“In the clear blue sky of physics, two small clouds of misunderstanding were left on the horizon obscuring beauty and clarity. (” The knowledge of physics is like the great blue sky, which is only These famous words were uttered in 1900 by the great British physicist Lord Kelvin, the creator of “absolute zero.” his name, in front of his colleagues at the Royal Institution in London.
These two “small clouds” were, one, an inconclusive result of the Michelson and Morley experiment, which could not show a discrepancy in the speed of light propagation in space, and the other, a problem posed by the so-called “black”. . body “emitted by an object heated to a high temperature. Lord Kelvin believed that there was an anomaly in the details, as there was nothing new to discover in physics, after Newton’s universal gravity and Maxwell’s electromagnetism. , only the measures needed to be reviewed.
From clouds to devastating storms
However … behind the first of these two clouds was nothing more and nothing less than the theory of relativity, behind the second quantum mechanics! Consider the two main theories on which twentieth-century physics was built. A century that radically changed our view of such fundamental concepts as time, space, matter or energy. This anecdote that is often told can be the starting point of the new article by the philosopher and astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau, dedicated precisely to these small anomalies, which sometimes make us jump from one model to another.
More than a century after Lord Kelvin, the situation in this regard has not fundamentally changed. Organized around “standard models” (particles for the infinitesimal, cosmology for the infinitesimal, etc.), contemporary physics also faces its share of deviations. It also has two – or three or four … – “clouds”, at least some of which (but which ones?) Will sooner or later end up in destructive storms, which raises our strongest theories. And Aurélien Barrau tells us that this will always be the case … and that is why he warns us from the beginning: “Literally, all theories are wrong”!
cosmic anomaly
by Aurelien Barrau. Edicions Donod, 192 pages, € 16.90 (published on September 7).
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