The Roles of Primitive Knowledge, of Language, and of Mathematics in the Physicsal Sciences

Abstract

Of the two path-breaking physical theories of the present century, one, the theory of relativity, started with an analysis of the observations of observers moving with respect to each other and continued by postulating the spacetime coincidence of two objects, that is, their collision, as the phenomenon to be described by the theory. The other path-breaking theory, that of the quanta, did not begin with fundamental philosophical postulates but was led, in the course of its development, to considering the process of observation as the basic event, the outcomes of which the theory should predict. Unfortunately perhaps, the basic events, in terms of which the two theories intend to describe nature, are very different if not contradictory. Nevertheless, the tendency to proceed to increasingly primitive concepts is common to the two theories as it is shared also by mathematics.