Topic 1 Philosophy as a worldview and a generalized picture of being From mythological ideas - to abstract thinking. Practice as a decisive condition for the formation of theoretical thinking If for a student philosophy is one of the disciplines studied (and it

Aristotelian (ancient) scientific picture of the world Science is one of the forms of spiritual culture. It differs from philosophy in that it asks itself not general and broad, but specific questions, seeks to find accurate and universally recognized answers to them, considers it necessary to prove everything,

Newtonian (classical) scientific picture of the world The first scientific revolution, as we already know, took place approximately in the 5th-4th centuries. BC e. in Ancient Greece. Its result was the emergence of science. At the same time, the first scientific picture of the world was formed, which can be called

Einstein's (non-classical) scientific picture of the world At the turn of the last and present centuries, the third scientific revolution in the history of mankind took place. Recall that the time of the first is called the 5th century BC. e., and the scientific picture of the world, which became its result, is ancient, or

Scientific picture of the world In the process of spiritual evolution, humanity did not receive the promised happiness, but received information, for which culture should also be grateful. What is it in the most proven scientific form? In other words, what is the current scientific picture

Topic 12. The second scientific picture of the world (classical natural science) 1. Heliocentrism2. The decline of natural philosophy3. Mechanism 4. Deism5. stationarity

Topic 13. The third scientific picture of the world 1. The main features of modern natural science2. Substance and field3. The first models of the atom4. Elementary particles5. A new look at space and time6. The nature of universal gravitation7. Planets, stars, galaxies8. Bigger hypothesis

1. Introduction
2. Features of the scientific picture of the world
3. Basic principles of building a scientific picture of the world
4. General contours of the modern scientific picture of the world
5. Conclusion
6. References

Introduction

Knowledge of individual things and processes is impossible without simultaneous knowledge of the universal, and the latter, in turn, is known only through the former. This should be clear to every educated mind today. Similarly, the whole is comprehensible only in organic unity with its parts, and the part can be understood only within the framework of the whole. And any "private" law discovered by us - if it is really a law, and not an empirical rule - is a concrete manifestation of universality. There is no such science, the subject of which would be exclusively universal without knowledge of the individual, just as a science is impossible, limiting itself only to the knowledge of the particular.
The universal connection of phenomena is the most general pattern of the existence of the world, which is the result and manifestation of the universal interaction of all objects and phenomena and is embodied as a scientific reflection in the unity and interconnection of sciences. It expresses the internal unity of all elements of the structure and properties of any integral system, as well as the infinite variety of relations of this system with other systems or phenomena surrounding it. Without understanding the principle of universal connection, there can be no true knowledge. Awareness universal idea the unity of all life with the entire universe is included in science, although more than half a century ago in his lectures given at the Sorbonne, V.I. Vernadsky noted that not a single living organism is in a free state on Earth, but is inextricably linked with the material and energy environment. "In our century, the biosphere receives a completely new understanding. It is revealed as a planetary phenomenon of a cosmic nature."
Natural science worldview (ENMP) - a system of knowledge about nature, formed in the minds of students in the process of studying natural science subjects, and mental activity to create this system.
The concept of "picture of the world" is one of the fundamental concepts of philosophy and natural science and expresses general scientific ideas about the surrounding reality in their integrity. The concept of "picture of the world" reflects the world as a whole as a single system, that is, a "coherent whole", the knowledge of which implies "knowledge of all nature and history ..." (Marx K., Engels F., collected works, 2nd volume 20, p.630).
Features of the scientific picture of the world
The scientific picture of the world is one of the possible pictures of the world, therefore it has both something in common with all other pictures of the world - mythological, religious, philosophical - and something special that distinguishes the scientific picture of the world from the diversity of all other images of the world. Like all other pictures of the world, the scientific picture of the world contains certain ideas about the structure of space and time, objects and their interactions, laws and the place of man in the world. This is something common that is present in every picture of the world. The main thing that distinguishes the scientific picture of the world from all other pictures of the world is, of course, the “scientific” nature of this picture of the world. Therefore, in order to understand the peculiarity of the scientific picture of the world, it is necessary to understand the peculiarity of science as a special type of human activity. philosophy is a special direction, which is called "philosophy and methodology of science". This direction is trying to understand what is science? At first, philosophers thought that science is fundamentally different from non-scientific types of knowledge, and scientific knowledge has such a feature as a “criterion of demarcation.” It shows that science begins after it, and everything on the other side is something non-scientific. Various philosophers offered different signs as a "demarcation criterion". For example, some said that the main thing in science is the use of a special method of thinking called "induction", i.e. the transition from particular facts to their generalizations in general judgments. Others said that the main thing in science is the use of mathematics, others argued that only science uses such judgments from which it is possible to deduce consequences and verify or refute these consequences in experience. All the proposed features, to one degree or another, turned out to belong to non-scientific types of knowledge. Then the philosophers decided that science does not sharply differ from non-science, but gradually grows out of non-scientific types of knowledge, strengthening some features and weakening others. The main feature of science is not just one thing, but a whole system of properties, which in some special combination and proportions is inherent in scientific knowledge, although each individual element of this system can be found far beyond the boundaries of science. All those signs that were previously offered as a "criterion of demarcation", they are all little by little true, but now they should be considered together, as separate sides. One of the biggest problems of human thinking is the problem of connecting facts and ideas. There is, on the one hand , what we observe through our senses is the so-called "sensory knowledge", and there are thoughts, ideas, logic is the area of ​​\u200b\u200b"rational knowledge". Usually people either limit themselves to sensory knowledge only, or break away from facts and observations and use hypotheses divorced from life. The first feature of science is the combination of sensory and rational types of knowledge. In science, it is necessary not only to invent hypotheses, but only such hypotheses that could either be confirmed or refuted on the facts. On the other hand, the facts themselves must be objective, i.e. verifiable by many people and expressing certain regularities and theoretical models.Bringing facts closer to theory, the science of races views facts as consequences of theories ("deduction"), bringing theory closer to facts, science uses such theories that are obtained on the basis of generalization (induction) of facts. The unity of inductive and deductive methods in knowledge increases the scientific character of this knowledge, bringing together rational and sensual forms of knowledge. One of the signs of scientific knowledge is the use of mathematical methods. Mathematics is the science of structures. A structure is, for example, a set of natural numbers together with operations and relations on it, a set of vectors in three-dimensional space. Mathematics explores various structures and builds theories about these structures - introduces concepts and their definitions, axioms, proves theorems. Theories about structures are built using special symbolic languages ​​and strict logical reasoning (logical proofs). Structures in pure form nowhere can we observe through our senses, for example, nowhere can we see the numbers "two" or "three", we always see some specific two or three objects, for example, two apples, three trees, etc. At the same time, it cannot be said that the number "two" has nothing to do with two apples. For example, if we add the number "three" to the number "two", we will get the number "five" - ​​and all this is happening so far only within the framework of pure mathematical structure. But it turns out that if you add three apples to two apples, you also get five apples. Thus, the number of apples obeys the same laws as numbers in general - these are the laws of structure. So, the number of apples is to some extent just a number, and in this sense it is possible to study various numbers of objects by studying the number in general. A mathematical structure can realize itself in the sensible world. The implementation of the structure is already, as it were, a special case of the structure, when the elements of the structure are given in the form of specific observable objects. But operations, properties and relations remain in this case the same as in the mathematical structure. So science discovered that the world around us can be represented as realizations of many different mathematical structures, and next feature science is the study of the world around us as realizations of mathematical structures. This explains the great importance of mathematics for the transformation of ordinary knowledge into science. Real science is inconceivable without a scientific experiment, but it is not so easy to understand what a scientific experiment is. Let's start here with an example. Until Galileo's discovery of the law of inertia, Aristotle's mechanics dominated physics. The great ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that force is not proportional to acceleration, as Newton later suggested, but to speed, i.e. F=mv. For example, if a horse is pulling a cart with a load, then as long as the horse applies force, the cart moves, i.e. speed is not zero. If the horse stops pulling the cart, then the cart will stop - its speed will be zero. Now we know that in fact there are not one, but two forces - the force with which the horse pulls the cart, and the force of friction, but Aristotle thought otherwise. Galileo, reflecting on the problem of mechanical motion, built such a thought experiment. Galileo imagined what would happen to a body that received a push and moved on a smooth surface. Having received a push, the body continues to move for some time and then stops. If the surface is made more and more smooth, then from the same push the body will travel an increasing distance to a stop. And then Galileo, having imagined a sequence of such situations in which the body moves along an increasingly smooth surface, passes to the limit - to the case of such an ideal situation when the surface is already absolutely smooth. Taking the tendency to move further and further after a push to the limit, Galileo now claims that on a perfectly smooth surface the body will never stop after a push. But after the push, the force does not act on the body, therefore, the body will move indefinitely, the speed is not equal to zero in this case, and the force will be equal to zero. Thus, force is not proportional to speed, as Aristotle thought, and forceless motion is possible, which we today call uniform rectilinear motion. Summarizing this example, we can draw the following conclusion. The experiment presupposes some transformation of the real situation, and in this transformation the real situation to some extent approaches some ideal limit. It is important that in the experiment it would be possible to achieve an ever greater idealization of the real situation, building, as it were, a limiting sequence of experimental situations tending to a certain ideal-limit. The experiment plays the role of a kind of “highlighter” in scientific knowledge. limit states from real natural situations. These limits are usually called "models" and are realizations of certain mathematical structures. Thus, another feature of science is the use of such structures, which are obtained as the limits of experimental situations. So, the scientific picture of the world suggests that the world around us consists of two began - forms and matter. Forms are just another name for various mathematical structures that make up, as it were, a natural and logical skeleton of all processes and phenomena in the world. Thus, structural forms that express themselves in numbers, operations and relations are the basis of everything. This kind of philosophy is close to the philosophy of "Pythagoreanism", named after the great ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who taught that numerical structures are the basis of everything. The scientific picture of the world further assumes that structure-forms are clothed in matter and thus realized in the form of an infinite variety of sensually perceived phenomena and processes. Structures do not just repeat themselves in the sensual-material world, they are largely transformed, weakened and mixed. Therefore, we need special method , which could allow you to see pure structures behind their material implementations. This is the method of experiment, the method of unity of induction and deduction, the method of mathematics. The scientific picture of the world suggests that we can understand the world around us only to the extent that we can see the underlying form structures behind it. Structures make up part of the world comprehended by our mind. Forms-structures constitute the logical basis not only of the reality lying outside our consciousness, but they are also the logical foundation of the human mind. The structural unity of the human mind and the world is a condition for the cognizability of the world, moreover, its cognizability precisely through structures. Science is in many ways a special method of cognition, a peculiar way of obtaining structural knowledge. But in science there is always another component, which presupposes one or another philosophy or even religion. For example, in the Renaissance, science was closely connected with the so-called "pantheism" - the idea of ​​God as penetrating any part of the world and coinciding with the infinite Cosmos. Later, science adopted the philosophy of materialism and atheism. Therefore, we can talk about two types of principles of the scientific picture of the world: 1) the internal principles of science that provide the scientific method of cognition as the above-described method of restoring structures that lie behind the visible shell of the sensory world, 2) the external principles of science that determine the connection of science as a method of cognition with this or that picture of the world. Science can connect with any picture of the world, as long as the internal principles of science are not destroyed. From this point of view, there is no pure (i.e., built only on the basis of internal principles) scientific picture of the world. In all cases when we talk about a scientific picture of the world, there always exists one or another picture of the world (as a system of external principles of science), which is consistent with the internal principles of science. points of view, we can talk about three scientific pictures of the world: 1) a pantheistic scientific picture of the world - here the internal principles of science are combined with pantheism (this is a picture of the world of the Renaissance), 2) a deistic scientific picture of the world - here the internal principles of science are connected with deism ("deism" , or “the doctrine of double truth” is the doctrine that God intervened in the world only at the beginning of its creation, and then God and the World exist completely independently of each other, therefore the truths of religion and science also do not depend on each other. Such a picture of the world was accepted in the Enlightenment), 3) an atheistic scientific picture of the world - here the internal principles of science are combined with atheism and materialism (such is the modern scientific picture of the world). In the Middle Ages, the dominant religious picture of the world too suppressed the existence and development of the internal principles of science, and therefore we cannot call the medieval picture of the world scientific. But this does not mean at all that the impossibility of combining the Christian picture of the world and the scientific method of cognition in the Middle Ages is the final argument against the possibility of harmonizing the internal principles of science and Christianity in the general case. In this regard, one could imagine the possibility of a fourth variant of the scientific picture of the world: 4) theistic scientific picture of the world (“theism” is the doctrine of the creation of the world by God and the constant dependence of the world on God). The development of the modern scientific picture of the world speaks for that the external principles of science are gradually changing, the influence of atheism and materialism in the modern scientific picture of the world is weakening.One of the most weighty arguments of the defenders of the atheistic scientific picture of the world is the principle of objectivity.Scientific knowledge is objective knowledge, and objectively is that which does not depend on human consciousness Therefore, scientific knowledge should involve going beyond human subjectivity, as if throwing out of the sphere of scientific knowledge everything that relates to psychology, consciousness and the humanities in general.The principle of objectivity is presented by the supporters of the atheistic scientific picture of the world as one of the principles of materialism and this form is served as one of the most essential internal principles of science, as a necessary condition for the cognizability of the structures of reality. One can try to explain this by separating the two principles of objectivity - structural and materialistic. The structural principle of objectivity is one of the internal principles of science, which implies the construction of scientific knowledge on the basis of precisely objective structures that are common to man and nature. The materialistic principle of objectivity is an external principle of science, limiting the field of objective structures only within the framework of predominantly inorganic structures, i.e. structures that realize themselves in the material-sensory world on inorganic processes and phenomena. Moreover, the development of modern science leads to an ever greater convergence of natural science and humanitarian knowledge, showing in practice that it is possible to build scientific knowledge, and hence the implementation of the principle of objectivity, not only in the field of dead nature but also in the humanities. Moreover, the penetration of scientific methods of research into the humanities has been achieved recently not due to reduction to inorganic structures, but on the basis of the humanization of the methods and means of scientific knowledge themselves. So, we can conclude that the scientific picture of the world always consists of two types of principles - internal and external. What unites all scientific pictures of the world is precisely the presence in them of the internal principles of science, providing it as a specific, structural-empirical method of cognition and suggesting a philosophy of matter and form-structure. The difference in scientific pictures of the world follows from the possibility of accepting different external principles of scientific knowledge, consistent with its internal principles. From this point of view, we have identified pantheistic, deistic, atheistic and theistic scientific pictures of the world. It can be assumed that the development of the modern scientific picture of the world gradually leads to a departure from the external principles of atheism and materialism and the emergence of some 5) synthetic scientific picture of the world, in which the coordination of the internal principles of science, apparently, will be achieved with external principles expressing the synthesis of external principles individual (analytical) scientific pictures of the world.
Basic principles of building a scientific picture of the world

