Invitation to travel to the land of revolutions

Invitation to travel to the land of revolutions

“On such fundamental matters as the general philosophy of change, science and society usually work hand in hand. (…) Men of learning transposed into nature the liberal program of slow and orderly change that they advocated for the transformation of human society. (…) In his argument for gradualism as an almost universal rhythm, Darwin had to employ Lyell’s characteristic method : the rejection of mere appearance and common sense in favor of an underlying reality. Contrary to what popular myths accredit, Darwin and Lyell were not the heroes of true science, defending objectivity against the theological lucubrations of “catastrophists” like Cuvier and Buckland. The catastrophists were men as concerned with scientific truth as the gradualists.”

Stephen Jay Gould in "Panda’s Thumb"

"The quantum hypothesis leads to the admission that there are phenomena in nature that do not occur continuously but abruptly and, so to speak, explosively."
Physicist Max Planck in "Introduction to Physics"

"The meaning of the word mutation must be clarified when used in history. The term is borrowed from biology, where it designates the transformation of a being or a species, which historians believe is impossible to reverse. It is therefore a more radical phenomenon than a revolution (...) Natural phenomena fluctuate : they vary from one case to another and they can take an unprecedented course under the effect of apparently tiny causes."
Physicists Georges Charpak and Roland Omnès
in "Be learned, become prophets"

" A revolution is a purely natural phenomenon which obeys physical laws more than the rules which normally determine the development of society. Or rather, these rules take on in a revolution a character which brings them much closer to the laws of physics, the material force of necessity manifests itself with greater violence."
Friedrich Engels Excerpt from a letter to Karl Marx dated February 13, 1851

Journey to the land of revolutions

How about embarking on a philosophical journey into the world of radical change ? This is a stroll that will be anything but boring or monotonous, if the narrator manages to capture the full variety of its landscapes. Our journey will cross the territories of science, history, economics, and politics in all directions. Don’t worry if you don’t have any background in these fields : there’s no ready-made thinking for this type of itinerary. The journey is no more leisurely than a sea trip on raging waves. We stroll along a seemingly tranquil plateau and, suddenly, tumble to the bottom of the most impressive precipices. We lie down on a peaceful grassy meadow, and suddenly find ourselves in the center of an erupting volcano. A mountain like the Andes, which seems unchanged since time immemorial, rises imperceptibly beneath our feet due to the sudden movements of the Earth’s crust. The ground, apparently immobile, suddenly becomes unstable, and moves in fits and starts, in earthquakes. A seemingly calm ocean is suddenly lifted by a tsunami caused by the straightening of a continental plate blocked by its neighbor, causing in a few seconds, a shock equivalent to the energy of 500 megatons of TNT, the equivalent of 30,000 Hiroshima bombs, and lifting 30 cubic kilometers of water. In the depths of these oceans, the crust is far from calm. Three-quarters of the planet’s volcanoes are found underwater, and the most violent eruptions take place under tons of water. Some ridges, these mountain ranges buried in the oceans, experience several tens of thousands of earthquakes per year. When magma suddenly reaches the surface, it causes cataclysmic effects. In the depths, large gas bubbles develop, which suddenly reach the surface. A volcanic island can suddenly appear or disappear in the middle of an ocean. A snow slope, dazzling in the sun, runs wild and transforms, following a tiny action, into a raging movement of devastation, destroying everything in its path. Suddenly, a material changes from a non-magnetic to a magnetic state, from a solid to a liquid, from a normal state to a superconducting state. A snowflake changes its structural type. An atomic nucleus suddenly and unpredictably decomposes into lighter nuclei and emits radioactive radiation. An atom (or particle) emits a photon, as suddenly as it is unexpected. A living cell suddenly divides (meiosis), unpredictably. A neuronal synapse discharges violently. With the instability of its snow layers, an avalanche is triggered violently and unexpectedly. The climate has similar shocks in store for us : cyclones and storms. Periods of glaciation and warming follow one another, abruptly,without allowing us to predict them. They are as unexpected as they are radical in their time of action and in the extent of their transformation. On our scale too, the weather has its surprises in store for us, as brutal as they are violent, unleashing an unexpected storm here or brutally precipitating tons of water or ice there onto the astonished observer. A cold wave spreads in the heart of summer. In the middle of the desert heat, a storm floods the wadi and drowns its occupants. In a liquid in which salt is dissolved, the salt crystallizes. The moment is unexpected each time. The event is brutal. No one can predict it exactly, neither the moment of its onset, nor its magnitude. The interval between two shocks changes constantly and we can only highlight an average probability. Presenting the phenomenon as the product of a regular action, of a progressive evolution, cannot give an idea of the process, which is discontinuous. The change is qualitative. There is not even a transition from continuous to discontinuous, contrary to what quantitative measurements sometimes suggest, but small jumps followed by a jump of greater magnitude. These "peak effects" are found in all areas : from social struggle to stock market prices, from the bifurcations of life to changes in the states of matter. A quantity of small discontinuities in all directions suddenly become coherent, enter into resonance, and produce a discontinuity on a large scale. Resonance, which is the basis of a very large number of interaction phenomena, is linked to the unexpected correlations of the rhythms of phenomena more than to their physical attributes. This is how the light photon and matter (atom or particle), matter and the void, the body and the brain, neural networks and mental events are connected. The systems and laws concerned by resonance have a particularity highlighted by the great physicistThere is not even a transition from continuous to discontinuous, contrary to what quantitative measurements sometimes suggest, but small jumps followed by a jump of greater magnitude. These "peak effects" are found in all areas : from social struggle to stock market prices, from the bifurcations of life to changes in the states of matter. A quantity of small discontinuities in all directions suddenly become coherent, enter into resonance, and produce a discontinuity on a large scale. Resonance, which is the basis of a very large number of interaction phenomena, is linked to the unexpected correlations of the rhythms of phenomena more than to their physical attributes. This is how the light photon and matter (atom or particle), matter and the void, the body and the brain, neural networks and mental events are connected. The systems and laws concerned by resonance have a particularity highlighted by the great physicistThere is not even a transition from continuous to discontinuous, contrary to what quantitative measurements sometimes suggest, but small jumps followed by a jump of greater magnitude. These "peak effects" are found in all areas : from social struggle to stock market prices, from the bifurcations of life to changes in the states of matter. A quantity of small discontinuities in all directions suddenly become coherent, enter into resonance, and produce a discontinuity on a large scale. Resonance, which is the basis of a very large number of interaction phenomena, is linked to the unexpected correlations of the rhythms of phenomena more than to their physical attributes. This is how the light photon and matter (atom or particle), matter and the void, the body and the brain, neural networks and mental events are connected. The systems and laws concerned by resonance have a particularity highlighted by the great physicistPoincaré : the ability to jump, abruptly and unexpectedly, from one structure to another, completely new one.

Hold your breath. Unpredictability is the order of the day. This cruise won’t be a long, quiet river. The sites to be visited will be both the shocks of nature [ 1 ] and those of society : tornado, cyclone, tsunami, erupting volcano, earthquake, avalanche, lightning, storm, hurricane, nuclear explosion within stars [ 2 ] , birth of a galaxy, sudden formation of a pulsar, triggering of gamma ray bursts [ 3 ] , collision of galaxies, explosion of a supernova, bursting of a storm, radioactive fission and fusion, electric discharge, superconductivity, unstable or metastable particle, transformation of energy into matter and vice versa, state transition or breaking of symmetry of matter, photon/electron collision, sudden emission and reception of photons by matter, sudden change of chemical catalysis, jump of state of matter (solid, liquid, gaseous), quantum jump [ 4 ] , crisis [ 5 ] of the laser, crystallization, jump of states of matter, rapid succession of bonds and separations of living molecules, emission and reception of signal molecules by a living cell, leap of increasingly specialized cell lines, phase transition of the development of the living, leap of physical and mental growth, birth, death of the individual, cell suicide, electrical discharge of the neuron, emission/absorption of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, activation and deactivation of a brain circuit, orgasmic crisis, flash of consciousness, leap of consciousness state (wakefulness, slow sleep and paradoxical sleep), emotional shock, leap of heart rate, heart attack, epilepsy, change of lifestyle of a species, genetic mutation, invention of new plans for organizing life, explosion of diversity of species, transformation of a fin into a leg and a wing, mass extinction of species, brutal economic depression, overthrow of a regime, collapse of a civilization, riot, revolt and social revolution. The list of abrupt interruptions of a mechanism that had long been calm but contained potentially explosive contradictions is far from over....

Why such a Prévert-like list ? Is it not absurd, for example, to draw a parallel between phenomena as dissimilar as the "violence" of a volcano in an explosive eruption and the "gentleness" of crystallization, which simply deposits a salt ? "Violence" is a characteristic that depends on the dimension at which one examines it. We will see that a simple chemical reaction with electron stripping has a character of considerable violence relatively. And these two phenomena, volcanism and crystallization, are much more linked than it seems. Volcanoes explode when magma crystallizes [ 6 ]quickly. Its viscosity abruptly blocks the flow of lava, causing the impressive explosion of the crater. It is common to think about the geodynamics of the globe while forgetting major volcanic eruptions. Indeed, they are very rare. But the massive, violent, and rapid nature of their eruption has a considerable influence on the history of the globe, its crust, its climate, and life. Volcanism and plate tectonics are brutal phenomena, producing continents, seas, currents, climate, and all the fundamental conditions for life on Earth. It is the collisions of these two phenomena that gave the Earth’s crust its appearance. Mountains are not the only evidence of these eruptions. Even with regard to climate, they certainly have a preponderant influence on the temperature of the globe, greater than the small variations in solar emission or the very small greenhouse effect, on which public attention has been focused. Thus, the greatest ups and downs in temperatures are certainly more linked to major volcanic eruptions than to other effects. There have been very few major eruptions in the Earth’s history, but they have been the most significant for the Earth, for the climate, and for living beings, despite their small place in the long term, very long periods occurring without such events. Violent events leave a mark that goes beyond the immediate shock. They mark history because they have a profound effect. Everyone knows that a person who has suffered a depression will remain preoccupied for a long time by the fear of falling back into it. The mark will go well beyond the duration of the crisis. It will affect the rest of one’s existence, relationships, and way of approaching life. Human psychology is not as far removed from the general functioning of the universe as we like to believe. It fundamentally obeys the same necessities. It is not stable, it is constantly transforming, even if our consciousness is in search of certainties, of more orderly rationalities. Like matter and society, it obeys a contradictory mixture of order and disorder. The taste for order and rationality is more or less pronounced among individuals. But the search for absolute order is as mad as the pursuit of absolute disorder. Natural functioning is intermittence, a feedback, a mixture of order and disorder. This results in the possibility of sudden changes. The accidents of human psychology bear witness to this as much as the sudden accidents of meteorology or those of socie

The San Andreas Fault is a spectacular manifestation of the earthquakes that mark plate movements. These, far from occurring continuously, are locked by friction and occur only during earthquakes that are discontinuities of all sizes.

Just as it is not fixed, regular, or continuous, the universe is not evolutionary. Even if the authors preferred to remove the "r," the world is in a state of permanent revolution. This revolution can be masked, inhibited, blocked, diverted, or momentarily crushed, but it never disappears definitively. Its influence is always present. The brakes of transformation, these conservative mechanisms of nature and society, force them to advance only in leaps and bounds. Continents do not advance slowly and gradually, but in fits and starts, during earthquakes. Magma does not emerge onto the surface of the globe little by little, but during brutal volcanic eruptions. Species do not give rise to new species continuously, slowly, and regularly, but rarely and brutally.

The stories of matter and society recount these extraordinary adventures with multiple twists and turns. The universe seems motionless, then the situation turns out to be as changeable as it is astonishing. This is a very different image of the universe than that of regular movement and slow, steady evolution : immense durations during which nothing happens, then an incredible acceleration with unimaginable developments. The shocks are then impressive. Galaxies collide, absorb each other, destroy each other, or build each other in impressive conflagrations. Particles destroy each other, or build each other, by shock. Economic systems, at the height of their success, enter into crisis. Empires, the most powerful and uncontested, see their contradictions explode and are overthrown. A structure collapses without external action. One or two molecular modifications of homeotic genes, those that control the body’s organizational plan, give rise to a new species or cause death. Negligible factors become preponderant. The small becomes large. The disordered becomes coherent. Order turns into agitation. The inert becomes alive. The solid becomes fluid. The presumed stable turns out to be chaotic. The unstable can turn out to be durable. A maximum level of agitation can result in a globally stable structure. The most fundamental structures are transient and very fleeting. Potential change is constantly present within the structure and can, at any moment, be actualized, implemented. Time is not immune to these reversals. The past returns in force to the present [ 7 ] . Rhythms change abruptly. Hold on tight, surprise is in store.

One of the reasons for the unexpected nature of large-scale events in a short time, both natural and social, is fundamental. Both are based on non-equilibrium. The second reason is the interaction of scale, a product of the existence of hierarchical structures, and its consequence : small factors cannot be neglected. Even detailed knowledge of the past does not allow us to predict what will happen next. No one can formulate with infinite precision any real fact, whether it is an element of History or a phenomenon of nature. However, each detail can have, in the course of events that follow one another, a disproportionate importance (a property called non-linearity [ 8 ] ). The third reason is the multiplicity of possibilities. Laws do not impose a single solution [ 9 ] . This does not mean that nature does not obey laws. It is the lower level of structure that decides between the different solutions. A single law is not enough, nor is a single level of hierarchy. The fourth reason is the fundamental discontinuity, that of causes and effects. The notion of a "cause-effect link" is outdated. Qualitative change, fundamental to the dynamics of society and nature, is not based on a continuous link. Finally, the fundamental reason is precisely this dynamic character of phenomena in which contradictions are never exhausted, but always renewed, at least in their form. Contradiction does not lead to the suppression of causes, but to the novelty of the element produced and the level of interaction. Dialectical "synthesis" is a source of radical change, of the formation of new structures. The product of this dynamic of the nonlinear, the discontinuous, the non-equilibrium, the contradictory is unpredictability, despite the world’s obedience to laws. The best guides are incapable of insuring you for such a stunning journey.

It is therefore pointless to seek in this text a philosophical recipe for getting used to the dazzling accelerations of the history of nature and society. They are enough to disconcert even the most patient and informed observers. Long periods of calm poorly prepare us for the short and intense moments of transformation—qualitative, structural, and revolutionary—that surround them. The ruling classes themselves are not prepared for revolution. Could King Louis XVI have guessed in 1789, by asking the French people to gather and write the cahiers de doléance, that he was thus giving a collective conscience to a revolution in the making ? Did he know, by convening the Estates-General, that he was thus preparing a political direction for a coming popular insurrection ? He had no way of conceiving of such a situation. Nor were the future leaders of this revolution themselves aware of it. The (bourgeois) revolutionaries neither produced nor manipulated the insurrection, and only led it in its final phase, in 1792-94, three or four years later. The revolution is indeed a necessary product of events, classes, their goals, and their power relations. It is a phenomenon based on the consciousness of men, but not solely on individual consciousness. Collective consciousness is quite different : it is an objective fact, within the domain of scientific study. Elementary consciousness, that of individuals, is only the basis of emergence, of collective consciousness. Just as the random agitation of a molecule is the basis of the emergence of organized states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). And this emergence does not happen haphazardly. It is a material phenomenon obeying laws. But these laws are not fixed. They are dynamic. This character means that reality is produced as the process progresses and the final result cannot be known in advance.

Insensible, unpredictable, unexpected, brutal, incomprehensible, there has been no shortage of qualifiers for each revolutionary event that we modestly call the "origin" (origin of different types of matter, galaxies, stars, life, species, branches). Authors agree on one point : origins pose a problem, but they differ on the reasons for this difficulty. What disturbs the ancient philosophy of determinism is the rupture of the continuity of causality. What bothers the supporters of the notions of pre-programmed change is that such a phenomenon apparently has no precursor element that prepares it, that gives a first outline and builds a material and causal continuity. What bothers the opponents of brutal change is that the transformation is qualitative. Their world is not eternal. The laws of nature show that the seemingly most solid structures must perish. This cannot leave a social class in power, worried about its future, indifferent. The unpredictability and irreversibility of history ultimately lead the most rationalist authors to leave "original" situations, that is, revolutions and qualitative changes, in the shadows, abandoning them to the irrational. The dynamics that underlie the logic of revolution are very far from the statics that would rest on usual logic, including the old scientific conception, the one for which "nothing is lost, nothing is created" or "the same causes generate the same effects." Many of us unfortunately continue to think that these proverbs cover genuine scientific thought. The logic of sudden change is quite different : it invents, it makes something new. It builds structures and even completely new scales, emerging levels of reality. From a large group of molecules [ 10 ] , it derives a state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) with a law of this state, and a structure (cloud, sea, rock, star, galaxy) with a law of structure. From a chemical exchange between a large number of molecules, it derives the dynamics of life. From a large group of neuronal cells, it extracts exchanges, networks, neuronal images, memory and, finally, conscious thought. With all due respect to those who think that "there is nothing new under the sun", nature and society will never stop producing novelty. The diverse memorization capacities of individuals, so different, come from the fact that memory, like all brain functioning, is a historical construction and not a functioning entirely pre-established genetically.

Likewise, any human group with a certain level of activity is the product of a dynamic capable of inventing and creating something new. What founds new societies, ways of life, production, property and social relations, in short new civilizations, is in no way fixed, regular, continuous or linear. Even in embryo, even in ideas, in formulated or unformulated objectives, we cannot find these innovations within the initial group. Sedentary society comes from a nomadic world. Cities were born from a peasant world without urban concentration. This birth, brutal, left no traces to the point that, in the Greece of the cities, one did not conceive of a birth [ 11 ] of urban society and one thought that it had always been. The kingdoms came from a society without central power. Thought comes from a cerebral neurochemistry which did not contain it at all since the neuron does not think. From neural automatism emerges thought, just as civilization emerges from sedentary, agrarian, urban, artisanal, and commercial societies. Stars, a permanent emission of energy, come from masses of gas that emit no energy to the outside world. States of matter arise from the movements of individual molecules, but these only collectively produce a gas, a liquid, or a solid. Temperature and pressure are properties that arise from molecules for which these parameters had no meaning. Particles of matter arise from the massless quantum vacuum. Life emerged from inert matter. But the matter of living things is just matter. Isolated from the overall process, the materials of living things do not function. The principal one, DNA, while unconnected, is just an inert molecule.

In each of these examples, the emerging order is founded in a brutal, astonishing, impressive way, breaking with the world that gave birth to it while coming from nothing other than this world. The new order, its structure, its laws, its functioning did not exist, even embryonic, within each of the individuals who would collectively establish it. We find no state of matter, no species, no society, no institutional rules at the level of the individual, whether it be an individual particle, a molecule, a living being, a man. It is collective relations that give rise to an order at a qualitatively different hierarchical level. A city cannot be explained by adding together the actions of a million or more individuals. An atom cannot be understood by adding together the individual atoms that compose it. We cannot explain the army by the individual soldier, nor the state by the civil servant or the head of state, nor human society by the individual, nor capitalism by the individual capitalist, nor liquid by the individual action of the molecule. We cannot avoid the qualitative leap. No life in the molecule (including that of DNA). No consciousness in living matter. No thought in the neuron. No state within the civil society of the Neolithic. No flow of time within the void. No regular time or continuous movement in space for the individual particle. No solid, liquid, or gas, no temperature, nor pressure in individual molecules. Molecular individuals do not define a state of matter. There is no matter specific to the star, no matter specific to the planet, no matter specific to the galaxy. There is no gene specific to man, no gene specific to the great ape, no gene specific to apes. The genes of some can function in many species, not just the one in which it was found. And in a man, monkey genes produce a man ! In a mouse, fly genes produce mouse organs... Because it is collective action, interaction with the rest of the biochemical material, that produces a species. A gene-individual does not know what it is about to manufacture as a species, as a body. A neuronal cellular individual does not feel, does not think, does not see. A neurotransmitter does not transmit information. It is only part of a collective interaction within which it has no independent role. Consciousness does not preexist within the neuron, any more than collective consciousness does in the individual. The working classes of France, in 1789, rising up against the last remnants of feudalism, did not, individually, have the goals that would emerge from the debates and collective actions. The property we want to emphasize here is the emergence, from a large number of individuals,of new phenomena that were not visible within each of them. The other point we emphasize is the appearance of a new order arising from disorder.

Scientists have noted the role of revolutions, sometimes drawing parallels with what they observe in science. This is the case of biochemist Roger Lewin , in "Complexity," where he interviews archaeologists who note that the State is a precedent for a situation of "imminent collapse" in situations as diverse as the fall of the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization, or Chaco Canyon. He adds : "These are turning points in the history of societies, rapid changes like those observed in biological and physical systems under the name of phase transitions." » Particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann , who believes that self-organizing systems extend from matter to human society, comments on the fall of the Mayan empire in "The Quark and the Jaguar" : "The collapse of the classic Mayan civilization more than a millennium ago has given rise to a wealth of hypotheses, but the cause remains a mystery and a source of controversy even today. Did the common people get tired of working under the yoke of the rulers and the aristocracy ? Did people lose faith in the complex religious system that ensured the power of the elite by holding the social fabric together ?" Recent studies show that droughts caused the ruling classes to lose their authority. The April 2006 issue of "Pour la science" quotes them as saying : " Some archaeologists have pointed out that control of water supplies allowed the ruling elites to establish centralized power. Droughts, by rendering inoperative the techniques and religious rites that guaranteed water abundance, would have weakened this ruling class. (...) The collapse of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia around 4200 years ago, the decline of the Moche culture on the coast of Peru around 1500 years ago and the end of the Tiwanaku culture on the Bolivian altiplano are all associated with persistent regional droughts. (...) Each of these collapses had been interpreted exclusively in terms of human factors : wars, overpopulation, depletion of resources. (article by Lary Peterson) . But what is striking in this analysis, beyond the climatic factor, is that the author, who is not a revolutionary, interprets the fall of civilizations as a fall of the dominant class, a class that is no longer respected by the exploited population because the social order that it defends no longer appears to conform to the natural order - in fact because it no longer allows a very large population - more precisely very concentrated - to live by agricultural activity. In his work "The Construction of Life", even a follower of so-called "synthetic" evolutionism (partisan of all selection) like John Maynard Smith distinguishes in the history of life eight phase transitions [ 12 ] which are qualitative leaps. This remark is not secondary but essential to the understanding of order. This is a negation of disorder. This means that revolution pre-exists the state (which is only its product by negation), just as agitation pre-exists the structure of matter, whether it be the genetic or cellular particulate structure. This is a considerably different image, both scientifically and philosophically. Revolution is therefore the negation of negation that constructs a new structure. The disorder of revolution is necessary to unblock social evolution.

