In 1821, Romantic music gained a victory with the first representation of the Freischütz290 by Carl Maria von Weber.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler pushes the organic theory of culture and State to its ultimate consequences. Carl Schmitt will comment on the works of Savigny. The economist Ernst Wagemann will strive to lay the bases of an ‘organic economy’. And the Viennese school, with Othmar Spann, will see in Adam Müller, the precursor of the ‘spirit of community’ (Geist der Gemeinschaft), one of the founders of sociology.
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Romantiques allemands (vol. 1 et 2), collection presented by Maxime Alexandre, Erika Tunner, and Jean-Claude Schneider. Gallimard, 1,606 and 1,744 pages.291
Le romantisme politique en Allemagne, a study by Jacques Droz. Armand Colin, 211 pages.292
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La Société des études romantiques293 (27 rue Racine, 75006 Paris), whose secretary is Marie-Claude Chemin, publishes the journal Romantisme twice a year (through Flammarion).
Scientific
Worldviews and Cosmology
Imagine an observer equipped with the same astronomical instruments as us, but who is millions of light years from our solar system. ‘If he looks far enough into the sky, the world that he will see will be similar to the world that we see. And even more similar the further he will look’.
This is not the least of modern cosmology’s paradoxes.
Astronomy observes the stars and describes their properties. Astrophysics attempts to interpret these properties through the play of the laws of physics. Borrowing from each without confusing them with each other, cosmology deals with the universe considered as a whole.
From Aristotle to Einstein
Jacques Merleau-Ponty, sixty-one year old Professor at the University of Nanterre, first cousin of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bruno Morando, lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris, editor-in-chief of the journal L’Astronomie, astronomer at the Bureau des Longitudes, have divided their work into three parts. Each consists of a ‘philosophical presentation’ and a ‘scientific presentation’ which cross-reference each other.
Three names are advanced which correspond to three great milestones in cosmology: Aristotle for Antiquity, Newton for the classical era, and Einstein for the contemporary period.
The alternation of day and night, the succession of the seasons, the movement of the sun, moon, and planets have struck the imagination of the ancients. The peoples of the Near East draw upon a hypothesis of chance: astrology; the Greeks, a science: astronomy.
Aristotle remarks that a shadow is cast upon the moon by the earth at the beginning and the end of eclipses, always in a circular form. He draws the logical conclusion: the earth is a globe. Thus is born the ‘spherical cosmology’, equally illustrated by Plato, Pythagoras, Eudoxus of Cnidus, and Ptolemy. According to this conception, the universe is associated with prominent geometric forms. The earth is a sphere around which are arranged other celestial spheres, each eternally describing the same movement of an absolute perfection.
Two centuries after Pythagoras, Aristarchus of Samos imagines ‘the hypothesis which makes the earth a planet like the others, turning both upon itself and around the sun’. The idea passed unnoticed. Seeking ‘eternal truths’, the theologians of the Middle Ages preferred to take the ideal views of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
Everything changes in the Renaissance with Copernicus (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1542), Kepler, and Giordano Bruno. ‘Copernicus, reviving Aristarchus whose work he knew well, showed that the heliocentric hypothesis, in which the sun is the centre of the universe, gives an even more satisfying explanation for the apparent movement of the planets than the system of Ptolemy. Fifty years later, Kepler discovered the exact laws of the movement of the planets around the sun’.
The spherical cosmology collapsed one tranquil night in the summer of 1609, when the lens of Galileo revealed a new world. The universe ceased to be the place for the election of ‘absolute movements’. The stars, which the progress of optics allowed us to observe better, are described by irregular ellipses. The ideal spheres of the Empyrean where angels guide the planets in their course, the ‘sublunary world’ of Aristotle, and the ‘crystalline heaven’, disappear at the same time. The Church, deeply struck, protests. It is too late. The earth is no longer the centre of the universe. It is the beginning of the end of anthropocentrism.
But at the same time, the world ceases to be apprehended as a whole. The distribution of the stars is declared ‘without necessary relevance to the framework in which objects are cast and events unfold.’ In the eighteenth century, science centres its attention on the fundamental laws of celestial phenomena and seems to give up trying to solve questions touching on the structure of matter, the nature of space, and the limits of the universe. Newton speaks a priori of the ‘infinity of the world’. The idea which is imposed is of a spatio-temporal framework which is void, homogenous, and infinite, peopled by bodies in interaction, but whose distribution remains approximately known.
Until the middle of the eighteenth century, two systems dispute the legacy of Aristotle: that of Descartes, built on abstract rationalism, and that of Newton, founded upon experiment. It is the second, supported notably by Voltaire, which prevails, thus consecrating the reign of classical physics.
‘We owe to Kant’, comment Merleau-Ponty and Morando, ‘one of the first cohesive attempts at cosmological synthesis based on Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which remarkably anticipates, on certain points, modern theories’.
The new cosmological revolution, which takes place at the dawn of the twentieth century, restores the notion of totality. Announced by Fitzgerald, Lorentz, Gustave Le Bon, it is systematised by Einstein. ‘From cosmology to microphysics, Einstein has imposed his mark and modified the image of the world’, writes Professor Louis Rougier in his Traité de la connaissance (Gauthier-Villars).294
Initially, however, Einstein did not seek to create a new theory of the universe. He only wanted to ‘give the existing theories a more simple and secure logical basis’.
