Réflexions sur la notion de nature à l’âge classique

Abstract

Mathematics plays a double role in modern physics. First, it enables the mathematician to construct the phenomena he organizes under laws. These laws are removed from the judicial domain and are claimed to be laws of Nature. The effect of amazement determined caused by the coincidence between mathematics and phenomena culminated with the Newtonian law of attraction and theism; but it was for a very short time. A second role of mathematics shows scepticism beneath the work of construction: with as much rigour as the former, it undermines the certainty that the physician was about to give to laws, dividing it and ascribing degrees to the fractions of probability. So Nature is thus changed into what the mathematician may guess of the organization of phenomena, with calculable chances of being right or wrong, and into the right he allows himself to guess such an organization.