Brutal phenomena, whether natural or social, disturb us by their unexpected nature, the absence of an evident rationality. There is no causal continuity, justifying their emergence and disappearance, as well as the global upheaval of the order that they provoke. The conceptions that they require disturb many calm certainties, as well anchored as the distinction between matter and life, between man and animal, or the idea that natural laws are based on order (order of the atom, the particle, the species, the gene, DNA, the star… and fixed order of all the constants that correspond to it). We are forced to recognize that the tranquility of the world is only an illusion, as are the appearances of fixity, constancy, regularity or continuity. Violence, with its brutality, discontinuity and qualitative change, is the midwife [ 13 ] of many processes. The explosion of a star in a supernova [ 14 ] is far from being the only violent reaction in the material universe. The apparently fixed light of the star is the product of nuclear transformations within its core. On a completely different scale, microphysics also has its impressive brutalities. The tearing of an electron from the atom, the basis of all molecular chemistry, is, proportionally, as violent as nuclear fission and fusion, as the collision between two photons producing a particle and antiparticle (materialization) or the opposite effect (dematerialization). Particle and antiparticle couple, giving an interaction particle or energy and, thus, overcome their contradiction or mask it. The leaps in matter and society come in all sizes, sometimes imperceptible and sometimes on the scale of large-scale crises, from earthquakes on the earth to those of the stock market, from cyclones to biological crises and from earthquakes to those of society. The transformations that will be discussed in this study, the unexpected, spontaneous, radical and brutal structural changes, are only visible to the naked eye in a few rare moments [ 16 ], during the eruptive crisis, and yet are permanently underlying and at work in the general mechanism of operation. They are the manifestations of a very particular type of phenomena. It is a brutal transformation in which there is a discontinuity due to a change in the level of organization of a disorderly collective agitation. The discontinuous character and the passage of level gives an appearance of irrationality due to the rupture of linearity of causality. The appropriate term to describe them seems to us to be "the revolution". Let us give the floor to some authors on what they mean by revolution.

Reflections on the Social Revolution...

" Proletarian Revolution and Bourgeois Ideology
" The composition of this book, complex and imperfect in its architecture, is the very image of the circumstances in which it was born : the author strives to expose a definite conception of the dialectic proper to the revolutionary process (...). Anyone who is only interested in the dramatic aspects of a revolution will do better to leave this book aside. But anyone who, in the revolution, sees something other and more than a grandiose spectacle, anyone who considers it as an objectively determined social crisis, governed by its internal laws, will perhaps find some profit in reading the pages we submit to him. "
At the moment when I publish this work in French, I resign myself in advance to being accused of dogmatism, casuistry, a predilection for the exegesis of old texts and above all of a certain lack of "clarity". Alas, in the aversion felt for materialist dialectics, an aversion so common in French "left" circles, including of course the socialist ranks, only a certain form of official thought is expressed, a conservative spirit which has deep roots in the history of the French bourgeoisie. But let us not doubt that the dialectic of the historical process will overcome the ideological habits of this bourgeoisie, just as it will overcome the bourgeoisie itself. (...) a new revolution in the domain of ideas which is inseparable from a revolution in the domain of things. (...)"
"But it is precisely because revolution is a "state of things" - that is to say, a stage in the development of society conditioned by objective causes and subject to definite laws - that a scientific mind can foresee the general direction of the process. Only the study of the anatomy of society and its physiology allows us to react to the course of events based on scientific predictions and not on amateur conjectures. The revolutionary who "despises" revolutionary doctrine is no better than the healer who despises medical doctrine, which he ignores, or the engineer who rejects technology."
Leon Trotsky
Preface to the French edition of "The Permanent Revolution"

“Revolution, the greatest step taken towards the total emancipation of the human race.”
Historian Léonard Gallois
in “Picturesque History of the French Revolution”

“The French Revolution is humanity’s first attempt to take its own reins and direct itself. (...) Only revolutions can destroy institutions long condemned. In times of calm, one cannot bring oneself to strike, even when what one strikes no longer has any reason to exist. Those who believe that the renovation necessitated by all the intellectual work of the 18th century could have been done peacefully are mistaken. One would have sought to make a pact, one would have stopped at a thousand personal considerations, which in times of calm are highly prized ; one would not have dared to frankly destroy either privileges or religious orders, or so many other abuses. The storm takes care of that. The temporal power of the popes is certainly out of date. Well ! Everyone would be convinced that one would not yet decide to sweep away this ruin. One would have to wait for the next earthquake for that. Nothing is done by calm : one only dares in revolution. »
Ernest Renan in “The Future of Science, Thoughts of 1848”

"Take the French Revolution (...) As natural as the rain falling. First of all, you don’t do it for fun. You do it because something pushes you to. (...) Just as natural as the rain falling."
John Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath"

" The Necessity of Revolution
" There are times in the life of humanity when the need for a tremendous shock, a cataclysm, which will shake society to its very core, is imposed in all respects at once. (...) We feel the need for a revolution, immense, implacable, which will not only overturn the economic system based on cold exploitation, speculation and fraud, not only overturn the political scale based on the domination of a few by cunning, intrigue and lies, but also stir society in its intellectual and moral life, shake off torpor, remake morals, bring amidst the vile and petty passions of the moment the invigorating breath of noble passions, of great impulses, of generous devotions. (...) But let the indifferent sleep and the pessimists grumble : we have other things to do. Let us ask ourselves what will be the character of this revolution that so many men sense and are preparing, and what should be our attitude in the face of this eventuality. (...) The next revolution will have a character of generality that will distinguish it from the previous ones. It will no longer be one country that will throw itself into the turmoil, it will be the countries of Europe. (...) As in 1848, a shock occurring in one country will necessarily spread to the others, and the revolutionary fire will engulf the whole of Europe. »
Pierre Kropotkin in « Paroles d’un révolté »

" The Russian Revolution of 1905
"We must see to it – and except us there will be no one to do it – that the people know these days full of life, rich in content and great in their significance and effects in a more detailed and profound way…"
Illich Lenin in the Preface to Gorky’s "The Mother"

A Qualitative Transformation
“The concentration of production, the development of technology, and the raising of the consciousness of the masses (…), these processes occur simultaneously ; they not only reinforce each other, but also retard and limit each other. Each of these processes, at a higher level, requires a certain development of another of these processes, at a lower level. But their complete development, for each of them, is incompatible with that of the others. (…) These processes do not develop in isolation from each other but limit each other until they reach a certain point which depends on many circumstances, but is in any case very far from their mathematical limit, the point from which they undergo a qualitative change ; their complex combination then gives rise to that phenomenon which we call social revolution.”
Leon Trotsky in “Summary and Prospects”

The nature of the revolution in Russia ?
"People who think summarily, or who do not think at all, assume that they have solved the question by saying : in Russia there is now a ’bourgeois revolution’ taking place. In reality, the question is posed thus : what is this bourgeois revolution ? What are its internal forces and future prospects ? During the great French Revolution, the main driving force was the urban petty bourgeoisie leading the peasant masses. (...) Between the Revolution of the ’Third Estate’ in France and our revolution (of 1905), there was the German Revolution of 1848. There was the German revolution of 1848. This last was also bourgeois. But the German bourgeoisie was incapable of fulfilling its revolutionary role. To characterize the events of 1848, Marx wrote : "The German bourgeoisie behaved in such a feeble, cowardly, and slow way that when it rose up against absolutism and feudalism, it found itself threatened by the proletariat (...)." Reading this characteristic picture (...), do we not recognize our own bourgeoisie and its leaders ? The Russian bourgeoisie entered the political arena after the German bourgeoisie. The Russian proletariat is incomparably stronger, more independent, and more conscious than the German workers of 1848. The general European development has put the social revolution on the agenda. All these circumstances have deprived the liberal bourgeoisie of the last remnants of confidence in itself and in the people. (...) On the eve of the war, the proletariat found itself at the highest point of revolutionary agitation. The number of workers on strike in 1914 equaled that of the strikers of 1905. (...) The movement between 1912 and 1914 developed on a larger scale than at the beginning of the century. As ten years earlier, the war halted the development of the workers’ movement. The fall of the International struck the vanguard of the workers’ movement. Thirty-one months passed, months of defeats, high prices, scandals, hunger (...) before the proletarians took to the streets. And they did so against the wishes of the bourgeois liberals. On March 6, on the eve of the general strike, the press called on workers not to disrupt the normal course of production so as not to hinder military operations. But this did not stop the starving women. They took to the streets shouting the slogan : "bread and peace." The workers supported them. (...) The proletarians of Petersburg were not yet strong enough, organized enough, did not have sufficient contacts with the proletarians of all Russia, to be able to conquer power. But they were strong enough to send, at the first attempt, Tsarism to the historical museum. (...) All the efforts of the liberals to push aside the class struggle (...) will remain a dead letter.
Leon Trotsky
in the newspaper “Die Zukunft” (April 1917)

"The transfer of state power from one class to another is the first, principal, fundamental characteristic of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific sense and in the political and practical sense of this concept. Marxism obliges us to draw a most exact, objectively verifiable account of class relations and of the concrete particularities of each movement in history.
" Lenin
in "Letter on Tactics" (April 1917)

"History of the Russian Revolution
" The history of a revolution, like any history, must, above all, relate what happened and say how. But that is not enough. From the narrative itself, it must be clear why things happened as they did and not otherwise. Events cannot be considered as a chain of adventures, nor inserted one after the other, on the thread of a preconceived morality. They must conform to their own rational law. It is in the discovery of this inner law that the author sees his task. "
The most incontestable feature of the Revolution is the direct intervention of the masses in historical events. Ordinarily, the State, monarchical or democratic, dominates the nation ; history is made by specialists in the profession : monarchs, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at decisive turning points, when an old regime becomes intolerable for the masses, they break down the fences that separate them from the political arena. (...) The history of the revolution is for us, above all, the story of a violent irruption of the masses into the domain where their own destinies are decided. (...) »
« It is impossible to understand, accept or paint the Revolution, even partially, if one does not see it in its entirety, with its real historical tasks which are the objectives of its leading forces. If this view is lacking, one misses both the goal and the Revolution. It disintegrates into heroic or sinister episodes and anecdotes. One can paint fairly well-timed pictures of it, but one cannot recreate the Revolution, and even less so, one cannot reconcile oneself with it ; if, indeed, the unheard-of privations and sacrifices are without purpose, history is… a madhouse. (...) Taking into account all the other necessary qualities, only he who learns to understand the Revolution in its totality, to regard its defeats as steps towards victory, to penetrate the necessity of its retreats, and who is capable of seeing, in the intense preparation of the forces during the reflux, the eternal pathos of the revolution and its poetry will become a poet of the Revolution."
Leon Trotsky
in "Literature and Revolution" (1924)

Russia February 1917
"The revolution seems to army commanders, enterprising in words, indefensible because it is terribly chaotic : everywhere there are aimless movements, opposing currents, human eddies, astonished and suddenly stunned faces, greatcoats flapping in the wind, gesticulating students, soldiers without rifles, rifles without soldiers, children firing in the air, the hubbub of thousands of voices, whirlwinds of unleashed rumors, unjustified fears, deceptive joys... ; it would seem that all it would take is to raise a saber over all this tumult and it would immediately scatter without asking for its rest. But this is a crude optical illusion. Chaos only in appearance. Beneath it is an irresistible crystallization of the masses on new axes. (...) No return possible. »
Leon Trotsky
in “The Russian Revolution” (1st volume “February”)

Revolutionary Determinism
"It takes absolutely exceptional circumstances, independent of the will of individuals or parties, to free the discontented from the genes of the conservative spirit and lead the masses to insurrection. The rapid changes of opinion and mood of the masses in times of revolution, therefore, arise not from the flexibility and mobility of the human psyche, but from its profound conservatism. Since ideas and social relations chronically lag behind objective circumstances, until the moment when these collapse in a cataclysm, the result in times of revolution is jolts of ideas and passions that police brains simply represent as the work of "demagogues". (...) However, the processes that occur in the consciousness of the masses are neither autonomous nor independent. With all due respect to idealists and eclectics, consciousness is nevertheless determined by the general conditions of existence. »
Leon Trotsky
in the Preface to “History of the Russian Revolution”

"It is an absolute truth that we shall be condemned to perish if the revolution does not break out in Germany."
Lenin
March 7, 1917, at the 7th Congress of the Bolshevik Party "Lenin and Trotsky with their friends were the first who outstripped the world proletariat by their example... What a party can provide in the historical hour in courage, strength of action, revolutionary insight and logic, Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades have amply given... In this sense, they have the imperishable merit in history of having taken the lead of the international proletariat in conquering political power and in posing in practice the problem of the realization of socialism. Bolshevism has become the symbol of practical revolutionary socialism." Rosa Luxemburg in "The Russian Revolution", 1918

"We are far from even completing the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. We have never deluded ourselves with the hope of completing it without the support of the international proletariat."
Lenin - Third Congress of Soviets - January 1918

“What are classes in general ? They are what enables one part of society to appropriate the labor of the other part. If one part of society appropriates all the land, we have a class of large landowners and a class of peasants. If one part of society owns the factories and plants, owns the shares and capital, while the other works in factories, we have a class of capitalists and a class of proletarians. It was not difficult to drive out the tsar ; it took only a few days. It was not very difficult to drive out the large landowners ; it could be done in a few months ; it is not very difficult either to drive out the capitalists. But abolishing classes is infinitely more difficult. The class struggle continues, it has only changed its form. »
Lenin

« The iron fist of the social democrat Noske crushed the uprising of the Spartacists in Berlin in January 1919, as the German Bolsheviks called themselves, in memory of the revolt of the Roman slave Spartacus. (…) But, on March 2, 1919, (the Bolsheviks) created a third international, the Communist International or Comintern, intended to take over from the second, which had passed over with arms and baggage to the class enemy. (…) Three weeks later, he announced at the eighth Congress of the (Bolshevik) party the proclamation in Budapest by Bela Kun of a “Republic of Councils” on the Russian model. (…) A few days later, a Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Munich. But the assassination of its leader, Kurt Eisner, was to quickly put an end to its existence. As for the Hungarian communist regime, it was overthrown after 133 days by the Romanians acting on behalf of the West. (…) There, as elsewhere, the White Terror quickly succeeded the Red Terror. In the meantime, unrest had developed among the Allied soldiers who had landed in Russia. (…) A mechanic officer, André Marty, organized a mutiny in the French army. On April 3, Paris had to withdraw its expeditionary force from Odessa. The English evacuated Baku the following month. »
André Fontaine
in « History of the Cold War »

The Socialist Revolution is Worldwide
"We have repeatedly stated that the proletarian revolution cannot flourish victoriously within national frameworks. This assertion might seem to some readers to be refuted by the nearly five-year experience of our Soviet Republic. But this conclusion is unfounded. The fact that Workers’ Power has been able to maintain itself against the entire world, and in a single, moreover backward, country, testifies to the colossal capacities of the proletariat, which, in more advanced, more civilized countries, would perform miracles. But, in the political and military sense, as a government, we have not arrived at the formation of a socialist state, and we have not even come close to it. The struggle for the preservation of revolutionary Power has caused an extraordinary lowering of the productive forces ; but Socialism is imaginable only through their growth and flowering. The customs negotiations with the bourgeois states (...) are a striking testimony to the impossibility of an isolated construction of Socialism within the national frameworks. (...) The grandiose impetus of the socialist economy in Russia will only be possible after the victory of the proletariat in the principal European nations."
Leon Trotsky
in his 1922 Afterword to "War and Revolution"

From the Paris Commune to the World Revolution "Proletarian revolutions (...) interrupt their own course at every moment, return to what seems already accomplished in order to begin it anew (...) appear to overthrow their adversary only to enable him to draw new strength from the earth and rise up formidable again in front of them, constantly retreat again before the infinite immensity of their own goal, until finally the situation is created which makes any turning back impossible (...). It is good on this 72nd anniversary of the Paris Commune to recall this characteristic of proletarian revolutions given by Marx in 1851. The paths of history, and especially of the proletarian revolution, are not a straight line which is traversed in a single stroke at a certain epoch and which ensures, with heavy sacrifices, victory or defeat. For one who considers events only in the period which coincides with his own experience, the historical curve seems at times to descend to its starting point ; but for one who considers them in their historical totality, this curve indicates the ineluctable march of the proletariat towards power and of society towards communism. » Albert Mathieu, known as Barta , founder during the Second World War of the Trotskyist group Internationalist Communist Union, in the review « Class Struggle » (March 1943)

… and on the revolutions of matter

"Chemistry is a revolutionary school of thought. Not because there is a chemistry of explosives. Explosives are not always revolutionary. No, because chemistry is, above all, the science of the transformation of matter. Chemistry is dangerous for every absolute, for conservative thought locked into immobile categories."
Leon Trotsky
’s speech at the Mendeleev Congress of Chemistry in September 1925

"This bifurcation is a punctuated, critical phenomenon, through which the system acquires a new global behavior and new properties."
Physicists Janine Guespin-Michel and Camille Ripoll
in the journal "Sciences et Avenir" of August 2005

"We are thus witnessing a cascade of transition phenomena of an explosive nature presiding over the emergence, for which the science of non-linear provides a universal model, the bifurcation (...)"
Physicist Grégoire Nicolis
in the journal "Sciences et Avenir" of August 2005

“The canonical example of self-organized criticality is the sandpile. A sandpile exhibits punctuated equilibrium behavior, in which periods of stasis are interspersed with rockfalls. (...) The sandpile evolves from one configuration to another not gradually, but by means of catastrophic avalanches. (...) The evolution of the sandpile occurs through revolutions, like history in Karl Marx’s vision. Precisely because dynamic states are suspended in the critical state, everything happens through revolutions and not gradually. Indeed, self-organized criticality is a method invented by nature to effect enormous transformations on very short timescales. (...) Large systems with a large number of components evolve toward an intermediate “critical” state, far from equilibrium, for which minor perturbations can trigger events of all sizes, called “avalanches.” Most changes occur during these catastrophic events rather than following a gradual, steady path."
Physicist Per Bak in "When Nature Gets Organized"

"Particles are not identifiable objects. (...) they could be considered as events of an explosive nature." Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in "Quantum Physics and the Representation of the World"

"Nature presents itself to us like those little flies on hot summer days, which we see almost motionless, supported by a wingbeat so lively that we can hardly discern it, and which suddenly change place almost instantaneously, in a short and rapid flight, to stop a little further away : stationary states spread out before our eyes, but to perceive transients, we have to look for them."
Physicist Georges Lochak
in his preface to "The Degradation of Energy" by Bernard Brunhes

"Quantum physics deals with things (...) that undergo phase transitions."
David Ritz Finkelstein
in "The Void," a collective work edited by Edgar Gunzig and Simon Diner.

"Current microphysics is essentially based on the detailed description of stationary states (also called quantum states), while only statistical calculations are made for transitions. (...) But the transition itself, as an individual process, is not described. As a result, it is not explained how stationary states are maintained, because to explain their astonishing stability, it would be necessary to understand what happens when a system deviates from a stationary state under the effect of a disturbance (...)" Physicist Georges Lochak in an article entitled "Towards a microphysics of the irreversible" in the "Revue du Palais de la Découverte"

"An excited electron ’falls’ to a lower level, emitting a photon. (...) Einstein introduced the notion of spontaneous transition by analogy with that of radioactive decomposition."
Physicist-chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers
in "Between Time and Eternity"

"Photons are not completely describable and undergo spontaneous transitions in the vacuum."
David Ritz Finkelstein
in "The Adamantine Ether," an article from "The Vacuum,"
a collective work presented by Edgard Gunzig and Isabelle Stengers

“Radium, this great revolutionary of the present time.”
Physicist Henri Poincaré in “The Value of Science”

"Science is not about the status quo, it’s about revolution."
Physicist Leon Lederman
in "If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question ?"

"Doesn’t physics tend to deny time by appealing to the ’immobile ideals’ that are universal laws ? The question remains whether physics has the vocation to describe the immutable, or whether, on the contrary, it must become the legislation of metamorphoses."
Physicists Etienne Klein and Michel Spiro in "Time and its Arrow"

"Transitions and Revolutions : A Model
" Human societies provide countless examples of abrupt transitions (...) One might legitimately wonder whether this type of very rapid transition could not be understood in a general way (...). And since we are asking questions about transitions (abrupt changes) (...) this brings to mind the dynamics of human societies. Regarding " revolution " , it is not absurd to think of a transition in a sense that is close to that which it has in the exact sciences. (...) These systems occasionally exhibit spatio-temporal intermittency behaviors, separated by long periods of calm. In other words, the control parameter of such systems is no longer constant ; it increases but very slowly over time, until it reaches the threshold value, and the burst of spatio-temporal intermittence that then occurs causes the constraint to decrease far below the threshold, from which it begins to increase again until the next burst. »
Physicists Pierre Bergé, Yves Pomeau and Monique Dubois-Gance
in “From Rhythms to Chaos”

"In nature, nothing is immutable. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, movement, and change."
Physicist David Bohm in "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics"

“A photon of sharp light brushes against an atom of matter. A fleeting collision in the depths of reality. Two electrons emerge, one of each sign, lively and fast as lightning, well almost ; they slow down, bend their trajectory, launch photons ; if they meet again, they merge into each other and then disappear, giving off, like their last breath, two furtive grains of light.”
Physicist Etienne Klein
in “Under the Atom, the Particles”

"We have studied some examples that seem to be enormous leaps in biological evolution (...). Revolutions do happen."
Physicist Murray Gell-Man in "The Quark and the Jaguar"

"Evolution is the result of a struggle between what was and what will be, between the conservative and the revolutionary (...)"
Biologist François Jacob in "The Logic of Life"

"The triggering of the nerve impulse results from the permeability of the membrane to sodium ions. The electrical potential controls this opening of the membrane when it crosses a threshold value, it unmasks channels through which the sodium ions rush "explosively" into the interior of the cell."
Neurophysiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux
in "L’homme neuronal"

"By giving rise to proteins, RNAs acted as sorcerer’s apprentices. (...) The appearance of proteins therefore, literally and figuratively, introduced a new dimension in the development of the chemistry of living things. These new macromolecules, capable of deploying effective chemical tools in space to constitute specific and efficient catalytic sites, opened up vast perspectives for the evolution. Thanks to them, the organization of matter was able to take a decisive and revolutionary step."
Chemist Martin Olomucki
in "The Chemistry of Living Things"

What do we mean by "revolution" in the field of social history, where this term is commonly used ? "When the Revolutionary War broke out, the kings did not understand it ; they saw a revolt where they should have seen the change of nations, the end and the beginning of a world," replied Chateaubriand in "Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe." It should therefore not be seen as a simple revolt. But how can we distinguish the two ? The great French writer learned from the Revolution of 1789 that social revolution is the end of one world and the beginning of a new one. How is this possible ? This can only happen if elements of this "new world" are born within the oppressed masses : forms of society, objectives, organizations of a new type, a new consciousness capable of finally imposing itself. Revolution presupposes the emergence of independent organizations of the popular masses, defending the interests of these masses and representing these interests, even in a confused and embryonic form. This is the origin of the new power, of the new society : a change in the mindset of the broad masses. Social and political revolution is essentially a transformation of the collective consciousness, even if many commentators see it primarily as a violent and irrational action of the masses. In 1789, the French Revolution began when the broad masses understood, by writing the cahiers de doléance, that they could no longer tolerate the old social order and when the ruling classes understood, symmetrically, that nothing could function as before. It was at this level that an objective mechanism, subject to examination by scientific study, was set in motion. The revolution became an objective necessity. Emphasizing the central and dynamic role of collective revolutionary consciousness in the French Revolution, historian Jules Michelet explained in "History of the French Revolution" that "In the meantime, all that a long study of the precedents of the Revolution, and of the Revolution itself, leads us to believe, (...) is that between true science and popular consciousness, there is nothing contradictory." Understanding the revolution needs science, because the mechanism of emergence [ 17 ]of a revolutionary collective consciousness is objective, natural one should say. The emergence of collective consciousness within a society is as astonishing as the emergence of individual consciousness appearing within the multitude of connections and neural messages of a human brain, as much as the emergence of civilization within agrarian society, of life in matter, of a new species or the invention of an organ within the living, or even of matter in the void. It is indeed a question of studying the revolution as one scientifically analyzes a storm, a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, that is to say as a natural phenomenon, even if, in this domain, human consciousness and the voluntary action of individuals, organizations and social groups intervene of course.

