The Depths of Illusion

1. Why did you choose this topic?

Anne Dippel: While researching writers in Vienna, I became fascinated by Schrödinger's entanglements of media, language, and matter. My journey continued at CERN and led me to Lüneburg, where Martin Warnke and I embarked on further research in Jülich and Vienna, encountering Wittgensteinian dilemmas.

Martin Warnke: The topic was at the very center of my research area Media Cultures of Computer Simulations, and as an educated physicist I took the splendid opportunity to investigate a case together with Anne Dippel.

2. What new perspectives does your book offer?

The book demonstrates how computer simulations influence contemporary scientific knowledge culture. It illustrates the shift from mathematically founded, hierarchical, and deductive knowledge structures toward statistically underpinned, algorithm-based, data-driven modes of inquiry. This transformation necessitates a change in perspective and modes of self-assuring within the sciences, moving from causal proofs toward probabilistic and correlational approaches.

3. What makes your topic relevant for current research debates?

The simulation is the messenger. The book reveals how digital understandings of the world create discrete monads out of matter, opening pathways that contrast with traditional mathematical approaches. We demonstrate how digital binarism leads to illusions, decentering even mathematics in the quantum world's observer problem.

4. Choose one person you would like to discuss your book with!

Rodrigo Ochigame und  Hans Jörg Rheinberger.

5. Your book summary in one sentence:

This book explores pathways to navigate the new uncertainties and opportunities in knowledge design brought about by computer simulations and AI.

Are computer simulations theory, experiment, or something in between? Anne Dippel and Martin Warnke explore the epistemological status of computer simulations. By examining the erosion of concept-based truth in the digital age in combination with pathways of knowledge in physics, they offer a media ethnography of the famous quantum physics double-slit experiment and its simulation. Recognizing simulations as central to shaping reality and multiplying illusions, the authors propose “operational realism” as epistemic composure in the digital era. The work raises ethical questions about algorithmic world design, offering humor, revelations, and insights into new ontologies of knowledge.