Are there any common denominators that may underlie the practices of leading physicists and scientists, Renaissance alchemists, and indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca healers? There are obviously a myriad of things that these practices do not have in common. Yet through an analysis of the body and the senses and styles of grammar and social practice, these seemingly very different modes of existence may be triangulated to reveal a curious set of logics at play. Ways in which practitioners identify their subjectivities (or ‘self’) with nonhuman entities and ‘natural’ processes are detailed in the three contexts. A logic of identification illustrates similarities, and also differences, in the practices of advanced physics, Renaissance alchemy, and ayahuasca healing.

Physics and the “I” and “You” of experimentation

A small group of physicists at a leading American university in the early 1990s are investigating magnetic temporality and atomic spins in a crystalline lattice; undertaking experiments within the field of condensed matter physics. The scientists collaborate together…