The last decade has seen an increasing number of references to quantum mechanics in the humanities and social sciences. This development has in particular been driven by Karen Barad’s agential realism: a theoretical framework that, based on Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, aims to inform social theorizing. In dealing with notions such as agency, power, and embodiment as well as the relation between the material and the discursive level, the influence of agential realism in fields such as feminist science studies and posthumanism has been profound. However, no one has hitherto paused to assess agential realism’s proclaimed quantum mechanical origin including its relation to the writings of Niels Bohr. This is the task taken up here. We find that many of the implications that agential realism allegedly derives from a Bohrian interpretation of quantum mechanics dissent from Bohr’s own views and are in conflict with those of other interpretations of quantum mechanics. Agential realism is at best consistent with quantum mechanics and consequently, it does not capture what quantum mechanics in any strict sense implies for social science or any other domain of inquiry. Agential realism may be interesting and thought provoking from the perspective of social theorizing, but it is neither sanctioned by quantum mechanics nor by Bohr’s authority. This conclusion not only holds for agential realism in particular, it also serves as a general warning against the other attempts to use quantum mechanics in social theorizing.

We treat, as an illustrative example of gravitational time dilation in relativity, the observation that the centre of the Earth is younger than the surface by an appreciable amount. Richard Feynman first made this insightful point and presented an estimate of the size of the effect in a talk; a transcription was later published in which the time difference is quoted as ‘one or two days’. However, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the result is in fact a few years. In this paper we present this estimate alongside a more elaborate analysis yielding a difference of two and a half years. The aim is to provide a fairly complete solution to the relativity of the ‘aging’ of an object due to differences in the gravitational potential. This solution—accessible at the undergraduate level—can be used for educational purposes, as an example in the classroom. Finally, we also briefly discuss why exchanging ‘years’ for ‘days’—which in retrospect is a quite simple, but significant, mistake—has been repeated seemingly uncritically, albeit in a few cases only. The pedagogical value of this discussion is to show students that any number or observation, no matter who brought it forward, must be critically examined.

Explanation is one of the most discussed notions in philosophy of science. This may be because there is little consensus among specialists on how explanation in a scientific context should be characterised. Three main approaches appear to be alive today: the formal-logical view, the ontological view, and the pragmatic view. Between these three classes of theories little agreement seems possible. Beyond the expectation that explanation is meant to provide a particular kind of information about facts of matter, there seems to be little agreement at all. Given this, the pragmatic view has at least one advantage, namely, its ability to accept the others. Alternative conceptions of explanation may be construed as promoting wholly possible goals of a given scientific explanation in so far as the pragmatic situation determines that it is appropriate to pursue these goals. What pragmatists deny is that any of these other views tell us what scientific explanation is or that they cover all forms of scientific explanation, i.e., that there is any one goal of scientific explanation. Various approachesThe formal-logical approach considers scientific explanation as something quite distinct and very different from ordinary explanation. It holds that every scientific explanation should have certain objective features by which it can be completely characterised and understood. Following Carl Hempel, a scientific explanation is to be construed as an argument with a propositional structure, i.e., an explanandum is a proposition that follows deductively from an explanans. This kind of approach gives us a prescriptive account of explanation in the sense that a proposition counts as a scientific explanation if, and only if, it fulfils certain formal requirements. As Hempel remarked, summarising his own position, "Explicating the concept of scientific explanation is not the same thing as writing an entry on the word 'explain' for the Oxford English Dictionary." 1 His approach offers certain norms with respect to which we can demarcate scientific explanations from other forms of explanation.

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