What if Science Thought? The Relevance of René Thom or Introducing Topology into Today’s Sciences

“To Predict is not to Explain”. Such was the warning of one of 20th-century France’s major thinkers, whose legacy is becoming increasingly inaudible in today’s scientific community: René Thom (Fields Medal 1958). To predict, or the ambition of predictability, requires the (potentially infinite) reduction of the forms of nature into discontinuous, quantifiable elements: primarily, so as to enable the subsequent control of their interactions, within a space, according to a mathematical law.