The leading principles of building a modern scientific picture of the world are: the principle of global evolutionism, the principle of self-organization (synergetics), the principle of consistency and historicity.
Global evolutionism is the recognition of the impossibility of the existence of the Universe and all smaller-scale systems generated by it without development, evolution. The evolving nature of the Universe also testifies to the fundamental unity of the world, each component of which is a historical consequence of the global evolutionary process started by the Big Bang.
One of the most important ideas of European civilization is the idea of ​​world development. In its simplest and undeveloped forms (preformism, epigenesis, Kantian cosmogony), it began to penetrate into natural science as early as the eighteenth century. And already the 19th century can rightly be called the century of evolution. First, geology, then biology and sociology began to pay more and more attention to the theoretical modeling of developing objects. But in the sciences of inorganic nature, the idea of ​​development made its way very difficult. Until the second half of the 20th century, it was dominated by the original abstraction of a closed reversible system, in which the time factor plays no role. Even the transition from classical Newtonian physics to non-classical (relativistic and quantum) did not change anything in this respect. True, some timid breakthrough in this direction was made by classical thermodynamics, which introduced the concept of entropy and the idea of ​​irreversible time-dependent processes. Thus, the “arrow of time” was introduced into the sciences of inorganic nature. But, ultimately, classical thermodynamics also studied only closed equilibrium systems. And non-equilibrium processes were considered as perturbations, secondary deviations that should be neglected in the final description of a cognizable object - a closed On the other hand, the penetration of the idea of ​​development into geology, biology, sociology, and the humanities in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries was carried out independently in each of these branches of knowledge. did not have a core expression for the whole of natural science (as well as for the whole of science).In each branch of natural science, it had its own forms of theoretical and methodological concretization (independent of the other branch). unified model of universal evolution, identification of general laws in genera linking into a single whole the origin of the Universe (cosmogenesis), the emergence of the solar system and our planet Earth (geogenesis), the emergence of life (biogenesis) and, finally, the emergence of man and society (anthroposociogenesis). Such a model is the concept of global evolutionism. In the concept of global evolutionism, the Universe is presented as a natural whole developing in time. The entire history of the Universe from the "Big Bang" to the emergence of mankind is considered in this concept as a single process in which the cosmic, chemical, biological and social types of evolution are successively and genetically linked. Cosmochemistry, geochemistry, biochemistry here reflect the fundamental transitions in the evolution of molecular systems and the inevitability of their transformation into organic matter.
The principle of self-organization (synergy) is the observed ability of a matarium to self-complex and create more and more ordered structures in the course of evolution. The mechanism of transition of material systems to a more complex and ordered state is apparently similar for systems of all levels.
The appearance of synergetics in modern natural science was apparently initiated by the preparation of a global evolutionary synthesis of all natural science disciplines. This trend was largely restrained by such a circumstance as the striking asymmetry of the processes of degradation and development in animate and inanimate nature. To maintain the consistency of the overall picture of the world, it is necessary to postulate the presence of matter in general not only destructive, but also creative tendencies. Matter is capable of performing work against thermodynamic equilibrium, self-organizing and self-complicating.
The postulate about the ability of matter to self-development was introduced into philosophy quite a long time ago. But his need for fundamental and natural sciences (physics, chemistry) began to be realized only now. On this wave, synergetics arose - the theory of self-organization. Its development began several decades ago. Currently, it is developing in several directions: synergetics (G. Haken), non-equilibrium thermodynamics (I.R. Prigozhiy), etc. The general meaning of the complex of ideas developed by them, calling them synergetic (G. Haken's term).
The main worldview shift produced by synergetics can be expressed as follows:
the processes of destruction and creation, degradation and evolution in the Universe are equal;
the processes of creation (increasing complexity and orderliness) have a single algorithm, regardless of the nature of the systems in which they are carried out.
Self-organization is understood here as a spontaneous transition of an open non-equilibrium system from less to more complex and ordered forms of organization. It follows that the object of synergetics can be by no means any systems, but only those that satisfy at least two conditions:
they must be open, i.e. exchange matter or energy with the environment;
they must also be substantially nonequilibrium, i.e., be in
state far from thermodynamic equilibrium.
So, synergetics claims that the development of open and highly non-equilibrium systems proceeds through increasing complexity and order. There are two phases in the development cycle of such a system:
1. Smooth period evolutionary development with well-predictable linear changes, eventually leading the system to some unstable critical state;
2. Exit from a critical state at once, abruptly, and transition to a new stable state with a greater degree of complexity and order.
Important feature the second phase is that the transition of the system to a new stable state is ambiguous. And hence it follows that the development of such systems is fundamentally unpredictable.
The most popular and illustrative example of the formation of structures of increasing complexity is a well-studied phenomenon in hydrodynamics called Benard cells.
This phenomenon, which is well known to everyone, is unbelievable from the standpoint of statistical mechanics. After all, it testifies that at the moment of the formation of Benard cells, billions of liquid molecules, as if on command, begin to behave in a coordinated manner, although before that they were in chaotic motion. (The word "synergy", by the way, just means "joint action"). Classical statistical laws obviously do not work here, this is a phenomenon of a different order. After all, if, even by chance, such a "correct" and
a stable "cooperative" structure was formed, which is almost unbelievable, it would have immediately collapsed. But it does not disintegrate under appropriate conditions (an influx of energy from outside), but, on the contrary, it persists steadily. This means that the emergence of structures of increasing complexity is not an accident, but a pattern.
The search for similar processes of self-organization in other classes of open non-equilibrium systems seems to promise to be successful: the mechanism of laser action; crystal growth; chemical clock (Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction), the formation of a living organism, population dynamics, market economy - all these are examples of self-organization of systems different nature.
The synergetic interpretation of such phenomena opens up new possibilities and directions for their study. In a generalized form, the novelty of the synergetic approach can be expressed in the following positions:
Chaos is not only destructive, but also creative, constructive; development is carried out through instability (chaoticity).
The linear nature of the evolution of complex systems, to which classical science is accustomed, is not the rule, but rather the exception; the development of most of these systems is non-linear. And this means that for complex systems there are always several possible ways of evolution.
Development is carried out through a random choice of one of several allowed possibilities for further evolution at the bifurcation point.
Therefore, randomness is not an unfortunate misunderstanding, it is built into the mechanism of evolution. It also means that the current path of evolution of the system is perhaps no better than those that were rejected by random
choice.
The ideas of synergetics are interdisciplinary in nature. They provide a basis for the global evolutionary synthesis taking place in natural science. Therefore, synergetics is seen as one of the most important components of the modern scientific picture of the world.
Consistency
Consistency means the reproduction by science of the fact that the Universe appears as the largest of the systems known to us, consisting of a huge number of elements (subsystems) of different levels of complexity and complexity.
orderliness.
A system is usually understood as a certain ordered set of interconnected elements. The systemic effect is found in the appearance of new properties in an integral system that arise as a result of the interaction of elements (hydrogen and oxygen atoms, for example,
combined into a water molecule, radically change their usual properties). Another important characteristic of the system organization is hierarchy, subordination - the consistent inclusion of lower-level systems into systems of more high levels. The systemic way of combining elements expresses their fundamental unity: due to the hierarchical inclusion of systems of different levels into each other, each element of any system is associated with all elements of all
possible systems. (For example: man - biosphere - planet Earth - Solar system - Galaxy, etc.) It is this fundamentally unified character that the world around us shows us. In the same way
the scientific picture of the world and the natural science that creates it are organized accordingly. All its parts are now closely interconnected - now there is practically no "pure" science. Everything is permeated and
transformed by physics and chemistry.

