Beyond Archimedean Space-Time Structure

It took two millennia after Euclid and until in the early 1880s, when we went beyond the ancient axiom of parallels, and inaugurated geometries of curved spaces. In less than one more century, General Relativity followed. At present, physical thinking is still beheld by the yet deeper and equally ancient Archimedean assumption. In view of that, it is argued with some rather easily accessible mathematical support that Theoretical Physics may at last venture into the non-Archimedean realms. In this introductory paper we stress two fundamental consequences of the non-Archimedean approach to Theoretical Physics: one of them for quantum theory and another for relativity theory. From the non-Archimedean viewpoint, the assumption of the existence of minimal quanta of light (of the fixed frequency) is an artifact of the present Archimedean mathematical basis of quantum mechanics. In the same way the assumption of the existence of the maximal velocity, the velocity of light, is a feature of the real space-time structure which is fundamentally Archimedean. Both these assumptions are not justified in corresponding non-Archimedean models.