Juventud

Juventud
Un perfume como una acida espada
de ciruelas en un camino,
los besos del azucar en los dientes,
las gotas vitales resbalando en los dedos,
la dulce pulpa erotica,
las eras, los pajares, los incitantes
sitios secretos de las cases anchas,
los colchones dormidos en el pasado, el agrio valle verde
mirado desde arriba, desde el vidrio escondido:
toda la adolescencia mojandose y ardiendo
como una lampara derribada en la lluvia

Pablo Neruda, 1942

Youth

A scent like a sword forged with the acid
of plums found by a road,
the sugary kisses that linger in the teeth,
the drops of life sprinkling on the fingertips,
the sweet erotic heart,
the yards, the haystacks, the inviting
secret rooms in the vast houses,
matresses sleeping in the past, the raging green valley
seen from above, from a hidden window:
adolescence all flickering and burning
like a lamp knocked over in the rain

Pablo Neruda, 1942

Bangla Kobita

Tomar hater norom patai, ache ek desh ,
She desher nam nai, boyesh nai , shomoy nai,
Ronger bashorer modhye shudhu chonyar khela ,
Koto shopner tari, koto bhalobashar nouka.

Jhokhon shokal ashe , neel gondho mekhe,
Kandher choyae tomar beche uthi,
Bheja chokher mishti mithye khela,
Tomar kache rekhe jabo chabi.

Ghorer kone bandha ache, moner shesh dirghoshash,
Altto hate bhalobesho,
Benche other age , shobuj choker aral theke ,
Shunte pai shudhu tomar thonter hansi .

lines ...maybe a little more..

"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof" V

"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. But to win it requires total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence, which is man, for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth."
John Galt

" You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross that river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow.
It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen..."
The Things They Carried

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Albert Einstein


"Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does."
Ambrose Bierce

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism."
Albert Einstein

"The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view- one could almost say the essence of it- is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality."
(Capra, The Tao of Physics)



"Civilization has come about by going to school more than to church."
Lemuel K. Washburn

"And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone....."
Leonard Cohen

"Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion."
Richard Dawkins

"My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all."
Richard Dawkins

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
Albert Einstein

"My darling. I'm waiting for you. How long is the day in the dark? Or a week? The fire is gone, and I'm horribly cold. I really should drag myself outside but then there'd be the sun. I'm afraid I waste the light on the paintings, not writing these words. We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we've hidden in - like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. Where the real countries are. Not boundaries drawn on mapswith the names of powerful men. I know you'll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That's what I've wanted: to walk in such a place with you. With friends, on an earth without maps. The lamp has gone out and I'm writing in the darkness."
Katherine, The English Patient

"When the Washington Sentinels left the stadium that date, there was no tickertape parade, no endorsement deals for sneakers or soda pop, or breakfast cereal. Just a locker to be cleaned out, and a ride home to catch. But what they didn't know, was that their lives had been changed forever because they had been part of something great. And greatness, no matter how brief stays with a man".
The Replacements

"Sometimes it would stop raining long
enough for the stars to come out.And then it was nice.It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou.There was always a million sparkles on the water.Like that mountain lake.It was so clear, Jenny,it looked like there were two skies
one on top of the other. And then in the desert,when the sun comes up,I couldn't tell where heaven stopped
and the earth began..."
Forrest Gump

"No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it
is not a time. Heaven is being perfect."
"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you
touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a
million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit,
and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being
there."
from Jonathan livingston seagull




"your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself being true to anyone else or anything else is is not only impossible , but the mark of a fake messiah"
From the Messiah's Handbook(Illusions)

“And in that study of the history of the human mind, in that study of ourselves, of our true selves, India occupies a place second to no other country. Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only.”
- Dr. Friedrich Max Mueller

"Reason, Observation and Experience -- the Holy Trinity of Science -- have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect."
Robert G. Ingersoll

"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church."
Ferdinand Magellan

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities".
Ayn Rand

"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."
Ayn Rand

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Nietzsche "The Dawn"

"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great.
You can be that great generation."
Nelson Mandela



"My 41 -foot-long painting
of the ocean's horizon...I have of late been pondering
that painting.
It has struck me to view
the ocean as the past...
...the sky as the future...
...and the present as that thin,
precarious line where both meet. Precarious because as
we stand there, it curves underfoot...
...ever-changing..."
Bo,Off the Map