Historicity

Historicity, and consequently, the fundamental incompleteness of the present, and indeed any scientific picture of the world. The one that exists now is generated both by previous history and by the specific socio-cultural features of our time. The development of society, a change in its value orientations, awareness of the importance of studying unique natural systems, in which integral part the person himself is included, it changes both the strategy of scientific research and the attitude of a person to the world.
But the universe is also evolving. Of course, the development of society and the Universe is carried out in different tempo-rhythms. But their mutual imposition makes the idea of ​​creating a final, complete, absolutely true scientific picture of the world practically unrealizable.

General contours of the modern natural-scientific picture of the world

The world we live in is made up of open systems, the development of which is subject to general laws. At the same time, it has its own long history, in general terms known to modern science. Here is a chronology of the most important events of this history:

20 billion years ago - Big Bang.
3 minutes later - the formation of the material basis of the Universe (photons, neutrinos and antineutrinos with an admixture of hydrogen nuclei, helium and electrons).
A few hundred thousand years later - the appearance of atoms (light elements).
19-17 billion years ago - the formation of structures of different scales.
15 billion years ago - the appearance of first-generation stars, the formation of atoms of heavy elements.
5 billion years ago - the birth of the Sun.
4.6 billion years ago - the formation of the Earth.
3.8 billion years ago - the origin of life.
450 million years ago - the appearance of plants.
150 million years ago - the appearance of mammals.
2 million years ago - the beginning of anthropogenesis.
We pay attention first of all to the successes of physics and cosmology, because it is these fundamental sciences that form the general contours of the scientific picture of the world.
The picture of the world drawn by modern natural science is unusually complex and simple at the same time. It is difficult because it can confuse a person who is accustomed to classical scientific ideas consistent with common sense. The ideas of the beginning of time, corpuscular-wave dualism of quantum objects, the internal structure of vacuum capable of producing virtual particles, and other similar innovations give the current picture of the world a little "crazy" look.
But at the same time, this picture is majestically simple, slender and somewhere even elegant. These qualities are given to it mainly by the leading principles we have already considered for the construction and organization of modern scientific knowledge:
consistency,
global evolutionism,
self-organization,
historicity.
These principles of constructing a scientific picture of the world as a whole correspond to the fundamental laws of the existence and development of Nature itself.
These fundamental features of the modern natural-scientific picture of the world mainly determine its general outline, as well as the very method of organizing diverse scientific knowledge into something whole and consistent.
Conclusion

AT modern world The scientific picture of the world causes people not only admiration, but also fears. You can often hear that science brings a person not only benefits, but also the greatest misfortunes. Atmospheric pollution, accidents at nuclear power plants, increased radioactive background as a result of tests nuclear weapons, "ozone hole" over the planet, a sharp reduction in plant and animal species - people tend to explain all these and other environmental problems by the very factor of the existence of science. But the point is not in science, but in whose hands it is, what social interests stand behind it, what public and state structures direct its development.
The growth of global problems of mankind increases the responsibility of scientists for the fate of mankind. question about historical destinies and the role of science in its relation to man, the prospects for his development has never been so sharply discussed as at the present time, in the context of the growing global crisis of civilization.
Science is social institution, it is closely connected with the development of the whole society. The complexity and inconsistency of the current situation lies in the fact that science is involved in the generation of global, environmental issues civilizations; and at the same time, without science, the solution of these problems is in principle impossible. This means that the role of science in the history of mankind is constantly increasing.
I have tried to highlight some of the key features
modern natural-scientific picture of the world. This is just its general outline, by sketching which you can begin to get acquainted with the specific conceptual innovations of modern natural science in more detail.

Bibliography
1. Concepts of modern natural science. Ed. Lavrinenko V.N. and Ratnikova V.P. M., 2004.
2. Kapitsa S.P. etc. Synergetics and forecasts of the future. M., 2001.
3. Pakhomov B.Ya. Formation of the modern physical picture of the world. M., 1985.
4. Haken G. Information and self-organization. Macroscopic approach to complex systems. - M., 1991.

"picture of the world" called a set of ideas that has developed at a particular stage of human development about the structure of the reality surrounding a person, the ways of its functioning and development.

The picture of the world is formed, on the one hand, as an integral part of the worldview, and, on the other hand, on the basis of the original worldview principles and integrating the knowledge and experience accumulated by mankind.

The picture of the world is a complexly structured integrity, including the conceptual part of the picture of the world and a set of visual images of culture, man, his place in the world. These components are combined in the picture of the world in a way specific to a given era, ethnic group or subculture.

The picture of the world is formed both in the mind of an individual and in the public mind, which explains the various projections of the world in existing pictures.

Distinguish religious, scientific and philosophical pictures of the world. Their fundamental differences are determined by two positions: 1) the main problem solved by each of these pictures of the world and 2) the main ideas that they offer to solve their problem.

RCM problems: Relationship between God and man

RCM Ideas: Divine creation of the world and man

FKM problems: Relationship between the world and man.

FKM Ideas: monism, dualism and pluralism; dialectics and metaphysics; eclecticism; reductionism; mechanism; the question of the relation of thought to being.

NCM problems: Synthesis and generalization of heterogeneous, sometimes contradictory, parts of knowledge into a single, logically consistent whole

NCM Ideas: The world, as a set of natural processes, develops according to its own, objective and specific laws for each of these processes.

Religious Picture of the World (RKM)

- a set of the most common religious ideas about the world, its origin, structure and future. The main sign of the RCM is the division of the world into the supernatural and the natural, with the absolute dominance of the first over the second.

The Creator creates the world “out of nothing”, before the act of creation there was nothing but God (creationism). Absolute being cannot be known by man in a rational way, because the Creator's intention cannot be accessible to creation. A person in RCM is given the role of a child who is loved, encouraged and elevated as he strives and tries to get closer to the Creator and live according to his instructions. In various religious denominations, the RCM differ in details, but they have in common the principle of providentialism, the divine predestination of created being and its imperfection.

The religious answer to the question "Why do I live?" is to save the soul.

RCM is developed by theologians.

Scientific picture of the world (SCM) - a special form of knowledge systematization, qualitative generalization and ideological synthesis of various scientific theories.

Being an integral system of ideas about the general properties and regularities of the objective world, the scientific picture of the world exists as a complex structure, including as components general scientific picture of the world and pictures of the world of individual sciences(physical, biological, geological, etc.). Pictures of the world of individual sciences, in turn, include the corresponding numerous concepts - certain ways of understanding and interpreting any objects, phenomena and processes of the objective world that exist in each individual science

Features of NCM:

1. The scientific picture of the world will differ from religious ideas about the world based on the authority of the prophets, religious tradition, sacred texts, etc.

Religious ideas are more conservative in contrast to scientific ones, which change as a result of the discovery of new facts. In turn, the religious concepts of the universe can change in order to approach the scientific views of their time. The basis for obtaining a scientific picture of the world is experiment, which allows you to confirm the reliability of certain judgments. At the heart of the religious picture of the world lies the belief in the truth of certain judgments belonging to some kind of authority.

2. The scientific picture of the world also differs from the worldview inherent in everyday or artistic perception of the world, which uses everyday/artistic language to designate objects and phenomena of the world.

A person of art creates artistic images of the world based on the synthesis of his subjective (emotional perception) and objective (dispassionate) comprehension, while a person of science focuses exclusively on the objective and eliminates subjectivity from the results of research with the help of critical thinking. Emotional perception is right hemisphere (figuratively), while logical scientific justification, abstractions, generalizations are left hemisphere.

Philosophical picture of the world gives the ultimate general idea about him. Created within the framework of the ontology, FKM determines the main content of the worldview of an individual, social group, society. Being a rational-theoretical way of knowing the world, the philosophical worldview is abstract in nature and reflects the world in the most general terms and categories.

Hence , FKM is a set of generalized, systematically organized and theoretically substantiated ideas about the world in its holistic unity and the place of man in it.

Features of FKM:

1. Unlike RCM, FCM always relies on NCM as a reliable foundation.

Cosmocentric FKM of antiquity fully corresponded to the natural-philosophical level of development of ancient science.

On formation natural philosophy and anthropocentrism The Renaissance was powerfully influenced by the heliocentrism of N. Copernicus and J. Bruno.

Mechanistic model of the world arose on the basis of the classical mechanics of I. Newton and was based on the philosophical principles of the unity of the world, as well as the laws and concepts of mechanics (mass, particle, force, energy, inertia).

who replaced her dialectical, relativistic QM built on a scientific foundation quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, and now it is based on the principles of global evolutionism and synergetics.

2. Each stage of the developing FKM puts before science and philosophy the task of comprehending certain concepts, deepening, clarifying or fundamentally new definition of the content of fundamental philosophical categories, through which FKM is built.

3. The philosophical picture of the world breaks up into multiple, pluralistic pictures.

In order to cognize the world, we are trying to create a general, scientific picture of the world from private knowledge about the phenomena and laws of nature. Its content is the basic ideas of the sciences of nature, principles, patterns, not isolated from each other, but constituting the unity of knowledge about nature, determining the style of scientific thinking at this stage in the development of science and culture of mankind.

In each period of human development, a scientific picture of the world is formed, which reflects the objective world with the accuracy and adequacy that the achievements of science and practice allow. In addition, the picture of the world also contains something that at this stage has not yet been proven by science, i.e., some hypotheses

Actually, science goes through three main stages in its development: classical, non-classical and post-non-classical, which reflected the change in the concept of the scientific picture of the world in the process of science development.

