The current competition regime that characterizes international science is often presented as a quest for excellence. It diversely affects research in Latin America and research in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This article asks how this competition regime may orient the direction of research in Latin America, and to whose advantage. It is argued that, by relating excellence to quality differently,

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2.5.1 Fluctuating metric 2.5.2 Stochastic electrodynamics 3 ELEMENTS OF ELECTRODYNAMICS 3.1 The free radiation field 3.1.1 Electromagnetic potentials 3.1.2 Normal modes of the field 3.1.3 Hamiltonian of the radiation field Development in terms of plane waves States of circular polarization Canonical representation Transition to the continuum Sums over polarization 3.2 Electrodynamics of the point charge 3.2.1 The Abraham-Lorentz equation of motion 3.2.2 The radiation reaction: a discussion 3.2.3 The need for a cutoff 3.3 Causal version of the Abraham-Lorentz equation 3.4 The extended charge PART II: THEME 4 THE ZEROPOINT RADIATION FIELD 4.1 Discovery and nature of the zeropoint field 4.1.1 The origins of stochastic electrodynamics 4.1.2 The zeropoint field, classical or quantum? 4.1.3 Recovery of atomic stability 4.1.4 Further comments on the zeropoint field 4.2 Properties of the zeropoint field 4.2.1 Density of states and spectral density 4.2.2 Lorentz invariance of the zeropoint field spectrum 4.2.3 Some sequels of the Wien and Stefan-Boltzmann laws 4.2.4 Energy content of the zeropoint field 4.3 Statistical description of the zeropoint field 4.3.1 Two-point correlations 4.3.2 Distributions of random field variables 4.3.3 Statistics of the zeropoint field 4.3.4 Comparison with the second-quantized radiation field 5 THE EQUILIBRIUM RADIATION FIELD 5.1 The Planck distribution 5.1.1 Nonclassical nature of stochastic electrodynamics 5.1.2 Moments ofthe energy distribution

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The present paper reveals (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics as an emergent property of otherwise classical ergodic systems embedded in a stochastic vacuum or zero-point radiation field (zpf). This result provides a theoretical basis for understanding recent numerical experiments in which a statistical analysis of an atomic electron interacting with the zpf furnishes the quantum distribution for the ground state of the H atom. The action of the zpf on matter is essential within the present approach, but it is the ergodic demand what ultimately leads to the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics. The paper thus represents a step forward in the quest for an elucidation of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.