The awareness of common interests within the struggling classes is not pre-existent. It emerged abruptly from the clash of violently contradictory interests. Hence the imperceptible nature of the revolutionary upsurge. The moment of the crisis only became evident once it was fully developed and ready to explode at the slightest spark. If this were not the case, no crisis would come to an end. Commenting on the particular character of the eruption of the social revolution, the revolutionary Karl Marx remarked mischievously : "Well dug, old mole !" He thus emphasized that the thrust of the revolutionary crisis is molecular, imperceptible, subterranean and is not a mechanism that is easy to observe, to grasp and to predict. "No more evident than the grass growing ," said Lenin about the development of revolutionary consciousness and the progression of the social crisis. Of course, spontaneous structuring is not the only factor involved. Class consciousness also comes from the progression of ideas, from past experience, from revolutionary organization, from the existence of vanguard minorities, from their organization, all things that do not appear spontaneously and do not arise directly from molecular processes. The action of small factors, of a lower scale, within a large-scale movement, is not specific to social phenomena, as shown by the theory of deterministic chaos which uses in this regard the expression "sensitivity to initial conditions." The intervention of individuals and small groups in History does not detract from the character of the phenomena, even if it considerably modifies the outcome of events. Understanding this mechanism of emergence of a social consciousness, therein lies the difficulty of the study of revolution. This mechanism is as natural as that of the volcano. It is the formation, from the agitation of individual actions and consciousnesses, of the sudden appearance of a higher, collective level. The living world provides us with many examples in which individual functioning produces a collective system, the properties of which were not present within individuals. Life itself is not the work of an isolated cell. One would not describe the construction of a collective coherence of a large number of small magnets in any other way [ 18 ](ferromagnetism). This remark does not detract from the specificity of human consciousness. It only refers to the brutal and revolutionary mode of formation of emerging levels, a mechanism that proves to be universal and the foundation of all dynamic reality. The popular masses participate in large-scale changes that obey laws and are part of the mechanisms of the universe. These are objective facts, even if they are carried out by individuals, according to their awareness of events. "As Friedrich Engels said, ’No one knows the revolution he is making. ’" writes physicist Etienne Klein in "A Little Journey into the Quantum World." The revolutionary G. Munis explains in his analysis of the Spanish revolution of 1936, "Lessons of a Defeat, Promise of Victory" : "When they begin a revolutionary struggle in a country, the masses are generally not aware of the historical rupture they are inaugurating ; they see only the most direct and immediate causes. This is what allows many political impostors to take advantage of their trust when they deserve only their contempt." The time factor is then an essential point. If the pressure of the masses is sufficient, if the ruling class does not have the capacity to react quickly, if the way is prepared by revolutionary organizations, the masses will have enough time to become aware of the significance of their aspirations and to realize their true objectives. The speed of collective awareness is decisive in order not to give the ruling class time to pull itself together and give itself the means to crush the revolution.

Brutal phenomena of nature and society are everywhere present, even if some poets sing of "the calm of nature" and the praisers of order proclaim the "solidity" of matter, the "adaptability" of life, the eternity of empires, the continuity of civilizations, ideologies and states. Taking the opposite view of this thesis, we affirm that, in all areas, the explosion [ 19 ] is an essential phase of phenomena : explosion of the structure of nuclear matter, explosion of the star, explosion of the burst of nerve impulses, explosion of the emission of neurotransmitters, volcanic eruption, brutal climate change, social explosion, explosion of species in the Cambrian [ 20 ] , explosion of civilization, explosion of the social revolution, economic explosion, population explosion, etc. It is not in France that we should make efforts to explain that the State is a structure born of violence and not from the pen of the legislator. Social and political institutions are not born from respect for institutions but from their violation by the force of class struggle. We marvel, in physics as much as in politics, that the destruction, by collision, of structures produces new structures. Every day, accelerators explore the possible results of collisions between particles that produce new particles, more or less ephemeral. The brutality of the fabrication of a new organization is astonishing, whether it is a natural or social phenomenon. In both cases, men appeal to mystical explanations, because the natural explanation of such an appearance will remain hidden from anyone who considers the structure as fixed, existing from all eternity and produced by intentionality. That a powerful and formidable empire could be defeated by the poor without means is presented as incomprehensible and should rather be explained by divine action [ 21 ] and by forces beyond the oppressed [ 22 ] . Indeed, whoever observes a social structure, in which he lives, does not know where it comes from and does not imagine another that preceded it, nor another that could follow it. The appearance of the city and of civilization is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing emergences of social evolution. The appearance of the State, to be clearly distinguished from the previous one, is just as astonishing. It is perfectly strange for a man to seek the origin of Man, as for a being of matter to conceive the appearance of matter. It is to make the universe emerge from nothingness, light from black and thought from... nothing. We believe we are touching the irrational, the mysterious, the limits of human understanding.

But where society is most reluctant to conceive of abrupt change is, of course, in the social sphere. From the earliest antiquity of civilizations, it was in the face of threats of social revolution that the ruling classes, understanding that the collective popular consciousness was of vital importance to the ruling class, decided to address the beliefs of the oppressed, whom they had until then abandoned to their personal or local convictions. The state religions, which were now developed, attempted to solidify the domination of the ruling class by attributing to the state an eternal character, like the gods, and by asking their astrologers and sorcerers to base this durability of power on the tranquility of the stars in the sky and the regular, apparently eternal movement of the sun and planets. The character of religion changes fundamentally with the appearance of the state. This has been noted by anthropologists, as Alain Testart recalls in the article "Gods in the image of kings" in the journal "Les grands dossiers des sciences humaines" : "From time immemorial , the figure of the gods has been modeled on that of kings. And in return, the image of kings is adorned with divine virtue. But divine kingship is not just a reflection of that of humans. The gods represent a more tolerable imaginary model of human command." On another level, the State needed god-kings to justify the legitimacy of the god-kings : in the absence of an earthly continuity of the State, the gods provided a continuity in the heavens.

The religious claimed to find in the sky a stability that existed neither in the climate, nor in agricultural or commercial activity, nor in social and political life. A useless quest ! There is nothing eternal in the Universe, neither galaxies, nor stars, nor matter. Nor is there any law that can claim the status of eternity. Matter is no more stable than life or human society. It had a birth. It changed form. The law of gravitation itself has not always existed. It is only one of the poles of one of the forms of the contradiction of matter, one of its historical stages. The starry sky, the very image of stability in ancient religions, turns out to be a product of the disordered agitation of matter and the violence of shocks [ 23 ] . The sun is the result of the disordered movements of hydrogen and helium gases, which undergo radioactive transitions toward heavier atoms with the emission of a large amount of energy. Stars appear and disappear. Planets, dust of stone and gas, temporarily trapped in orbits, may eventually leave their solar system. The seemingly calm night of a starry sky resounds (notably through gamma waves and emitted particles) with the explosions of its stars, the collisions of its galaxies, and probably even more violent shocks such as those involving black holes. The infinitely small is no less agitated than the infinitely large. Matter, which was thought to be immobile and stable, at least in its so-called elementary atoms, contains, buried within it, not only the Brownian motion of its colliding molecules, but also all the nuclear explosions of its atomic nuclei, all the quantum leaps of its microscopic reality, all the collisions between particles, via light photons, and all those linked to the effervescence of the void. Agitations and brutal discontinuities are everywhere present, in all domains and at all scales. As the ideology of state religions had done (from the cult of the Pharaoh to Christianity, Confucianism and Islam), the science of the rising bourgeoisie, scientism or positivism, spread a scientific ideal based on an ideology of order, fixity, stability, progress and balance, an ideal which proved to be totally unfounded with the discoveries of the "new physics" to use the expression of the physicist Davies . To seek a philosophy concerning science and history is not to construct a new scientism, but to conceive of a dynamic mode based on agitation.

The notion of a fixed and stable object (atom, particle, molecule, crystal) is replaced in physics by that of a globally stable dynamic structure [ 24 ] , that is to say an order arising from collective disorder. This notion is found in all fields whenever an order is produced from the noise of multiple shocks. Crises of matter do not just destroy structures : they build new ones. Particles disintegrate, atomic nuclei break, transforming part of their matter into energy, materials crack, bodies dissolve and solids see their structures destroyed. The agitation of matter thus jumps by a degree. But the opposite also occurs. Solutions crystallize. Energy becomes matter. Molecular bonds are structured, including on a large scale. Fluids transform into solids. Magnetic structures appear suddenly. Various forms of organization appear. Solids crystallize. Chemical reactions couple. Life is formed. It multiplies structures, mechanisms, and diversity. Nor is matter a fixed "thing," which, through its constancy, would oppose the rapid changes of life. On the contrary, both are based on extremely active dynamics of change.

In inert matter on a small scale, a materialization/dematerialization mechanism occurs at high speed, with jumps over very small distances of time and space, and establishes matter. It is also a construction/destruction mechanism that establishes the living, whether its functioning or its transformation. Creation is, as we know, permanent within the living. But it is not a creation ex nihilo, from nothing. These are existing potentialities that become real. In genetic functioning, diverse potentialities existed and were inhibited. The appearance of novelty is an inhibition of inhibition and it allows the creation of new species that previously existed only as potentialities. The same is true of matter that appears in the void. It does not come from nothing but from the ephemeral particles of the void. It is a virtual particle that becomes real and establishes microscopic matter. The material particle only seems stable to us because it is constantly new, because its mass passes very quickly from one virtual particle to its neighbor within the cloud of virtual points. If a mass particle were to maintain constant properties, this would cost it infinite energy, which is impossible. It therefore jumps between transient states that it occupies for very short times. The time of existence is the limit of the interval during which the particle must perceive the world around it. The measurements, carried out by matter itself to move and transform according to the environment, cannot exceed this duration, can only reach limited distances, and are therefore imprecise. The same virtual particle only retains its characteristics as a mass particle for a very short time, before returning to the void. The constancy of the same particle would require a precision of value in material interactions such that it would take infinite time and energy to achieve. Real nature only works by approximation since it must act in a finite time, is generally short, and cannot exchange enough information to use fixed values. Acting quickly is crucial for interacting with a phenomenon with a limited characteristic time. Acting too slowly would be as insignificant as hammering a nail slowly !

Within dynamics, abrupt change—revolutionary crisis—is not an accident, but a fundamental, constructive, and even constitutive element of the process. The overall conservation of the characteristics of a structure is achieved through jumps, which mark the elimination of the old structure and the birth of a new one. Examples of such phenomena are legion. To survive, the particle must abruptly emit one or more photons through a process that is comparable to a shock and by which the particle jumps from one state to another. Through the emission of certain bosons (interaction particles), those of the Higgs mechanism , the particle cedes its mass property to the neighboring virtual particle. The virtual becomes real and vice versa, through a procedure comparable to the same type of shock and which establishes a new structure. It is through this mechanism of abrupt change that the characteristics of the old particle are preserved. Structural conservation has taken place at the expense of the particle’s materiality. The latter has disappeared or, more precisely, it is no longer the same grain that carries it. It is at the price of this disappearance and this appearance that matter is preserved at the structural level (conservation of mass, charge, energy, etc.). The splitting of the living cell has the same characteristics (jump, brutality, unpredictability, probabilistic phenomenon). The maintenance of the properties of the cell has, here too, been done at the expense of the life of the old disappeared cell. Destruction is the basis of construction. The living needs to constantly make disappear a quantity of cells and molecules. Living cells are phenomena permanently on the edge of the crisis leading to death.

All these crises, in such diverse fields, have in common the same mode of operation, whether it concerns matter and life but also consciousness and society. These common characteristics are the interaction of scale, the large-scale discontinuity of matter, space and time linked to the rapid and unusual cohesion of individual elements on a small scale, the ratio of the duration of interaction and the time characteristic of the structure, the creation of a new organization of interactions, capable of building a new order called emergent, that is to say, one that is not present in the present elements taken individually. To this description, which lovers of formal propositions can choose as a definition of revolution, each specialist in one of these fields will say that he perfectly recognizes either superconductivity, or crystallization, or the economic crisis, or nuclear fusion, etc.

Understanding the mechanisms of matter sheds light on how human societies function (and vice versa). The capitalist economic crisis illustrates this type of dynamic. In a stock market crisis, we see the importance of the speed and size of shocks. If a large number of diverse stock market values increase or decrease coherently in a short period of time, it is catastrophic. In normal times, there are constant small crises for this or that stock market value, but no general crisis. It is the coordination of movements, usually independent and incoherent, that causes the crisis. The disorder of purchases and sales is synonymous with conservation, and excessive order (brutal coherence of purchases and sales), achieved abruptly, causes a major shock capable of destroying the economic structure. Human society experiences the same type of phenomenon when hundreds of thousands of workers are, at the same time, affected by a large-scale social movement. A number of social and political struggles, previously separate, came together in a short period of time in a single movement, causing a qualitative change. In France, in 1789, the peasants’ aspiration for land, the bourgeoisie’s demand for a state at its service and for national unification, and the radical urban petty bourgeoisie’s demand for freedom, often contradictory, combined into a single movement. In Russia, in 1917, the workers’ revolution, the revolt against war, the aspiration for land, and the national demand of oppressed peoples did not simply add up : if they took place simultaneously over a short period of time, they provoked a new situation of a higher dimension and an additional level of scale.

Sociology, politics and history use the term revolution for this type of phenomenon.. Biology, medicine, psychiatry, evolutionism and paleontology, like economics, use the notion of "crisis", from the heart attack to the Permian extinction crisis, from the epileptic crisis to the Cambrian biodiversity expansion crisis. Physico-chemistry calls these sudden changes "phase transitions", "critical phenomena", "emergence of structure", "symmetry breaks", etc. These images do not simply describe one domain or another, but the same mode of existence of a dynamic process and thus extend to a wide category of phenomena. What characterizes large-scale discontinuities is that they are carried by quantities of random, small-scale discontinuities, moving in all directions. During the crisis, "rupture" is indeed the correct descriptive term, because these elementary discontinuities suddenly become coherent, producing a large-scale discontinuity. The chemical bond breaks. The atomic nucleus fissions. Lightning disrupts the symmetry of the air, structuring a space in which a favorable direction for electrical propagation was absent. The breaking of symmetry is a very effective image for the establishment of a new order. The social order cracks, leading not only to chaos but also sometimes to a new type of power. The snow slope splits, destabilizing considerable masses of matter. The snow has changed structure, and a simple movement was enough to cause a major catastrophe. The Earth’s crust breaks. The planet experiences major earthquakes. While they are quite rare on a large scale, there are constantly myriad small-scale tremors, of all kinds of sizes, with no fixed periodicity. In all these diverse phenomena, we observe multiple, apparently random agitations that coordinate in a very short time. The photons that have become coherent produce the laser beam. Excessive coherence of vibrations in matter not only leads to the breakdown of the structure but also to the formation of a new structure on a large scale. For example, the agitation of water molecules exists in all directions in a mass of water, but a sudden shock produces a large-scale wave : the tsunami. The "pacemaker" cells of the heart collectively produce the propagation rhythm of muscle contraction, but this rhythm is not fixed. If it becomes too coherent, it causes a heart attack called ventricular fibrillation. Similarly, neural networks interact, building circuits capable of stimulating themselves at a certain rhythm. If these interactions become too coherent, they cause the onset of epilepsy. The brain needs a certain level of underlying disorder to produce transient structures. If fixed structures appear in brain function, it is a crisis.The overly prolonged looped activation of certain neural circuits causes serious mental illnesses such as obsessions. A rock experiences breaks of all sizes and in all directions. This is the basis of apparent solidity on a large scale. But if the small cracks in the rock, reaching a threshold, coordinate, they cause the rock to rupture on a large scale. A whole series of small, disordered agitations, small-scale discontinuities, usually imperceptible, acting brutally in a more coordinated way on a large scale, cause a discontinuity of great magnitude. Coherence in the class struggle is revolution. Millions of individual revolts do not add up ; they can react exponentially and produce something new, a new potential for society. Anyone who has not experienced large-scale seismic shocks can imagine that the earth is generally calm and stable and believe that only an accidental cause, external to normal functioning, could have caused a rupture. It can ignore small disturbances (however brutal and strong on their scale) and forget that these small ruptures are part of the same dynamic as massive changes. The functioning of the Earth’s crust is inseparable from the functioning of the mantle (chaotic convection of molten materials) and that of the core. It is convection that causes hot spots to emerge and causes volcanic eruptions. It is plate tectonics linked to the movement of the underlying magma that produces plate movement and earthquakes. The rupture only reveals oppositions that were previously inhibited (in this case by plate friction). These oppositions, exceeding a threshold, are expressed brutally. Change is, therefore, a brutal leap. Inhibited or hidden contradictions result in a qualitative leap.Someone who has not experienced large-scale seismic tremors may imagine that the Earth is generally calm and stable and believe that only an accidental cause, external to normal functioning, could have caused a rupture. They may ignore small disturbances (however sudden and strong on their scale) and forget that these small ruptures are part of the same dynamic as massive changes. The functioning of the Earth’s crust is inseparable from the functioning of the mantle (chaotic convection of molten materials) and that of the core. It is convection that causes hot spots to emerge and causes volcanic eruptions. It is plate tectonics linked to the movement of the underlying magma that produces plate movement and earthquakes. The rupture only reveals oppositions that were previously inhibited (in this case by plate friction). These oppositions, exceeding a threshold, are expressed abruptly. The change is, therefore, a sudden leap. Inhibited or hidden contradictions result in a qualitative leap.Someone who has not experienced large-scale seismic tremors may imagine that the Earth is generally calm and stable and believe that only an accidental cause, external to normal functioning, could have caused a rupture. They may ignore small disturbances (however sudden and strong on their scale) and forget that these small ruptures are part of the same dynamic as massive changes. The functioning of the Earth’s crust is inseparable from the functioning of the mantle (chaotic convection of molten materials) and that of the core. It is convection that causes hot spots to emerge and causes volcanic eruptions. It is plate tectonics linked to the movement of the underlying magma that produces plate movement and earthquakes. The rupture only reveals oppositions that were previously inhibited (in this case by plate friction). These oppositions, exceeding a threshold, are expressed abruptly. The change is, therefore, a sudden leap. Inhibited or hidden contradictions result in a qualitative leap.

For ordinary mortals, the world changes little or nothing, because every morning the earth seems the same and the same sun rises in an identical sky, but the sun changes on many scales. Every second for radioactive fusions, on a scale of tens of years for the movements of the outer layer, on an even larger scale for the interaction movements between the concentric layers of the star. As individuals, we are also subject to transformations on several successive scales : molecular changes below a thousandth of a second, biological changes every second, metabolic changes every day, etc. However, we try to convince ourselves of the continuity of our consciousness and to persuade ourselves that all these shocks do not make us, each time, a different man. Every day, we wake up reassuring ourselves that we are the same man and that we will meet the same loved ones, in an unchanged environment. This psychological construction is not obvious. It took us the long months of our early childhood to establish this confidence in the future and in ourselves. The feeling of the permanence of our "self" was the product of a lot of work by our brain and is not acquired from birth. It is not a definitive gain. It can easily be called into question due to painful individual experiences. For example, the hormonal attacks of adolescence, sexuality, and growth produce a destabilization of self-confidence, due in particular to a discontinuity in personal reactions and, sometimes, in physical appearance. Balance, self-confidence, confidence, stability, stress control are everyday conquests, never definitively acquired, as shown by so-called psychological illnesses – in fact, psychology is inseparable from the rest of functioning. As long as there is no shock, we are content with the belief in the fixity of our self, as an indisputable fact that does not require explanation. However, we regularly check this in our physical and mental mirrors. This is what we call consciousness. In this sense, continuity is a need of our ego, but discontinuity, real, is the strongest. The same is true of the stability of society.