1 . classical science (XVII-XIX centuries). The dominant type of knowledge is classical mechanics.

a) S -Ср - [О]. The object of knowledge must be described in a "pure" form.

b) science is clear

c) the world is qualitatively homogeneous; all his bodies consist of the same material substance; there are only quantitative differences between the bodies. The laws of the heavenly and earthly worlds are the same.

d) a rigid ("Laplacian") determinism is established, built on the recognition of unambiguous cause-and-effect relationships. Randomness was seen as a form of ignorance

e) the world is fundamentally cognizable: in the end, one can find absolute truth, that is, to obtain complete complete knowledge about the world.

f) an anti-evolutionist attitude dominates in science. Matter is an inert, non-evolving substance; There is a finite limit to the divisibility of matter

2. Non-classical science (the end of the 19th century - the last third of the 20th century), relativistic physics and quantum mechanics appear.

a) S - [Cp - O]. The description of the object of cognition must also include a description of the means of cognition.

b) science is losing the principle of visibility. Increasingly, science deals with mathematical description,

c) the world begins to be considered as a multi-level system in which there is a microworld described by statistical probabilistic laws, there is a macroworld described by classical mechanics and a megaworld described by relativistic physics.

d) chance is a form of manifestation and addition of necessity. And besides, randomness is considered as a factor that takes place along with necessity.

e) there is no absolute truth, reality is so multifaceted and changeable that all theories can only be relative, each theory has a moment of truth in itself. The principle of complementary concepts is spreading.

f) The evolutionary idea becomes the norm and ideal of scientific explanation in biology, geology, social systems, but in physics knowledge abstracted from the idea of ​​evolution continues to build up.

3 . Post-non-classical science (last third of the 20th century - present). The dominant paradigm ideas are the ideas of evolution, self-organization and consistency, on the basis of which the formation of a modern universal scientific picture of the world takes place.

a) . The object of cognition cannot be described not only without the means and methods of cognition, but also without taking into account social goals and intrascientific knowledge.

b) strengthening the role of interdisciplinary research.

c) organic combination of experimental and theoretical, fundamental and applied knowledge,

d) methodological pluralism (many different equal, independent and irreducible methodologies)

e) truth is considered not only as relative and concrete, but also as conventional.

f) not physics, but biology, anthropology takes the first place.

As can be seen from these stages, the scientific picture of the world has been refined and developed over many centuries - penetration into the essence of natural phenomena is an endless, unlimited process, since matter is inexhaustible. With the development of science, people's ideas about nature are becoming deeper and more adequate, more and more reflecting the true, real state of the surrounding world.

Modern scientific picture of the world

The basis for the formation of the modern picture of the world was determined by a series of discoveries at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: the discovery of the complex structure of the atom, the phenomenon of radioactivity, the discrete nature of electromagnetic radiation, etc.

Fundamentals of the new picture of the world:

a) general and special theory of relativity (the new theory of space and time has led to the fact that all frames of reference have become equal, therefore all our ideas make sense only in a certain frame of reference. The picture of the world has acquired a relative, relative character, the key ideas about space have changed, time, causality, continuity, the unambiguous opposition of the subject and the object was rejected, the perception turned out to be dependent on the frame of reference, which includes both the subject and the object, the method of observation, etc.)

b) quantum mechanics (it revealed the probabilistic nature of the laws of the microcosm and the irremovable corpuscular-wave dualism in the very foundations of matter). It became clear that it will never be possible to create an absolutely complete and reliable scientific picture of the world, any of them has only relative truth.

The advent of quantum mechanics led to a huge revolution not only in physics but also in related disciplines. Quantum theory also helped the development of semiconductor technology, without which modern electronics is completely unthinkable, and also contributed to the creation of quantum radiation generators - lasers, which have become firmly established in everyday life person. The most important consequence of discoveries in quantum physics, the theory of relativity and nuclear physics- mastery of nuclear energy.

It is also worth noting the emergence of new revolutionary theories. For example, string theory, which combines the ideas of quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity and is based on the hypothesis that all elementary particles and their fundamental interactions arise as a result of oscillations and interactions of ultramicroscopic quantum strings on scales of the order of the Planck length of 10 −35 m.

Within the framework of the new picture of the world, there have been revolutions in the private sciences and the emergence of a number of new interdisciplinary areas (synergetics, astrophysics, genetics, cybernetics).

Cosmology and astrophysics . The most impressive achievement of physics in the middle of the 20th century, which has huge consequences for worldview and philosophy, is the discovery of the expansion of the Universe, and subsequently the discovery of the existence of the "beginning of the Universe" - the Big Bang. The existence of dark matter and dark energy was discovered - matter and energy invisible to modern instruments, which, however, participates in gravitational interaction. Dark matter and energy make up the vast majority in the mass of matter in the Universe and determine its evolution and further fate. An impressive manifestation of dark energy has been discovered - the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. Predicted black holes, planets in other solar systems have been discovered

Synergetics . An equally important role in the formation of a new scientific picture of the world is played by the theory of self-organization (synergetics). Synergetics is an interdisciplinary area of ​​scientific research, the task of which is to study natural phenomena and processes based on the principles of self-organization of systems. It studies any self-organizing systems consisting of many subsystems (electrons, atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, organs, complex multicellular organisms, man, human communities). Synergetics approved the universal interconnectedness of the world and the multi-variant development of systems.

Thus, over the course of the 20th century, science has greatly changed its appearance, which caused the creation of a new modern picture of the world.

Modern natural-scientific picture of the world

It contains the most typical information about the modern natural-science picture of the world, given in most manuals and textbooks. To what extent these ideas are limited in many ways, and sometimes simply do not correspond to experience and facts, readers can judge for themselves.

The concept of mythological, religious and philosophical picture of the world

The picture of the world is - a system of views on the objective world and man's place in it.

The following pictures of the world are distinguished:

 mythological;

 religious;

 philosophical;

 scientific.

Consider the features of the mythological ( Mithos- legend, logos- doctrine) pictures of the world.

Mythological picture of the world is determined by the artistic and emotional experience of the world, its sensory perception, and as a result of irrational perception - social illusions. The events taking place around were explained with the help of mythical characters, for example, a thunderstorm is the result of the wrath of Zeus in Greek mythology.

Properties of the mythological picture of the world:

 humanization of nature italics ours, we pay attention to the widest distribution in modern science of such humanization. For example, belief in the existence of objective laws of the Universe, despite the fact that the very concept of "law" was invented by man, and not found in the experiment, and even laws that are unambiguously expressible in human concepts ) , when natural objects endowed with human abilities, for example, "the sea raged";

 the presence of fantastic, i.e. having no prototype in reality gods, for example, centaurs; or anthropomorphic gods resembling humans, such as Venus ( italics ours, we draw attention to the general anthropomorphism of the Universe common in science, expressed, for example, in the belief in its cognizability by man);

 interaction of gods with man, i.e. the possibility of contact in various spheres of life, for example, Achilles, Hercules, who were considered the children of God and man;

 lack of abstract reflections, ie. the world was perceived as a collection of "fabulous" images, not requiring rational thought ( italics are ours, just as fundamental scientific postulates do not require rational thinking today ) ;

 the practical orientation of the myth, which was manifested in the fact that in order to achieve a certain result it was supposed set of concrete actions e.g. sacrifice ( the italics are ours, as to this day science does not recognize a result that is not obtained through strictly fixed procedures).

Each nation has its own mythological system that explains the origin of the world, its structure, the place and role of man in the world.

At the next stage in the development of mankind, with the advent of world religions, a religious picture of the world is emerging.

religious(religion- holiness) picture of the world based on the belief in the existence of the supernatural, such as God and the devil, heaven and hell; does not require proof , rational substantiation of their provisions; the truths of faith are considered higher than the truths of reason ( italics are ours, as fundamental scientific postulates do not require proof).

The religious picture of the world is determined specific properties religion. It's presence faith as a way of existence of religious consciousness and cult as a system of established rituals, dogmas, which are an external form of manifestation of faith ( italics are ours, just like in science, faith in the cognizability of the Universe, the role of dogmas-postulates and scientific rituals of “extracting the truth”).

Characteristics of the religious picture of the world:

 The supernatural occupies a leading role in the universe and people's lives. God creates the world and governs the course of history and the life of the individual;

 “earthly” and sacred things are separated, i.e. direct contact of a person with God is impossible, in contrast to the mythological picture of the world.

Religious pictures of the world differ depending on the characteristics of a particular religion. In the modern world, there are three world religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.

Philosophical picture of the world based on knowledge, and not on faith or fiction, like mythological and religious. It presupposes reflection, i.e. contains reflections on one's own ideas about the world and about a person's place in it. Unlike previous paintings, the philosophical picture of the world is logical, has an internal unity and system, explains the world based on clear concepts and categories. It is characterized by free-thinking and criticality, i.е. lack of dogmas, problematic perception of the world.

Ideas about reality within the framework of the philosophical picture of the world are formed on the basis of philosophical methods. Methodology is a system of principles, generalized ways of organizing and constructing theoretical reality, as well as the doctrine of this system.

Basic methods of philosophy:

1. Dialectics- a method in which things and phenomena are considered flexible, critical, consistent, taking into account their internal contradictions and changes (italics ours, the good idea embedded in the dialectical method is difficult to implement in practice due to the extreme limitations of existing knowledge, often dialectics in science boils away into ordinary taste)

2. Metaphysics- a method opposite to dialectics, in which objects are considered separately, statically and unambiguously (conducted search for absolute truth ) (italics ours, although formally modern science recognizes that any "truth" is temporary and private, nevertheless proclaims that this process converges over time to a certain limit that playsde facto the role of absolute truth).

Philosophical pictures of the world may differ depending on the historical type of philosophy, its nationality, specifics philosophical direction. Initially, two main branches of philosophy are formed: Eastern and Western. Eastern philosophy is mainly represented by the philosophy of China and India. Western philosophy, which dominates modern natural science ideas, originated in ancient Greece, goes through several stages in its development, each of which determined the specifics of the philosophical picture of the world.

The ideas about the world, formed within the framework of the philosophical picture of the world, formed the basis of the scientific picture of the world.

Scientific picture of the world as a theoretical construct

The scientific picture of the world is a special form of representation of the world, based on scientific knowledge, which depends on the historical period and the level of development of science. On each historical stage development of scientific knowledge, there is an attempt to generalize the acquired knowledge to form a holistic view of the world, which is called the "general scientific picture of the world." The scientific picture of the world differs depending on the subject of study. Such a picture of the world is called a special scientific picture of the world, for example, a physical picture of the world, a biological picture of the world.

The scientific picture of the world is formed in the process of formation of scientific knowledge.

