Abstract
A CURIOUS change is apparent in contemporary thought. The scientific revolution, with its Subversive principle of relativity and its paradoxical quantum theory, invaded the calm and secluded groves of philosophy and caused a strange disturbance. The positivity of science, at least in the form which it had assumed in the nineteenth century, seeme to disappear; accepted principles and methods suddenly became, suspect; old controversies lost their meaning; onew worlds were being discovered. The reception of the new mathematical relativity by philosophers was at first decidedly hostile. An attitude of incredulity Was followed by amazement and dismay. When the results of the eclipse observations of May 1919 were made known, and the principle of relativity, which had been formulated fourteen years before by Einstein, was found to be actually verified and confirmed, the interest was no longer confined to academic circles; popular expositions in journals and scientific manuals flooded the book market and every one was eager to be informed. A few mathematicians and many philosophers thought the whole excitement would prove to be a nine days' wonder and hoped, somewhat impatiently, that all would be explained away and that physics would again free itself from metaphysics. The principle of relativity has not been explained away; on the contrary, in an almost incredibly rapid time, it has established itself as orthodoxy. A revolution in ideas which a few centuries ago would have occupied generations now seems to take place between night and morning and while we sleep. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was discovered by intrepid navigators that our earth is a sphere. It was not until past the middle of that century that a daring thinker suggested that the earth moves, and it was not until a century later than that, and after bitter persecution, that the revolution of ideas which it implied was accomplished.
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CARR, H. Truth and Tradition. Nature 118, 109–111 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118109a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118109a0