Even if we don’t really know what holds it together, we believe that the social universe is as durable as the material universe, because we have a hard time imagining sudden, qualitative change, and even more so, integrating it into our projects. Until the day reality forces us to. Someone who has not experienced any social revolution, who has not seen the volcano explode, may believe that it is a phenomenon external to normal functioning and think that, barring accidents, social classes will coexist eternally without major clashes. On the other hand, someone who seriously studies revolutionary mechanisms, as scientists or representatives of the ruling classes most often do, realizes that there are earthquakes, both material and social, constantly occurring at all scales, and that, sometimes, they are coordinated on a large scale. Some very ancient philosophies, such as those of the American Indian civilizations, those of Asia, or those of the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, asserted that the world exists because it is, each time, destroyed and then rebuilt in endless cycles. This mythology is not only based on the observation of nature and its cycles (the seasons, life, and death), but also on historical political experience : civilizations developed, then were overthrown, and new ones appeared. These beliefs assumed not one creation but several successive creations.

Today, without resorting to any metaphysics, our knowledge teaches us that the world was not made gradually, continuously, or all at once, but through multiple destructions and restarts, called "transitions." On the small scales of matter, the great variety of particle shapes is a crystallization or fossilization of the stages of this history, which recalls the multiple brutal events of which they are the products, the historical stages of the cosmos. Astrophysicist Marc Lachièze-Rey writes in the "Dictionary of the History and Philosophy of Science" that "The second fundamental novelty of our cosmology, undoubtedly the most surprising, lies in the recognition of the evolution of the universe. All objects and systems in nature are born, live, and die. This is obvious for living beings, but we now know that planets, stars, galaxies also evolve. » At any given moment, there are stellar explosions in a region of space or galaxy collisions, but this affects us only slightly, given the small number of stars that explode in a human lifetime and the infinitesimal probability of being affected by these explosions, given their distance. The cosmos has not ceased to undergo these large-scale transitions, numerous and abrupt. They have occurred quite rarely (relative to intermediate periods), only at certain historical instants, which gives a misleading feeling of durability, if not stability, given the time scale on which we observe the world. Scale interactions, which produce considerable transformations coming from the small scales of the mechanism, will always astonish the observer who ignores this property. Microscopic matter experiences billions of transformations of species per second : the quark changes type, the neutrino jumps from one kind to another, proton and neutron are exchanged, the electron jumps from one state to another, from one atomic layer to another, … Human societies reserve the same type of surprises and the regimes, the most solid in appearance, sometimes explode under the internal contradictions of class societies and under the blows of revolutionary explosions of the exploited and the oppressed, highlighting unexpected potentialities. They have no need to have been provoked by external phenomena and are first caused by the direct, spontaneous development of the internal contradictions of these systems

The spontaneous nature of these changes in matter is underlined by the fundamental property called "self-organization" [ 25 ] . The term spontaneous is very important in this characterization. A large number of individuals, particles, molecules, groups of molecules, or others have the capacity, without having received any structured order from the outside, to build forms of organization, a capacity that these elements did not possess individually. In nature, there is no fixed plan of organization, no pre-existing program, no pilot, no will, no goal, no principle assuming in advance the result. We are little prepared philosophically for such a notion. We are educated in the idea that order comes by itself, that order produces order, possibly that order on a large scale produces order on a small scale. The key to a society, in this conception, would be institutions, structures, a pre-established order, leaders, organizers, managers, but not elementary agitation. On the contrary, order is a product of the self-organization of basic agitation ! Yet the emergence of order from disorder is the foundation of inert matter itself… This astonishing property of self-organization did not manifest itself once and for all during a single creation of matter, this supposed origin of the Universe, but continues to occur before our eyes. Matter is constantly being formed and structured. Particles are materialized and dematerialized in the void. Atoms are built and destroyed, for example, within stars. Many phenomena on our scale are also based on this property of matter. When convection movements produce emergent structures, it is also this property of self-organization that we observe. This can be realized in the formation of a cloud. This structure is not simply a sum of individual water molecules. Without internal dynamics, so many tons of water could not remain in the air for long and would even fall immediately as rain. Let’s take a simpler example, closer to home. This is what happens when the rice cooking water runs out in the pot. We then notice holes regularly distributed within the rice. The upward and downward convection movements of heat have spontaneously self-organized. This is also the process at work when trees self-distribute within a forest. Self-organization is the appearance of collective structures among a large number of individuals when this structure did not exist for them individually.

There is no miracle in these multiple "creations." They have no need for a supreme being, a commander who orders nature to produce this or that. The Universe produces everything feasible according to the laws. It thus produces novelty billions of billions of billions of times per second before our eyes, even if it is not easy to achieve. It is so frequent and so rapid that we do not even perceive it. Who has seen a particle appear ? Who has seen a star born ? A genetic mutation ? Or a new species ? Who has seen two molecules bond or detach ? The philosophies that based reality on the sensible, according to which the world exists only through our human sensations, are definitively outdated. Man will never be able to perceive, due to the limits of his senses, the material phenomena described in quantum physics, which sometimes occur over extremely small durations, on the order of a thousandth of a second to a million billionth of a second. Not only does their size hide them from us, but the short duration of their existence prevents us from ever being able to receive their effects. The quantum vacuum carries phenomenal quantities of energy, but these appear in such short intervals of time that we cannot measure them with our best instruments. Sensing things supposes that they remain identical to themselves for a sufficiently long time so that we are capable of lastingly defining a state of things. So-called fundamental matter (the particle, the atom, the molecule), which we believed to be fixed, reveals itself to be full of life (and therefore of death), builds and destroys itself, and proves capable of changing abruptly, without any intermediate stage, preparation, or warning sign, from one form of organization to another. It organizes itself spontaneously, that is to say, without external intervention, into particles, nuclei, atoms, molecules, macromolecules. Matter only exists when it exchanges energy with its neighbors, called light, radiation, interaction particles or bosons [ 26 ] . These exchanges are the energy shocks that position, fix the energy, determine the structure, its durability and its form. When this structure momentarily ceases to exist, it returns to the void from which it came. This quantum void, far from being the absence of violent agitation, is the seat of the most brutal shocks of energy. The fluctuations that occur there can concern incredible energies provided they occur with great speed.

Nature is no more peaceful than society. Change is violent and unexpected. It is neither gradual nor prepared by multiple tiny steps. The law of nature is not fixity, the uniqueness of solutions, nor order versus disorder. Balance, so vaunted by many authors, is not the foundation of the world, whether of society, life, or matter. Finding constant quantities is not enough to describe the transformations that occur within dynamics. The so-called "tendency toward equilibrium" is metaphysical. There is no law that compels reality to evolve toward this famous state. Laws tend to minimize quantities, but this does not necessarily mean a tendency toward immobility. Agitation may well be the least energy-intensive state. Structural durability itself does not mean fixity. On the other hand, a universe moving irremediably towards equilibrium could not produce new structures. Physics had shown that isolated systems (neither receiving nor losing energy or matter) move towards equilibrium (in particular the law of thermodynamics). But, in the universe, nothing is isolated. Everything exists only because it is subject to interactions [ 27 ] . The main reason comes from the fact that each individual element belongs to larger wholes in space and time. As a result, each element interacts with a large part of the world which reacts on its own existence at different scales. The resulting order is not a stable, pre-established order. It is neither linear, nor fixed, nor continuous. It can change but not gradually. It is based on structures arising from disorder [ 28 ] , built up as they go along, and on thermodynamics far from equilibrium : dissipative structures as the physicist-chemist Ilya Prigogine called them . " In addition to their self-organizing properties, some out-of-equilibrium systems possess so-called bifurcation properties. Early in the process, there is a critical moment when the system becomes unstable. At this moment, the application of a weak external field (for example, a gravitational field or a magnetic field) can determine the state that will develop next. The system then behaves as if it possessed a sort of primitive memory ." can be read in the issue of the journal La Recherche entitled " Order and Disorder" , Special Edition November-December 2002. The change of vision is complete. It is conceptual, philosophical. Ilya Prigogine is precisely one of those who were perfectly aware that we were not just changing the perception of a single field of study, thermodynamics, but the whole conception of science. Self-organization is not the only important novelty : discontinuity, non-linearity [ 29 ] , the formation of feedback loops, emergence, strange attractors, entanglement (superposition of states), etc., accompany it. Matter is not a thing [ 30 ] but an emergent structure resulting from the agitation of the vacuum, which jumps from one state to another extremely quickly, so quickly that these jumps are imperceptible when observed by matter with much longer characteristic times. On the other hand, particles with short characteristic times and being observed in small numbers (or as individuals) are sensitive to the rapid changes that characterize quantum physics. This is the source of the leap between classical and quantum physics, of the phenomenon called decoherence [ 31 ] .

Inert matter undergoes, permanently but discontinuously, during shocks, variations, changes in structure, multiple transformations. One of these spontaneous forms of organization of matter is the living, based on a particularly great instability of molecular bonds [ 32 ] and on multiple loop interactions. The apparent biological fixity of life – notably the order based on DNA – is illusory. It is the agitation of RNA and proteins around the genes carried by the DNA that activate or inhibit the processes of manufacturing new proteins. Contrary to a widely held idea, we are not entirely determined as soon as we have received our individual genome. The processes through which the cell passes are decisive for the rest of its history. Every living being carries within it multiple possibilities. And above all, the old idea “one DNA equals a single type of living being” turns out to be false. The same DNA is capable of producing many other molecules than those of the “self” ; its genes could produce other species, if all these "foreign" bodies produced by our body were not recognized as such, then inhibited or destroyed by protective processes (chaperone proteins, immune system, self-destruction, etc.). The multiple potentialities of the genetic mechanism, much more flexible than we thought, masked in normal times, are revealed during violent attacks (thermal, chemical, ecological or climatic). In a crisis situation, the protective processes of the species, the individual, the cell, the "self" are overwhelmed and variations, contained in particular in the potentialities of DNA or RNA, are then expressed. It is not a slow, imperceptible evolution, an accumulation of tiny changes without effect (internal evolution of the species), but, on the contrary, radical changes with the production of structural novelty (bifurcation of groups of living beings, production of new organizational plans, speciation). There is a leap from unicellular to multicellular, but also from the animal without vertebrae to the vertebrate, with the appearance of new structures such as organs, limbs, wings, feathers, shells, eggs, etc.

The particularity of matter that we are highlighting here is fundamental. The production of novelty is not an incidental remark but the very foundation of reality. Reality is not only the sum of the determinations that are expressed but also of those that are potential within the structure. It is very different. A quantum phenomenon contains multiple possibilities. Experience, measurement, realizes only one of the possibilities. This is one of the fundamental ideas of quantum physics, which rediscovers a brilliant idea from the philosopher GWF Hegel. The mass particle exists only because it constantly jumps from one corpuscle to another, because the particle constantly changes state. Global conservation exists only through transformation and even destruction. Life exists only through the death of cells, molecules, individuals, groups, species. Society exists only through the violent destruction of previous societies and old social relationships. Creation is not a creation as creationists envision it, but billions per second. It is a creation in the artistic or artisanal sense and not in the sense of a pre-planned construction. By a mistake, often made, many authors continue to consider genetics as a pre-written program. There are of course instructions written in the genome, in the molecules (proteins or RNA), but it is the dynamics of the interactions that determine the production of the body. The reading of DNA is selective. It is dynamic and not fixed. It modifies the results. It allows the diversification of cells within an individual, functions for the same cell (depending on the environment) and the evolution of species.

Within living things, the capacity for qualitative change is not only encountered during rare episodes of species transformation or branching out of living organisms. This type of change, the qualitative leap, occurs at all scales. Life is constantly undergoing transformation. Variations occur throughout its existence, depending on the reactions the organism will experience. A single living being is already a story full of twists and turns. The development of the individual is, from the beginning and throughout its life, a change by leaps, of varying size and scope. The cell, the fertilized egg, constitutes a first qualitative leap, a first production of novelty. Cell multiplication transforms quantitative leaps into qualitative leaps. By multiplying, the first cell does not simply make the body grow ; it transforms it. It becomes a multicellular individual, but it does not constitute a simple colony of all identical cells. Cells specialize, specific tissues are built, giving rise to organs, collective mechanisms such as immunity or the nervous system, or even the brain.

Brutal, large-scale phenomena are produced by seemingly disordered events on a small scale. It is difficult to understand how, all of a sudden, the disordered agitation of thousands of individuals to hundreds of millions becomes coordinated and coherent. Whether they are particles, atoms, molecules, cells, neural networks, living beings, or humans, they are seized by an overall movement, behave as one, speak with one voice. This is the revolution. Atoms agitated in all directions, and in diverse states, coordinate in the "Bose-Einstein condensation." Photons become coherent in the laser effect. Neural networks organize themselves to produce mental images... These coordinate on a large scale in epilepsy. The rhythmicity of heart cells is brutally coordinated, producing a fixed rhythm that can be destructive. The apparent elementary disorder on a small scale proves capable of organizing itself on a large scale. This disorder is not pure chance as it appeared to be. Order is not stable but only more or less durable. And it is not the only possible order. We can move, in one fell swoop, from one order to another, change state, change structure, change system. When, on one scale, we have an impression of immobility, stability, regularity, or order, we only need to change scale to find ourselves in a veritable maelstrom, in which the agitation seems totally random.

The apparent tranquility of a water surface is only the overall product of the leaps in all directions of the molecules of water in the air and of air in the water. Contrary to appearances, the transition between air and water, far from being a surface, is a constantly agitated fractal zone which never reaches a state of equilibrium. The night sky, which gives us a serene image of space, only deludes us. The luminous ray, long considered as the mark of continuity and natural linearity, is only an optical illusion and not a physical object [ 33 ] . The luminous point of the star, apparently tranquil in the night, hides an incredible number of nuclear explosions in the center of the star brought to more than twelve million degrees by the confinement of this energy. The greater the potential underlying agitations, the more durable the structure they found. The sun will last longer the more nuclear fusion explosions it can deploy from its hydrogen and helium. The most durable particle is the one based on the most energetic interactions : the proton, whose structure is based on the interaction of its quarks. The incredibly rapid agitation within the proton [ 34 ] , notably the exchange of color charge between its quarks and the ability to fix and release quark/antiquark pairs, gives its stability – or rather its great durability – to the proton, the basic particle of the atomic nucleus. The atomic nucleus, which seems to us to be the basis of the stability of matter, was produced during thermonuclear explosions of stars. The heaviest nuclei were produced during the most energetic explosions. The radiations that constantly pass through us are echoes not only of the microscopic agitation described above, but also of those brutal events in space, nuclear fusions that provide energy for stars, supernova explosions of stars (which the astrophysicist Brahic calls "creative explosions"), collisions of stars and galaxies, and even echoes of what is called the Big Bang [ 35 ] (a brutal transition in our universe that notably produced the cosmic background radiation). Brahic says in "The Most Beautiful History of the Earth" that our planet " came from a spatial disorder of the universe."

Light, a term we use in the broad sense to designate all radiations and modes of interaction between parts of matter (physicists speak rather of bosons), is nothing other than the expression, within the void, of the collisions between the particles of matter and their collisions with the anti-particles. The shock, the discontinuity, the transformation by leaps (quanta) characterizes the particle scale of matter/light [ 36 ] . Light and matter are subject to qualitative leaps, which even prevent us from following them in their peregrinations on a microscopic scale, because they disappear and reappear, instead of following a continuous trajectory. The "simple" "elementary" particle is the product of multiple exchanges with the quantum void, reception of real and virtual photons, recomposition with virtual antiparticles (dematerializations) and new decompositions into two poles (materializations). The large collections of molecules that make up physical bodies on our scale present no fewer critical situations. The "simple" snowflake is constantly jumping from one structure to another. A quiet snow slope experiences structural upheavals in its superimposed layers that can lead to an avalanche. A water surface, a seemingly immobile interface between water and air, is the product of a multiplicity of extremely agitated exchanges in all directions between the two environments, as between the different layers of snow with diverse structures.

Many authors continue to search for laws of nature based on paths to equilibrium, on fixed structures (whether particles, strings, vortices, waves, species, branches, genes, etc.) and non-contradictory concepts, in the domain of life as well as inert matter. However, life is based on non-equilibrium, as are matter, man and society. Each particle is constantly jostled by the effervescence of the void which makes it jump from one point to another and threatens its structure with disappearance. Each cell is constantly a battle between genes and proteins of life and death. Instead of calling it a living cell, it should be emphasized that the cell is a contradictory process which constantly remains on the border between life and death. Life never definitively wins, except for the sick cancer cell. Because the internal mechanism of cell death (apoptosis) is essential to the functioning of the "living" cell. The same is true for each group of cells, each individual, each social group, each species, or the entire ecosystem : mechanisms of inhibition and suppression are equally indispensable. Each structure contains the elements of its own destruction. Death and life are maintained at the same time in a contradictory and combined manner. The outcome of these dynamic processes is that the symmetry between the two is only slightly shifted in favor of life. All these systems operate from a slight imbalance, also called a break in symmetry. Matter, like life, and class society, exist only thanks to this slight imbalance, without which there would be no matter, no life, no classes, and no social organization. Non-equilibrium does not prevent the structuring and sustainability of matter. On the contrary, it allows this spontaneous organization despite the ambient disorder and even thanks to this disorder, with regard to inert matter as well as the entire phenomenon of life, as for each cell, for each species, as for each ecosystem. We live in close proximity to animal species that seem to have always existed and seem unlikely to change. Yet, suddenly, a thermal or chemical attack, an ecological change can destabilize this supposedly immutable picture. Species then disappear en masse and new species appear in large numbers, themselves subject to destructive selection that preserves only a small part. The appearances of novelty in life are shocks and not slow transformations, as was long believed. But above all, they can only be explained because the apparent stability was based on contradictions, oppositions momentarily masked or inhibited. The rupture did not create these oppositions. It only revealed them. The structuring,The creation of a directionality where it did not exist or where several directionalities existed jointly, is the product of a dialectical rupture within a contradiction."Symmetry involves two opposing logical components : invariance and transformation," explains Cassé in "Of the Void and Creation. " Social life is a new level of these sometimes unexpected and incredible transformations, produced by long-hidden contradictions. A political regime or a social system, revered and feared, suddenly becomes, following the silent accumulation of a series of discontents, as unbearable to the rebellious people as a swarm of hornets. An order, considered frozen, brutally self-destructs. Sometimes, it is so weakened by its internal contradictions that a far less powerful adversary, a far less developed and armed society, can easily defeat it. The astonishment is so great that, centuries later, with all the documents in hand, commentators seriously question the causes of this collapse and are reluctant to recognize the action of the oppressed. Without warning, a society that has lasted thousands of years, respected and feared, is collapsing at high speed like a house of cards. For all those experiencing this event, it is occult forces that are the cause of such a social and political maelstrom. The oppressed themselves, accustomed to underestimating their strength in the face of power, do not consider that simple humans, poor and despised to boot, were capable of bringing down dominant powers. In fact, their astonishment resembles the refusal to consider small-scale earthquakes when understanding large-scale ones, which are much less frequent. Or the refusal to take into account, in the rupture of a dam, thousands of small cracks, which had formed relatively slowly and almost imperceptibly. It was these, by connecting together in a very short time, that formed a single, large fracture and swept away the structure. At first glance, the dam rupture and the earthquake do not seem to be able to be interpreted by molecular action, because the scale is so much larger. Yet this is indeed the case, because molecular action is capable of being coordinated to act at a high level. This mode of large-scale intervention of the ordinarily uncoordinated small scale is universal. It is the interaction of scale and this transformation concerns the entire universe. There is no phenomenon that does not belong to it and that is not capable of intervening at the various levels of reality. This is how the vacuum acts on microscopic matter, which itself intervenes on matter at our scale. This is also how interactions in a very short time intervene on phenomena with long characteristic times.

In the case of the fall of a state, the end of a social system, or the death of a civilization, the revolutionary action of the oppressed masses does not seem to be a hypothesis retained by many commentators, except in the few cases where the revolution is truly too obvious and well-known. Revolution presupposes the action of forces internal to society. This also means that the society that seemed stable was founded on contradictions that had managed, more or less sustainably, to balance themselves. These authors prefer to appeal to chance, beliefs, occult forces, external attacks (wars, invasions), the fall of large meteorites, major climate changes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, the depletion of resources, or all sorts of catastrophes that would have destroyed civilization. The Old Testament already developed a copy of the Mesopotamian myth according to which the first civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates collapsed because of the Flood. Similar theories have continued to be propagated in all history books about other civilizations that have disappeared body and soul, leaving very few traces, and have sought, each time, a natural disaster, or a war, to explain this astonishing fact. The most difficult thing to interpret in this way is the fact that men completely left the cities of entire regions, following these events whose origin we are seeking. And above all, they completely abandoned their mode of production, returning to the previous mode of production. The ruling classes, each time particularly targeted, were permanently overthrown. As we see, simply appealing to natural phenomena or an exhaustion of resources cannot suffice : there was clearly a violent social phenomenon that caused the fall of the social system.

Even if natural upheavals were at the origin of the fall of these societies, this could only have happened in a destabilized social and political climate [ 37 ]The poor masses were able to deduce from certain natural cataclysms that the gods no longer protected the kingdom, thus justifying their revolt against the ruling class. We find in the Old Testament the idea that the "plagues of Egypt" (various natural disasters) revealed that God was denouncing the Pharaoh’s regime. But the deep roots of the revolution do not lie essentially in the loss of belief in the god-kings. Confidence in the ruling class was lost due to political and social events that the natural disasters only reinforced. For example, if in 464 BC, Sparta was destabilized by an earthquake that destroyed part of the city, it was because the serfs, the helots, took advantage of it to revolt. While the earthquake may have provided some ideas, many other factors, social ones in this case, played a role, such as the revolt of the Greek cities of Asia Minor against the Persian occupiers thirty years earlier. The Spartans, who refused Athens’ help against the helots, were defeated by the revolution. Like natural disasters, war (the war against Persia in this case) is certainly an accelerator of class struggles and revolutions, a revealer. It acts to uncover contradictions that already existed between classes with opposing interests. For some commentators, the end of civilization is all the more incomprehensible because, in their eyes, it was born independently of the social struggles and civil society on the basis of which this civilization developed. Those who saw the will of a king, his great abilities, or popular beliefs as the origin of a sudden eruption of civilization can only explain its fall by the defects of a new monarch, which explains nothing. Indeed, we see that the decline continues even if we change kings. The lack of understanding of the sources of civilization is therefore at the root of their ignorance of the causes of the fall. According to these authors, the new society would have suddenly emerged from nothing. Men would have brutally admitted the superiority of one of their number, who would have become their king, imposed his laws on them and built the social and political structure. All this without being able to say what pushed these men to change their way of life in this way, moving from a free and poor, often nomadic existence, to a social, urban life, much more dependent, harder, for the majority of the population, and, above all, more productive. If the birth of civilization appears to them as a miracle (some even see it as proof of extraterrestrial intervention !), its fall can only be incomprehensible to them. The same astonishment is found in scientific study which, having long privileged order, balance, continuity, identifies any sudden transformation with irrationality. Disorder is often equated with the absence of laws.This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Every type of natural disorder is a form of order, of determinism. Just because molecules are moving in all directions doesn’t mean they’re doing it haphazardly. Each molecule obeys laws of interaction with the void and with other molecules. That the result is relative disorder doesn’t mean that the molecules act "at random." Simply lowering the temperature is enough to see that molecules can become coherent. The fact that molecular agitation, called Brownian motion, leads to average values (pressure, temperature) means that there is no such thing as chance, strictly speaking. Unless we give it the meaning of various independent phenomena that are not yet coordinated. If we give the word chance the meaning of the absence of laws, it seems excluded from our universe. If we give it the meaning of disordered agitation, we see that it is always combined, coupled with order, at all scales. What is happening is indeed necessary even if this necessity cannot be predicted, even if several futures are possible, even if the laws are diverse and intertwined, limiting and inhibiting each other. Pure order is not necessary and necessity is not only order.

