Abstract
I believe I should start with a kind of opening statement which will make the purpose of this paper clear and its presentation easier to follow. In the first place, it is not going to be a paper on philosophy or methodology of science — at least not in its usual, orthodox sense — but rather a philosophical comment on one particularly significant trend in twentieth-century physics. You may call it an essay in ‘philosophy of nature’, if we understand the term properly. I am fully aware of how unpopular and discredited this term has become; it is now rare to find institutions which still offer courses in ‘philosophy of nature’. It really takes courage to do so and I commend my colleague Robert Cohen for having introduced courses of this kind in the Boston University curriculum. It is not difficult to trace the causes of this unpopularity and I have analyzed them in some of my previous writings. In the first place, the term itself is a translation of the German Naturphilosophie coined by the German idealists in the post-Kantian period, and a lingering disappointment with their speculative and arbitrary constructions comes immediately to mind as soon as the word is mentioned. In truth, we could hardly find another period in which the contrast between sterile and a priori speculations such as those of Schelling and Hegel and the genuine progress in the empirical sciences were more striking; we have only to consider the development of geology, biology, chemistry and of the physics of electricity and magnetism during the same period.
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Notes
Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1928); Kurt Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton (Hamburg and Leipzig: Voss, 1890); Emile Meyerson, De l’explication dans les sciences (Paris: Payot, 1921); Federigo Enriques, Le dottrine di Democrito d’Abdera (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1948).
Cf. an effective refutation of this view in Meyerson, op. cit., II, pp. 320–321, and 356.
Benjamin Farrington, The Greek Science (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1944), Ch. 4.
K. Lasswitz, op. cit., I, pp. 257–258.
Lucretius, De rerum natura, II, w. 309–333; Bailey, op. cit., p. 332.
Bailey, op. cit., p. 80.
Enriques, op. cit., Ch. III, ‘Il principio d’inerzia’, pp. 57-91.
Hans Witte, Über den gegenwartigen Stand der Frage nach einer mechanischen Erklärung der elektrischen Erscheinungen (Berlin: Ebering, 1906); P. Drude, ’Über die Fernwirkungen’, Annalen der Physik 62 (1897), pp. XXV—XLIX (on numerous models of gravitation); finally, E. T. Whittaker, History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity. The Classical Theories (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), and Kenneth Schaffner, Nineteenth-Century Aether Theories (New York: Pergamon Press, 1972).
Jean Perrin, Les atomes (Paris: Alcan, 1914), p. 253.
A. Einstein, ‘Relativity and the Ether’, in Essays in Science (New York: Philosophical Library, 1934), p. 110.
Cf. White, op cit., pp. 216–219; Osborne Reynolds, The Sub-Mechanics of the Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1903), p. 1.
H. Weyl, Was ist Materie? (Berlin: Springer, 1924), p. 18.
Cf. the bibliographical references in M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, new paperback ed. (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1969), p. 242.
Niels Bohr, Quantum d’action et noyaux atomiques,Actualités scientifiques et industrielles, No. 807 (Paris, Hermann, 1939), p. 12; Robley D. Evans, The Atomic Nucleus (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), pp. 30–31.
Otto R. Frisch, Atomic Physics Today (New York: Basic Books, 1961), pp. 132, 186, and 192; W. Heisenberg, ‘The Nature of Elementary Particles’, Physics Today 29 (1976), 32–39, “words such as ’divide’ or ’consist of’ have to a large extent lost their meaning”. Hence Heisenberg’s skeptical attitude toward the quark hypothesis (fold, p. 39). (This was probably his last article.)
H. Reichenbach, The Direction of Time (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956), p. 265.
E. Meyerson, De l’explication dans les sciences (Paris: Payot, 1921), I, Ch. X.
On this point, see J. B. Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, Ch. VI: ‘The Proposition That All Potential Energy Is in Reality Kinetic’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). On Huygens’ kinetic model of potential energy, cf. K. Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton (Hamburg and Leipzig: Voss, 1890), II, p. 373. Spencer’s view is stated in his First Principles, 4th edition, Appendix (New York: Appleton, 1896), pp. 598–599.
K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), pp. 215 ff.;
A. Landé, From Dualism to Unity in Quantum Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 225
P. Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), pp. 215–230
Max von Laue, ’Über Heisenbergs Ungenauigkeitsbeziehungen und ihre erkenntnistheoretische Bedeutung’, Naturwissenschaften 22 (1934), 439–441.
M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1969), Ch. XVI.
H. Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1950), p. 313.
E. Bauer, `Rapports entre la physique actuelle et la philosophie’, in L ‘Evolution de la physique et la philosophie, Quatrième Semaine Internationale de Synthèse (Paris: Alcan, 1935), pp. 31–33.
H. Margenau, `Advantages and Disadvantages of Various Interpretations of Quantum Theory’, Physics Today 7, no. 10 (1954), 6–13.
E. Schrödinger, What Is Life and Other Scientific Essays (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), p. 175.
D. Bohm, `Explanation by Hidden Variables at a Sub-Quantum Level’, in Observation and Interpretation, edited by S. Körner (London: Buttersworth Scientific Publications, 1957), p. 35.
J.-P. Vigier, The Concept of Probability in the Frame of the Probabilistic and Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’, ibid., p. 76.
P. A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 4.
K. Popper, `The Propensity Interpretation of the Calculus of Probability and Quantum Theory’, Observation and Interpretation, pp. 65–71.
A. Landé, op. cit., pp. 78–79.
K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 221; `The Propensity Interpretation p. 69; Landé, op. cit., p. 76.
Popper, `The Propensity Interpretation… ’, p. 68.
A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 193. There is every indication to support the view that Whitehead was not only fully aware of the discovery of the vibratory nature of matter, but even anticipated it. The contrary view of Robert Palter and Abner Shimony is not supported by the texts. Cf. A. Shimony, `Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Whitehead’, in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1965), p. 307; R. Palter, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 218. On the relation of Bergson’s view of matter to that of Whitehead, cf. both my books: The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1969), pp. 368–369, 375 and 391 and Bergson and Modern Physics, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1971), Part III, Ch. 14.
Whitehead, op. cit., p. 73.
Otto von Frisch, op. cit., p. 90.
Jean Piaget, Le développement des quantités physiques chez l’enfant: conservation et atomisme (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1941); M. apek, `The Significance of Piaget’s Research on the Psychogenesis of Atomism’, in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 8 (Dordrecht, Holland: D, Reidel, 1971), pp. 446–455.
The non-substantial character of particles was explicitly stressed by A. March, Die physikalische Erkenntnis und ihre Grenzen (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1960), pp. 58–62 and 95–97. W. Yourgrau, although generally favorable to the Popper-Landé view, concedes that concepts like `sameness’ or `individuality’ do not apply to micro-particles. See his `On the Reality of Elementary Particles’, in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, ed. by M. Bunge (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 369.
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Čapek, M. (1991). Particles or Events?. In: The New Aspects of Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 125. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2123-8_11
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