Atomic Time and Quantum Literacy: Michel Serres's Apologia for Science

Michel Serres is well known as a strong advocate of science becoming a way of life. As a contribution to the growing literature seeking to address the Anthropocene, this article develops how we could relate the strong and underlying motif of quantum optics that is at work throughout Serres's oeuvre, and the implications Serres exposes in terms of a natural philosophy (Bühlmann 2020), through what the author sees as the quantum literacy of a world poetics of the current present. Such a literacy is literacy for which the constitutive relation for theoretical thought—between light, vision, and speculation—turns into an intellectual and yet material and physical power. Such a literacy would be an impersonal kind of literacy, a literacy for which poetics, mathematics, and the sciences are inextricably linked in the domain of what is here called—in distinction to atom time—atomic time.