"Tout résultat experimental particulier doit être considéré comme la projection de cas généraux que nous devons inventer" : cet énoncé qui a surgi lors d'une discussion que j'avais avec Jean-Marie Lehn trouve un écho dans le livre de John Tyndall, qui succéda à Faraday à la Royal Institution (Faraday as a discoverer, Ed Apollo) :
"When an experimental result was obtained by Faraday, it was instantly enlarged by his imagination. I am acquainted with no mind whose power and suddenness of expansion at the touchh of new physical truth could be ranked with his. Sometimes I have compared the action of his experiments on his mind to that of highly combustible matter thrown into a furnace; every fresh entry of fact was accompanied by the immediate development of light and heat. The light, which was intellectual, enabled him to see far beyond the boundaries of the fact itself, and the heat which was emotional, urged him to the conquest of this newly revealed domain. But though the force of his imagination was enormous, he bridled it like a mighty rider, and never permitted his intellectu to be overthrown. In virtue of the expansive power which his vivid imagination conferred upon him, he rose from the smallest beginnings to the greatest ends. "
La lumière et la chaleur sont peut-être aussi forte aujourd'hui mais la forêt que le soudain regain de lumière éclaire est aujourd'hui bien épaisse et rend plus difficile les découvertes.
RépondreSupprimerMalgré les énormes moyens mis en œuvre avec le LHC, le boson de Higgs se cache toujours dans je ne sais quel recoin de l'infiniment petit et la matière noire est toujours aussi mystérieuse. N'est-elle qu'une variable d'ajustement d'un modèle dépassé?