… Science is shut inside.
This is from The Birth of Physics by Michel Serres, translated by David Webb and William Ross (2018; 1977):
… No one reads the meteōra , not those of Lucretius, of Descartes or of anyone. Why this repression? Because philosophers, historians and the masters of science are concerned only with the ancient idea of law. With exact determination or rigorous overdetermination, and with the god of Laplace.
[line break added] With absolute control, and thus with mastery without vacillation or the ambiguity of margins. With power and order. The weather now and the weather to come infinitely surpass our account of them, so they are of no account. Because it is the place of disorder and the unforeseeable, of local danger, of the formless.
… Science is shut inside. From the start, it moves from the meteōra to the crucible and will never again leave this closure, which excludes chance and the uncontrollable, what today we would call hyper-complexity.
Lucretius’s physics is out in the open air. And ours is too, once again. The old closed systems are abstractions or ideals. The time for openness has arrived. Lucretius is prehistoric by comparison with Descartes, Laplace and every thermodynamic, that is to say metaphysical, closure; now these are prehistoric with respect to us. And the De rerum natura is there ahead of us. Outside in the storm and the rain.
My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 