This volume is a result of the 2018 symposium “Science and Literature: Einstein, Kafka and Houllebecq” at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. NTNU has an explicit interdisciplinary mission that encourages work mediating between what Percy C. Snow called Two Cultures, the humanities and the natural sciences, with an eye on the constitution of a Third Culture founded on transdisciplinary. Werner Heisenberg wrote a book on the topic, Der Teil und das Ganze. Heisenberg’s father, a typical 19th century German intellectual, mastered classical Greek better than German and had an intimate knowledge of Aristotle. For Werner Heisenberg, the classical humanities and the natural sciences of our day does not exist as epistemological separate areas, but rather as related parts of a Third Culture. Heisenberg’s starting point was the insight that already with Aristotle, energy could become matter and vice versa; Aristotle obliterated the original Greek idea of the atom as the paradigmatically indivisible. The center of our transdisciplinary subject lies in the following considerations: not only can energy become matter and matter become energy, which Aristotle established, and Einstein and Heisenberg experimentally confirmed, the humanities and natural sciences (and especially physics) have also become inter-connected. The same unsettling change is at the center of this volume about Kafka, Houellebecq, Einstein, and Heisenberg.weiterlesen