Science is a form of spiritual activity of people, aimed at producing knowledge about nature, society and knowledge itself, with the goal of comprehension of the truth (our italics, we emphasize the belief inherent here in the existence of some kind of objective, independent of man, truth) and discovery of objective laws (italics are ours, we draw attention to the belief in the existence of "laws" outside our minds).

Stages of formation of modern science

classical science (XVII-XIX centuries), exploring its objects, sought in their description and theoretical explanation to eliminate, if possible, everything that relates to the subject, means, methods and operations of his activity. Such elimination was considered as a necessary condition for obtaining objective and true knowledge about the world. Here the objective style of thinking dominates, the desire to know the subject in itself, regardless of the conditions of its study by the subject.

Non-classical science (the first half of the 20th century), the starting point of which is associated with the development of relativistic and quantum theory, rejects the objectivism of classical science, rejects the representation of reality as something independent of the means of its cognition, a subjective factor. It comprehends the connections between the knowledge of the object and the nature of the means and operations of the subject's activity. The explication of these connections is considered as the conditions for an objective and true description and explanation of the world.

post-non-classical science (the second half of the 20th - the beginning of the 21st centuries) is characterized by the constant involvement of subjective activity in the "body of knowledge". It takes into account the correlation of the nature of the acquired knowledge about the object not only with the peculiarity of the means and operations of the activity of the cognizing subject, but also with its value-target structures.

Each of these stages has its own paradigm (a set of theoretical, methodological and other guidelines), their picture of the world, their fundamental ideas.

classical stage has mechanics as its paradigm, its picture of the world is based on the principle of rigid (Laplacian) determinism, it corresponds to the image of the universe as a clockwork. ( Until now, mechanistic ideas occupy about 90% of the volume in scientists' minds, which is easy to establish by simply talking to them.)

With non-classical the paradigm of relativity, discreteness, quantization, probability, complementarity is connected with science. ( Surprisingly, the idea of ​​relativity still occupies an insignificant place in the practical activities of scientists, even the simple relativity of motion / immobility is rarely remembered, and sometimes it is directly denied)

Post-non-classical the stage corresponds to the paradigm of formation and self-organization. The main features of the new (post-non-classical) image of science are expressed by synergetics, which studies general principles self-organization processes occurring in systems of very different nature (physical, biological, technical, social, etc.). Orientation to the "synergetic movement" is an orientation to historical time, consistency and development as the most important characteristics of being. ( these concepts are still available for real understanding and practical use only by an insignificant number of scientists, but those who have mastered them and actually use them, as a rule, reconsider their vulgar and dismissive attitude towards spiritual practices, religion, mythology)

As a result of the development of science, a scientific picture of the world .

The scientific picture of the world differs from other pictures of the world in that it builds its ideas about the world on the basis of cause-and-effect relationships, that is, all phenomena of the surrounding world have their own causes and develop according to certain laws.

The specificity of the scientific picture of the world is determined by the peculiarities of scientific knowledge. Characteristics of science.

 Activities for obtaining new knowledge.

 Self-worth - knowledge for the sake of most knowledge ( our italics, in fact - knowledge for the sake of recognition, positions, awards, funding).

 Rational character, reliance on logic and evidence.

 Creation of holistic, systemic knowledge.

 Provisions of science required for all people ( italics ours, the provisions of religion in the Middle Ages were also considered mandatory).

 Reliance on the experimental method.

Distinguish between general and special paintings peace.

Special scientific pictures of the world represent the subjects of each individual science (physics, biology, social sciences, etc.). The general scientific picture of the world presents the most important system-structural characteristics subject area scientific knowledge as a whole.

General the scientific picture of the world is a special form of theoretical knowledge. It integrates the most important achievements of natural, humanitarian and technical sciences. These are, for example, ideas about quarks ( italics ours, it turns out that quarks, never separated from elementary particles by anyone and even supposed to be fundamentally inseparable, are “the most important achievement”!) and synergetic processes, about genes, ecosystems and the biosphere, about society as an integral system, etc. Initially, they develop as fundamental ideas and representations of the relevant disciplines, and then they are included in the general scientific picture of the world.

So what does the modern picture of the world look like?

The modern picture of the world is created on the basis of classical, non-classical and post-non-classical pictures, intricately intertwined and occupying different levels, in accordance with the degree of knowledge of certain areas.

A new picture of the world is just being formed, it still has to acquire a universal language adequate to Nature. I. Tamm said that our first task is to learn to listen to nature in order to understand its language. The picture of the world drawn by modern natural science is unusually complex and at the same time simple. Its complexity lies in the fact that it can confuse a person who is used to thinking in classical concepts with their visual interpretation of phenomena and processes occurring in nature. From this point of view, modern ideas about the world look somewhat “crazy”. But, nevertheless, modern natural science shows that everything that is not prohibited by its laws is realized in nature, no matter how crazy and incredible it may seem. At the same time, the modern picture of the world is quite simple and harmonious, since not so many principles and hypotheses are required to understand it. These qualities are given to it by such leading principles for the construction and organization of modern scientific knowledge as systemicity, global evolutionism, self-organization and historicity.

Consistency reflects the reproduction by science of the fact that the Universe appears to us as the largest system known to us, consisting of a huge variety of subsystems of various levels of complexity and order. The systemic effect consists in the appearance of new properties in the system, which arise due to the interaction of its elements with each other. Its other most important property is hierarchy and subordination, i.e. sequential inclusion of systems of lower levels into systems of higher levels, which reflects their fundamental unity, since each element of the system is connected with all other elements and subsystems. It is this fundamentally unified character that Nature demonstrates to us. Modern natural science is organized in a similar way. At present, it can be argued that almost the entire modern picture of the world is permeated and transformed by physics and chemistry. Moreover, it includes an observer, on whose presence the observed picture of the world depends.

Global evolutionism means the recognition of the fact that the Universe has an evolutionary character - the Universe and everything that exists in it is constantly developing and evolving, i.e. evolutionary, irreversible processes underlie everything that exists. This testifies to the fundamental unity of the world, each component part of which is a historical consequence of the evolutionary process started by the Big Bang. The idea of ​​global evolutionism also makes it possible to study all the processes taking place in the world from a unified point of view as components of the general world development process. Therefore, the main object of study of natural science becomes a single indivisible self-organizing Universe, the development of which is determined by the universal and practically unchanged laws of Nature.

self-organization- this is the ability of matter to self-complication and the creation of more and more ordered structures in the course of evolution. Apparently, the formation of more and more complex structures of the most diverse nature occurs according to a single mechanism, which is universal for systems of all levels.

Historicity consists in recognizing the fundamental incompleteness of the real scientific picture of the world. Indeed, the development of society, the change in its value orientations, the awareness of the importance of studying the uniqueness of the entire set of natural systems, in which man is included as an integral part, will continuously change the strategy of scientific research and our attitude to the world, because the whole world around us is in a state of constant and irreversible historical development.

One of the main features of the modern picture of the world is its abstract character and lack of visibility especially at the fundamental level. The latter is due to the fact that at this level we learn the world not with the help of feelings, but using a variety of instruments and devices. At the same time, we cannot fundamentally ignore the physical processes by which we obtain information about the objects under study. As a result, it turned out that we cannot speak of an objective reality that exists independently of us, as such. Only physical reality is available to us as a part of objective reality, which we know with the help of experience and our consciousness, i.e. facts and figures obtained with the help of instruments. When deepening and refining the system scientific concepts we are forced to move further and further away from sensory perceptions and from the concepts that arose on their basis.

The data of modern natural science are increasingly confirming that the real world is infinitely diverse. The deeper we penetrate into the secrets of the structure of the Universe, the more diverse and subtle connections we find.

Let us briefly formulate those features that form the basis of the modern natural-scientific picture of the world.

. Space and time in the modern picture of the world

Let us briefly summarize how and why our seemingly obvious and intuitive ideas about space and time have changed and developed from a physical point of view.

Already in the ancient world, the first materialistic ideas about space and time were developed. In the future, they went through a difficult path of development, especially in the twentieth century. The special theory of relativity has established an inseparable connection between space and time, and the general theory of relativity has shown the dependence of this unity on the properties of matter. With the discovery of the expansion of the Universe and the prediction of black holes, the understanding came that there are states of matter in the Universe, in which the properties of space and time should be radically different from those familiar to us in earthly conditions.

Time is often compared to a river. The eternal river of time flows by itself strictly evenly. “Time flows” - this is our sense of time, and all events are involved in this flow. The experience of mankind has shown that the flow of time is immutable: it can neither be accelerated, nor slowed down, nor reversed. It seems to be independent of events and appears as an independent duration. This is how the concept of absolute time arose, which, along with absolute space, where the movement of all bodies takes place, forms the basis of classical physics.

Newton believed that absolute, true, mathematical time, taken by itself without regard to any body, flows uniformly and evenly. The general picture of the world drawn by Newton can be briefly expressed as follows: in an infinite and absolute unchanging space, the movement of the worlds occurs over time. It can be very complex, the processes on celestial bodies are diverse, but this does not affect the space - the “scene” in any way, where the drama of the events of the Universe unfolds in unchanging time. Therefore, neither space nor time can have boundaries, or, figuratively speaking, the river of time has no source (beginning). Otherwise, it would violate the principle of the immutability of time and would mean the "creation" of the Universe. It should be noted that the thesis about the infinity of the world was already proven by the materialist philosophers of Ancient Greece.

In the Newtonian picture, there was no question either about the structure of time and space, or about their properties. In addition to duration and length, they had no other properties. In this picture of the world, such concepts as “now”, “earlier” and “later” were absolutely obvious and understandable. The course of the earth's clock will not change if it is transferred to any cosmic body, and the events that occurred with the same clock reading anywhere must be considered synchronous for the entire Universe. Therefore, one clock can be used to establish an unambiguous chronology. However, as soon as the clock moves away at ever greater distances L, difficulties arise due to the fact that the speed of light c, although large, is finite. Indeed, if we observe distant clocks, for example, through a telescope, we will notice that they lag behind by L/c. This reflects the fact that there is simply no “single global time stream”.

Special relativity has revealed yet another paradox. When studying movement at speeds comparable to the speed of light, it turned out that the river of time is not as simple as previously thought. This theory showed that the concepts "now", "later" and "earlier" have a simple meaning only for events that occur close to each other. When the compared events occur far away, these concepts are unambiguous only if the signal traveling at the speed of light managed to get from the place of one event to the place where another happened. If this is not the case, then the relation “earlier” - “later” is ambiguous and depends on the state of motion of the observer. What was “before” for one observer may be “later” for another. Such events cannot influence each other, i.e. cannot be causally related. This is due to the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is always constant. It does not depend on the motion of the observer and is extremely large. Nothing in nature can move faster than light. Even more surprising was the fact that the flow of time depends on the speed of the body, i.e. a second on a moving clock becomes “longer” than on a stationary one. Time flows the slower, the faster the body moves relative to the observer. This fact has been reliably measured both in experiments with elementary particles and in direct experiments with clocks on a flying plane. Thus, the properties of time only seemed to be unchanged. The relativistic theory has established an inseparable connection between time and space. Changes in the temporal properties of processes are always associated with changes in spatial properties.

