“Nature Exposed to Our Line of Questioning”: <i>Tomorrow’s Child</i> as Quantum Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article evaluates Ghost River Theatre’s Tomorrow’s Child through theories of subjectivity and reality founded on early quantum mechanics. When scientists first faced uncertainty, discontinuity, granularity of space, and other phenomena that affronted Newtonian and Kantian assumptions, they developed an approach to scientific discovery that respected an unassailable and primary subjectivity yet maintained a realism open to renegotiation. By blinding its spectators, Ghost River Theatre’s Tomorrow’s Child emphasizes the subjective orientation of basic cognition. Spectators must choose where to listen, an activity highlighted by their central spatial location. Yet the sounds from other possible orientations linger, reminding spectators of an amorphous, inaccessible, but actual and shared reality outside their orientation. When our orientations participate in that underlying world, Tomorrow’s Child shows us how our truths are both ours and participants in a shared world. Whether or not we agree with the charges, recent articles published by the Atlantic, New York Times, BBC, and other organizations have dubbed president Trump the first postmodern president. If, as many commentators and philosophers have suggested, postmodernism was influenced by quantum theory, then a re-examination of quantum theory helps us develop a framework to discuss subjectivity and personal truth without absconding from a shared reality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".