Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge
Monograph Series: Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation
About OKCIR
Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science ( Utopystics)
www.okcir.com
OKCIR (est. 2002) is an independent research and publishing initiative dedicated to exploring, in a simultaneously world-historical and self-reflective framework, the human search for a just global society.
Since the worlds utopian, mystical, and scientific movements have been the primary sources of inspiration, knowledge, and/or practice in this field, OKCIR aims to critically reexamine the shortcomings and contributions of these world-historical traditionsseeking to clearly understand why they have failed to bring about the good society, and what each can integratively contribute toward realizing that end.
The center aims to develop new conceptual (methodological, theoretical, historical), practical, pedagogical, inspirational and disseminative structures of knowledge whereby the individual can radically understand and determine how world-history and her/his selves constitute one another.
OKCIR promotes creative exercises in liberating sociology and alternative pluriversities of knowledge production and publication in the global cyberspace. As a virtual research center, its publications are available in part freely online in its open-stacks digital library, in part via subscription to its own or other academic database member-stacks, and others for purchase online via the Okcir Store and other online distributors. Selected publications are also available in print for online purchase by libraries, institutions, and interested print readers.
OKCIR pursues innovative editorial, digital, and print publishing practices reflecting its substantive goals, and is the publisher of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699, est. 2002) which explores issues pertaining to the centers interests. Human Architecture is a hybrid scholarly journal whose edited and monographed issues are simultaneously published also as individual books in hardcover, softcover, and PDF and/or EPUB ebook formats (with separately assigned ISBNs).
Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation (2014-) and Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) (1991-) respectively honor Tayyebeh Tamjidi (1928-) and Mohammed (Ahad) Tamjidi (1930-2007) whose parental love and support made the life and works of Mohammad H. (Behrooz) Tamdgidi, the founder of OKCIR, possible.
About this Book
In this major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi reports having unriddled the so-called quantum enigma.
This book opens the lid of the Schrdingers Cat box of the quantum enigma after decades and finds something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts. The book offers, in a transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framework, a relativistic interpretation to advance a liberating quantum sociology.
Deeper methodological grounding to further advance the sociological imagination requires investigating whether and how relativistic and quantum scientific revolutions can induce a liberating reinvention of sociology in favor of creative research and a just global society. This, however, necessarily leads us to confront an elephant in the room, the quantum enigma.
In Unriddling the Quantum Enigma , the first volume of the series commonly titled Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations , sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi argues that unriddling the quantum enigma depends on whether and how we succeed in dehabituating ourselves in favor of unified relativistic and quantum visions from the historically and ideologically inherited, classical Newtonian modes of imagining reality that have subconsciously persisted in the ways we have gone about posing and interpreting (or not) the enigma itself for more than a century. Once this veil is lifted and the enigma unriddled, he argues, it becomes possible to reinterpret the relativistic and quantum ways of imagining reality (including social reality) in terms of a unified, nonreductive, creative dialectic of part and whole that fosters quantum sociological imaginations, methods, theories, and practices favoring liberating and just social outcomes.
The essays in this volume develop a set of relativistic interpretive solutions to the quantum enigma. Following a survey of relevant studies, and an introduction to the transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framing the study, overviews of Newtonianism, relativity and quantum scientific revolutions, the quantum enigma, and its main interpretations to date are offered. They are followed by a study of the notion of the wave-particle duality of light and the various experiments associated with the quantum enigma in order to arrive at a relativistic interpretation of the enigma, one that is shown to be capable of critically cohering other offered interpretations. The book concludes with a heuristic presentation of the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of what Tamdgidi calls the creative dialectics of reality. The volume essays involve critical, comparative/integrative reflections on the relevant works of founding and contemporary scientists and scholars in the field.
Liberating Sociology
From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations
Volume 1
Unriddling the Quantum Enigma
About the Author
Previous books by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi
Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism
(Routledge/Paradigm, 2007)
Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Mohammad-Hossein (a.k.a. Behrooz) Tamdgidi (pronounced tamjidi) is the founder of OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics), and its research and teaching publication, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699) which have served since 2002 to frame his independent research, pedagogical, and publishing initiatives. Formerly an associate professor of sociology specializing in social theory at UMass Boston, he has previously taught sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Oneonta.