"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else."
Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".
Atlass Shrugged - Ayn Rand

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death...Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
Bertrand Russell

"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
Carl Sagan

" What a dream I had
Pressed in organdy
Clothed in crinoline
Of smoky burgundy
Softer than the rain.
And when you ran to me, your
Cheeks fleshed with the night
We walked on frosted fields
Of juniper and lamplight ..."
Simon and Gafunkell

"Ain't no angel gonna greet me
It's just you and I my friend
And my clothes don't fit me no more
I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.."
Bruce Springsteen

"They say , they built the traintracks over the Alps between Vienna and Venice before there even was a train that could make the trip, they built it anyway.....they knew one day a train would come..any arbitrary turning along the way and i would be elsewhere , i would be different...what are four walls anyway, they are what they contain ....the house protects the dreamer..."
Francesca, Under the Tuscan Sun

"Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror..."
V

"I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all. No... not the artful postures of love, not playful and poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening, but love that... over-throws life. Unbiddable, ungovernable - like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love - like there has never been in a play..."
Viola - Shakespeare in Love

"When it comes to a choice between two evils, I always choose the one I haven't tried before."
Mae West

" Sam: It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it'll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand, I know now folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something."
Lord of the Rings

The Philosophical and Sociological motivations for Relativity and Einstein’s Creative Empiricism

