THE free will was one of the starting points of my writing project,
It was accompanied by the desire to explore what could become of thehumanity in a near future which, however, I will not know in my lifetime. Certainly, the subject is nothing original. Robert A. Heinlein, one of the pioneers in the field, had already outlined a "history of the future" since 1950. We could cite another author that I do not know and who makes projections of the future of man.

For me, the free will opens an almost infinite set of paths that theindividual can borrow, as opposed to what the destiny or theinevitable imposes. I would be stating the obvious by recalling that, as the dead, there destiny is inevitable. What we ignore at every moment of our conscious life, it is the " how " and the " When ".

Let's take a trivial example: the return journey after a day of work. Out of habit, we always follow the same path without even thinking about it. One evening, however, instead of taking the road from the right, we turn left: we have to buy some bread. This change will not prevent us, unless something unforeseen happens, from finishing the evening at home.

What I'm getting at is that we don't choose our Place of birth, nor our parents, nor the Company that shapes us. But we have, to a certain extent, the ability to make our own choices, in other words to take our fate in hand.

THE theme crosses the whole literature, Since "The Iliad" ofHomer, where the gods interfere in business human while leaving to the hero a part of free will, up to more recent works. I could cite "1984" ofOrwell, but I prefer “An unsustainable world” ofIra Levin (1970). This novel describes a perfect world where injections neutralize all will. One day, the hero transgresses the rules of a dystopian government system. By tracing the threads of the established order, he discovers those who maintain thebalance of this world under control. The latter offer him to sit on their table, the one where the planning is done destiny of thehumanity. So, Levin tells the storyhistory ofmen who believe themselves masters of their choice, while they are governed by a invisible and higher power.

THE Foundation cycle ofIsaac Asimov struck me even more. His central concept, there psychohistory, postulates that, if each individual keeps a free will, L'evolution of thehumanity still follows a predetermined path, punctuated byinevitable steps. I would name these steps of the "knots of inevitability". All individual has the free choice to move in theinterweaving of the companies. Yet, Foundation starts from the postulate that thehumanity will undergo crises to predetermined moments by this famous psychohistory that theauthor press one irrefutable scientific approach.

Free will And fate are therefore not necessarily incompatible. If I had to represent these two notions, I would imagine a three-dimensional space, extended by the dimension of time, to which I would add a fifth dimension : that of the sequence of events. I have not yet established whether this dimension East unique Or multiple.

My vision of the universe, which would be reduced to a three-dimensional diagram, would look like a infinite spiral of attached balloons. At the center of each one takes place, in spiral, a line representing the time, connecting each ball to the next by one node. To the surface, THE events appear as shooting stars to light trails all intersecting in the same direction. In the end, these trajectories converge towards specific points : my knots of inevitability.

This idea came to me in my youth, when reading a pocket book of popularization of thehistory of astronomy. I discovered that two scientists had reached the same physical laws to the same era without knowing the works from each other. This was the case of Johannes Kepler, which establishes the laws governing the movement of the planets, and of Godefroy Wendelin, who independently obtained comparable results. Wendelin, a few years later, applied the Kepler's third law to Jupiter's satellites. It does not appear that he had direct knowledge of the works of Kepler when he undertook his calculations, And Kepler, for his part, never mentions Wendelin in his known writings. THE rapprochement between their works was established a posteriori by the historians of science, who found that Wendelin had confirmed, in a manner independent, part of the works of Kepler in a different context.

This type of intellectual coincidence is not uncommon. Thehistory of science is full of these convergence nodes where several spirits, isolated from each other, achieve similar discoveries. Among the most striking examples:

1. Infinitesimal Calculus

• Isaac Newton (England) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Germany) developed differential and integral calculus at the end of the 17th century.
• Each adopts its own notations, and no exchange takes place between them at the time of initial development.

2. The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection

• Charles Darwin (England) and Alfred Russel Wallace (Malaysia/Indonesia) independently arrived at the same theory in the 1850s.
• Wallace sent his manuscript to Darwin without knowing that the latter had been working on it for twenty years.

3. The Telephone

• Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland / USA) and Elisha Gray (USA) each designed a system for transmitting voice by wire in 1876.
• They filed their patents within hours of each other, without any prior contact.