Only fragments of Epicurus’ writings remain, at least up to now. In conclusion of Book II, Epicurus said, “Thus we have proven that there are simulacra; that it turns out that their generation occurs at the speed of thought; and also that they possess movements of unsurpassable speed.” Read carefully: unsurpassable speed, speed of thought, and simulacra. Thousands of years after Epicurus, the postulate of the absolute speed of light for the world of visible matter was posited and established, yet the whole aspect of subtle matter is missing.

So what is the speed of thought, feelings, emotions, and other “developed products”? Does thought, subtle matter, move faster than light? When a man and a woman look at each other and feel attracted to each other, what exchanges have taken place and at what speed? When ideas form in your brain and then become words, at what speed? When you speak and think several steps ahead while still having time for side thoughts, at what speed? The world of subtle matter has its own physics and laws. Epicurus brought together the physics of the visible and the subtle. And since then… nothing, forgotten.

Open your eyes and all your faculties. ‘For someone who is in their right mind must make a preliminary distinction: when they argue about the World and what appears to us in the world, they are arguing about a certain image that comes from certain accidental properties of things, properties transmitted, through vision, to a process of thought or a process of memory.’ There is an image of the world of visible matter and an image of the world of subtle matter. Both are needed to try to understand the World. There are the senses of visible matter and those of subtle matter. Both interact and in fact the notion of causality cannot be complete without both unless one invents the notion of chance, probability, to compensate for the lack of rational and logical explanation. Nature does not know chance, man invented it to hide his ignorance.

Philippe