The deterministic world view of force at a distance between point particles from the Newtonian era was the accepted view of reality in the realm of physics. Faraday, Lorentz and Maxwell with their ideas of electrodynamics and field theory of forces posed a conceptual and practical problem to Newtonian mechanics. During the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the twentieth century, Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics were in constant conflict with each other. Even as most scientists were adhering to one side or the other, Albert Einstein came up with the theory of Special relativity combining the two ideologies. He followed it with General relativity which revolutionized Newtonian gravitation and laid down the fundamentals for the modern understanding of space and time. This paper explores the philosophical and sociological roots of relativity and the nature of the scientific community within which the view of the relativistic world was conceived. An attempt is also made at understanding Einstein’s creative empiricism and his unique approach to doing science.
A proper understanding of the ideological constructs that led to the breakdown of the Newtonian deterministic world view is essential in grasping the motivations that created the need for the relativistic world view. Even before Faraday and Maxwell’s ideas of “force as a field” and the treatise on electromagnetism, intellectuals were discussing the absurdity of the absolute space construct. George Berkeley regarded widely as the father of modern idealism said, “there was indeed no real knowable object behind one's perception, that what was real was the perception itself” (Wikipedia), therefore “for Berkeley it was absurd that space could be anything but relative” (Cushing). This concept of a subjective sensory frame of experience being the only acceptable truth wasn’t the accepted idea in 17th century science; however in another 150 years it would become the avant garde of physics. However due to Newton’s draconian hold on the scientific establishment for almost a century after his death the growth of the understanding of force and motion strayed little from the conventional view. The discovery of “lines of force” and more importantly the synthesis of electricity and magnetism proved to be the nemesis of Newtonian mechanics.
The real challenge to Newtonian Ideology came from Maxwellian electrodynamics. As presented by James Clerk Maxwell, forces instead of affecting the accelerations of objects (as propagated by Newton), affected their velocities. Thus electrodynamics postulated the existence of a finite velocity of propagation. This was the velocity of light. Maxwell’s equations posed major philosophical and scientific problems which Newtonian mechanics could not account for. The only way to settle this dispute was “to interpret Maxwellian electrodynamics as a theory which presupposes the existence of the aether, states of the electromagnetic field being states of the aether” (Maxwell). Even though the ad-hoc concept of the aether helped Maxwell understand electromagnetism it was experimentally refuted and proved to be useless in understanding the propagation of the continuous electromagnetic field. Thus the fundamental problem in 19th century physics was the mutual disagreement between Newtonian dynamics and Maxwellian electrodynamics. The institutional change which created a unifying system of ideology that formulated both schools of thought was brought about by both physicists and philosophers.
Immanuel Kant, arguably the greatest German philosopher of the enlightenment, published A Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In it Kant made a divergence between empiricism and rationality. According to him the reality that was available to us was simply our perception of what the true nature of reality was. Therefore logical explanations of truth proved nothing until empirical sensory data confirmed its existence. A universal world view which created subjective reality based on the nature of the observer was influential in the development of relativity. Thus Kant’s ideas affected the perception of space, motion and most importantly time. The roots of simultaneity which was the “very starting point of special relativity” (Gödel) came from Kantian ideals that “deny the objectivity of change and consider change as an illusion or an appearance due to our special mode of perception” (Gödel) Other than providing the nature of thought and reality within a rather broad frame of understanding Kant’s contributions to the specific development of relativity is negligible. Kant’s writings which became fundamental to the western philosophical structure, deeply affected an Austrian boy born to a tutor in the village of Moravia.
Ernst Mach, born in 1838 in Austria, was the forerunner of the theory of relativity. A student of little promise he barely passed school and “complained to his father of the tedious religious exercises” (Feuer). Mach viewed the history of ideas as changing myths of reality and believed that the time had come when “a dynamic mythology was overcoming a mechanistic” (Feuer). According to Mach, time and space were the “devourer” and the “separator” respectively and it was time for a change of their basic natures. Mach’s rather poignant childhood memories and subsequent forays into the practice of loneliness evoked in him the desire to conceptualize “the relativized world in which there was no privileged frame of reference, no absolute...” (Feuer). Mach and his followers were phenomalists – they depended on natural phenomena to help them construct the true nature of truth and reality. Thus for Mach the world was a “coherent mass of sensations” (Feuer). As a scientist and thinker Mach believed in simplicity and always tried to find the least complex answer to a problem (hence his disregard for the atomic theory). Europe during the last decade of the 19th century was enthralled by Machian ideals of scientific knowledge. The new generation of scientists was essentially enraptured by the Machian ideology which according to them complemented Karl Marx’s concept of social change. Since reality was “social forms for organizing experience”(Feuer) and not objective as the older world view propagated, the Marxists found that Machian beliefs would help them discover “a new scientific truth , a new social form for organizing experience”(Feuer). Another redeeming factor of the Machian school of thought was its critique and dismissal of absolute space and time which ran parallel to the Marxian conceptual expulsion of “unobservable (and) idealistic principles from social science”(Feuer). Even as the Austrian school of science was entering a period of revolutionary growth the writings of an English philosopher were taking the more conservative English scientific establishment by storm.
David Hume was the fountainhead of the English and Scottish enlightenment. His propagated style of approaching knowledge was called “skepticism”. However it was his Treatise on Human Nature which most affected the growth of the relativistic school of thought. As propagated by Hume, “time and space are not to be regarded as self-subsistent entities; rather one should speak of the temporal and spatial aspects of physical processes”(Stachel). Therefore his ideology almost mirrored the one taught by Mach. Hume’s statement that “time is nothing but the manner, in which some real object exists"(Stachel), was instrumental in providing a fundamentally new outlook on time.
