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The Second Scientific Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

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It is easy to guess from the title of this article that its content will deal with the current changes in the foundations of physical sciences—the changes which are far-reaching enough to be called revolutionary. But the full significance of this intellectual upheaval will become clear only if we compare it to another scientific revolution which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The significance of this first scientific revolution is fully recognized by the historians of science and historians in general; if I shall recall its main features, it will be only to provide us with a contrasting backdrop against which the salient features of the contemporary transformation of physics will stand out more vividly and more suggestively. The comparison between what is going on now and what went on three centuries ago will clearly show that the distance along which physical science moved in the last fifty years is not only greater than that covered in the last three centuries, but also—and this is far more significant— greater than the distance separating the science of Newton from that of Aristotle. In other words, the twentieth century revolution is far more profound than what was rather inappropriately called “the Copernican revolution;” the intellectual distance between Aristotle and Newton is far smaller than the distance separating the world of Newton and Laplace from that of Einstein, Planck, de Broglie, and Heisenberg.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 "The Cult of ‘Common Usage,' " British Journal for the Philosophy of Sci ence, (III) 1952-3, pp. 303-7.

2 F.J. Dyson, in Scientific American, vol. 120 (March 1954), p. 92.

3 Cf. on this point the article of Louis de Broglie, "Léon Brunschvicg et l'évolution des sciences," in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, vol. 50 (1945), pp. 72-6.

4 This was pointed out by Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique (P.U.F., 1946), pp. 131-3; 175-6.

5 A.O. Lovejoy, "The Paradox of Thinking Behaviorist," The Philosophical Review, XXXI (1922).

6 Matière et mémoire, 28th ed. (1934), p. 241: "Les atomes qui se poussent et s'entrechoquent ne sont point autre chose que les perceptions tactiles ob jectivées, détachées des autres perceptions en raison de l'importance exceptionnelle qu'on leur attribue, et érigées en réalités indépendantes…"

7 Robert Oppenheimer, The Constitution of Matter (Condon Lectures, 1956).

8 "bestimmte und wohlunterschiedene Objekte" in Georges Cantor's termi nology.

9 Alfred Binet's article "La pensée sans images," appeared in Revue Phi losophique, 1903.

10 Jordan's articles appeared in Naturwissenschaften, XX (1932) and Erkennt nis, IV (1934), pp. 215-252; the resulting discussion in Einheit der Wissenschaft (1935), pp. 178-184.

11 John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty. Gifford Lectures, 1929, Reprinted in 1960 in Capricorn Books (G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York), pp. 249-250.