Le réel quantique : Entreprise microphysique ou perspective métaphysique ?

Abstract

The history of human thought that dominated the Western world is known as the Greek miracle. This took off from the 6th century before J-C, and is universally recognized as knowledge. We owe to it the awareness of reason in the quest for an understanding of the phenomena of nature, the purpose of which is a methodical search for wisdom and truth. Philosophy, as a science, seeks the most general explanations of the nature of the universe. At that time, philosophy and science were the same given that they were rationally in the pursuit of scientific objectivity. The resumption of mechanistic thought in the 17th century gradually led to the abandonment of medieval philosophical and theological explanations in favour of Newton classical mechanical. This showed that we are only mechanical cogs in a universe with a clockwork movement; incapable, through our mental efforts, of self-determination as being in the world. This classic image of pernicious human beings becoming institutionalized in society is still relevant today. The impossibility to applying the laws of Newtonian mechanics to electromagnetic phenomena led to demise of scientific materialism. The necessitating the birth of particle physics, which postulates that reality is both wave and particle. The microphysical enterprise, on the other hand, brings improvements to the knowledge of reality, it allows us to understand that nature is not a set of blind and unconscious relationships that act mechanically. The postulates of particle physics, which describe an abstract reality that can be demonstrated experimentally by mathematical objects, show that the quantum world is not a world in itself, rather a relative world of knowledge that a subject can have about nature. At this level, knowledge is a definite quantum state. This leads to questioning the approach of the Ancients who thought of knowledge as a relation of a subject to an object. The latter being external and having autonomous principles. On the contrary, far from conceiving nature as the holder of an intrinsic reality, quantum reality reminds us that science can only study the process by which human beings form their own knowledge, develop the representations that will make it possible to give meaning to the universe and to the human himself.