Preface

Abstract

The 12th international symposium, The Vigier Centenary - 3rd Regime Natural Science Towards a Physics of The Observer: Honoring Noted Mathematical Physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier, 20-23 September 2021, was postponed three times due to travel restrictions imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic. The conference was originally to be held in historic Liege, Belgium, but ended up with a Virtual Meeting venue at the Noetic Advanced Studies Institute, Escalante Desert Research Facility, Beryl, Utah, USA. This symposium – the Centenary of J-P Vigier’s birth (January 16, 1920 Paris, France to May 4, 2004, Paris, France) marks the final conference in the series running for 27-years.Vigier was often called ‘Le Heretique du Physique’ in the French media. Most of his work – over 400 papers, chapters and books relates to cutting-edge extensions or alternative interpretations to ‘mainstream physics’ such as photon mass, or the de Broglie-Bohm-Vigier Causal-Stochastic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics for example.Einstein asked Vigier to become his assistant at Princeton’s Advanced Studies Institute; but since Vigier was ‘politically involved’ with the French in Vietnam the US government would not allow him entry to the USA at that time. Thus, he became Nobelist Louis de Broglie’s assistant instead.The Vigier conference began in 1995, with the first two conferences held at York University in Toronto, Canada. It was one of a handful of such Avant-garde series ‘allowing’ physicists to color outside-the-box; including CASYS, PIRT and ANPA, which emerged in the last decades of the 20th-century to cover areas of fundamental physics which at that time had no obvious outlet for discussion. These are vital areas for discussion now, but at the time, particle physics was thought solved by string theory and supersymmetry, and gravity by various approaches to quantizing general relativity.A surprise is likely to occur with the looming experimental awakening of the imminent paradigm shift to 3rd regime Natural Science; current thinking, for all practical purposes, insists that gravity must be quantized. This arises from the belief that the quantum mechanical stochastic foam is an impenetrable basement of reality. String theory (now a 12D M-theory), an evolution of 5D Kaluza-Klein theory, has been developed as the putative theory of quantum gravity; but there is no a priori reason that gravity must be quantized. The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and cosmology, while known to be incomplete, still myopically governs ‘allowed’ research avenues.