A closer look at human history reveals that people have always tried to decipher the riddle of the origin of existence in different ways and with different methods.
Religious philosophers like Thales
only dealt with spiritual thoughts, while non-religious philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre
considered only the material part of the human being or what is visible in their reflections on the phenomenon “human”.
The current state of science has come a long way. In doing so, it has managed to solve countless problems that have made life on planet Earth difficult. It gave us high technology and thus cars, airplanes, spaceships, satellites, various advanced machines, high-rise buildings, household appliances, shoes with a breathable sole and even frozen food! Nevertheless, people do not feel happier and the longing for the "good old days"
can still be felt everywhere.
Over the decades, various specialist areas have been derived from science and divided into just as many special subjects. With the help of scientific discoveries, some religious scientists have done their best in various ways to prove the existence of the relation of the two dimensions of human beings, which interact but are different from each other, namely the soul and matter.
It is believed that the earliest considerations in this context in philosophy are thoughts about the atom that originated in India in the 6th century BC. The Nyaya
and Vaisheshika
schools have developed elaborated theories on how atoms combine to form more complex structures. Around 450 BC, Democritus coined the term átomos, which means "cannot be dismantled". This general term, which originally came from the teacher Democritus, Leukipp, is still used in science. According to the account of Pliny the Elder, it is assumed that around 400 BC a Persian scientist named Ostanes, who was a teacher of some Greek philosophers such as Democritus and Plato, theorized about atoms.
After the Middle Ages, i.e. between the end of antiquity and modern times, from around the 6th to the 15th centuries, there were two events that had a major impact on the world of science for quite a long time, namely the birth of a child in 1596 in La Haye en Touraine in France, who would later become a famous philosopher, mathematician and scientist.
That child was René Descartes, who, about 40 years later, could be described as a scientist who sought to solve the mystery of existence. He dealt with these questions until he came up with the remarkable idea that there must be "a universal method for researching the truth". With this in mind, he started his work. The idea was not new, but it was brilliant, since it was the greatest wish of mankind to know how the universe came about, where man comes from, why he was created, what tasks he fulfills on earth, where he goes after death, how to reasonably clarify the discrepancy and paradox between human destinies, etc.
Descartes’ most important writings concern, among other things, analytical geometry and epistemology, that is, the famous Descartes doubt:
“The common assumption that scientific knowledge arises from sensory perception and thinking must be questioned become. Neither of the two sources can be trusted unchecked. Our senses often deceive us because we don't just perceive but earlier perceptions that constitute our body, condition our current perceptions - we project.
But you shouldn't trust thinking unchecked either, because an evil demon could affect the mind, so you draw wrong conclusions and be mistaken. Therefore, first of all, everything is to be doubted. “
(Descartes) (Translation: from German text)
With this idea and the scientific laws that he shaped, some weak points of the science and philosophy of the time were removed, at least theoretically and regardless of their correctness. Although many of his philosophical considerations were rejected or at least heavily criticized by later philosophers and thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Blaise Pascal, G. W. Friedrich Hegel
and others, he is still considered the founder of modern, early modern rationalism.
Eight years before Descartes' death, the second important event in the Renaissance happened: the birth of Isaac Newton in Lincolnshire in Great Britain.
Newton
was a physicist, chemist, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. In classical mechanics, we owe him, among other things, the three basic laws of movement and the concepts of absolute time, absolute space and long-distance effects. The laws that he developed in all areas of natural science formed the foundation of classical physics and mechanics.
It is hard to believe that Newton's works were not influenced by Descartes' considerations, because after the laws and principles of classical mechanics were accepted in the academic institutes and universities at the time, a new scientific mentality developed from both ways of thinking, the Descartes and Newtonian—a scientific worldview, where one feels less a trace of interaction between the phenomena involved in a certain process. A mixture of ideas that regards the whole of existence only as a gigantic machine that was once developed, ignited and started by God and in which we humans are just nuts and bolts. This is called Descartes-Newton considerations, which conquered and determined the academic reasoning for almost three centuries until the early 1960s.
Personally, I am convinced that, under the influence of this way of thinking, the collaboration between philosophy, intangible thoughts and reasons on the one hand and natural sciences on the other hand has failed in this era, and the two spheres have gone their separate ways.
Although the two natural scientists Descartes and Newton have changed the world of science greatly, neither was able to explain the meaning of existence to us, and to explain the substances and living things of this world, the reason and the method of the origin of existence.
Many thinkers, philosophers, physicists and biologists have responded to the historically natural tendency that constantly inspires people to find answers to the above questions. Each of these prominent personalities was only able to uncover part of the mystery of existence, but neither Descartes nor the others were able to put the different pieces of the puzzle in their correct places and complete the picture, since they ultimately lacked a definition that would have been able and competent to explain reasonably and scientifically the non-material side of man, i.e. the quantum side of matter.
In this regard, the scientists examined matter in a wide variety of forms and areas to see how functional and lively it is. The deeper their knowledge of matter became, the less it became obvious where this functionality actually came from. In these uninterrupted efforts, they continually discovered new factors, the interaction of which with other components required better and more careful explanations.
In order to be able to correctly and precisely investigate newly discovered factors, the scientists needed more extensive terms, expressions and equations. For this reason, it was necessary to expand the boundaries of science in every direction and to replace outdated definitions with new ones—a development that constantly led to the emergence of new subjects in science. One such fact that opened the door to a much larger world of science for people was the word "quantum", meaning, simply, "much smaller than you can imagine", and it triggered a revolution in science.
The fact that different principles can apply in the very small world than in our surrounding world was a tangible point with which one could describe both matter and the invisible dimension of matter in one term and explain their relation to each other.
Footnote
Quantum is Latin and means 'how big', 'how much'