Everything began in 1881, when Michelson attempted to demonstrate, with the aid of light signals, the ‘movement of the Earth in relation to aether’, that is to say the ‘absolute movement’ of the Earth in space. The experiment fails — it appears to administer ‘proof’ that the Earth is immobile.
For a quarter of a century, physicists apply themselves rigorously to the problem. In 1905, Einstein discovers the solution. He formulates the theory of special relativity, which he will generalise ten years later.
It is the electromagnetic properties which explain the failure of the experiment. If the Earth seems immobile, it is because ‘aether’ does not exist. The speed of celestial bodies is limited to 300,000 km per second. It is isotropic, that is to say, it is the same for all observers whatever their movement will be. A traveller overtaken on a road by an automobile driving at the speed of light would be, in one second, 300,000 km from this vehicle, regardless of his own speed. And the result would be the same if he was crossed instead of being overtaken.
‘Common sense does not appear to be accounted for’, writes Pierre Marcenet in the Cahiers universitaires.295 ‘But it must take into account the simultaneity necessary for every observation’. We can say that a stick is thirty centimetres long if we can, at the same time, make the graduated increment of thirty coincide with a point situated at one of its extremities, and zero with a point situated at its other extremity. Now this simultaneity of observations taken at the extremities ceases to apply when two complexes are in ‘relative movement’ to each other, which is the case with all celestial bodies. This constant movement is translated by a spatial and temporal ‘distortion’. The more the speed increases, the more time seems to slow down, the more distances seem to shrink.
The notions of ‘absolute’ space and time thus become inadequate. The two elements can no longer be separated. We will speak of instances-localities296 lo
calised in time-space. The Newtonian postulates, fundamental in physics and classical quasi-cosmology, must be abandoned.
Alongside this, Einstein demonstrates that it is possible to reduce mass to energy. Classical physics had already noted that a heated body is heavier. In atomic physics, four hydrogen atoms give helium with a mass weight proportional to the intervening loss of energy. Nature is transformed into energy according to the well-known formula: E = mc2. The source of the radiance of stars is thus identified, which would be recreated artificially via atomic bombs.
The problem of the coexistence of matter and energy is resolved by this fact. Matter is the inertia of energy.
No Privileged Place
In 1915, general relativity extended the theses of special relativity to all possible observations, and not only to observations animated by a uniform movement. Gravitation then loses its mysterious character. Inert mass and heavy mass are identical, the laws of gravitation merely translate the inertia of matter. It is an effect of the ‘curvature of space-time’: masses (planets, for example, modify the properties of ambient space in the same way that hot bodies modify the temperature of the ambient milieu. Space is defined as a field of pure gravitation existing everywhere there is energy and whose characteristics vary. Outside of space, there is not a ‘void’, there is nothing.297
‘The sun, quite a massive body, “creates” in its vicinity a geometry whose fundamental curves are the trajectories of the planets. But elsewhere, in the vicinity of Sirius for example, another geometry will prevail’.
In the vicinity of a mass’s interior, space is all the more ‘curved’ the greater and denser this mass is. ‘If its size surpasses a certain limit, the curvature becomes such that space closes in upon itself in some way. Nothing, neither matter nor light, can escape it: this is a part of the universe completely separate from the rest’. Eddington (Space, Time, Gravitation, Hermann) has calculated that a globe of water with a 750 million kilometre radius would form a space of this kind. A luminous ray would turn around, returning indefinitely to its point of departure.
Gravitation affects all phenomena. In a gravitational field, rays of light are diverted, clocks slow down, etc. The universe is not Euclidean: ‘At a very large scale’, writes Merleau-Ponty and Morando, ‘the distribution of matter in the universe is uniform. Not only is it verified that neither the Earth, the sun, nor the galaxy are the centre of the universe and that they do not occupy a remarkable place, but there is no centre in the universe at all, no notable place, no privileged location’.
Alongside the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the elaboration of non-Pythagorean arithmetic, non-Pascalian numbers, and non-Aristotelian logic, the birth of modern theories of knowledge are announced. All at once, the ‘formal truths’ of the ancient Greeks, the ‘apriori world’ of Descartes, the ‘infinite space’ of Newton, the ‘noumena’ of Kant, and the categories of the scholastics collapse.
The Big Bang Thesis
The ‘cosmological revolution’ has not yet come to its conclusion. The theory of relativity is succeeded, with Max Plank and Heisenberg, by the quantum theories of matter and energy, and then the theory of elementary particles. Theoretical cosmology has passed from the stage of the construction and study of particular ‘models’ of the universe, to research of general classes, such as the observational cosmology used to narrow these classes of models into more restrained sub-classes that agree as much as possible with the results of observation.
‘One question divides the researchers: that of the “origin” of the universe. Two great hypotheses confront each other: the thesis of continuous creation, according to which the universe has existed for all time in a dynamic form, and the thesis of the ‘primeval atom’ (or Big Bang theory, to use the Anglo-Saxon expression).