The concept of time was further developed in the general theory of relativity, which showed that the gravitational field influences the rate of time. The stronger gravity, the slower time flows compared to its flow away from gravitating bodies, i.e. time depends on the properties of moving matter. Observed from the outside, time on the planet flows the slower, the more massive and dense it is. This effect is absolute. Thus, time is locally inhomogeneous and its course can be influenced. However, the observed effect is usually small.

Now the river of time rather seems to flow not everywhere in the same way and majestically: fast in narrowings, slowly on the reaches, broken into many branches and streams with different flow rates depending on the conditions.

The theory of relativity confirmed the philosophical idea, according to which time is devoid of independent physical reality and, together with space, is only a necessary means of observation and knowledge of the surrounding world by rational beings. Thus, the concept of absolute time as a single stream, flowing uniformly regardless of the observer, was destroyed. There is no absolute time as an entity torn off from matter, but there is an absolute speed of any change and even an absolute age of the universe, calculated by scientists. The speed of light remains constant even in non-uniform time.

Further changes in the concepts of time and space occurred in connection with the discovery of black holes and the theory of the expansion of the Universe. It turned out that in the singularity, space and time cease to exist in the usual sense of the word. The Singularity is where the classical concept of space and time breaks down, as do all the known laws of physics. In the singularity, the properties of time change drastically and acquire quantum features. As one of the most famous physicists of our time, S. Hawking, figuratively wrote: “... the continuous flow of time consists of an unobservable truly discrete process, like a continuous flow of sand in an hourglass viewed from a distance, although this flow consists of discrete grains of sand - the river of time is split here into indivisible drops...” (Hawking, 1990).

But one cannot assume that the singularity is the boundary of time, beyond which the existence of matter occurs already outside of time. It's just that here the space-time forms of the existence of matter acquire a completely unusual character, and many familiar concepts sometimes become meaningless. However, when trying to imagine what it is, we find ourselves in a difficult position due to the peculiarities of our thinking and language. “Here, a psychological barrier arises in front of us, connected with the fact that we do not know how to perceive the concepts of space and time at this stage, when they did not yet exist in our traditional understanding. At the same time, I get the feeling that I suddenly fell into a thick fog, in which objects lose their usual outlines ”(B. Lovell).

The nature of the laws of nature in the singularity is still only guessed at. This is the cutting edge of modern science, and much here will be further refined. Time and space acquire completely different properties in the singularity. They can be quantum, they can have a complex topological structure, and so on. But at present, it is not possible to understand this in detail, not only because it is very difficult, but also because specialists themselves do not know very well what all this can mean, thereby emphasizing that visual intuitive ideas about time and space as an unchanging the durations of all things are correct only under certain conditions. In the transition to other conditions, our ideas about them must also be substantially changed.

. Field and substance, interaction

Formed within the framework of the electromagnetic picture, the concepts of field and matter were further developed in the modern picture of the world, where the content of these concepts was significantly deepened and enriched. Instead of two types of fields, as in the electromagnetic picture of the world, four are now considered, while the electromagnetic and weak interactions have been described by a unified theory of electroweak interactions. All four fields in corpuscular language are interpreted as fundamental bosons (13 bosons in total). Every object of nature is complex education, i.e. has a structure (consists of any parts). Matter is made up of molecules, molecules are made up of atoms, atoms are made up of electrons and nuclei. Atomic nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons (nucleons), which in turn are made up of quarks and antiquarks. The latter by themselves - in a free state, do not exist and do not have any separate parts, like electrons and positrons. But on modern ideas they can potentially contain entire closed worlds with their own internal structure. Ultimately, matter consists of fundamental fermions - six leptons and six quarks (not counting antileptons and antiquarks).

In the modern picture of the world, the main material object is the omnipresent quantum field, its transition from one state to another changes the number of particles. There is no longer an impenetrable boundary between matter and field. At the level of elementary particles, mutual transformations of the field and matter are constantly taking place.

According to modern views interaction of any kind has its physical mediator. Such an idea is based on the fact that the speed of transmission of influence is limited by a fundamental limit - the speed of light. Therefore, attraction or repulsion is transmitted through a vacuum. Simplified modern model the interaction process can be represented as follows. The fermion charge creates a field around the particle, which generates the boson particles inherent in it. By its nature, this field is close to the state that physicists attribute to vacuum. We can say that the charge perturbs the vacuum, and this perturbation is transmitted with damping over a certain distance. Field particles are virtual - they exist for a very short time and are not observed in the experiment. Two particles, once within the range of their charges, begin to exchange virtual particles: one particle emits a boson and immediately absorbs an identical boson emitted by another particle with which it interacts. The exchange of bosons creates the effect of attraction or repulsion between the interacting particles. Thus, each particle participating in one of the fundamental interactions has its own bosonic particle that carries this interaction. Each fundamental interaction has its own carriers-bosons. For gravitation these are gravitons, for electromagnetic interactions - photons, strong interaction is provided by gluons, weak - by three heavy bosons. These four types of interactions underlie all other known forms of motion of matter. Moreover, there are reasons to believe that all fundamental interactions are not independent, but can be described within the framework of a single theory, which is called superunification. This is another proof of the unity and integrity of nature.

. Particle Interchanges

Interconvertibility is a characteristic feature of subatomic particles. The electromagnetic picture of the world was characterized by stability; not without reason it is based on stable particles - electron, positron and photon. But stable elementary particles are the exception, and instability is the rule. Almost all elementary particles are unstable - they spontaneously (spontaneously) decay and turn into other particles. Mutual transformations also occur during particle collisions. For example, let's show the possible transformations in the collision of two protons at different (increasing) energy levels:

p + p → p + n + π+, p + p → p +Λ0 + K+, p + p → p +Σ+ + K0, p + p → n +Λ0 + K+ + π+, p + p → p +Θ0 + K0 + K+, p + p → p + p + p +¯p.

Here p¯ is an antiproton.

We emphasize that in collisions, in reality, it is not the splitting of particles that occurs, but the birth of new particles; they are born due to the energy of colliding particles. In this case, not any transformations of particles are possible. The ways in which particles are transformed during collisions obey certain laws that can be used to describe the world of subatomic particles. In the world of elementary particles, there is a rule: everything is allowed that is not prohibited by conservation laws. The latter play the role of prohibition rules regulating the interconversions of particles. First of all, these are the laws of conservation of energy, momentum and electric charge. These three laws explain the stability of the electron. It follows from the law of conservation of energy and momentum that the total mass of the decay products is less than the rest mass of the decaying particle. There are many specific “charges”, the conservation of which is also regulated by the interconversions of particles: baryon charge, parity (space, time and charge), strangeness, charm, etc. Some of them are not conserved in weak interactions. Conservation laws are associated with symmetry, which, according to many physicists, is a reflection of the harmony of the fundamental laws of nature. Apparently, it was not in vain that ancient philosophers considered symmetry as the embodiment of beauty, harmony and perfection. You can even say that symmetry in unity with asymmetry rule the world.

Quantum theory has shown that matter is constantly in motion, not remaining at rest even for a moment. This speaks of the fundamental mobility of matter, its dynamism. Matter cannot exist without movement and becoming. The particles of the subatomic world are active not because they move very fast, but because they are processes in themselves.

Therefore, they say that matter has a dynamic nature, and the constituent parts of the atom, subatomic particles, exist not in the form of independent units, but in the form integral components inextricable network of interactions. These interactions are fueled by an endless flow of energy, manifested in the exchange of particles, the dynamic alternation of the stages of creation and destruction, as well as the incessant changes in energy structures. As a result of interactions, stable units are formed, of which material bodies are composed. These units also oscillate rhythmically. All subatomic particles are relativistic in nature, and their properties cannot be understood outside of their interactions. All of them are inextricably linked with the space around them, and cannot be considered in isolation from it. On the one hand, particles have an impact on space, on the other hand, they are not independent particles, but rather clumps of the field penetrating space. The study of subatomic particles and their interactions reveals to our eyes not a world of chaos, but a highly ordered world, despite the fact that rhythm, movement and incessant change reign supreme in this world.

The dynamic nature of the universe is manifested not only at the level of the infinitely small, but also in the study of astronomical phenomena. Powerful telescopes help scientists monitor the constant movement of matter in space. Rotating clouds of hydrogen gas thicken, condense and gradually turn into stars. At the same time, their temperature rises greatly, they begin to glow. Over time, the hydrogen fuel burns out, stars grow in size, expand, then shrink and end their lives in gravitational collapse, while some of them turn into black holes. All these processes take place in different parts of the expanding universe. Thus, the whole Universe is involved in an endless process of movement, or, in the words of Eastern philosophers, in a constant cosmic dance of energy.

. Probability in the modern picture of the world

The mechanical and electromagnetic pictures of the world are based on dynamic patterns. Probability is allowed there only in connection with the incompleteness of our knowledge, implying that with the growth of knowledge and the refinement of details, probabilistic laws will give way to dynamic ones. In the modern picture of the world, the situation is fundamentally different - here the probabilistic regularities are fundamental, irreducible to dynamic ones. It is impossible to predict exactly what kind of transformation of particles will take place, one can only speak about the probability of this or that transformation; it is impossible to predict the moment of particle decay, etc. But this does not mean that atomic phenomena proceed in a completely arbitrary manner. The behavior of any part of the whole is determined by its numerous connections with the latter, and since we, as a rule, do not know about these connections, we have to move from classical concepts of causality to ideas of statistical causality.

The laws of atomic physics have the nature of statistical regularities, according to which the probability of atomic phenomena is determined by the dynamics of the entire system. If in classical physics the properties and behavior of the whole are determined by the properties and behavior of its individual parts, then in quantum physics everything is completely different: the behavior of the parts of the whole is determined by the whole itself. In the modern picture of the world, chance has become a fundamentally important attribute; it appears here in a dialectical relationship with necessity, which predetermines the fundamental nature of probabilistic laws. Randomness and uncertainty are at the heart of the nature of things, so the language of probability has become the norm in describing physical laws. The dominance of probability in the modern picture of the world emphasizes its dialectic, and stochasticity and uncertainty are important attributes of modern rationalism.

. physical vacuum

Fundamental bosons represent excitations of force fields. When all fields are in the ground (unexcited) state, then they say that this is the physical vacuum. In the old pictures of the world, the vacuum was considered simply as emptiness. In the modern one, this is not a void in the usual sense, but the basic state of physical fields, the vacuum is “filled” with virtual particles. The concept of a “virtual particle” is closely related to the uncertainty relation for energy and time. It is fundamentally different from an ordinary particle that can be observed in the experiment.

