Digression on the quality of knowledge in a universe of atoms

Notice how cerebral all these advances were of Einstein’s. With little data and few experiments to guide him, he plumbed the deep logic of the formulas that summarized so much of Nature then known to science. At about the same time, however, triggered by technologies whose power had mounted throughout the nineteenth century, a Pandora’s box of new physical phenomena sprang open for which the old formulas failed to account. Subsequent progress in theory required a steady stream of reports from the laboratory to weed out conceptual dead ends and suggest new directions. The new experiments probed matter’s fine structure and its behavior at extremes of temperature and pressure. New theories to explain them conceived matter as a concretion of particles held together by electromagnetic forces. The component particles were supposed to be more or less like those of Democritus, but bound electrically to produce composite atoms corresponding to each of the chemical elements within Mendeleev’s famous periodic table.