Ever since Democritus of Abdera (460-370 B.c.E.) introduced the concept of atoms in Western thought, later to be elaborated by Epicuros (as transmitted by Diogenes Laertius) and Lucretius, it lay at the basis of materialistic and atheist world views. Therefore, it may be less surprising to know that as late as 1624 in France, the teaching of atomism was a crime punishable by death. Even when atoms had been accepted, after the time of John Dalton (1766-1844), and indeed were considered (...) indispensable by chemists, resistance against them continued among many physicists. Ludwig Boltzmann, who derived the laws of thermodynamics from the hypothetical existence of "atoms" was the foremost advocate of atomism in the nineteenth century, while another Austrian, Ernst Mach, was its most prominent opponent. Einstein’s first articles were entirely within the Boltzmann tradition. As he explained in his autobiography, his work on fluctuations and Brownian motion was undertaken because of his desire to guarantee the existence of atoms of definite finite size. Boltzmann’s statistical methods were also used by Max Planck for the quantum hypothesis of light, so &dquo;both roots of quantum theory, the Planck root and the Einstein root, go back to Boltzmann&dquo; (Boltzmann, 1981). (shrink)

RESUMO: Bergson e Einstein participaram de uma conferência no Collège de France, em Paris, no mês de abril de 1922. Muitos desencontros entre o físico e o filósofo, no que diz respeito à questão do tempo, são já superados, se considerarmos a existência de processos dinâmicos instáveis, mas ainda permanece atual a questão da interioridade do tempo à ciência e, portanto, a possibilidade de retomada da complementaridade entre a ciência e a metafísica, proposta por Bergson, como necessária para a compreensão (...) da complexidade dos problemas contemporâneos. A partir das concepções de intuição em Bergson e Einstein, este artigo explora as dificuldades e as potências do diálogo entre a Física e a Filosofia. ABSTRACT: Bergson and Einstein attended the conference held in Paris at the Collège de France in April 1922. Many disagreements between the physicist and the philosopher with regard to the question of time are overcome if we consider the existence of unstable dynamic processes. However, the question of interiority of time in science still remains, and therefore also the possibility of a resumption of the complementarity between science and metaphysics - something Bergson proposed as necessary for understanding the complexity of contemporary problems. Based on the concepts of intuition in Bergson and Einstein, this article explores the difficulties of, and the potentials for, the dialogue between physics and philosophy. (shrink)