0191 -9067/81 /010005-08$02.00/0 Copyright ® 1981 SUNSAT Energy Council THE WORLD AND ENERGY MARC PELEGRIN Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aerospatiales Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches de Toulouse B.P. 4025, 31055 Toulouse Cedex France Does reality exist outside the human brain’s conception of it? A question without an answer, and one that will remain unanswered. Philosophers, as well as mathematicians and physicists, are divided over the thoughts this question evokes in their minds. As for me, a simple engineer, although daily confronted with concrete problems, I would be tempted to say that whoever claims to answer this question is putting forward a postulate that, like all postulates, is unwarranted and unverifiable: man, in his environment, has only models that he himself has created; he can marvel at the excellent performance of these models and consequently use them to predict the evolution of this environment, that is, to a certain measure, the evolution of the world. The recent conquest of space, however, has just pushed back the doubt between reality (what is the meaning of this word?) and the model practically universally accepted by mankind: putting a man on the moon and bringing him back confirms man’s theory of his own environment. It is a sublime confirmation of Newton’s theory and more simply, off = my. Yet the navigation of the great migratory birds, more than this astounding success, forces even farther back the limits of doubt between the model and “reality.” Man’s model is very close, let us say it is tangent, to that of the carrier pigeon or the stork: the proof of this lies in the results of experiments conducted in a planetarium where all celestial configurations, including the one we know, were possible: the migrants fashioned themselves a celestial pattern analogous to our own. In fact, I should say that man’s reconstruction of migratory bird patterns indicates that they use a celestial pattern analogous to his own. This long digression, which I hope you will excuse, shows that one's reality is another’s fiction and vice versa. Therefore, may those who still consider the theme on which our three-day discussions will be based, a fiction, rest assured: this is indeed the place for them; the subject is well worth the trouble. For the philosopher, the energy crisis is an unimportant economic incident. For the economist, it is a harsh reality he was unable to foresee although everything indicated the inevitability of such a crisis . . . But, I must admit, this is very easy to say — after the fact. The evolution of the price of consumer goods and services rendered by industrialized countries and the price of a ton of oil purchased from the Middle East showed such a divergence between 1965 and 1973 that this catastrophe was imminent: in constant francs, a ton of oil delivered to Europe in June 1970 cost 65 francs and in 1973: 306 francs!
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