Apollo versus Dionysus. In a famous essay Friedrich Nietzsche argued that
Greek culture---and much of Western Civilization---has been shaped by the
two competing forces of reason and emotion. This dichotomy partly motivates
the historical development respectively of science and the arts. My talk
will illustrate the two sides of this divide with examples taken from
physics and from literature. Does a poem by Emily Dickinson have anything in
common with the quantum Hall effect?
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