A virtual particle exists for such a short time ∆t that the energy ∆E = ~/∆t determined by the uncertainty relation turns out to be sufficient for the ''creation'' of a mass equal to the mass of the virtual particle. These particles appear on their own and immediately disappear, it is believed that they do not require energy. According to one of the physicists, the virtual particle behaves like a fraudulent cashier who regularly manages to return the money taken from the cash register before it is noticed. In physics, we do not so rarely meet with something that really exists, but does not manifest itself until the case. For example, an atom in its ground state does not emit radiation. This means that if it is not acted upon, it will remain unobservable. It is said that virtual particles are unobservable. But they are unobservable until they are acted upon in some way. When they collide with real particles that have the corresponding energy, then real particles are born, i.e. virtual particles turn into real ones.

The physical vacuum is a space in which virtual particles are born and destroyed. In this sense, the physical vacuum has a certain energy corresponding to the energy of the ground state, which is constantly redistributed between virtual particles. But we cannot use the energy of the vacuum, because this is the lowest energy state of the fields, corresponding to the lowest energy (it cannot be less). In the presence of external source energy, excited states of fields can be realized - then ordinary particles will be observed. From this point of view, an ordinary electron now seems to be surrounded by a "cloud" or "coat" of virtual photons. An ordinary photon moves "accompanied" by virtual electron-positron pairs. Scattering of an electron by an electron can be considered as an exchange of virtual photons. In the same way, each nucleon is surrounded by clouds of mesons, which exist for a very short time.

Under some circumstances, virtual mesons can turn into real nucleons. Virtual particles spontaneously arise from the void and dissolve into it again, even if there are no other particles nearby that can participate in strong interactions. This also testifies to the inseparable unity of matter and empty space. Vacuum contains countless randomly appearing and disappearing particles. The relationship between virtual particles and vacuum is dynamic in nature; figuratively speaking, the vacuum is a “living void” in the full sense of the word; endless rhythms of births and destructions originate in its pulsations.

Experiments show that virtual particles in a vacuum quite realistically affect real objects, for example, elementary particles. Physicists know that individual virtual vacuum particles cannot be detected, but experience notices their total effect on ordinary particles. All this is consistent with the principle of observability.

Many physicists consider the discovery of the dynamic essence of vacuum one of the most important achievements of modern physics. From the empty receptacle of all physical phenomena, the void has become a dynamic entity of great importance. Physical vacuum is directly involved in the formation of qualitative and quantitative properties of physical objects. Properties such as spin, mass, and charge manifest themselves precisely when interacting with vacuum. Therefore, any physical object is currently considered as a moment, an element of the cosmic evolution of the Universe, and vacuum is considered the world material background. Modern physics demonstrates that at the level of the microworld, material bodies do not have their own essence, they are inextricably linked with their environment: their properties can only be perceived in terms of their effects on the environment. Thus, the inseparable unity of the universe is manifested not only in the infinitely small world, but also in the super-large world - this fact is recognized in modern physics and cosmology.

Unlike previous pictures of the world, the modern natural-science picture considers the world at a much deeper, more fundamental level. The atomistic concept was present in all previous pictures of the world, but only in the 20th century. managed to create a theory of the atom, which made it possible to explain the periodic system of elements, the formation of a chemical bond, etc. The modern picture explained the world of micro-phenomena, explored the unusual properties of micro-objects and radically influenced our ideas that had been developed over the centuries, forced them to radically revise them and decisively break with some traditional views and approaches.

All previous pictures of the world suffered from metaphysics; they proceeded from a clear distinction between all the studied entities, stability, and static character. At first, the role of mechanical movements was exaggerated, everything was reduced to the laws of mechanics, then to electromagnetism. The modern picture of the world has broken with this orientation. It is based on mutual transformations, a game of chance, a variety of phenomena. Based on probabilistic laws, the modern picture of the world is dialectical; it reflects dialectically contradictory reality much more accurately than previous paintings.

Previously, matter, field and vacuum were considered separately. In the modern picture of the world, matter, like the field, consists of elementary particles that interact with each other, mutually transform. Vacuum "turned" into one of the varieties of matter and "consists" of virtual particles interacting with each other and with ordinary particles. Thus, the boundary between matter, field and vacuum disappears. At a fundamental level, all the facets in nature really turn out to be conditional.

In the modern picture of the world, physics is closely combined with other natural sciences - it actually merges with chemistry and acts in close union with biology; It is not for nothing that this picture of the world is called natural-scientific. It is characterized by the erasure of all and all facets. Here, space and time act as a single space-time continuum, mass and energy are interconnected, wave and corpuscular motion are combined and form a single object, matter and field are mutually transformed. The boundaries between traditional sections within physics itself are disappearing, and seemingly distant disciplines such as elementary particle physics and astrophysics turn out to be so connected that many talk about a revolution in cosmology.

The world in which we live consists of multi-scale open systems, the development of which is subject to common laws. At the same time, it has its own history, in general terms known to modern science, starting from the Big Bang. Science knows not only the “dates”, but also in many respects the very mechanisms of the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present day. Brief chronology

20 billion years ago Big Bang

3 minutes later Formation of the material basis of the Universe

A few hundred years later The appearance of atoms (light elements)

19-17 billion years ago Formation of structures of different scales (galaxies)

15 billion years ago The appearance of first-generation stars, the formation of heavy atoms

5 billion years ago Birth of the Sun

4.6 billion years ago Formation of the Earth

3.8 billion years ago Origin of life

450 million years ago Plants appeared

150 million years ago The appearance of mammals

2 million years ago Beginning of anthropogenesis

the most important events are shown in Table 9.1 (taken from the book). Here we paid attention primarily to the data of physics and cosmology, because it is these fundamental sciences that form the general contours of the scientific picture of the world.

Change in natural science tradition

Reason is the ability to see the connection between the general and the particular.

Achievements in natural science, and above all in physics, once convinced mankind that the world around us can be explained and predicted its development, abstracting from God and man. Laplacian determinism made a person an outside observer, a separate humanities knowledge was created for him. As a result, all previous pictures of the world were created, as it were, from the outside: the researcher studied the world around him detachedly, out of touch with himself, in full confidence that it was possible to investigate phenomena without disturbing their flow. N. Moiseev writes: “In the science of the past, with its desire for transparent and clear schemes, with its deep conviction that the world is basically quite simple, a person has turned into an outside observer studying the world “from the outside”. A strange contradiction arose - a person still exists, but exists, as it were, on his own. And space, nature - also by themselves. And they united, if it can be called an association, only on the basis of religious beliefs.”

(Moiseev, 1988.)

In the process of creating a modern picture of the world, this tradition is decisively broken. It is replaced by a fundamentally different approach to the study of nature; now the scientific picture of the world is no longer created “from the outside”, but “from the inside”, the researcher himself becomes an integral part of the picture he creates. W. Heisenberg said this well: “In the field of view of modern science, first of all, there is a network of relationships between man and nature, those connections by virtue of which we, bodily beings, are a part of nature, depending on its other parts, and by virtue of which we ourselves nature is the subject of our thought and action only together with man. Science no longer occupies the position of only an observer of nature, it is aware of itself as a particular type of interaction between man and nature. The scientific method, reduced to isolation, analytical unification and ordering, ran into its limits. It turned out that its action changes and transforms the object of knowledge, as a result of which the method itself can no longer be removed from the object. As a result, the natural-scientific picture of the world, in essence, ceases to be only natural-scientific.” (Heisenberg, 1987.)

Thus, the knowledge of nature presupposes the presence of a person, and we must clearly realize that, as N. Bohr put it, we are not only spectators of the performance, but at the same time actors in the drama. The need to abandon the existing natural-scientific tradition, when a person moved away from nature and was mentally ready to dissect it in infinite detail, was well aware already 200 years ago by Goethe:

Trying to eavesdrop on life in everything,

Phenomena rush to desensitize,

Forgetting that if they violate

inspiring connection,

There is nothing more to listen to. ("Faust")

Especially brightly a new approach to the study of nature was demonstrated by V. Vernadsky, who created the doctrine of the noosphere - the sphere of Reason - the biosphere, the development of which is purposefully controlled by man. V. Vernadsky considered man as the most important link in the evolution of nature, which is not only influenced by natural processes, but, being the bearer of the mind, is able to purposefully influence these processes. As N. Moiseev notes, “the doctrine of the noosphere turned out to be just the link that made it possible to connect the picture born by modern physics with the general panorama of the development of life - not only biological evolution, but also social progress ... A lot of things are still not clear to us and hidden from our sight. Nevertheless, a grandiose hypothetical picture of the process of self-organization of matter from the Big Bang to the present stage is unfolding before us, when matter recognizes itself, when a mind becomes inherent in it, capable of ensuring its purposeful development. (Moiseev, 1988.)

Modern rationalism

In the XX century. physics rose to the level of science about the foundations of being and its formation in living and inanimate nature. But this does not mean that all forms of the existence of matter are reduced to physical foundations, we are talking about the principles and approaches to modeling and mastering the whole world by a person who himself is a part of it, and is aware of himself as such. We have already noted that the basis of all scientific knowledge is rational thinking. The development of natural science has led to a new understanding of scientific rationality. According to N. Moiseev, they distinguish: classical rationalism, i.e. classical thinking - when a person "asks" questions to Nature, and Nature answers how it works; non-classical (quantum-physical) or modern rationalism - a person asks Nature questions, but the answers already depend not only on how it is arranged, but also on the way these questions are posed (relativity to the means of observation). The third type of rationality breaks the road - post-non-classical or evolutionary-synergetic thinking, when the answers depend both on how the question was asked, and on how Nature is arranged, and what its background is. The very posing of the question by a person depends on the level of his development, his cultural values, which, in fact, are determined by the entire history of civilization.

. classical rationalism

Rationalism is a system of views and judgments about the surrounding world, which is based on the conclusions and logical conclusions of the mind. At the same time, the influence of emotions, intuitive insights, etc. is not excluded. But it is always possible to distinguish a rational way of thinking, rational judgments from irrational ones. The origins of rationalism as a way of thinking lie in ancient times. The whole system of ancient thinking was rationalistic. The birth of the modern scientific method is associated with the revolution of Copernicus-Galileo-Newton. During this period, the views that had been established since antiquity underwent a radical breakdown, and the concept of modern science was formed. It is from here that the scientific method of forming statements about the nature of relationships in the surrounding world was born, which is based on chains of logical conclusions and empirical material. As a result, a way of thinking was formed, which is now called classical rationalism. Within its framework, not only the scientific method was established, but also a holistic worldview - a kind of holistic picture of the universe and the processes that take place in it. It was based on the idea of ​​the Universe that arose after the revolution of Copernicus-Galileo-Newton. After complex scheme Ptolemy's Universe appeared in its amazing simplicity, Newton's laws turned out to be simple and understandable. New views explained why things happen this way and not otherwise. But over time, this picture has become more complicated.

