chasing subjects

Classical mechanics turned around the concept of simplicity. The world it described was the result of a set of trajectories which were determined and reversible. In that view, you could isolate a central fact (say universal gravitation) and from there you could rebuild the whole universe. The most important formula in Newton's mechanics was the famous F = m . a. which was the first cause for a universal causal structure. To unfold it, you require positions and velocities, on the one hand, and to know the nature of the dynamic forces on the other. If you had that, in this framework of absolute space-time, and you made explicit the initial conditions, you would be able to predict the set of past and future trajectories. In this world, the subject is secondary, as everything turns around the object. This is, according to some people, the world of the common sense.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), there was going to be another copernican turn in this story, one brought up by Eistein's relativity theory. In this new framework, the concept of space and time as absolute is disposed of. Now, they are relative to the reference structure determined by the subject. That is to say, Einstein adopts for the physics the "copernican turn" Kant (the one in the picture) had introduced for philosophy, which was nothing but the establishment of the subject (not the object) as the center of the world (although for many people this had started with Descartes, already). Actually, Newton's theory had been the subject of critique, precisely because of this conception of absolute space (cf. the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence). This view by Einstein does not involve relativism, though, as all laws remain invariable with the change of structure of reference, and as a result, there are absolute laws of nature regardless of which system the subject is located in, although it is true that there are no privileged structures of references. Reality in this world view is a sum of subjectivities, and therefore, there's no definitive breakdown between subject and object: they keep existing as separated realities, although the center had shifted.

Now, the copernican turn will become more radical in the next step of the story: quantum mechanics. It is there where the Kantian (or Husserl's) philosophy become actual, or postmodern if you want. There's no object (there's no spoon)... Everything is the subject. Quantum mechanics establishes a model where dynamic trajectories are associated to wave functions. That is to say, the world is now a set of particles that behave like waves that behave like particles... The whole system entails a couple of things that are absolutely revolutionary: (i) prediction is impossible, beyond statistical probability, because there are no determined trajectories anymore; (ii) measuring reality transforms reality (this is, roughly, the main consequence of Heisenberg's incertitude principle). Both things say, in essence, not only that the subject has now an absolute priority, but that the subject is the only thing. The consequences of this last step (for now) in the evolution of physics, will have consequences at many levels of our world, from Husserl's phenomenology to Blanchot's or Barthes' literary theories, and many other really interesting ideas that for some reason (specific some) are often discredited under the name of post-modernism (i.e. the after to a world that had established the primacy of the subject over the object, but had left the object there, as some independent reality). In some future post, I may go to explore this other side. For today, however, this has already been too much diversion, and I gotta get back to work on my "dear" topic of deixis and dativity.

To read more on this (from a more academic point of view) you can check this out:
Scientific Revolutions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)