The most astonishing thing is not that brutal disorder is capable of coordinating itself, nor that it can attack order, that small-scale agitation, fluctuation, undermines a large-scale edifice, but, on the contrary, that a large number of small-scale elements acting in a disorderly manner, brutally coordinate, building a new order, global and large-scale. Thus, the agitation of molecules produces the structure of the cloud. The agitation of the vibrations of the heart cells produces the heartbeat. The agitation of neuronal messages produces sensations and thought. The agitation of proteins, of RNA, around the genes contained in DNA, produces genetic functioning. Human agitation produces social functioning. The agitation of the void produces the structures of particulate matter. The higher level in the scales is therefore the product of the agitation at the lower level. This agitation brings about a new order that is not reducible to the sum of the lower-level elements [ 38 ] . The multiple possibilities for organizing the levels highlight as many diverse structures as possible.

Several futures for a system are possible [ 39 ] within the same dynamic obeying laws. The existence of several potentialities does not mean that nature acts as it pleases. This is not "free will", despite the use of unfortunate expressions such as "free electron" or "free path of the molecule". It may look like chance but it is not. The apparent disorder on a small scale is deterministic. The order it creates, on a large scale, is still deterministic. But it is not deterministic in the sense that we understood it in the past. Deterministic does not mean completely ordered, nor predictable, nor reducible to fixed objects. The establishment of the new order is historical, depends on small events, and can take very diverse and unexpected forms. The law, far from simply producing conservation, allows us to establish levels of structuring with new laws. While supporters of the existing order have retained from the revolution only the brutality of the transformation, the violence, and the destructive nature of the old order, science shows that revolution, transition, allows for the establishment of a new order. It is the construction of a new structure, called emergent, which did not exist, even in embryo, within the system. The future cannot, therefore, be a simple reproduction of the past. History does not repeat itself identically. It is constantly innovating. Its study requires access to a philosophy of change, essential for anyone who wants to understand its dynamics and act on it.

There are no ready-made answers for destabilizing events with unexpected consequences. Anyone who has attempted to predict revolutions, crises, volcanic eruptions, climate change, tornadoes, and earthquakes, as well as their possible consequences, has come up against the unpredictability of history. Wherever sudden change occurs, where discontinuity and self-organization reign, that is, the spontaneous formation of new structures, the interaction of scale, an integral part of the laws of nature as well as of social laws, gives them a random appearance. These laws thus manifest this seemingly illogical correlation between chance and necessity. These two notions, once considered logically and diametrically opposed, are thus dialectically united in a single dynamic. Contingency, far from opposing determinism, appears as the purest mode of expression of necessity, of the law of nature. We remember how shocked Einstein was that someone wanted to make him admit that the atom emits a light photon randomly, that is, at any instant and for no reason. "Nature does not play dice," he thought. Nature and society are agitated, but they are not irrational for all that, he said. During a qualitative leap, there is discontinuity, but not an absence of causality.

Natural dynamics are based on contradictions. These are not contradictions in the sense of the old formal logic, according to which opposites do not coexist and eliminate each other definitively. The overall structural order is all the more durable when it is based on sudden internal changes. Think of the relative stabilization of capitalism through crises. The more severe a crisis, the more it establishes a new form of the system capable of lasting. Contradiction has a dialectical character [ 40 ] . Hegel explains in his "Small Logic" : "When one encounters, in an object or in a notion, contradiction (and there is no object in which one cannot find a contradiction, that is to say, two opposite and necessary determinations, an object without contradiction being only a pure abstraction of the understanding which maintains with a kind of violence one of the two determinations and strives to distance and hide from consciousness the opposite determination contained in the first), when one encounters, we say, contradiction, one is accustomed to concluding that it results in nothingness. (…) Here, it is nothingness, but nothingness which contains being, and reciprocally, it is being, but being which contains nothingness." For example, within our world, we find a contradiction between light and matter since energy is arranged in the form of mass or radiation and the two forms have opposite properties. And yet, matter contains light in its dynamic process, and light contains matter. These dialectical contradictions lead to transformations that are impossible for contradictions of pure logic, in which one of the opposing determinations cannot produce the other. Yet, matter plus matter can produce radiation (which occurs notably within the atomic bomb). Light plus light can produce darkness, as the phenomenon of light interference reveals. Light plus light can produce matter, as in the case of the appearance of pairs of matter and antimatter. When opposites eliminate each other, it is only to reappear in a new form or at another level. They coexist within the same entity, interact, are inseparable while remaining opposites. In the old formal logic—to which mathematicians who study contemporary logic, such as Kleene, have given up -, we would be dealing with either matter or light, whereas we find light within matter and vice versa. We would have either a wave or a corpuscle, either order or disorder, either a local phenomenon or an extended phenomenon, etc. A fixed state would suppose that the other is eliminated, whereas the possible states are superimposed. The physical system is made up not only of the states that express themselves but also of all those that are capable of doing so, virtual states. The world that expresses itself is no longer the only world. There also exists the universe of potentialities and it is this that must be questioned. The particle is a superposition of states. A logical opposition would lead to one or the other of the states or even to the destruction of both. If a physical effect did not know its opposite, contradictory effect, the universe would implode. If, at any level, gravitation or electromagnetism prevailed without being contradicted, matter would have disappeared. If this symmetry of opposites were not itself contradicted, if there were no broken symmetry, no transcended contradiction, the universe would be immutable, without history, without innovation, and without dynamics. The living cell is a superposition of life and death. It contains a current functioning and several other possible ones, through specialization of the cell. It contains a current genetic functioning and many other potential ones.

Formal logic will never allow us to interpret [ 41 ] a dynamic containing the elements of its own destruction and the construction of a new structure, that is to say, containing its own contradiction. For this philosophy, "what is, is." A particle is a particle and the void is empty. The principle of identity prohibits a superposition of potential states. The change of state linked to an internal dynamic has no logical meaning because it supposes an instant where A is not A. The existence of internal contradictions is not describable within this logic of "yes or no." On the other hand, for dialectical logic, the interpenetration of opposites is the production of novelty, the virtual and the real do not oppose each other but interact and exchange each other constantly. Also have a dialectical functioning (opposite poles fighting, annihilating, inhibiting, exchanging, combining and then dividing, and together creating new entities) life (proteins and genes of life and death, complementarity of nucleotides in pairs in DNA, genes (inhibitor and activator, proteins, hormones, neurotransmitters, neural networks, nervous circuits), matter (opposite charges, opposite spins, anion/cation, oxidant/reducer, acid/base, solvent/solute, matter/antimatter, etc.), the class struggle and the various economic and social structures such as productive forces [ 42 ] , relations of production, political and social structure and relations between classes, including the most explosive, the revolution. The class struggle is often hidden. Many structures of society aim to provoke an alliance between classes with opposing interests. Due to inter-class agreements, real or imaginary, of ideological influence or simple deception, social classes mask, inhibit, delay their oppositions. They divide and merge, alternately and contradictorily. Structures are there to divert clashes between opposing elements. The class struggle, even if distorted and diverted, nonetheless determines the fundamental meaning of significant changes in society. All the brutal events of History, as of matter, are conditioned by the contradictions of the system.

Within matter, too, discontinuities are masked only because they contain, at all levels, their opposites, with which they couple and build interactions that mask these oppositions without eliminating them. The entire universe is full of these dichotomies between an element and its opposite. Positive and negative electricities, particles of matter and antimatter, male and female hormones, activating and inhibiting molecules, activating genes and inhibiting genes, activating nerves and inhibiting nerves, enzymes and substrates, receptors and ligands, one would be unable to cite the entire range of opposing mechanisms which, by fighting each other, produce a certain form of order, giving an illusory impression of fixity, stability, continuity, linearity, periodicity or regularity. Microbial attacks have their inhibitors, stock market rises have their downward reversals, matter has its antimatter and matter experiences sudden dematerializations, imperceptible to our senses because they are very rapid. These polar opposite discontinuities, masked when they combine [ 43 ] , appear abruptly when they separate, and manifest themselves suddenly in the form of brutal transitions. Opposite poles appear and disappear successively at high speed in the void. The latter is sometimes transparent to light and sometimes impenetrable like a wall. Air, transparent to light, becomes a real wall for it, as soon as it contains fog. An agitation in all directions, like the void or air, seems like nothing, appears motionless, inert and, suddenly, its contradictory poles arise, explode the structure and cause a qualitative change. The small size (in space and time) of these agitations and the fact that they take place in all directions makes them imperceptible. They suddenly become active and produce a new order. The collision of photons builds matter. The collision of continental plates makes mountains. The collision of the electron being torn from an atom allows the formation of molecules. The collision of molecules builds the temperature and pressure of gases and establishes the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas). The collision due to the concentration of gases forms stars. The collision of imploding stars forms the heaviest atoms… etc…. It is in violence that the new order is born. Modern physics calls the phenomenon that produces order a break (of symmetry) ! For example, it is crystallization in a saline solution, condensation in a cloud, the formation of matter in a vacuum [ 44 ], the structuring of snowflakes, etc. All these mechanisms are based on an opposition, a symmetry, which breaks. If there were an interaction that did not have its opposite, a particle its antiparticle, a gene its inhibitor, etc., this interaction would develop to infinity (positive feedback), causing its own destruction by exhaustion of energy, or would destroy the world. If this symmetry were perfect, without symmetry breaks, the world would not be dynamic, would have no history. It is a very slight lack of symmetry between matter and antimatter that makes the material world. A very slight break in symmetry in the genetics between man and woman, causes the female genes to prevail a little bit. This is one of the hypotheses considered for the disappearance of Neanderthal man. He would have disappeared because his genes were supplanted. His superiority in abilities and weapons would have led him to defeat the sapiens. He would have taken their wives, more slender and attractive than the Neanderthal women. The children born from these unions would have been the most numerous. The victory of the Neanderthals over the sapiens would be the basis of their defeat, the sapiens genes having triumphed via the sapiens women ! Whether this version is confirmed or not, genetics obeys, like matter, the idea of breaking symmetry, just as social revolution is a breaking of symmetry between opposing classes.

It is the breaking of symmetry between the two hemispheres of our brain that allows the two hemispheres to specialize, exchange points of view, without harming the decision-making power of the overall structure. It is this breaking that marks the production of an order, a structure. Previously, it was believed, on the contrary, that order came from symmetry. Indeed, the two cerebral hemispheres are not exactly opposed, which allows each of them to specialize in certain functions. This is not specific to the brain. The body is lateralized and the two sides are symmetrical, but they are not exactly so. Just as there is a dominant cerebral hemisphere, there is a dominant side. There are left-handed people and right-handed people. Without the domination of one of the two hemispheres, we could never make a decision or act. But this domination is not necessarily permanent or continual. This explains why at certain times our emotional pains take over and at others our intellectual capacities, to summarize somewhat crudely. We pass easily from one situation to another [ 45 ] . In the old version of the symmetry of diametrically opposed opposites, we did not understand how order could change and, even less, how an order on totally new bases could emerge. According to the new vision of the world, the breaking of symmetry would be everywhere at the origin of novelty, that of matter, of life, of man, of thought and of civilization… Each of these appearances is a breaking of symmetry. The appearance of the material world sounds the victory of matter over antimatter. Life sounds the triumph of levorotatory molecules over dextorotatory ones. That of the brain the domination of one hemisphere over the other. Social evolution initially resulted in the domination of one sex over the other, of free men over slaves, of the rich over the poor, of cities over the countryside, of exploiting classes over exploited classes. The breakdown of symmetry comes from contradictions that develop within a system that is almost symmetrical to the point of rupture, to the point of revolution.

The qualitative changes resulting from these dialectical contradictions, and in particular the multiplicity of possible combinations, lead to the richness of the variety of forms and the construction of a history that is not a simple cyclical repetition of the same events and the same mechanisms. The multiplicity of physical particles, including the less stable or unstable particles that disintegrate at high speed, shows that the inert is also rich in multiple possible variations. The living provides a striking illustration of this. In the mechanism of life, the dialectical contradiction (interpenetration, exchange and overcoming of opposites) between identical repetition of hereditary material and variation, between conservation and transformation [ 46 ] , between virtual and real is permanent. The form of life most subject to variation, that of the bacterium, is the best able to protect itself against external aggression. Being based on internal disorder protects the global order from external disorder much better than a fixed order would ! To give an example, let us recall that the Japanese government had asked its electrical technicians to design electrical installations with fixed measurements : pole height, cable length, cable position. It was observed that the cables broke, whereas the same type of installations with slightly variable values held up very well in Western countries. Fixity does not mean durability. In a fixed order, the interior may seem preserved, but the slightest change in external conditions can cause a rupture. In a dynamic order, order is not diametrically opposed to disorder. The durability of the particle is not based on fixity but on ultra-rapid exchanges with the void. Life is another demonstration of this. The disorder of cellular interactions (agitated modification of genetic interactions) is not only a cause of destruction but also a source of novelty and a guarantee of sustainability.

The dialectical nature of matter and life is constantly evident : too much stability leads to destruction, and too much variation produces a new order. Any fixed structure is more likely to disappear quickly. The speed of transformation is a means of conservation. The proton, based on the ultra-rapid interactions of its components, the quarks, is the most durable of particles. Any social and political regime that contains its own form of internal destruction has a better chance of surviving for a long time. This is, among other things, what bourgeois democracy has understood very well, breaking the domination of a particular political clan, to better avoid breaking the system itself. As Aristotle observedIn "Politics," under dictatorship, the domination of the ruling class is, paradoxically, much more fragile than under democracy. A rigid material can break more easily than a flexible one. The functioning of the living organism is not based on fixity, constancy, or a periodic regularity, contrary to what the old conceptions of rhythms of life, homeostasis, and metabolism suggested. The heart experiences crises because the "normal" mechanism is not a stable order, periodic rhythms, but, on the contrary, a succession of linked processes of organization and disorganization of the pulsations of the cardiac rhythmic cells. The brain suffers crises in the event of excessive regularity of the message and the areas concerned. The functioning of neuronal interactions is not based on conservation alone but on a contradictory mechanism : structuring of networks in phase followed by destructuring. Fixity, regularity, immobility is death. Contrary to what a non-dynamic interpretation of Darwinism would have us believe, according to which selection results from the trimorph of the most adapted, an overly adapted species disappears at the slightest change in the conditions of existence. The mechanism of life does not go in a single direction : towards the identical reproduction of the most adapted to the conditions of existence. Life constantly produces variety that goes against any tendency towards conservation. It is these capacities for variation that are constantly present and that are expressed in phases of transformation. It has generally maintained itself thanks to its capacity, during major crises (particularly climatological), to produce new species. This capacity already existed within life and has only been expressed in these exceptional circumstances. The aggression linked to the crisis has inhibited the inhibition of variety, by overflowing the so-called chaperone mechanisms that eliminate non-compliant production. These mechanisms operate permanently and are contradictory to variation. The appearance of new species is a break in the symmetry between these contradictory processes. The same is true of social and economic organization. The capabilities of the new social class did not appear overnight during the revolution. They already existed beforehand, but they were inhibited, diverted, masked, and combated by the social structure. These structures, having reached a level of saturation, experience crises when an opposing mechanism is exhausted and can no longer carry out the necessary correction in a sufficiently short time. Speed is a fundamental element of the revolutionary crisis. Royalty, having reached a deadlock, exploded both in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917.Social systems experience crises when the two opposing forces can no longer block each other and one of them can intervene collectively within a short time. Social groups, previously integrated into the feudal order, such as the Third Estate, overthrow the order when the cohesion of their aspirations and actions is achieved at high speed and the ruling class proves incapable of coping. Order becomes a factor of disorder. Classes, part of the previous stable mode of operation or supposedly so, decide, without warning, that there is no longer any question of accepting submission. The revolutionary event is not inexplicable, irrational, or indeterministic. However, because it results in a break in symmetry between contradictory laws that were almost symmetrical, it depends on small factors and is not predictable, either in time or space. Not everything is possible, but the possibilities are multiple. The break in symmetry is a bifurcation. Produced by chain reactions, it causes multiple bifurcations and can lead to global and qualitative change. Hence the infinite variety of history.

The history of the material Universe is no less rich than human life and society in novelties produced by contradictions, interactions and combinations between opposites : multiplicity of kinds of virtual and real particles, durable and unstable particles, and interacting particles (like photons of light), multiplicity of possibilities within a packet of interacting particles (bosons), multiplicity of possible positions and movements and positions of the particle within its polarization cloud, multiplicity of possible states of the particle (by absorbing or emitting bosons), multiplicity of possible paths from one state to another (Feynman schemes) .), multiplicity of transient structures employing these elements. And a whole dynamic governs their interactions, based on qualitative transformations and dialectical laws. Two particles of opposite electrical charges give off light (photons) by annihilating each other and transforming into energy. The opposing electricities canceled each other out, but they produced two photons of opposite spin. A new contradiction was produced. This is what we call the laws of electromagnetism since it concerns not only light, electricity, matter, and magnetism, but also their exchanges, their transformations of form. These laws are characterized by dynamics. Nothing remains motionless, unchanged, fixed. Light decomposes, endlessly and spontaneously, into virtual particles and antiparticles, then recomposes, and so on. The contradiction between charges and their opposites (in terms of spins, flavors, colors, or strangeness of the particles) never disappears. It constantly changes form. It exchanges itself. Opposites constantly combine, then separate again. The laws of physics called symmetry breaks are nothing more than ballets whose dancers separate only to better reunite in other frolics. These contradictions are not a game of the mind but the mechanism that allows for change and movement. A world without contradiction would allow for no modification, no change of structure, no change of position, nor any transformation of movement. There is no matter on one side and light on the other, nor mass on one side and void on the other, nor order on one side and disorder on the other. There is no state that remains constantly identical to itself. A stable system would be imperceptible because it is incapable of interacting. A universe based on stable states would be a dead universe, without novelty and without history. That the contradiction between order and disorder is dialectical is not a secondary remark, for science as for social study. This is an essential key to understanding the capacity for qualitative change. The incessant agitation stems from this permanent struggle of contradictions within it and allows for the exploration of multiple possible paths and the confirmation of those that best express the needs of both nature and social classes. Disorder constantly transforms into order and vice versa. The possibilities multiply, then a fork in the road makes a choice, and it begins again. In biology, this is the "game of possibilities."

As paradoxical as it may seem, effervescence, noise, agitation, "chance" [ 47 ] , the multiplicity of possibilities, the permanent struggle of opposites, the qualitative leap are at the basis of the construction of a certain type of order (emerging, provisional, contradictory, changing, hierarchical, interwoven with disorder), in nature as in society. Whether it is a question of birth as of death, of transformation as of conservation of structures, of limitation of durability as of lasting order, of destruction of the old order as of construction of a new order, in short of determinism as of unpredictability, in the natural domain as in the social domain, order is inseparable from disorder, the opposition between them having meaning only within certain limits and then changing into its opposite. Ignorance of this paradoxical rule, that is, the belief that it is order that explains order and disorder that produces disorder, is the basis of many misunderstandings, both historical and scientific. This is, of course, not a simple intellectual error but a social ideology based on the interests of the ruling class. The source of the durability of the ancient Chinese empire is often sought in its ferocity, in a kind of cultural, political, and social immobility of the political regime. In fact, the multiple overthrows of the various Chinese regimes by more "barbaric" but more dynamic peoples are the basis of the success of the Middle Kingdom. Its durability stems from its multiple overthrows. The history of ancient China is one of these upheavals leading to massive destruction and then to new, renovated structures. The same is true of the various kingdoms of the pharaohs, conquered by other societies each time they weakened, due to internal contradictions (within the ruling class as well as in their relationship with the exploited). The maintenance of a kingdom of the pharaohs comes from the fact that the kingdom has changed hands, politics, form of power, laws and even dominant people (Egyptian, Hyksos, Sudanese, etc.). The durability of the civilizations of India, the apparent constancy of civilization, technology or culture, also comes from the fall of civilization and then successive reconquests by more "barbaric" peoples who revitalized societies that had reached thresholds, achieving social explosions. The flourishing period of ancient Greece is not based on a fixed order but on the struggle of independent cities among themselves, on commercial competition. The period of Athenian domination is the sign of a decline of this civilization. In Central America and Mexico, there is said to have been a single line of Indian civilizations : the Olmecs [ 48 ]replaced by the Maya, followed by the Zatopecs, the civilization of the city of Teotihuacàn, the Toltecs and then the Aztecs [ 49 ] . This list does not reflect a continuous and linear succession. There is a two-century "gap" between Teotihuacàn and the Zatopecs, who end in the 8th century, and the Toltecs who begin in the 10th century. Many civilizations overlap in the chronology, such as the Olmecs and the Maya, or the Zatopecs and the Aztecs. On the other hand, all the falls of a society are brutal, followed by a fall and disappearance of the civilization and not replaced by each other. The cities disappear [ 50 ] completely and are abandoned to the desert or the virgin forest. Most of the time, it does not seem at all that each new society has overthrown the previous one. There is no continuity in Mesoamerican civilizations, any more than in those of the Middle East or Asia. It was internal contradictions that caused societies to explode, much more than external attacks. The latter, when they occurred, could only triumph when the internal structure was already destabilized. A well-known example is the confrontation between Cortés and Aztec society in the midst of a crisis. Once again, social revolution is the right term to describe the mechanisms of structural transformation. Contradictions, ruptures of symmetry, are the locomotives of history. The Indian myths of the Americas integrated these brutal societal changes into their mythology of the cycles of the universe in the form of the replacement of vanished suns, thus interpreting the rebirth of a new power as a reappearance each morning of the sun that had disappeared at night. The idea made it possible, while recognizing that regimes had fallen, to encompass all civilizations in a single movement. This story does not construct a seamless chain of events, but rather a succession of discontinuities, as brutal as they are unexpected. The dominance of a city or social group was only temporary in Indian societies, which constantly organized confrontations, frequently overthrew their leaders, abandoned their cities, and brought down military, civil, and religious leaders. Consistency is not the hallmark of Indian societies. Quite the contrary.