In the 19th century the world has already appeared before people as a kind of complex mechanism, which was once once launched by someone and which operates according to quite definite, once and for all outlined and cognizable laws. As a result, a belief in the unlimitedness of knowledge arose, which was based on the successes of science. But in this picture there was no place for the man himself. In it, he was only an observer, not able to influence the always definite course of events, but able to register the events taking place, to establish connections between phenomena, in other words, to learn the laws that govern this mechanism and, thus, to predict the occurrence of certain events, remaining an outside observer of everything that happens in the universe. Thus, the man of the Enlightenment is just an outside observer of what is happening in the universe. For comparison, let us recall that in ancient Greece a person was equated with the gods, he was able to interfere in the events taking place around him.

But a person is not just an observer, he is able to cognize the Truth and put it at the service of himself, predicting the course of events. It was within the framework of rationalism that the idea of ​​the Absolute Truth arose, i.e. about what is actually - that does not depend on a person. The conviction in the existence of the Absolute Truth allowed F. Bacon to formulate the famous thesis about the conquest of Nature: a person needs knowledge in order to put the forces of Nature at his service. Man is not able to change the laws of Nature, but he can force them to serve humanity. Thus, science has a goal - to multiply human strength. Nature now appears as an inexhaustible reservoir designed to satisfy his boundlessly growing needs. Science becomes a means of conquering Nature, a source of human activity. This paradigm ultimately brought man to the brink of the abyss.

Classical rationalism established the possibility of knowing the laws of Nature and using them to assert the power of man. At the same time, ideas about prohibitions appeared. It turned out that there are also various limitations that are insurmountable in principle. Such restrictions are, first of all, the law of conservation of energy, which is absolute. Energy can change from one form to another, but it cannot arise from nothing and cannot disappear. This implies the impossibility of creating a perpetual motion machine - these are not technical difficulties, but the prohibition of Nature. Another example is the second law of thermodynamics (the law of non-decreasing entropy). Within the framework of classical rationalism, a person is aware not only of his power, but also of his own limitations. Classical rationalism is the brainchild of European civilization, its roots go back to the ancient world. This is the greatest breakthrough of mankind, which opened the horizons of modern science. Rationalism is a certain way of thinking, whose influence both philosophy and religion have experienced.

Within the framework of rationalism, one of the critical approaches to the study of complex phenomena and systems - reductionism, the essence of which is that, knowing the properties of the individual elements that make up the system, and the features of their interaction, it is possible to predict the properties of the entire system. In other words, the properties of the system are derived from the properties of the elements and the interaction structure and are their consequences. Thus, the study of the properties of a system is reduced to the study of the interaction of its individual elements. This is the basis of reductionism. With this approach, many important problems of natural science have been solved, and it often gives good results. When they say the word "reductionism", they also mean attempts to replace the study of a complex real phenomenon with some greatly simplified model, its visual interpretation. The construction of such a model, simple enough to study its properties and at the same time reflecting certain and important properties for the study of reality, is always an art, and science cannot offer any general recipes. The ideas of reductionism turned out to be very fruitful not only in mechanics and physics, but also in chemistry, biology and other areas of natural science. Classical rationalism and the ideas of reductionism, which reduce the study of complex systems to an analysis of their individual components and the structure of their interactions, represent an important stage in the history of not only science, but the whole of civilization. It is to them that modern natural science owes its main successes in the first place. They were a necessary and inevitable stage in the development of natural science and the history of thought, but, while fruitful in certain areas, these ideas were not universal.

Despite the successes of rationalism and the rapid development of the natural sciences associated with it, rationalism as a way of thinking and the basis of world outlook has not turned into a kind of universal faith. The fact is that in any scientific analysis there are elements of the sensory principle, the researcher's intuition, and the sensory is not always translated into the logical, since part of the information is lost. The observation of nature and the successes of natural science constantly stimulated rationalistic thinking, which, in turn, contributed to the development of natural science. Reality itself (i.e., the surrounding world perceived by a person) gave rise to rational schemes. They gave birth to methods and formed a methodology, which became a tool that made it possible to draw a picture of the world.

The separation of spirit and matter is the weakest point in the concept of classical rationalism. In addition, it led to the fact that in the minds of scientists, the belief that the world around us is simple is deeply rooted: it is simple because such is reality, and any complexity comes from our inability to connect the observed into a simple scheme. It was this simplicity that made it possible to build rational schemes, obtain practically important consequences, explain what was happening, build machines, make life easier for people, and so on. The simplicity of reality, which was studied by natural science, was based on such, it seemed, "obviousness" as ideas about the universality of time and space (time flows everywhere and always the same way, space is homogeneous), etc. Not always these ideas could be explained, but they always seemed simple and understandable, as they say, self-evident and not in need of discussion. Scientists were convinced that these are axioms, once and for all determined, because in reality it happens this way and not otherwise. Classical rationalism was characterized by the paradigm of absolute knowledge, which was affirmed throughout the Enlightenment.

. Modern rationalism

In the twentieth century I had to abandon this simplicity, from what seemed self-evident and understandable, and accept that the world is much more complicated, that everything can be completely different than scientists are used to thinking, based on the reality of the environment, that classical ideas are just private cases of what might actually be.

Russian scientists also made a significant contribution to this. The founder of the Russian school of physiology and psychiatry, I. Sechenov, constantly emphasized that a person can only be known in the unity of his flesh, soul and the Nature that surrounds him. Gradually, in the minds of the scientific community, the idea of ​​the unity of the surrounding world, of the inclusion of man in Nature, that man and Nature are an indissoluble unity was affirmed. A person cannot be thought of only as an observer - he himself is an acting subject of the system. This worldview of Russian philosophical thought is called Russian cosmism.

One of the first who contributed to the destruction of the natural simplicity of the surrounding world was N. Lobachevsky. He discovered that besides the geometry of Euclid, there can be other consistent and logically coherent geometries - non-Euclidean geometries. This discovery meant that the answer to the question, what is the geometry of the real world, is not at all simple, and that it may be different from Euclidean. Experimental physics must answer this question.

At the end of the XIX century. another of the fundamental ideas of classical rationalism was destroyed - the law of addition of velocities. It was also shown that the speed of light does not depend on whether the light signal is directed along the speed of the Earth or against (Michelson-Morley experiments). In order to somehow interpret this, it was necessary to recognize as an axiom the existence of a limiting velocity of propagation of any signal. At the beginning of the XX century. a number of pillars of classical rationalism also collapsed, among which the change in the idea of ​​simultaneity was of particular importance. All this led to the final collapse of the ordinary and the obvious.

But this does not mean the collapse of rationalism. Rationalism has passed into a new form, which is now called non-classical or modern rationalism. He destroyed the apparent simplicity of the surrounding world, led to the collapse of everyday life and evidence. As a result, the picture of the world, beautiful in its simplicity and logic, loses its logic and, most importantly, visibility. The obvious ceases to be not only simply understandable, but sometimes even simply wrong: the obvious becomes improbable. Scientific revolutions 20th century led to the fact that a person is already ready to face new difficulties, new improbability, even more inconsistent with reality and contrary to the usual common sense. But rationalism remains rationalism, since at the heart of the pictures of the world created by man, there remain schemes created by his mind on the basis of empirical data. They remain a rational or logically rigorous interpretation of experimental data. Only modern rationalism acquires a more liberated character. There are fewer prohibitions that this cannot be. But on the other hand, the researcher more often has to think about the meaning of those concepts that until now seemed obvious.

A new understanding of the place of man in Nature began to take shape in the 1920s. with the advent of quantum mechanics. It clearly demonstrated what E. Kant and I. Sechenov had long suspected, namely, the fundamental inseparability of the object of study and the subject studying this object. She explained and showed with specific examples that relying on the hypothesis about the possibility of separating the subject and the object, which seemed obvious, does not carry any knowledge. It turned out that we, people, are also not just spectators, but also participants in the world evolutionary process.

Scientific thinking is very conservative, and the approval of new views, the formation of a new attitude towards scientific knowledge, ideas about truth and new picture World passed in the scientific world slowly and uneasy. However, the old is not completely discarded, not crossed out, the values ​​of classical rationalism still retain their significance for humanity. Therefore, modern rationalism is a new synthesis of acquired knowledge or new empirical generalizations, it is an attempt to expand the traditional understanding and include the schemes of classical rationalism as convenient interpretations, suitable and useful, but only within certain and very limited limits (suitable for solving almost all everyday practice) . However, this extension is absolutely fundamental. It makes you see the world and the person in it in a completely different light. You have to get used to it, and it takes a lot of effort.

Thus, the original system of views on the structure of the surrounding world gradually became more complicated, the initial idea of ​​the simplicity of the picture of the world, its structure, geometry, and ideas that arose during the Enlightenment disappeared. But there was not only complication: much of what previously seemed obvious and mundane turned out to be in fact simply wrong. This was the hardest thing to figure out. Distinguished distinction between matter and energy, between matter and space. They turned out to be related to the nature of the movement.

We must not forget that all individual representations are parts of a single inseparable whole, and our definitions of them are extremely conditional. And the separation of the human observer from the object of study is not at all universal, it is also conditional. This is just a convenient technique that works well in certain conditions, and not a universal method of cognition. The researcher begins to get used to the fact that in nature everything can happen in the most incredible, illogical way, because in reality everything is somehow connected with each other. It is not always clear how, but it is connected. And the person is also immersed in these connections. At the heart of modern rationalism is the statement (or the postulate of consistency, according to N. Moiseev): the Universe, the World are a kind of single system (Universum), all elements of the phenomenon of which are somehow interconnected. Man is an inseparable part of the Universe. This statement does not contradict our experience and our knowledge and is an empirical generalization.

Modern rationalism is qualitatively different from the classical rationalism of the eighteenth century. not only by the fact that instead of the classical ideas of Euclid and Newton, a much more complex vision of the world has come, in which classical ideas are an approximate description of very special cases, mainly related to the macrocosm. The main difference lies in the understanding of the fundamental absence of an external Absolute observer, to whom the Absolute Truth is gradually revealed, as well as the absence of the Absolute Truth itself. From the point of view of modern rationalism, the researcher and the object are connected by indissoluble bonds. This has been experimentally proven in physics and natural science in general. But at the same time, rationalism continues to be rationalism, because logic has been and remains the only means of constructing inferences.