Marijan Šunjić

Modern physics and transdisciplinarity

International congress Transdisciplinary approaches of the dialogue between science, art and religion in the Europe of tomorrow

 Sibiu, Romania,
9 - 11 September 2007
Archdiocese of Sibiu
Faculty of Theology "Andrei Saguna", Sibiu

Abstract

Great advances of classical physics in the 19th century, with its deterministic character, seemed to announce the triumph of the « ; scientific method» ; , which promised to solve all important questions regarding nature and humanity, thus arrogantly claiming all other human achievements, including arts and humanities, and especially religion to be irrelevant. This gave support to materialist and positivist tendencies in philosophy, as well as to extreme scientism. However, several surprising developments in the 20th century, including quantum physics and relativity, soon revolutionized physics. With their intrinsic nonlocality and indeterminism, they shattered and changed not only the preconcieved ideas about the scientific research, but also modified the conceptual framework of our approach to reality. Many of the previously accepted dogmas were reconsidered, like the (inductive) « ; scientific method» ; , creation of hypotheses and their verification, subject-object interference, realism of physical theories, the use of ordinary language in science, reductionist programme had to be extended to include complexity and emergence, etc. Suddenly the arrogance of the 19th century science disappeared, giving way to more tolerant attitudes. It became obvious that our knowledge based on scientific research was essentialy limited, and this convinced (some) physicists that other modes of acquiring knowledge were not only acceptable but even necessary. This included other scientific disciplines, humanities, philosophy, but also religious experience in many forms, and especially ethics in research itself but even more in its technological applications. In this paper I discuss these developments in modern physics which opened the way to transdisciplinarity, but also the problems in establishing this dialogue which arise from the present specialization and fragmentation of science.