Abstract
What in the preceding pages we have called simply reason is, needless to say, a particular kind of reason, namely, the reason of the scientist or, more precisely, the theoretical physicist. In the course of this work we have alluded several times to the fact that there is a considerable gap between this reason and that of the ordinary man, and even the man who is considered educated in the ordinary sense of the word, but is insufficiently grounded in the study of the sciences. We have stressed in particular that the imagination inexperienced in this way of thinking is unable to achieve any real understanding of the relativistic concepts.
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Notes
Tychonis Brahe, Epistolarum astronomicarum libri (Uranienburg and Frankfurt, 1610), p. 190. Anatole France, in a well-known passage, has pointed out very aptly and colorfully the principal differences between medieval man’s idea of the universe and our own (Le jardin d’Epicure, Paris, 1895, p. 1).
Cf. Wilhelm Ostwald, Grosse Männer, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1910), p. 115.
CPP 3:369; 6:586, 637–638; Pierre Laffitte, ’Cours de philosophie première - Première le?on,’ Revue occidentale 1 (1878) 288.
Aimé Cotton and Henri Mouton, Les ultramicroscopes (Paris, 1906), p. 1.
It will perhaps not be out of place to recall here that an actual attempt to organize science, a very modest attempt compared to Comte’s designs, ended in deplorable failure. Colbert, with the best of intentions, had thought he could prescribe to the members of the Académie des Sciences how they were to go about their work. Gaston Darboux certainly expressed the unanimous feeling of scientists toward this misguided effort when he wrote: “This organization did not turn out well, as will easily be imagined. Nothing is more deadly than restrictions on the freedom of the scientist. Research must be free and the spirit must be able to blow where it listeth” (Eloges academiques et discours, Paris, 1912, p. 299).
St. Vincentii Lirinesis, Commonitorium Primum, Chs. 23, 27, in Patrologie Migne, Patres Latini (Paris, 1846), Vol. 50, pp. 667, 674.
Henri Poincaré, Savants et écrivains (Paris: Flammarion, s.d.), p. 6.
Sir Oliver Lodge, in 1908, while emphasizing the need to assume the existence of an ether, nevertheless concluded that Lord Salisbury was correct when he wittily defined it as being “little more than a nominative case to the verb to undulate” (’The Aether of Space,’ Nature 79 [1909] 323).
This explains the at first puzzling fact that the heliocentric system, though perfectly well-known in antiquity (cf., for example, Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, Oxford, 1913, passim), was so little able to gain acceptance that it subsequently fell into complete oblivion. It is because the only reasons that militated in its favor were reasons of sim-plicity and (until the introduction of the principle of inertia) they came up against mechanical considerations. These reasons of simplicity became all the more persuasive, however, as the number of observed facts increased, and it became necessary to increase the complications of the reigning theory to account for the anomalies that these facts seemed to present for it. As early as the Middle Ages these complications had reached the point that they were apparent to any unprejudiced thinker, as is illustrated by the well-known anecdote conderning Alfonso X of Castile. The king, who was much enam-ored of astronomy (we owe to him the famous Alfonsine Tables) is said to have cried out one day, when confronted with the intricate pattern of epicycles, that if he had been in the Creator’s place, he would have arranged things more simply. Even if we assume that the quotation is apocryphal, like so many other historical statements, the fact that it could be invented nonetheless shows that this was a sentiment that seemed quite natural to his contemporaries. Thus it was that the Copernican theory was finally able to triumph despite the formidable aid given to its adversaries by theological considerations (cf. §252), which, Duhem to the contrary (Le système du monde, Paris, 1913, 1:425), certainly played only a very small role in antiquity.
Joseph Bertrand, Les fondateurs de I’astronomie moderne, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1865), p. 51.
Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als-Ob, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1913).
Ernst Mach, Die Leitgedanken meiner Naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnislehre (Leipzig, 1919), p. 11.
Hermann Kopp, Geschichte der Chemie (Brunswick, 1845), 1:341, 345.
Emile Borel, preface to Einstein, La théorie de la relativité restreinte et généralisée, trans. J. Rouviere (Paris, 1921), p. 8.
James Hutchinson Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (Edinburgh, 1898), p. xlix.
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Meyerson, É. (1985). Dogmatism and Skepticism in Science. In: The Relativistic Deduction. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 83. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5211-9_25
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