H-Measures and Applications
Luc C. Tartar · 1990
Historians interested in the evolution of Science will probably be very surprised when they will analyse all the strange fashions that have struck the scientific community in the second part of this century. They will certainly be aware of the political orientation of those who had launched many of these fake new ideas and wonder why mathematicians had not been more rational in their behaviour. Will they find another example of political censorship than the one that had suppressed two pages of the introduction of an article where I had described my scientific ideas [1] ? Will everyone agree that it was indeed slanderous that I had thanked there two of my teachers, Laurent Schwartz and Jacques-Louis Lions and that this part should definitely be cut? Had the censors thought that they could suppress the mention of other political facts and avoid me describing them elsewhere [2] ? Historians may wonder at the stupidity of these censors and ponder if they had even understood the meaning of the few lines that they had spared at the beginning: Il y a une difference enorme entre l'etude des singularites d'equations aux derivees partielles (lineaires ou non) et celle de leurs oscillations: c'est la difference entre la physique classique et la physique quantique. In this article I had described my point of view that the study of oscillating solutions of partial differential equations was the key mathematical question to investigate in order to shed some light on the strange rules invented by physicists for explaining natural phenomena. Every specialist of differential equations is aware of the distinction between finite and infinite dimensional effects and it is only the result of an intensive propaganda that so many have adopted a point of view about mechanics which was adequate in the eighteenth century when partial differential equations had not yet found their place and that continuum mechanics and electromagnetism were not even thought of. However, even if all the extensive knowledge about linear partial differential equations contained in the treatise of L. Hormander [3] had been available at the beginning of the century, it would not have helped so much the physicists puzzled as they were by the spectroscopic measurements of light absorbed and emitted in some gases. One cannot blame then those who have invented the strange rules of quantum