Date: Thursday, 16th April, 4:00 pm (Warsaw time)
Place: Faculty of Psychology, room 3.03
Join the transmission here: zoom link
At the edge of knowing: how language and embodied experience shape our understanding of black holes
Abstract
Black holes are among the most extreme (and mysterious!) objects in the universe — and among the most cognitively challenging. At the singularity, our best physical theories break down. Beyond the event horizon, no information can escape. Black holes thus impose a hard limit on what we can know, making them a compelling case study for questions about scientific understanding: how do we conceptualise objects that resist direct experience, direct observation and direct theoretical descriptions?
This talk approaches that question from two complementary angles. The first is linguistic and philosophical. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and image schema analysis, I analyse the language of black hole physics across five canonical university textbooks. The analysis distinguishes explicit pedagogical metaphors from implicit, theory-constitutive metaphors embedded in the technical vocabulary. I show that the field relies on a small set of embodied schemas that carry inferential entailments about what a black hole is and how matter behaves near one. I also identify tensions between what textbooks say explicitly about metaphor and what their implicit language suggests.
The second angle is empirical. Drawing on video recordings, survey data, and focus group interviews from a science festival study, I examine how groups of visitors – often parents with young children – engaged with an immersive virtual reality experience featuring black holes and other astronomical phenomena. The analysis identifies four types of collaborative engagement and shows how the immersive and visually striking nature of VR can serve as a bridge between abstract knowledge and everyday experience.