The January 2007 issue of "Sciences et avenir" magazine, for example, features a report entitled "The Fall of the Mayan Empire" which, written by Bernadette Arnaud , recalls how this civilization theorized the end of the world, constantly living in fear of the collapse of the system :"The Maya are the only civilization to have inscribed its history in a framework of this kind : their anxiety is the succession of different cycles. They fear, above all, ruptures, the passages from one cycle to another. "They were convinced that the current world had been preceded by others, and that each creation was followed by destruction," says Claude Baudez. "(...) They expected, for example, the repetition of the same events in each katun of the same name (...)" If a calamity had occurred during the previous katun – which could be verified in the records – another catastrophe was to be expected in the next. (...) For reasons long described as mysterious (...) the Mayan cities that dot the center of the Yucatan Peninsula are indeed emptying of their inhabitants. (...) Long unanswered, the enigma of the fall of the Maya is now giving rise to interesting hypotheses drawing arguments from recent archaeological and climatological discoveries. Three possibilities are suggested. First, political collapse. (...) Power seems to have been distributed among several lineages. "The absence of hegemony will be compensated for by regional particularities. (...)" concludes Claude Baudez. Second hypothesis to explain the sudden decline : armed conflicts. The Maya are not a peaceful people. They are frequently at war. (...) But is this enough to explain the scale of the fighting ? American archaeologists brought to light in the 1980s and 1990s events of considerable violence that are believed to have taken place from 760 onwards, in the Petexbatin sector, around the ancient city of Seibal, in Petén. (...) These wars mainly generated instability, insecurity, and fragility. It remains to understand their sudden increase at the end of the 8th century. One hypothesis is increasingly appealing to scientists : disorders of climatic origin could have exerted a decisive influence. This is the third avenue being pursued by researchers. (...) Geologists from the University of Florida have been able to demonstrate the existence of very serious climatic problems, in particular a severe global drought during the interval 800-1000. (...) Their consequences for Mayan agriculture were catastrophic. (...) As the crises repeated themselves, many leaders likely proved incapable of coping : "Some of them had to temporarily overcome the protests, because not everyone jumped at the first crisis of 760. By 810, however, many began to be affected. In 860 even more so. And in 910, practically everyone." " continues Dominique Michelet, director of the Franco-Mexican archaeological mission in Rio Bec, Yucatan. "This collapse is therefore not only the result of a phenomenon of rejection and aporia of the political system,but really a situation that affects the populations. They abandon entire areas." At the end of the 9th century, Tikal lost 90% of its population. (...) "I would even tend to say that it was not the anthropogenic degradation of the environment that was responsible for the collapse of the Maya. Everyone forgets that apart from them, there were other disappearances in Mesoamerica. The Teotihuacàn culture, for example (the largest urban concentration on the American continent at its peak in 200-500 AD) or even that of the Olmecs..." retorts Dominique Michelet. What is traditionally referred to as the "collapse of Classic Maya civilization" (i.e., the disappearance of a large number of sites between 800 and 900 CE) is thought to be due to a series of phenomena scattered across time and space, and very diverse in their scope. Some affected entire regions, others only cities. They first affected the ruling groups, before the cities were completely emptied of their inhabitants around the year 1000. Later, during what is called the "post-classic collapse," the last two major cities of the pre-Hispanic Maya world, Chichén Itza (1221) and then Mayapán (1450), were also abandoned.

Not once does the author of this article speak of a social revolution. However, many times, one feels the term come to mind, then be repressed… Internal contradictions, economic, social and political, have weakened and then led to the overthrow of the structure, without a new social structure immediately taking over and benefiting from previous achievements. The fall can open a period without social organization, or with a considerable decline in civilization, for significant periods before neighboring societies less advanced, technically, culturally, socially and economically, rise, sometimes taking advantage of the level of civilization reached and using it to build a new domination, a new empire. All authors, who differ on interpretations, continue to be surprised by such brutal changes. A civilization is overthrown when it had reached its highest level of influence, progress and its greatest area of domination. It disappears without a trace. The method is common : suddenly the population abandons the cities [ 51 ] and returns to the village life of the countryside. The end of the city becomes the death of civilization. The way of life is swept away. The ruling class disappears. It is indeed a revolution. "All civilizations, and in all times, take their true measure in the city," recalls Joël Schmidt in "Life and Death of Slaves in Ancient Rome." It is on the ruins of this civilization that a more "barbaric" people achieves its own development. It itself undergoes a qualitative transformation, a shock, a development that does not follow all the stages but gains all the previous achievements in one fell swoop. It is from disorder that the new order is born and every passage is based, not on continuity, but on discontinuity.

This remark, concerning the history of societies, applies to any historical dynamic, for example that of nature. The observer, whether archaeologist, scientist, economist, activist or philosopher, will be troubled in his analyses if he expects a law to be based on order and always produce order. And first of all, he must admit that disorder obeys laws. Then, he needs a philosophy that encompasses opposites, order and disorder, in the same dynamic. Contrary to what the old formal logic suggests, order generates disorder and disorder is necessary for the expression of the law. In this case, we will speak of a probabilistic law. [ 52 ] The mathematical law is realized only on a large number of experiments. It does not act on each element one by one. It is not a description of the real process. The impossibility of predicting everything in detail for each individual evolution does not mean that there would be no determinism or that we know nothing but that there are collective phenomena. There are determinisms but they take place at the lower hierarchical level. This is the case in quantum physics [ 53 ] as well as classical. The most famous and simple example is that of the disordered molecular agitation of the gas which produces an equilibrium temperature. We find these situations in biology. The durability of the bacterial organization, the apparently oldest living structure, comes from its capacity to mutate at high speed. The basic molecule of genetics, DNA, the one which is expressed to form proteins and therefore the living body (and not the one which remains conserved in stem cells), is constantly destroyed and reconstructed, copied identically then transformed then corrected again. It is the copies in RNA, modified, which act, and not directly the DNA.

The first idea that emerged from the discovery of genetics was that of a manufacturing "program," but this image, wrongly influenced by computers, turns out to be erroneous. Life organizes itself spontaneously. There is no pilot, neither internal nor external. There is no pre-established program [ 54 ] . Even the molecule that seems more than any other to define this kind of program, DNA, does not directly determine a coding of proteins. The activation of genes, segments taken from DNA, depends on many other modes of operation (for example, feedback from RNA [ 55 ] and proteins), which are not written into the macromolecule. DNA itself is not acquired once and for all, but is constantly reconstructed. The processes of life that produce regular results (the children of a species belong to the species) are based on very disordered interactions between various molecules of biochemistry. For example, Jean-Claude Ameisen explains the extraordinary precision of the immunology mechanism that protects the individual from attacks : "It is by using the formidable power of chance that the embryo blindly tinkers with its immune system. The universe of receptors that allow our T lymphocytes, after our birth, to defend us, is not predetermined, it does not "pre-exist" as such in the library of our genes. It is born from a form of lottery that allows our immune system, from a small number of genetic information, to explore the field of possibilities. "
To understand how life works, there is no need for any process other than the agitated and disordered one of matter interacting through bonds, established then dissociated and reconstructed. The laws of biochemical interactions alone are sufficient to interpret the formation of the extraordinarily varied biochemical products of life and the multiple beings in which they participate. Each being is a unit, but it is based on an internal collective action. And it participates in a collective action at the higher level of the group, the species, and finally the ecosystem. Bacteria, plants, animals constitute colonies. Social life gives a collective meaning to living individuals, and the collective structures of living beings, like their lifestyles, also change in brutal and astonishing ways. The result of all this hubbub is not a fixed order that would be the frozen conservation of the species. The appearance that nothing changes within the species is based on a permanent struggle between transformation and conservation, a struggle that has momentarily reached an unstable equilibrium. We observe a permanent process of reconstruction that allows us to build the potential of other species even if the mechanism simultaneously produces their destruction. The construction of multiple paths and the destruction of these variations—this is the basic mechanism, the dialectical process, which establishes the "constancy" of the species. The apple tree only produces apples. It produces multiple possibilities for doing something else, but it also contains numerous means of selecting only the apple, a certain type of apple, of reproducing "the self" ! However, this is only true in normal times, when internal or external aggressions are limited. In times of crisis, the protective mechanisms are overwhelmed. The possibilities suddenly become real. Change becomes possible. Nature is no longer a copy but a transformation. The same mechanism that regulates conservation and transformation brought about a brutal, global, and qualitative change because the order it organized was of the same type : resulting from a previous brutal, global, and qualitative transformation.

In all fields, one would search in vain for the source of sustainability in the fixity of characteristic quantities or in fixed properties, which would completely describe structures. To say that a quantity is conserved describes an interaction and not an object. This interaction is not marked by fixity but by a very agitated process of change (relative to the characteristic rhythm of the structure). Finally, the interaction only takes into account a part of the characteristics of the structure. This means that the interaction does not say everything about the structure. Two particles that enter into a relationship do not know everything about each other. They only have a short exchange (an interaction particle) and then disappear for each other. The interaction particle is a brutal intervention from a lower level (the photon for example). Matter could not interact with matter without the exchange of photons, that is, without changing its internal state. Constancy is in no way the basis of exchanges. As for the isolated particle (without relation to another particle), it could not maintain its charge or mass (numerically fixed) if it did not constantly exchange light photons and particles (called virtual) from the extraordinarily dynamic agitation of the quantum vacuum. The durability of the material particle does not lie in its physical immutability and the basis of structural stability is not based on the constancy of the parameters. On the contrary, it is because it constantly mutates (it is never the same object, the mass property jumping from one virtual particle to another), that the material particle maintains its characteristics, such as its mass or charge. But these characteristics, while they indicate the type of interaction with the environment, do not say everything about the individual particle. Interactions taking place in a characteristic time do not allow particles to know everything about this environment. They have, like us, a general image of what surrounds them and act according to this fuzzy, vague, approximate image. The number suggests a universe acting through precise and complete knowledge of the universe, through interaction between precise quantities. The particle is changeable and cannot be characterized by fixity. It does not have infinite energy allowing it to explore the world in all its details, at all scales. Finally, unlike the fixed number, it is contradictory. All of physics is based on such dialectical relationships : between material energy and radiant energy, between wave and particle, between matter and antimatter, and between matter and vacuum. The particle is surrounded by a polarization cloud that resembles a wave, but everything that resembles a wave is composed of particle/antiparticle pairs from the vacuum.The void is composed of virtual matter, and matter is based on the interaction of the void. These opposites constantly fight and change into one another. Here again, we find the interdependence and interpenetration of opposites. The particle structure only retains its characteristics (mass, charge, dimensions, etc.) thanks to a dynamic through which the particle disappears. [ 56 ] and reappears endlessly (quantum leap). Random agitation and disorder are the very source of order. We would thus expect that the most durable structure would be the most fixed, and the opposite is true. The structure based on abrupt change is the most lasting. The one that is the least agitated, and seems solid to us, will, on the contrary, break abruptly and unexpectedly.

The material and luminous universe (remember that, in this text, the term light implies not only electromagnetism but also interactions) was born from the void. Material and interaction particles are emergent structures, which means that they are born spontaneously within the void, without external action, abruptly, without gradual stages. Matter/light was not only born once, but it is born endlessly within the agitation of empty space. It is the void that allows matter to preserve itself by transforming itself. The vacuum does not resemble the image we had until recently, that is, a total absence of particles (material and light) and energy. The vacuum is full of energy, and also of particles, but they are fleeting particles, too fast for us to perceive them and which produce the quantum fluctuations of the fields. [ 57 ] They are, potentially, particles of matter. We remember that matter/light is characterized by the conservation of energy. What is new in the intervention of the vacuum is that in very short times, by spending a very large amount of energy, the violation of the conservation of energy is the basis for the formation of the conservation of structure. The virtual particles [ 58 ] , in rapid transformation, melt the so-called real particles, that is, those based on the conservation of energy. Matter is built from the vacuum. The particles of the vacuum, improperly called "virtual", are very real [ 59 ] . Materiality is only a property that jumps quickly from one virtual particle to another. In a slightly shorter time, therefore with a little less energy, light changes into matter and antimatter. Conversely, matter transforms into energy, that is to say returns to the vacuum. Matter and antimatter [ 60 ]unify in the light photon, disunite in the polarized vacuum, oppose each other in the electromagnetic field, and merge into an explosion of energy. The apparent stability of the matter/light universe is based on the organization of all these reactions in loops. The vacuum, the builder of the entire universe, does not appear to us as a physical being but as nothingness, because, on our scale, it is transparent. The speed of the interactions contributes to making it insensitive to our perception and to making us believe that matter would remain identical to itself in a space without content. We already do not perceive molecular agitation with our senses. That of the vacuum is not even really sensitive to our measuring devices and our experiments. We only find its presence by reasoning on these observations. This is what quantum physics did to discover the quantum vacuum. Very rare are experiments like those of Casimir or Bôhm-Aharonov which allow us to measure the vacuum. At our level, we will not be able to feel the incredibly rapid dynamics of the vacuum, a fundamental process, however, since it is the basis of the particle (material and interaction). Quantum physics is often in contradiction with common sense only because the latter stems from an observation of nature at a single hierarchical level, corresponding to certain scales of time and space. Sometimes, nature, observed at one scale, appears to us to be lawless because it obeys various laws, at various scales of time and space. The random appearance at one scale is not in contradiction with order at another scale. It is even the basis of the structures emerging from the order at the next level. That the molecules are agitated is an asset for forming perfect geometric structures during crystallization, structures obtained by occupying all the interstices. There is another scale beneath the material universe. It is the vacuum. And there is another scale beneath the vacuum, a scale called virtual of virtual [ 61 ]by physicists. What cannot be explained on our scale and only resembles agitation is not necessarily an indeterministic phenomenon, as many physicists believed when quanta were discovered. Successive values without apparent relation do not prove an indeterminism of the world, as the Copenhagen school of quantum physicists believed. No description of interactions is complete because the particle contains other possibilities than those that are expressed instantaneously on a scale. These different levels, interacting and mixed, are observed in all domains. In the space of mental events, we observe that memory is a virtual reality that can be actualized, by being evoked by a neural circuit. There is the same relationship between virtual and actual as for the link between particle and void. And there is the same fractality with the virtual of virtual, and so on. The process is based on a double contradictory movement between actualization and virtualization, a double and contradictory process. The dialectical contradiction actuality/virtuality describes, for example, genetics. Genetic material is made of virtualities that can, or cannot, be actualized. Their deactivation can be realized or virtualized. We obtain all the complexity of the living, like all the laws of matter, through a virtual/real dialectical process. A nascent cell contains many possible stages of specialization that are its virtualities, which can be actualized or inhibited, and there are several levels of virtuality. DNA functions in the same way through multiple interactions between virtual and actual. The interaction between DNA and its surroundings allows the macromolecule and its action to be modified. The molecular agitation around DNA is essential to its functioning. DNA appears to be a fixed order, but its action is the product of the ambient disorder. Everywhere, the question of order and disorder depends on the level of structure considered. For example, is gas at rest an order or a disorder ? Its molecules are agitated in all directions. On the other hand, it achieves a relative fixity of pressure and temperature, as well as of volume occupation. It is even the permanent molecular agitation, or Brownian motion, which allows it to establish this relative stability. Order at one level is inseparable from disorder at another level. Better, we will show that order is emergent, that is to say that it is not pre-existing, that it arises from disorder (and vice versa). Within each disorder or each order, a complexity of levels of mixture of order and disorder, this is our new image of the world.

Virtual and real, chance and determinism, order and disorder, structure and agitation, far from being diametrically opposed, are interdependent, indispensable to one another. This has nothing to do with a limit of determinism—nature does not act haphazardly—nor with a limit of our investigative capacities, as was initially believed. It is the expression of the interwoven nature of causality. There is not a one-way, linear link (proportion) between cause and effect (nonlinear laws, feedback, tree structure of causes and inverse tree structure of effects, scale interactions, relativistic effects and non-linearity of time on a small scale). The addition of causes does not generally lead to the simple addition of effects. Small causes can lead to large effects. However, as soon as a smaller scale intervenes, we have this random appearance that resembles chance. Non-linearity means that the real world does not transform in a single direction or by a regular and direct progression, but is subject to contradictory actions, sometimes brutal, with radical turns of the situation in which rapid interactions bring into play older events. Accelerations are possible due to positive feedback [ 62 ] in cascades. These, autocatalytic [ 63 ] , give an illusion of regularity, and, if the jumps are small enough, an illusion of continuity. Negative feedback, having the role of contradiction, presents, conversely, a character of negation. Backtracking is possible, due to these negative feedbacks. The past can reappear unexpectedly and reactions prevail over action. It is not necessarily the direct past that we see reappearing within the future. The self-structuring of feedbacks produces a memory of the system. Systems based on irregularities can appear to be periodic phenomena and then suddenly become disordered. This is the case, for example, of certain ecosystems that become destabilized without any apparent cause [ 64 ]. Non-equilibrium states can very well pass, through this mechanism, for stable states, then abandon this apparent stability without a clear reason. An epidemic seems to have completely calmed down then suddenly reappears. Or, on the contrary, the epidemic develops apparently regularly then, in full expansion, it stops abruptly without apparent cause. The reason for this type of dynamic is the feedback, both positive and negative, which does not appear in broad daylight. Amplification effects, by positive feedback, are explained in this way, but also abrupt changes. Abrupt stops of a phenomenon are explained by the fact that within the dynamic there existed, hidden, a negative feedback. It is enough for the return in a loop to constantly produce the same effect for there to be a permanent expansion with a multiplier effect : an exponential growth.

Positive feedback (feedback) leads to exponential amplification effects (snowball effect) and means, in particular, that a small factor can lead to a large effect (spike effect). Although the phenomenon has a regular pattern (growth at a seemingly constant rate), the retroactive effect produces destabilization by multiplication. Life is the most impressive manifestation of this. Life multiplies, but it only does so where there is life. The construction of this type of structure requires a base. Rain requires dust. A crystal grows on the base of an initial crystal. The transformation of liquid water into snow is favored by the presence of already formed snow. The "snowball" effect is a positive feedback. The greater the snow mass, the longer the snow is preserved in this form. Around us, examples of positive feedback are legion. The city is one example : the larger the city’s population, the more it attracts a large population. A set of non-equilibrium situations is one of the cases of positive feedback, as in the case of the atomic bomb. The atomic decomposition of a nucleus leads to the multiplication of decompositions, a positive chain reaction. Living things are a good example, if only through the multiplication of cells or living beings. If these positive feedbacks were not contradicted, the entire universe would explode or exhaust itself, heading towards an end. But positive feedbacks are coupled with negative feedbacks and one does not definitively cancel the other. They couple, temporarily inhibit each other, organize themselves and constitute structures of interactions. There is thus a negative feedback within the phenomenon of glaciation, because the transformation of water into snow or ice produces heat. Hence a delaying effect of solidification as on the surface of a frozen lake. Reactions in the opposite direction can couple, keeping a system out of equilibrium for a long time. The system may give the illusion of being in a stable state when it will suddenly jump from one state to another, because a small cause then leads to a large effect. This non-linear nature of feedback is all the greater because there may be production of emerging levels of structure and, in this case, interaction of scale with jumps.
As in the history of humans, the course of things is neither regular nor continuous. The history of matter is subject to apparently random jumps. Despite these jumps resembling a disorderly agitation, nature obeys laws. The law is only concretely realized through the expression of agitation (appearance resembling chance). Science could only triumph because of the existence of laws, but it has, again and again, noted that the laws are statistical [65 ] , in thermodynamics as in quantum physics or chemistry. The fact that laws are probabilistic has long been confused with ignorance or an inability for man to understand the true nature of phenomena. In view of what we know now, it seems that it is not in this way, but by the emergence of order, that we must interpret laws based on a large number of experiments and allowing us to define only probabilities. For example, the temperature and pressure of a gas emerge from a statistic based on the agitation of a quantity of molecules. This does not mean that the trajectories of these molecules are unknowable or non-existent, but that their detailed knowledge is in no way necessary to understand the emerging phenomenon. The thermodynamic law (at the emergent level) does not exist at the scale of a molecule or a small number of molecules, but is based on a very large number of molecules. This does not mean that a single molecule does anything, does not obey laws, and that at its level, it acts randomly. It means above all that the law, at one scale, is not the same as at the lower level. The laws resulting from collective interactions are new, emergent. They exist at one level and disappear at the lower level. There is a pressure and a temperature of a gas but this does not exist at the level of the molecule of the same gas. There is a position of the molecule belonging to a macroscopic body but no position of each of the particles that compose it. We are perfectly familiar with this observation in human society. Societies obey laws that do not arise directly from the functioning of individuals. Economic phenomena follow the same type of dynamic. Changes in values are not the sum of individual changes. The phenomenon of the emergence of collective structures, hierarchical levels, and new laws is universal.

In the physics of matter, a law at the macroscopic level disappears at the particle level. For example, there are trajectories of the movement of matter at our scale but not at the quantum scale. Indeed, a trajectory assumes that we can know both position and velocity, which is not possible at the quantum level. Contrary to what some quantum physicists have claimed, this is not a questioning of the reality of the material world, but a radical change of vision. Reality, as seen at our scale, exists but as an emergent structure. The scale interaction, in this case, is called decoherence. Some call it the "Schrödinger’s cat" paradox, recalling the thought experiment posed by this physicist to highlight the contradiction between the macroscopic scale (that of the cat) and the microscopic scale (that of the decaying radioactive atom) where the cat’s death is triggered, or not. There is an appearance of chance at one level and order at the next. It remains to interpret this contradiction between chance and necessity, order at one scale and disorder at another, a mathematical law that disappears upon passing to another order. The apparent simplicity of certain numerical rules found in science should not hide complex processes, which are interwoven and retroactive. Flux and reflux, action and reaction, matter and antimatter [ 66 ] , small and large scales of time and space interpenetrate infinitely in all real processes. This results in laws that explain the past but do not predict the future, except in a few particularly simple cases of regular progressions, and then only for average values. During phases of abrupt change that lead not only to a bifurcation but to a tree-like cascade of discontinuities, the results are all the more unexpected [ 67 ] because they involve several hierarchical levels of reality. Whether the avalanche is called a crisis, an eruption, or a revolution, it exceeds our ability to predict the future. Small events follow one another, leading to a large-scale bifurcation, because they do not simply add up. Therein lies the cause of the unpredictability of phenomena. That of human society is well known. No one has been able to predict the rest of the history of societies. No one can predict the rest of the history of life. Physics today recognizes that no one can know the rest of the history of matter. This does not mean that the world does not obey laws, but that these laws are nonlinear, hierarchical, and interactive.

