The contemporary image of the world. The crisis of classical physics. In Arka, No 1, 1947, pp. 2-7.

The article by Viktor Ber (one of the pseudonyms of Viktor Petrov) consists of three parts: 1) Classical physics and its foundations; 2) What can contemporary physics contribute to our knowledge of the world? 3) The problem of space. The material presents the author's reflections on his contemporary physics (which he calls ‘modern’) as a phenomenon that is quite symptomatic of the first half of the twentieth century - the same product of anti-naturalistic and anti-rationalistic trends of the time as art, political and social movements, etc. The author underlines his comparison of these different spheres with the following thesis: ‘Modern physics is not the physics of the objectively given natural world: it is the physics of technically altered processes, just as Picasso's portraits are not nature perceived in its direct, immediate objective givenness’ (p. 7). According to the author, the desire for decomposition, whether of the atom in physics or of real things in Picasso's paintings, is a manifestation of the ‘explosive forces of the revolutionary era’, and the crisis of classical physics is a manifestation of the general crisis experienced by the time that the author witnessed.

Vlada Davidenko