The Belgian priest G. Lemaître (L’hypothèse de l’atome primitive. Griffon, Neuchâtel, 1946)298 was without doubt the first cosmologist to reflect upon the question of nucleosynthesis in the universe. His theory may be summarised in the following way: ‘the two principles of thermodynamics imply, from the point of view of quantum theory: (1) that energy exists in packets or distinct quanta and that the total remains constant; (2) that the number of these quanta grows without cease. As a consequence, if we go back through time, we must always find less quanta, until we have found all energy in the universe concentrated in a small number or in one single quantum’.
It is this unique quantum that Lemaître calls the ‘primeval atom’: the universe will be born from its sudden explosion, twelve or fifteen million years ago. The hypothesis is seductive. For the author, whose philosophical presuppositions are obvious, it has the primary advantage of restoring the notion of causality, which had been eliminated by the uncertainty principle. However, in the eyes of many cosmologists, the ideas of Lemaître are already outmoded. They do not allow us to explain the existence of the lighter elements: at best, the fragments of the primeval atom could only correspond to the heaviest nuclei. Some even consider that the idea of beginning and, as a result, that of an initial singularity, are meaningless — by the fact of the reevaluation which is imposed by the notion of time. In addition, we can also imagine a ‘pulsating’ universe, that is to say, passing in successive phases of expansion and contraction. (This hypothesis has been advanced by the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle). From this perspective, it is the continuous creation of matter that fills the voids created by the expansion of the galactic systems. (But the problem of the formation of the galaxies themselves has still not received a satisfying solution).
A new worldview is to be born. But it is not certain if science, by its very nature, can answer (and, by consequence, give a meaning) to three final questions, which are but one: the existence of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of the universe.
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La trois étapes de la cosmologie, a study by Jacques Merleau-Ponty and Bruno Morando.299 Laffont, 316 pages.
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In October 1976, 150 astronomers and astrophysicists gathered in Paris under the auspices of the CNRS and the International Astronomical Union to debate the formation and evolution of the universe. The expansionist cosmology, one of whose principal theoreticians, at the beginning of the century, was the American astronomer E. Hubble, had been strongly criticised. Within the framework of the law of uniform expansion of the universe, certain phenomena (notably the association of extra-galactic objects linked together by ‘bridges of matter’) indeed seemed unable to be explained. In addition, the constant of Hubble, deduced for each region of the universe by the relationship between speed of expansion and distance of galaxies, would prove to be inconstant. Now if there is continuous expansion in the universe, it is necessarily isotropic, that is to say, it is the same in every direction. There is thus a contradiction here.
During this same congress, Sandage and Taman have concluded to a new value for Hubble’s constant (H = 55), notably smaller than that obtained to the present. As a consequence of this result (which inscribes itself in a model of a universe in expansion) the ‘date’ of the formation of the cosmos is pushed back considerably.
Finally according to two researchers at the Institute Henry Poincaré (Paris), H. Karoji and L. Nottale, there is room to think that the light issued from galaxies shifts differently towards red depending on whether or not it passes through some concentrations of matter. The crossing of a cluster of galaxies, for example, will be linked to an accentuated ‘reddening’. This observation could give life again to theories of ‘tired light’, which base themselves on the fact that the energy of the photon (or ‘grain of light’) decreases throughout its journey because of its interaction with the matter that it crosses before reaching us.
The Origin of Life
‘We can only know the nature of things’, said Heraclitus of Ephesus, ‘when we know their origin and their evolution’. Today, the biologist no longer dreams of fabricating a man in a bottle. Nor even an amoeba or bacteria. He knows that these are the products of
hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. But he still preoccupies himself with the problem of ‘first causes’: the origin of life.
‘The traditional solutions to the problem of the origin of life point to two possibilities: either living beings emerge spontaneously from inert matter, or life existed in the universe for all eternity’, recalls Christian Léourier, twenty-nine years of age.
Since the end of the last century, it has become impossible to remain content with these explanations. The discovery of microbes, and the experiments of Pasteur on the sterilisation of culture media (1862), put an end to the belief in ‘spontaneous generation’. The theory of the ‘panspermia’, according to which life would be propagated from planet to planet by means of the ‘aether’, had also been refuted: no known germ could resist the high energy radiations of interplanetary space.
Alongside this, the theory of evolution formulated by Darwin has enabled the refutation of the ‘eternalist’ solution. From the instant that we admit that species have appeared one after the other, the question effectively arises of knowing where the first ‘thrust’ of evolution occurred.
Finally, evidence for the phenomenon of photosynthesis would appear as a challenge to scientific common sense.
It is by photosynthesis that solar energy intervenes in the great biochemical cycles of the terrestrial globe. Green plants (chlorophyll) absorb carbon dioxide from the air, and synthesise from it the organic substances that they need. Animals in turn receive these substances, either by directly absorbing the plants, or by nourishing themselves on herbivorous beings. All of these plants reject oxygen. Now it is precisely this that constitutes the breathable part of the atmosphere. Without oxygen: no life, no chlorophyll, no photosynthesis, no more oxygen.
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