In speaking of unpredictability, our purpose is not to insist on the limits, real or supposed, of our means of investigation and understanding of the laws that govern the world – contrary to the "relativist" discourse [ 68 ] , eclectic, cynical, agnostic, and above all skeptical of ideas, which is in vogue [ 69 ] . It is a question here of examining the mode of formation of natural and social laws and their character. In science as in history, the difficulty of predicting is not due to too many parameters and actors. Nor is it a limit of knowledge. The specificity of structures leads to a fundamental unpredictability. It is an impossibility of saying the sequence of events, which comes from the nature of these laws not from the limits of our capacities to know, our instruments or our concepts. It is nature that is incapable of knowing the totality of the world around it or the exact value of quantities. It is not only man, nor his senses, nor his concepts, nor his instruments. Three parameters or three interacting objects are enough for the laws to contain chaos, for order to be based on disorder and disorder on order. Hence the expression, mixing two apparently contradictory terms, of "deterministic chaos." We remember the discovery of this phenomenon by the physicist Poincaré.studying the gravitational interactions of three bodies : sun, earth and moon. The mathematical law of gravitation is known. So are the three bodies. And yet, we cannot predict in the long term where these three bodies will be located. They can follow trajectories for a long time and then suddenly jump from one possible trajectory to another, the movement become completely agitated and then the bodies completely leave the regular trajectories. This does not mean that they will cease to obey the law of gravitation. Laws other than gravitation, all non-linear laws, can give rise to the same phenomenon. In all these phenomena, to have deterministic chaos, three parameters are enough, such as temperature, pressure and wind in meteorology and convection ; such as the rate of rise, pressure and rate of degassing of magma for volcanic eruptions ; three angles of motion for the path of the moon around the earth moving around the sun, etc. In all these situations, the unexpected is the rule and not the exception. The predictable is at most based on probabilities. The predictable does not describe real processes but averages. The description of real phenomena is much more agitated than the laws of large numbers. There is an order that results from disorder, that accommodates agitation, that gives it meaning, and that finally returns to disorder. Such a law leads to singular situations in which the rest of the story is impossible to predict. The "simple" example of two coupled pendulums or of a damped pendulum (which loses energy) and maintained (it is periodically supplied with energy) leads to a system whose future movement cannot be predicted. It is capable of exhibiting regular behavior with a certain rhythm, then abruptly jumping, without warning, to another regularity with a new rhythm. However, this type of situation is extremely common, in fields that, physically, have nothing to do with it. For example, cardiac cells, the heart’s "pacemakers," obey the same type of dynamics resulting from the self-organization of feedback. This is what we call a new paradigm, a new universal image of the mode of operation. It replaces the old, linear image of periodicity, additivity, and fixed structures. This has fundamental consequences for our conception of determinism, which is now distinguished from the predictable and even the reproducible.

Contrary to what is often wrongly asserted, science cannot stop at the predictable. Today, it is very far from the old adage : "the same causes generate the same effects." In the coevolution of two species, there is not one cause and one effect. In the gravitational relationship between masses, one cannot separate cause and effect. This does not mean that a cause can have any effect. On the other hand, it is impossible, in science as in history, to find a situation in which exactly "the same causes" are brought together. Small disturbances of causes lead, in certain situations, to decisive bifurcations that considerably modify the course of history. On the other hand, the idea of separating and opposing causes and effects is in no way a conceptual foundation of the scientific approach. This absolutely does not mean that nature obeys no causality but that determinism is very far from a linear and direct relationship between causes and effects. Positive and negative feedbacks, fighting, coupling, organizing, constituting more or less durable structures of interactions, completely transform the type of causality. Determinism is not linear, nor additive, nor obeying a formal logic of the either/or type. Or matter or void. Or corpuscle or wave. Or order or disorder. The unpredictability that results from it, far from coming from a disorder coming from the outside, is fundamental. It comes from an essential and characteristic property of real functioning : self-organization, that is to say, the spontaneous capacity to produce structural novelty. This notably results in the property of nature to evolve towards transient states from which structural novelty, singularity, emerges. The feats of this type achieved by the material universe are the creation of particles, atoms, molecules, life, man, intelligence and society. Novelty did not appear once (creation of the world by a god), nor even six times (each day of divine "creation"), but took place billions of times, and takes place without ceasing : invention of stars, of galaxies in the infinitely large, of each kind of particle and material structure, of electrons, neutrinos, quarks in the infinitely small of inert matter, of shells, wings, organs, eyes, the brain in the living. The invention of man, of his consciousness, of his intelligence, of human society is not the product of a single creation but of thousands. Even the formation of a single human individual, from a fertilized egg, is based on a multitude of creations, of qualitative leaps. Together, let us explore these "creations" which did not need a creator since they are part of the natural mechanism.

Building a philosophy on science does not mean returning to the old scientism which claimed that bourgeois society was based on science and that it led to social progress. The aim of this text is not to develop a mechanistic or reductionist conception according to which the whole universe would be governed by a single mechanism, by a fatalism of DNA, nor as a general consequence of quantum agitation, or even of a chemistry which would determine the whole universe. Nor is it a question of denying the importance of consciousness in human history and, in particular, in social action. On the other hand, it is necessary to apprehend the universe in its dynamics, that is to say as a single mechanism of transformation having universal laws despite its diverse forms [ 70 ]. We will not attempt to say that the levels of structures of the universe are identical, at the various scales where they manifest themselves, but that their mode of transformation/conservation is. The atom does not explain the brain, any more than meteorology dictates its law to the class struggle. On the other hand, the universe is one and exists at all levels at the same time. The separation into its structural elements, into its levels has been an essential phase in the understanding of the universe, but leads to an erroneous philosophy : metaphysical, reductionist, fixed, linear, etc. The reasoning reminding us that the world is one is not a view of the mind but a fascinating insight. The establishment of the structure of the brain enlightens us on the mode of establishment of the structure of a society. And the class struggle has its own meteorology with its anticyclones and depressions, and sometimes its storms. All these diverse phenomena have one fundamental point in common : the way in which a new structure could appear, the way in which it can be maintained, and the way in which it can be destroyed, giving rise to a new structure. In short, the dialectic of reality concerns equally fields as diverse as physics, chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, and human history, in which transformation obeys universal laws of change. What will concern us is not the detail, the specificity, of each study but the examination of the general characteristics of a state common to them : the situation of an order in the process of structural transformation, the state of crisis or bifurcation, in short, the revolution. This is a notion that will be difficult to confine to a formal definition. The situation is both itself and its opposite. For example, there are elements of both a workers’ state and a bourgeois state, or both a feudal state and a bourgeois state. There is, at the same time, liquid and gas. There is, at the same time, order and disorder, etc. No change, no movement is conceivable without a leap, without a crisis, without a bifurcation, without a passage from order to disorder to order. This transitional state of crisis is not a single instant but a relatively brief period that can be described as "revolutionary" because the system then finds itself in a situation that is indispensable for brutal and qualitative transformations. It is in transition between the past and the future and is characterized by the fact that it is identical neither to the previous state nor to the future state. It does not obey the rules of either. This interval is rapid but not instantaneous. It is simply much faster than the rhythm of the functioning that it transforms. In this phase of change, several contradictory structures coexist.

What revolutionaries call dual power – in the midst of a social revolution, the moment when the exploited class develops its own power without having yet overthrown that of the exploiting class – is similar to what scientists who study living things improperly call evolution. Physicists call this phase of transformation a “phase transition” (quantum transitions of microscopic states, ferromagnetic transitions, superconducting or superfluid state transitions, Bose-Einstein condensation [ 71 ] , Ising spin transitions, climatic transitions, macroscopic solid-liquid-gas state transitions, vacuum/matter transitions, transitions between various levels of the vacuum, speciation transitions, animal/human transitions, etc.). The term transition also exists in politics, but it is wrongly used for the smooth transition from one regime to another. Of course, the phase of qualitative change is not instantaneous. However, it is not gradual. During "the transition," the various phases are present—what in politics, in a phase of revolutionary crisis, is called the duality of power—and the final state is not predetermined. As surprising as it may seem, we will show that it is indeed, in physics, in the human domain as in the social field, the same logic, that of revolution, even if it uses, in these different cases, dissimilar physical elements and organisms. The logic is of the same type. The study of the transitions of matter poses multiple problems that are found in social revolutions : the contradictory link between elementary agitation and organization, between transformation and conservation, between information and structuring, and the dialectical laws of the passage from one state to another.

We find these same dialectical modes of transformation within the living. Changes in species – or speciation (as opposed to small changes within a species) – are brutal and qualitative but are not punctual either. Human physiology obeys transitions in states of consciousness, transitions in cardiac rhythm, transitions in hormonal functioning, etc. Transitions take place within the transformation of species, the development of the living body or the structuring of cellular interactions [ 72 ] . We note that phases of change exist. They manifest themselves in periods of crisis that have a certain duration, during which avalanches of transformations are triggered and multiple possibilities open up. Potentialities that were previously inhibited are thus revealed. A species does not give birth to a single other species, in a linear and direct way, but to a tree-like transformation, dynamic of the biochemical reactions of the species which explores the multiple possible changes as well as their combinations. Indeed, these solutions, being transitory, can be modified, coupled, produce other novelties. These possibilities are capable, at this stage, of combining, multiplying the possible forms of change and surpassing the imagination of all futurists. Most of the individuals created will be destroyed, because unfit, but it happens that several of them are retained by selection and even end up replacing the original species. The transitory "solutions" interact and mutate at high speed. It is not surprising that the linear thoughts of "change from cause to effect" are still looking for "missing links" and "common ancestors" for them. This formal conception of causality assumes the linear, continuous, fixed action of laws with unique and predictable results.

In place of this old determinism, we encounter qualitative leaps, irreversible transformations, emergent structures arising from disorder, cause-effect trees, and feedback loops at all levels. This highly nonlinear process of order/disorder, conservation/transformation, requires dialectical thinking. Our study will begin with the particular mode of abrupt transitions. We will then demonstrate the extent to which a scientific philosophy is lacking to understand these transitions in matter, life, and history, and then we will begin examining the precise materials of science, history, economics, and revolutionary politics. Following a roadmap that is as chaotic as it is unexpected, the journey continually crosses these borders without showing its papers to customs. Enjoy your trip !

[ 1 ] The term "nature" is not used here in opposition to what is proper to man, nor to represent a world that has always existed. This expression has been used for too long in the sense of an unchanged and eternal functioning. We will defend the opposite conception : nature is inseparable from a history with events, radical changes, reversals of trend, revolutions. As for man and human society, they are inseparable from the natural mode of functioning.

[ 2 ] "The star has sufficient mass for gravitational compression at its center to produce a temperature high enough for nuclear reactions to spontaneously initiate. Once this ignition temperature is reached, nuclear reactions in the core will produce a flow of energy that will be radiated by the surface of the star in the form of heat and light. The star maintains itself by balancing internal pressure and gravity," explains astrophysicist John Barrow in "The Grand Theory."

[ 3 ] Sudden emission of high-energy radiation into space which may be linked in particular to the catastrophic end of a supermassive star.

[ 4 ] The atom jumps by emitting or absorbing a photon. The particle jumps state by emitting or absorbing particle/antiparticle or quark/antiquark pairs. Light jumps from one state to another by changing the number of photons. The neutrino jumps between its three states.

[ 5 ] “The modulated carbon dioxide laser produces a series of “crises” corresponding to a chaotic regime change,” write Marc Lefranc and Pierre Glorieux in “Knots in Chaos,” an article taken from the “Chaos” section of the journal “Pour la Science” in January 1995.

[ 6 ] A recent study by Katharine Cashman showed this at Mount St. Helens.

[ 7 ] For example, in a vacuum, we do not observe the unidirectional flow of time. Thus, the phenomenon of radiation can be explained by an action of the present on the future but also of the present on the past. The astrophysicist John Barrow recalls, in "The Grand Theory", that "All radiation fields obey equations admitting so-called "advanced" or "delayed" solutions. The delayed solutions describe the appearance of a wave after that of its source. The "advanced" solution, on the other hand, describes a wave coming from the future and absorbed by the source." The electromagnetic interactions described by Feynman diagrams make the past and future interact in both directions. The vacuum does not recognize the distinction between the two. It is matter that has caused the "arrow of time" to emerge, a breaking of symmetry between before and after but also between space and time which is a product of the history of the Universe like the breaking between matter and antimatter.

[ 8 ] The sum of the causes does not entail the sum of the effects. Double a cause does not cause double in terms of effect. Nonlinearity is itself caused by multiple factors of which scale interaction is only one. The relativistic character of physics is another : it causes in particular the non-additivity of velocities. Then there is the mode of formation of structures. A structure is not the sum of its elements. We must add the interaction energy. We must also add the feedbacks. This results in an exponential (therefore non-linear) character of positive feedbacks and negative interferences of negative feedbacks. Ilya Prigogine has emphasized the fundamental change in the type of dynamics that nonlinearity brings about. In terms of structures, there is no more additivity. For example, the water molecule, the "sum" of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, has no property that adds up to that of these "components".

[ 9 ] Biology speaks of the "game of possibilities". Physics uses the terms "multi-stationarity" (for example Prigogine) or families of solutions (Poincaré). Chemistry states that each product can intervene in several reactions giving very diverse results. Be careful, speaking of "possibles" does not mean that everything is possible and that we know nothing about the functioning of the Universe. It only means that the laws are not as simple as we thought and that their action is not linear. Let us quote Claude Debru in "Le possible, le réel et les sciences de la vie" : "The concept of the possible has recently taken on a more important place in the life sciences, due to new reflections on biological evolution as well as the very significant development of biotechnologies. We wish here to explore the idea that contingent things, those which could be a little different, are modifiable. The contingency of biological evolution has often been noted, and defined in notoriously different senses. Some biologists have made use of the counterfactual conditional, defining contingency by the idea that the existing world could not have been. If contingency is defined as the contradictory opposite of necessary and thus seen one-sidedly as the possibility of not being rather than the possibility of being or not being, it becomes inevitable that critics of necessitarian philosophies (in biology as elsewhere) will insist on evolutions that have not occurred, and will make use of the counterfactual conditional in their demonstration of contingency. The risk then is to substitute a necessitarian metaphysics with an opposing one. Other explanations of the actual course of biological evolution (and in particular of its great "decimations") are, however, scientifically possible. Contingency can also be defined, more realistically, as variation, namely that there is no impossibility for existing things to be a little different. In this regard, we wish to provide biological illustrations of the proximity, often noted by philosophers, between the possible and the real. "Biotechnological bricolage" is based on the use of processes and tools directly derived from biological evolution. It repeats some of the operations of "evolutionary bricolage." The most recent biotechnologies can be described as "directed evolution." The possibilities for variations on the fundamental themes of biological evolution are still poorly assessed, and are undoubtedly much greater than previously imagined, which will likely make it possible to circumvent certain difficulties encountered in the implementation, in particular, of medical biotechnologies.

[ 10 ] All physicists know that an electron does not behave in the same way if it is free or within an atomic structure. Similarly, there is a big difference between an interaction between two isolated molecules and interactions within a constantly interacting community. "In a dilute gas, each interaction will only significantly affect the two molecules in collision at the moment of impact. (...) But in certain so-called "critical" situations, when a gas changes state to become a liquid, for example, this assumption no longer applies and many components of the gas interact simultaneously, the effects being felt over a long range in the system," explains astrophysicist John Barrow.

[ 11 ] Aristotle explains in "Politics" : "It is clear from this that the city is one of natural things and that man is by nature a political animal."

[ 12 ] The mathematician Régis Ferrière summarizes his thesis in a presentation at the Université de tous les savoirs in July 2002 : "John Maynard Smith and his colleague Eors Szathmary, from the University of Budapest, propose a catalog of major transitions and develop a synthetic theory. Transition from RNA to DNA ; transition from free molecules of life to cells ; transition from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms ; from clonal reproduction to sexual reproduction ; from solitary life to social life (...) The contribution of Maynard Smith and Szathmary is to show that the leaps in complexity observed in the history of life can be explained by the emergence of new levels of organization to which natural selection applies, an emergence which is itself the result of the action of natural selection at the initial levels."

[ 13 ] Friedrich Engels pointed this out in "The Role of Violence in History." The midwife of every new society is also the producer of various physical structures.

[ 14 ] "We now know that these stellar explosions are indeed of a magnitude that defies imagination. They are supernovae, that is, explosions during which the luminosity of a star becomes comparable to that of an entire galaxy," writes Steven Weinberg in "The First Three Minutes of the Universe." This explosion is nothing other than a stage in the life of the star, a stage caused by the consumption of the "fuel" of the star’s energy. Suddenly, the contradiction between gravitation and radiation, the opposition of which was temporarily masked within the structure (the star), is suddenly unbalanced, and the star implodes, all the matter being thrown in a very short time onto the center of the star. New, heavier types of atomic nuclei are born from these explosions and they can also produce a new stage of the star, for example a neutron star or a black hole.

[ 15 ] "For example, it takes a total of 13.6 electron volts to tear the electron from a hydrogen atom, and this is a chemical event of exceptional violence," writes Steven Weinberg in "The First Three Minutes of the Universe."

[ 16 ] For example, supernovae, which are of great importance because they are essential for forming the heavy-nucleated chemical elements from which we are formed, occur only once a century in a galaxy of one hundred billion stars. But once a century is not much on a human scale.

[ 17 ] Sudden appearance within a community of a qualitatively new global property which did not exist among the different individuals.

[ 18 ] Heinz von Förster showed that small magnets spontaneously organize themselves when stirred. Astrophysicist John Barrow explains that this order can be destroyed by an increase in temperature : "Within a metal bar heated above a certain temperature, the thermal agitation of the atoms is sufficient to destroy any tendency to align and define a preferred direction of magnetization. In a hot state, the bar has no overall magnetization. But as the temperature of the rod decreases, the thermal agitation loses its intensity and is unable to disorient the atoms." Barrow explains how the rod can evolve into two opposite states of alignment of the small magnets. This is an example of a more general phenomenon called broken symmetry in which "a microscopic fluctuation tips the balance one way or the other."

[ 19 ] “We are witnessing a cascade of transition phenomena of an explosive nature presiding over emergence, for which the science of non-linear science provides a universal model : bifurcation.” explains Grégoire Nicolis in “The Enigma of Emergence”.

[ 20 ] 540 million years ago, a very brief phase of change – of the order of tens of millions of years – brought about the emergence of a large number of groups in the tree of life, all those that exist today.

[ 21 ] Let us take just one example from among the many stories of the collapse of powerful regimes overwhelmed by the masses as if by a flood : that of the fall of the Persian kingdom, at the time of King Khosraw : "They seized the kingdom of the Persians, overthrowing their warriors who gloried in the art of war. And we must not consider their coming as an ordinary event (...) How, without divine help, could naked men riding without armor or shield have won the victory ?" (Jean Bar Penkaye in his historical account entitled "Rish Mellê").

[ 22 ] The oppressed people of Mali, young people, students, women and the poor, who, in 1991, overthrew the power of the dictator, the dreaded Moussa Traoré, with their bare hands, are today convinced that this fall was surely programmed by forces far superior to their own. The Algerian people, who, in October 1988, threatened the military dictatorship, are convinced today that they were manipulated by occult forces, those of power (Algerian or foreign) for some, those of God and his representatives on earth for others... Even the Russian revolution of February 1917 gave rise to many defenders of the various conceptions of manipulation. Some claimed that the Bolsheviks had programmed it while the first to be surprised was Lenin ! Others believe that the manipulators are imperialisms. Still others believe in the hand of God... or of the devil ! Revolution is a phenomenon that remains foreign to them. The role of revolutionary communist activists is, of course, not to provoke revolutions. The class struggle takes care of that.

[ 23 ] Astrophysicist Jacques Paul entitled his May 2006 conference at the National Library of France : “Cosmic Violence” !

[ 24 ] In 1930, building on the study of the engineer Van der Pol, the physicist Alexandre Andronov, applying Poincaré’s concepts, invented the notion of "structurally stable". Instabilities do not prevent the structure from maintaining itself, even if it is not truly fixed. There are possibilities of change but the qualitative order is durable. It is a global stability which is preserved despite local instability. These notions will give rise to the theory of deterministic chaos. In "Does God Play Dice ?", Ian Stewart recalls how the physicists Alexandre Andronov, Lev Pontryagin and Stephen Smale invented this universal notion of "structurally stable", "to designate a flow whose topology does not change if the equations which describe it undergo a sufficiently small modification. This is an entirely different idea from that of a stationary state of a given equation. It is a solution that is stable for small changes in the initial conditions. But structural stability is a property of the system as a whole, and the system is stable with respect to small changes in the entire system of equations." This is the origin of the notion of a global order arising from the disorder of interactions.

[ 25 ] A specialist in self-organization in biology, Stuart Kauffman writes in "Complexity, Vertigo and Promises" : "I deliberately wrote my first book on the origins of order (titled "Self-Organization and Selection in the Evolution of Species") without ever defining self-organization. (...) I was much more concerned with showing concrete cases of self-organization. (...) Autocatalysis is a concrete case of self-organization. When you increase the molecular diversity of species in a system, the diversity of reactions it can generate increases more rapidly than the diversity of species. (...) It can be shown mathematically that a phase transition occurs when molecular diversity increases. What qualifies a phenomenon as emergent is a collective property that is not present in any of the individual molecules. The laws that govern emergent systems are related to the mathematical laws of phase transitions occurring in such systems, and more generally in everything that happens at a level higher than that of individual molecules."

[ 26 ] Most often, in the text, we will abbreviate this list by writing : light.

