Page Content (OCR)
we have not yet discovered is what we have not yet financed. “It does not exist” because the cash registers are empty. This financial power attributes a specific status to its beneficiaries, that of the “official’’ voice of science. In a reflex of cold-bloodedness, we give more moral credit to scientific institutions, even though they are stages of power strug- gles, than to the genius of mankind. As a consequence, interdiscipli- nary encounters are rare. They exist like the separate subsidiaries of a financial holding. In essence, fundamental physics should be “conta- gious.” The partitioning, if only phraseological and whether it is hori- zontal or vertical, does not promote the self-realization of research. It is remarkable that genuine science is practiced by junior scientists — the vast majority of discoveries, theoretical or otherwise, are made by the youngest — whereas science is predominantly organized by senior sci- entists who, once past a certain age, are no longer able to produce knowledge. Of course and fortunately there are still exceptions to that rule. Nevertheless, this urges us to make a triage of scientific articles written by these organizers who were educated years ago, i.e., based on normalized and compartmentalized referents. Saying scientific arti- cles is saying “official knowledge” and even official theories. This is how the great theories of the twentieth century became suc- cess stories. It is true that their predictive powers, particularly with regard to general relativity and quantum mechanics, are very big and meet the criterion of reproducibility in countless areas. This criterion has even become a barrier beyond which hardly any science exists. This deficiency is the status attributed to the soft sciences (human sci- ences, etc.). If history, still considered a science, is the exception to this criterion — since past events only occurred once — it is because we lean on tangible, material traces, providing of course that the instru- ments of pure science (still controversial in some situations) attest to the temporal origin of artifacts (radiocarbon dating, photolumines- cence, etc.). Cosmology, supported by the greatly publicized theory of the Big Bang, gathers experimental data that many feel cannot be reproduced by man because they represent the universe itself. There- fore, a cosmological view of the universe decrees what is right or not, measured against the contribution of the important theories men- 14 A panoramic view of science could therefore give us the illusion that we know a great deal about it, enough to solve various problems, even to the point that some astrophysicists authorize themselves to invade cosmogony with the instruments of cosmology. However, in tioned above.