The Crisis of Science: Does Atom Exist?
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The remarkable philosopher Edmund Husserl noted more than a hundred years ago that European sciences, primarily natural, are in a deep crisis. Husserl discovered this through a phenomenological method. This method carefully studies the processes taking place inside a person’s consciousness before a person comes to this or that conclusion about what is outside of him and what is not. It turns out that we are not dealing with things-in-themselves, but their representations in our minds. Everything that we know about the external world exists only in our consciousness.
Therefore, scientific disciplines, sincerely believing that they study the laws of the objective and independently of the existing world, are deeply mistaken. They only study the structures of our thinking. So it would be better to say so, leaving groundless claims to objectivity to political propagandists.
What Husserl clearly understood and brilliantly explained, scientists themselves began to understand. So, for example, in quantum mechanics, the process itself depends on the position and even on the very presence of the observer. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, the structure of time also becomes relative, which also depends on where we place the subject on the timeline. And if we assume the processes occurring at a speed greater than the speed of light, then time – beyond the limit of Minkowski space – becomes reversible. Modern superstring theory associates measurement structures with the calibration of the world sheet and the spirits of Fadeev-Popov, which also refers specifically to the subject.
The role of rhetoric, persuasion, and politics and economics in sciences that claim to be accurate have been uncovered by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Alexander Koyre. And finally, Michel Foucault, and after him even more revealingly Bruno Latour, showed perfectly well that at the origins of scientific experiments and discoveries lies pure swindle – the struggle of laboratories and scientific sects for grants, fame and power.
Putting all this together, some philosophers of science, such as John Horgan, came to the conclusion that the end of science has come, and modern scientists are crazy sectarians who have lost all connection with reality and are useful only for the invention of technical devices, whose production has long been divorced from the fundamental science.
If the building of objective reality, the study of which was previously claimed by the natural sciences, fell down, then this could not but affect the humanities. They were not considered accurate before, but now – in conditions of complete relativism and confusion – they have turned into loud arbitrariness.
Actually, this is postmodernity. Everything is relative, everything is fake, everything is ironic, everything is meaningless.
If earlier science was creating, or so at least it seemed to it, now it has openly begun to destroy.
You can mourn the end of science or its transformation into an ironic science (according to the same Horgan) or rejoice – tests and exams are canceled since the entire teaching corps is at once recognized as mentally deranged. But you can try to determine the moment when something went wrong. In my opinion, this is more important.
As a result of my own deconstruction of the modern natural science corpus of ideas and perceptions, the problem is atomism.
The idea of the existence of separate indivisible (and the atom in Greek means something indivisible) material particles, parts without a whole, was put forward by Leucippus and Democritus, and after them was picked up by Epicurus and Lucretius Carr. But in classical science – and up to the end of the Middle Ages – this idea was quite rightly considered nonsense. Not because atoms cannot be found (what today is called “atoms” is divisible, which means that they are not atoms at all), but because the One – mind, soul, spirit, – as Plato justly proved, cannot be deduced from much … Either mind or atoms. Atomism posits radical materialism and the profound meaninglessness of the world. In such a world, madness reigns, in it everything is accidental – everything is so, no more than otherwise (as the atomistic law of isonomy says). And as soon as – with Galileo, Newton and Gassendi – atomism became the basis of the natural sciences, humanity has fallen prey to a pernicious and dangerous hallucination. It began to imagine the external world as it not only is not, but cannot be. So the scientific worldview became insanity systematically instilled in people. And this naturally led to a total crisis.
They spoiled our minds, spoiled the world around us. Hence materialism, atheism, democracy, and liberalism. In politics, atomism was expressed in individualism, but the individual also does not exist and cannot exist, like the atom. Man is a continuum, his discreteness is an appearance. The absence of the One – in religion, state, society, morality – leads humanity to complete degeneration. And this is what we are seeing today. So the scientific worldview became insanity systematically instilled in people. And this naturally led to a total crisis. They spoiled our minds, spoiled the world around us. Hence materialism, atheism, democracy, and liberalism. In politics, atomism was expressed in individualism, but the individual also does not exist and cannot exist, like the atom. Man is a continuum, his discreteness is an appearance. The absence of the One – in religion, state, society, morality – leads humanity to complete degeneration. And this is what we are seeing today. So the scientific worldview became insanity systematically instilled in people. And this naturally led to a total crisis.
The last thing: if we want to save science, we must go back, reject atomism and everything built on it (in physics, chemistry, political science, etc.) and start all over again.