Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead

Author:Alfred North Whitehead
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VII

Relativity

In the previous lectures of this course we have considered the antecedent conditions which led up to the scientific movement, and have traced the progress of thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century this history falls into three parts, so far as it is to be grouped around science. These divisions are, the contact between the romantic movement and science, the development of technology and physics in the earlier part of the century, and lastly the theory of evolution combined with the general advance of the biological sciences.

The dominating note of the whole period of three centuries is that the doctrine of materialism afforded an adequate basis for the concepts of science. It was practically unquestioned. When undulations were wanted, an ether was supplied, in order to perform the duties of an undulatory material. To show the full assumption thus involved, I have sketched in outline an alternative doctrine of an organic theory of nature. In the last lecture it was pointed out that the biological developments, the doctrine of evolution, the doctrine of energy, and the molecular theories were rapidly undermining the adequacy of the orthodox materialism. But until the close of the century no one drew that conclusion. Materialism reigned supreme.

The note of the present epoch is that so many complexities have developed regarding material, space, time, and energy, that the simple security of the old orthodox assumptions has vanished. It is obvious that they will not do as Newton left them, or even as Clerk Maxwell left them. There must be a reorganization. The new situation in the thought of today arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning common sense. The settlement as inherited by the eighteenth century was a triumph of organised common sense. It had got rid of medieval phantasies, and of Cartesian vortices. As a result it gave full rein to its anti-rationalistic tendencies derived from the historical revolt of the Reformation period. It grounded itself upon what every plain man could see with his own eyes, or with a microscope of moderate power. It measured the obvious things to be measured, and it generalised the obvious things to be generalised. For example, it generalised the ordinary notions of weight and massiveness. The eighteenth century opened with the quiet confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid of. To-day we are at the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth. We have recaptured some of the tone of the early nineteenth century, only on a higher imaginative level.

The reason why we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we have finer imagination, but because we have better instruments. In science, the most important thing that has happened during the last forty years is the advance in instrumental design. This advance is partly due to a few men of genius such as Michelson and the German opticians. It is also due to the progress of technological processes of manufacture, particularly in the region of metallurgy.

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