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CHAPTER Reality put to the test aspects of science — theory, simulation and experiment — Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, lecturer at the University of Nice, said: “physicists do not even begin to cover what we want to know about reality, because speci- fying reality implies a considerable limitation of the scope of this reality, not in the least by the instruments adapted to our visual range....We are about to witness a change in the nature of scientific knowledge”. This author of popular science books testified: “reality is a mental construct rather than a whole of objects.” A mental construct? In other words, we are talking about consciousness! For Emmanuel Marode, director of research at CNRS*” (note: emphasis added by the author), “simulation is based on the /dea that reproducibility is a characteristic of reality [note: this is in itself a very restrictive and self-justifying axiom!]. In other words, we explain our observations by inventing entities with properties. We then visualize their behavior in the reality we try to reproduce in equations. We sub- sequently try to solve these equations and find stable solutions. Unfor- tunately, there are numerous cases where this is not true! The obtained solutions behave randomly and differ greatly if we make even the slightest change to the initial data.” This testimony tells us that repro- ducibility has its limitations. We indeed need to reflect on the scale of approximation in which we work and the probability amplitudes of the diffusion matrices. The divergences (the appearance of infinities in equations) still cause a problem (except in 3D time). The truth therefore lies in the internal coherence of the theory. When it comes to reality, Klein’s testimony brings up very relevant trick questions: “how real is the reality proposed by physics when the 105 SPEAKING OF THE CONJUNCTION of the three