[ 27 ] Albert Einstein explains in "The Evolution of Ideas in Physics" : "It took a bold scientific imagination to fully realize that it is not the behavior of bodies that matters, but the behavior of something between them (..) that is essential for understanding and ordering events."

[ 28 ] Henri Atlan explains in "The End of Everything Genetic" : "There are non-biological examples of organization by noise. They are provided by physical systems that are described by dynamic systems (...) comprising several local minima. Such a system can, at a time, get "stuck" in one of these minima ; but if there is an optimum quantity of noise, in this case temperature, this agitation prevents the system from remaining in this state for a long time, it allows it to leave it and go towards another minimum. (...) This model is used by physicists

[ 29 ] We are accustomed to considering that one table plus one table equals two tables is the foundation of mathematics as the description of reality. But the reality is very different. When an electron attaches to a proton, their whole (the hydrogen atom) is not equivalent to the sum of the two particles. For example, their energy is not the sum of the two energies nor their properties the sum of the properties of the two particles. When there is no additivity of phenomena nor proportionality (two particles do not have double properties), we will say that there is non-linearity. A living body is not the sum of its parts. The cardiovascular system or the nervous system is not the sum of the cells or organs that compose it. This property is fundamental because it profoundly changes the type of dynamics, the relationships between order and disorder, the possible states and the way of passing from one to the other. It is linked to a discontinuous dynamic, with several possible transitional states, with abrupt changes from one to the other, in which the hierarchical order arises from disorder. Order and disorder are completely intertwined. Herein lies the basis of the indispensable change in philosophy that is so difficult to conceive, without absolute concepts, without linearity of causality, without intermediate states, without predictability at all levels.

[ 30 ] To say this may seem perfectly absurd. It is not a question of saying that matter does not exist as a structure but that the "thing" is a philosophical concept in the same way as mass, charge or energy. The question is whether this concept is valid. We believe, of course, that objects are sensible evidences and that it is not necessary to conceive their meaning abstractly, philosophically. This is a mistake. The physicist Albert Einstein, who cannot be suspected of questioning the reality of the material universe, nevertheless stated in "The Evolution of Ideas in Physics", in the chapter "Physics and Reality" : "Science is not a collection of laws, a catalogue of unrelated facts. It is a creation of the human mind by means of freely invented ideas and concepts. Physical theories try to form an image of reality (…) One of the most primitive concepts is that of object. » Quantum physics has searched for "objects" in the very small world of particles and has not found any, at least not in the sense of ever-present bodies made of solid, compact matter that never disappears. It has found something quite different : another universe, the quantum vacuum, and material structures arising from this vacuum. But matter particles are not fixed bodies that exist continuously in time and space. Matter exists, but not in the sense we once understood it, that is, as "things."

[ 31 ] The lasting existence of matter as we know it at our scale comes from a phenomenon that takes place as soon as a large quantity of durable particles (as opposed to the ephemeral particles of the void) is assembled. It is the irreversible nature of the process that makes the phenomenon "matter" appear stable. This has been demonstrated by the work of Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle. The phenomenon of "decoherence" is as follows : microphysics is made up of particles that are in a situation of superposition of states. Matter at our scale is a structure of interactions in which coherent information exists, that is to say that the superposition of states is suppressed. As soon as coherent information is given to a system, the superposition is suppressed. From this irreversibility of coherence comes the fact that quantum phenomena, uncertainty, entanglement, superposition of states, are not sensitive at our scale.

[ 32 ] The chemical bond is a strong bond that costs a lot of energy to break. The biochemical bond is a loose bond, easy to break. Hence the multiplicity of high-speed, low-energy changes.

[ 33 ] This is a perfect example that what works mathematically does not necessarily describe real behavior in the universe.

[ 34 ] "Another way of understanding the intensity of this (strong) interaction is the extremely short time it takes to manifest itself : it is of the order of 10-23 seconds, sometimes even shorter. (...) We do not know of any phenomenon in nature that is more eager to come to fruition than these." explains the physicist Etienne Klein in "The Time of Particles".

[ 35 ] The expression, and even the notion, is questionable. It suggests a fundamental explosion. In fact, the expansion that is the basis of the idea of the Big Bang is accelerating. If it came from an explosion, it should be slowed down by gravity. On the other hand, an explosion would cause matter to explode, whereas expansion only enlarges the empty spaces that separate galaxies. Finally, expansion turns out to be mainly linked to the notion of inflation. However, the brutal nature is not called into question. The astrophysicist John Barrow writes in "The Grand Theory" : "This period of inflation would explain the regular expansion that we are currently observing." And he explains that the speed of this episode of inflation would provide an explanation for this homogeneity of expansion : "If the period of inflation is very short, it is enough to smooth out all the irregularities present (...)."

[ 36 ] In physics, there are apparently two kinds of "objects" : matter (or fermion) and light (or boson), two distinct kinds that include multiple varieties. And yet, a boson disappears upon meeting a fermion. If we collide two fermions with enough energy, we can obtain several bosons. All this indicates that the world of bosons and that of fermions are not distinct worlds. Especially since fermions absorb or emit bosons. And finally, bosons accelerated with sufficient energy can produce fermions ! And we actually find a common basis for both : the Planck quanta. There is certainly a matter/light unity. And yet matter and light are also opposed in many respects. For example, they obey inverse demographic principles : gregarious for the boson, individualistic for the fermion. Some love to group together and others are incapable of doing so. Unity does not mean uniformity or absence of internal contradictions.

[ 37 ] To attribute the fall of a society to natural catastrophes alone is to say that the revolution of 1789 was caused solely by the climatic disorders of 1786, the summer of 1788 and the winter of 1789. As if a social and political revolution had not been necessary to overthrow feudalism and royalty.

[ 38 ] It is impossible to understand the very existence of the cloud by considering it as a sum of molecules. The cloud would immediately fall under the gravitational pull of each molecule. It is impossible to understand the collective consciousness that emerges abruptly in a revolution solely through the reflections of individuals. It is impossible to understand life as the individual action of genes.

[ 39 ] "An atom in a stationary state generally has a free choice among the different transitions or other stationary states," explains physicist Niels Bohr in "Atomic Theory and Description of Nature."

[ 40 ] Friedrich Engels states that "Dialectics has shown, based on our experience of nature to date, that polar opposites in general are determined by the mutual action of two opposing poles interacting with each other, that the separation and opposition of these poles always exists in conjunction with their mutual connection and reunion, and conversely their union exists only to the extent of their separation, and their mutual connection only to the extent of their opposition."

[ 41 ] The physicist Max Planck stated in "Introduction to Physics" : "There is now, on the scientific ground, so to speak, no principle whose validity has not been questioned (...). From logic, as we see it implemented in its purest form, in mathematics, we can expect no help." In formal logic, opposites cancel each other out. In physics, opposing poles are inseparable. A new contradiction is constantly being reconstituted : a contradiction between opposing electricities within the atom as a permanent contradiction between life and death within the cell. Opposites cannot be separated in a fixed way in the study of the phenomenon. Matter is always contradictory and therefore always in the process of becoming.

[ 42 ] Many economists reason about productive forces as if they were ordinarily non-contradictory. However, their growth ultimately leads to their destruction, whether in a sector or generally in the event of a crisis. The rise in labor productivity ultimately leads to a fall in capital productivity. All production is both the construction and destruction (through consumption) of productive forces. In economics, as in other fields, dialectical contradictions are not mind games but touch on the most fundamental mechanisms.

[ 43 ] The atom appears electrically neutral because it combines particles of equal and opposite electricity in equal numbers. The vacuum appears neutral, or symmetrical, in terms of matter and antimatter because it contains equal amounts of both.

[ 44 ] In his "Dictionary of Ignorance" the physicist Michel Cassé sets out the new conception of the history of the cosmos based on breaks in the symmetry of the void : "Each profound restructuring, or breaking of symmetry, modifies the state of the void. Conversely, each modification of the state of the void induces a breaking of symmetry. The evolution of the universe thus proceeds by successive breakings of symmetry which result in "phase transitions", which disrupt the overall appearance of the cosmos."

[ 45 ] Rita Carter tells, in "Atlas of the Brain", these stories of the brain that our current knowledge in neuroscience allows : "The vast majority of mental functions are totally or partially lateralized. The origin of this lateralization is still poorly understood, but it seems that once it arrives in the brain, the information takes multiple parallel routes, and receives a slightly different treatment depending on the path followed (…) Each hemisphere chooses the tasks in accordance with its style of functioning, holistic or analytical. This opposition of style could be explained in part by a curious physical difference of the hemispheres. These are a mixture of gray matter and white matter. The gray matter corresponds to the central bodies of the brain cells (…) The white matter (…) is composed of dense bundles of axons – the extensions emitted by the cell bodies and transmitting the nerve influx. (…) Although small, this difference between the right and left hemispheres is important because it means that the axons in the right brain are longer and therefore connect neurons that, on average, are more dispersed. (…) This suggests that the left brain is better equipped than the left brain to simultaneously activate several brain modules, (…) which would explain the inclination of this hemisphere to produce general concepts. (…) The right brain, with its denser neuronal network, is, on the other hand, better equipped to carry out complex, detailed tasks, dependent on the close and constant cooperation of similarly specialized cells. (…) Conscious decisions, while they appear to be the work of a single dominant partner, are in fact based on information gathered by both hemispheres. But this dialogue sometimes encounters snags. The dominant hemisphere may ignore the information transmitted by its partner and make a unilateral decision. This can result in an emotional disturbance that is difficult to justify. Conversely, the non-dominant hemisphere can override the executive control of its partner (…) While a few thousandths of a second are enough for the corpus callosum to transmit an enormous amount of information between the two hemispheres, it sometimes happens that information that is particularly important for one hemisphere lingers in the transmitting hemisphere and is only weakly registered by the receiving hemisphere.

[ 46 ] The transformation of content is necessary for the conservation of overall structure. The transformation of structure is necessary for the conservation of elements. It is conservation that produces revolution.

[ 47 ] In the sense of the interaction between phenomena that do not have a linear and direct causal link, although these phenomena are deterministic. The tile falling on the passer-by is a simple example of the interaction between two deterministic phenomena. There is no causality between the falling of the tile and the passage of the pedestrian, … if there is no malicious action. It is only in this sense that we speak of chance in this text. This has nothing to do with a fundamental indeterminism.

[ 48 ] "The oldest civilization in Mesoamerica - the Olmecs - is 1000 years older than the oldest of the Aztec civilizations, whose capital (was) Tenochtitlan (...) The oldest phase is that of the Olmecs, which developed in the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico and which began in 1500 BC," explains Norman Bancroft Hunt in the "Historical Atlas of Mesoamerica."

[ 49 ] Olmecs (1500 BC – 400 BC), Mayans (1000 BC – 900 AD), Zatopecs (500 BC – 900 AD), Teotihuacan (from AD to 725 AD), Toltecs (950 AD – 1168 AD), Aztecs (1400-1500 AD).

[ 50 ] This is not unique to the cities of this continent. The disappearance of cities, without wars or other clear reasons to justify or explain it, is a phenomenon that has occurred in all regions that had seen the emergence of civilization. We find, for example, texts where scribes lament this end, in Sumer for the city of Nippur. The famous text "The Lamentation over the Destruction of Nippur" quoted by Samuel Kramer in "History Begins in Sumer" weeps over this disappearance. Kramer writes : "This city, Nippur, was prey to desolation and its inhabitants were scattered like a herd of mad cows. (...) Why are these cities destroyed, these families abandoned, and this in such a way that reason is lost and understanding is clouded ? » Of course, the writer of the time responds that the gods have turned away from the city and that this is where the reason for its fall lies (Sumerian mythology of the disappearance of civilization) as well as the hope in its restoration. But this seemingly irrational event is nothing other than the revolutionary eruption of the masses.

[ 51 ] Imagine that, all of a sudden, the urban population abandons not only a city like New York or New Delhi, but all the major cities of capitalist civilization. What reason could bring such a social cataclysm ? An earthquake ? A climatic problem ? And what if, as with the Indus civilization, it was simply 1052 cities that had been abandoned ? And this when no war seems to have occurred…. It is the same case with the ancient Mesoamerican cities : the Olmec capitals were thus brutally abandoned, San Lorenzo in -900 BC and La Venta in -400 BC. Here again, no war with neighboring peoples. Each time, the disappearance of cities means the death of civilization. This means that thousands of civilizations have disappeared body and soul. Let us recognize that there is a problem of interpretation of ancient civilizations. Of their death as well as their birth. In fact, the discontinuity they represent. For the appearance of cities and civilization was just as brutal as their disappearance. For example, in Norman Bancroft Hunt’s "Historical Atlas of Mesoamerica," we read : "The ceremonial center of Teotihuacán appears to have been planned and built in a single, vast operation around 300 AD."

[ 52 ] Léon Rosenfeld explained in "Louis de Broglie, physicist thinker" : "Probability does not mean chance without rule but just the opposite : what there is of rule in chance. A statistical law is above all a law, the expression of a regularity, an instrument of forecasting."

[ 53 ] The probabilistic nature of all phenomena concerning individual particles, so-called quantum phenomena, and the problem this causes for understanding determinism is clearly posed by the physicist Franco Selleri in "The Great Debate of Quantum Theory" : "Neutrons are unstable particles and end up disintegrating into proton + electron + antineutrino after a time corresponding to their average life. This is about a thousand seconds (...) neutrinos can live much less (let’s say a hundred seconds) or much more (let’s say three thousand seconds) than their average life of three thousand seconds. The problem arises very naturally of understanding the causes that determine the different individual lives in the different unstable systems." Franco Selleri explains that these variations can be explained in particular by "vacuum fluctuations in small regions surrounding the particle." On the other hand, there is no description of the neutron object or the particle object that explains these lives of various durations and this average duration. But we will see that quantum physics goes further and calls into question whether the particle is an individual object : "In quantum theory, all classical concepts, once applied to the atom, are as well or as poorly defined as "the" temperature of the atom. (...) The concept of the existence of the electron in space and time leads to a paradox." Hence the need to define the particle as an emergent structure resulting from the interactions of the vacuum and not as a pre-existing and fixed thing.

[ 54 ] Henri Atlan thus corrected the notion of a "program" of the living in a very incisive manner : "It is a program which needs the products of its reading and its execution in order to be able to be read and executed."

[ 55 ] RNA was once thought to be only a "messenger" used to copy pieces of DNA identically. In fact, RNA interacts with the product in a thousand ways. For example, in 2006, Craig Mello and Andrew Fire won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the mechanism by which RNA actively controls the outcome of gene expression, called RNA interference.

[ 56 ] The physicist Michel Spiro explains in his article for “Les dossiers de La Recherche” of July 2006 : “The mass of particles would not be an intrinsic property of the particles themselves : it would be linked to the way in which they interact with the quantum structure of the vacuum.”

[ 57 ] "Astrophysicists believe that the Universe could have been born from a space-time fluctuation of the void, this void not being nothingness but a chaos filled with virtual energy," explains astrophysicist André Brahic in "Sciences of the Earth and the Universe." "Also (the void) represents the most fundamental entity of physics, since it can exist independently of real particles, potentially contains them all, gives birth to them, mass and distinction and connects them together. Having pre-existed light, it appears to be a primordial physical being," specify physicists Ilya Prigogine and Nicolis in "In Search of the Complex."

[ 58 ] "The creation (and absorption) of an intermediate particle is a process that violates the conservation of energy. (...) It is in this sense that the exchanged particles are called virtual. (...) Heisenberg’s inequalities in fact allow a violation of the conservation of energy if it is limited in time." explains Françoise Balibar in the "Dictionary of the History and Philosophy of Science" and adds that virtual particles, these fugitive quanta of the vacuum, are just as real as particles but a little more fugitive : with a shorter lifespan. Every real particle is surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles or polarization cloud. The so-called real particle does not really exist. It is only a property that constantly jumps from one virtual particle to another, a property carried by a specific interaction particle called the Higgs boson.

[ 59 ] In the "Dictionary of Ignorance", the physicist Michel Cassé reports that "The furtive particles which emerge from the void and immediately rush into it connect together the stable and durable particles of matter, called real particles (quarks and leptons)."

[ 60 ] Each particle has its anti-particle which has equal and opposite charges (electric charge but also charge of “color”, “flavor”, “strangeness”, etc.).

[ 61 ] The particle is surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles (fleeting, which appear and disappear). Virtual particles of clouds of particles of the "virtual of virtual", and so on. "At the center the cloud of the virtual is still a virtual, of a higher order. And these doubly virtual electrons and positrons surround themselves with their own cloud of virtual corpuscles, and this ad infinitum" explains Cassé in "On the Void and Creation".

[ 62 ] Feedback occurs when the product of a reaction intervenes again to promote the resumption of this reaction (positive feedback) or to block it (negative feedback). In a cascade of interactions, there is no longer the cause on one side and the effect on the other. The old notions of a one-way street for causality and the linear nature of the notion of "action then reaction" disappear.

[ 63 ] Catalysis is a reaction in which a substance, the catalyst, promotes the reaction that synthesizes it. Autocatalysis assumes that a substance promotes its own formation. This is called positive feedback. Life assumes a quantity of such feedback loops. If this autocatalysis gives an illusion of continuity and linearity, as soon as we analyze the processes that produce it, we see that they are based on brutal shocks of the type fixing of a molecule or breaking of a chemical bond, that is to say tearing off electrons, in short ruptures. On the other hand, they can only function constrained by negative feedbacks that activate or inhibit it. Activation is not direct : it is a negation of negation. Genetic material is autocatalytic but, normally, it is inhibited. Without shock, attachment of a molecule, it cannot be activated.

[ 64 ] For example, an animal species suddenly changes its feeding habits.

[ 65 ] Physicist Bernard Derida explains the nature of statistical physics in "La complexe, vertigo et promesses" : "The object of statistical physics is the understanding of the behavior of systems made up of a large number of interacting objects. It had its origins in the work of Clausius, Maxwell and Boltzmann on the kinetic theory of gases, the aim of which was to understand the properties of a fluid from the collision laws of the atoms that constitute this fluid. Such an approach, which consists of trying to predict large-scale behavior from elementary interactions, can be considered in many other fields. (...) For a century, statistical mechanics has been working (...) to link the microscopic (atomic) scale to the macroscopic scale (that of the world with which we are familiar). (...) Sometimes, very slight changes in interactions at the microscopic scale lead to "catastrophic" changes, that is, qualitative changes at the macroscopic scale. These qualitative changes are called "phase transitions". (...) Other examples of phase transitions are found in the study of so-called ferromagnetic systems. The small magnets carried by the particles tend, in order to minimize their energy, to orient themselves all in parallel. At high temperatures, thermal agitation is sufficient to agitate these small magnets (...) Most often, phase transitions result from a collective effect. (...) In some cases, this simple rule is enough for a collective opinion to emerge (...). This collective, or cooperative, effect is quite similar to what happens to small microscopic magnets that decide to orient themselves in the same direction.

[ 66 ] For every particle of matter there is a corresponding particle of antimatter which has an equal and opposite charge. The electron’s antimatter is the positron. The proton’s antimatter is the antiproton. It was the physicist Dirac who highlighted the existence of antimatter by demonstrating that, if it did not exist, the particle would have disintegrated in a microsecond. Generally, antimatter cannot be observed in our material universe because matter and antimatter couple by transforming into energy. Antimatter appears in very short times. Without it, our world would be impossible. Light, for example, does not exist without the coupling of (fleeting) matter and antimatter. All interactions are based on a coupling of virtual matter and antimatter. This is how each interaction breaks down into opposites which couple again an instant later. In our world, antimatter does not last long, but it exists, is constantly reproduced, and is essential to the world we live in. The domination of matter is therefore not a definitive and absolute disappearance of its opposite, but a broken symmetry, which is fundamentally different. The contradiction of antimatter is therefore masked, which explains why it took so long to highlight it. This is a remark that is general to broken symmetries. The contradiction does not appear in an obvious way.

[ 67 ] In "Complexity, Vertigo and Promises", the physicist-chemist Ilya Prigogine explains that "Far from equilibrium, we observe a very wide variety of situations and a succession of bifurcations which give matter a historical aspect. (...) The laws become probabilistic because at the bifurcations, you cannot know what will happen."

[ 68 ] This philosophical conception has nothing to do with Einstein’s theory of Relativity. Relativism is an eclecticism which asserts that no idea has value in itself and that "everything is relative". Relativity seeks, on the contrary, what is real, that is to say what does not depend on ways of seeing, what is "absolute", independent of the system of observation.

[ 69 ] More than ever, science can hope to penetrate the functioning of the universe. However, a very strong ideological current defends a mixture of logical empiricism, indeterminism and agnosticism, that is to say, in plain language, the sum of three renunciations : renunciation of all objective reality (of the existence of reality outside of human experience), renunciation of knowledge through an intuitive description of nature (no other image than logical and mathematical formalisms) and of any description of concrete physical processes). Skepticism is the dominant current among authors who discourse endlessly on the (allegedly absolute) limits of man, society and knowledge. And, to crown it all, renunciation of any capacity of man to philosophize about the world, which amounts to leaving the field open to beliefs, irrationalism and immaterialism. There is a link between the refusal to accept the philosophy derived from modern science and another renunciation, that of renouncing the rationalization of social functioning, the renunciation of transforming the political and social structure. The fear of social change is, for every society and of course first and foremost for its ruling class, the rational basis for the refusal to develop its philosophy about the world.

[ 70 ] For example, the mathematician René Thom notes that "the dynamic situations which govern the evolution of natural phenomena are fundamentally the same as those which govern the evolution of man and societies." (in "Structural Stability and Morphogenesis")

[ 71 ] "The gathering of a large number of bosons on the same coherent wave can constitute a brutal phenomenon which occurs suddenly, above a certain temperature threshold (generally very low), which is called (...) "Bose condensation". (...) This condensation belongs to the class of phase transitions among which we can cite common examples of transitions which can occur at ordinary temperatures, such as the solidification of a liquid, or the condensation of a vapor." explain the physicists Georges Lochak, Simon Diner and Daniel Farge in "The Quantum Object".

[ 72 ] The "Dictionary of Philosophy and History of Science", a collective work directed by Dominique Lecourt, thus states that "Independently of the molecular content and the sequences involved, cellular reactions therefore tend to be described more and more in the language of communications, as resulting from signals between cells, constituted by the diffusion of molecules in the ambient environment and reception by appropriate molecular sites, where the spatial structures as well as the molecular detail of the "design" play a role."