Abstract
IN his presidential address to the annual statutory meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, under the title “Aristotle, Newton, Einstein”, Prof. E. T. Whittaker compared the modern revolution in physics, by which the ideas of relativity and the quantum theory have displaced those of Newtonian mechanics, with the revolution in the seventeenth century when Newtonian mechanics triumphed at the expense of Aristotelian Scholasticism. His main thesis was that the Scholastic ideas which were destroyed by the movement of which the work of Newton marked the culmination, were a perverted form of the true philosophy of Aristotle, and that the modern outlook represents a return— or at least a tendency to return— to the true Aristotelian outlook. The work of Tycho and Kepler disproved and overthrew the existing Scholastic cosmology, but it contained nothing inherently irreconcilable with the Scholastic metaphysics and might conceivably have been absorbed into the philosophy of the Schoolmen by a peaceful and conservative revolution. Actually, however, what was essentially a new metaphysic was introduced. The basic postulate of the Newtonian mechanics, in which it differed sharply from Scholasticism, was the fundamental and independent status accorded to space and time. Persistence of bodies in time and their displacement in space became the concepts to which everything in the external world had to be reduced, and bodies moved in obedience to the forces which acted on them in space and time.
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NEWTONIANISM AND SCHOLASTICISM. Nature 151, 59 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151059a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151059a0