Even though Hume and Mach were influential in providing an epistemological and conceptual framework for the construction of relativity they failed to provide concrete and specific arguments that would help unify the Newtonian world with the newly established Maxwellian ideas of electromagnetism. Mach propagated for a total rejection of Newtonian ideals of space, time and motion. Thus the two descriptions of reality were in conflict and there seemed to be little done in the manner of synthesis. The scientific community needed a theory or a set of laws that would be able to explain Newton’s laws of motion which had seemed to work so precisely for so long while maintaining the integrity of Maxwell’s laws which had been immaculately proven by empirical data. Two people provided the creative assimilation that was required for this endeavor. However just one of them is truly attributed as the author of the theory of special relativity. It is interesting to debate and analyze why the “other” isn’t. The controversy surrounding the true creator of special relativity mirrors the great argument that marred the discovery of calculus.
The credit for coming up with the system of “fluxions” or calculus is usually given to Newton , however Leibniz, as contemporary research has shown. deserved just as much renown and acceptance. A similar situation developed around relativity between French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare and Jewish physicist Albert Einstein. Even though devoid of the unprofessional acts of abuse which Newton employed against Leibniz, there is definite lack of recognition involved in this situation. At the International Congress of Arts and Sciences in 1904, more than a year before Einstein’s revolutionary paper was published, Poincare “used the expression ‘the principle of relativity’” (Feuer). Poincare had at this address had mentioned the finite and unsurpassable value of the velocity of light being central to the theory of relativity, expressed a need to create “electrodynamics of moving bodies”(Keswani) and pointed out that such a theory would utilize the Lorentz transformations. He had even described the same “light and clock” experiments that would later appear and be immortalized by Einstein’s paper. More importantly in the June of 1905, before Einstein’s paper had been published, he “discovered a complete covariance between Maxwell’s equations under Lorentz transformation including correct transformational formulae for the case when space for which Maxwell’s equations are given is occupied by electric charges” (Keswani).Another interesting and vital point Poincare suggested was that the effects of gravity “were propagated at the velocity of light” (Keswani). However Poincare’s publications in this field go back to his publication of Science and Hypothesis(1902), in which he talks about the “theory of relative motion” (Keswani) In the light of this revelation about Poincare and the factual evidence of his work it seems conducive to agree that he deserves to be just as celebrated as Einstein. The question remains why wasn’t he?
The answer exposes a rather subtle yet crucial difference in ideology and attitude which makes the final difference. Poincare believed that fundamentally the lack of sufficient human ability to understand natural phenomenon led to the “Invariable relativity” (Feuer). He regarded relativity to be only “empirically true of uniform motion, but not absolutely true” (Keswani). Therefore it was possible that with added learning and newer perspective this idea about the nature of space and motion would change. Therefore Poincare exhibited pure Kantian ideals of reality being merely a construct of our idea of what was actually real. Due to our inadequacy in evaluating observable phenomenon and discrepancies that arose as a result of the subjectivity of the observer, the theory of relativity was needed. This was a very different view of relativity from the one that Einstein possessed, for him the principle of relativity “became a foundation, an ultimate, underived fact of the physical world” (Feuer). In essence relativity to Einstein was a basic principle which had to be followed under all circumstances, even if that meant a re-invention of the existing fundamentals of science. Thus even as relativity became synonymous with the revolutionary new view of the physical world for Einstein , Poincare was still tied to older more restraining concepts of Newtonian dynamics. In Poincare’s agnosticism towards the theory of relativity lay his central nature – “he was a man of the establishment” (Feuer). Tied to constitutional ideals of learning and knowledge he found it a lot harder to change his philosophical outlook to correspond with his incredibly brilliant and progressive work in the pure natural sciences. Added to the philosophical limitations that afflicted Poincare was the lack of a social climate conducive for the growth of relativity. Even as social upheavals and dynamic revolutionary ideas were infused within the Zurich-Berne group of scientists , a “classical Voltairean skeptic”(Feuer) like Poincare was socially bereft and often politically and institutionally stifled by the “French Administrations centralized control”(Feuer), the draconian relationship shared by students and professors in France and “the gerontocracy in the Academy of Sciences”(Feuer). The Polytechnic represented a very different atmosphere. It was pregnant with ideas of social and ideological revolution and also had the advantage of being kept on their feet by constant arguments and threats from the existing and more traditional world view. In more ways the stage was set for a young, passionate and dynamic physicist to publish the single most important work in the history of science.
Einstein was 26 years old, full of rebellion and ready for a “brave new world”, when he wrote the four papers in 1905 that would forever change the nature of scientific thought. Most intellectuals of the early 20th century believe that three of those papers – On Brownian Motion, the Photoelectric effect and Special Relativity – were individually worthy of Nobel Prizes. However it is ironical that his Noble Prize achievement was on the Photoelectric effect which being a quantum field idea would be something that would disturb him in the future. It should be noted however that among the people on the Nobel committee that awarded him the prize was Lorentz, who believed that Poincare was the rightful source of special relativity, thus due to his non-assent the committee finally awarded Einstein the prize for Photoelectric effect. Being a part of the Austrian Machian school of thought, Einstein was influenced by the empirical rationalists like Kant and the positive empiricists such as Hume, however ideologically it was Mach who altered Einstein’s view of the physical universe. Lorentz, Maxwell and Poincare were the more scientific influences and Einstein paid credit to every one of them later on in his life. Einstein’s greatest achievement was possibly moving past a more conservative one sided idea of understanding and doing science. Thus he unified the old with the new – Newtonian mechanics with Maxwellian electrodynamics – and created system of thought that was a modified version of the two existing ones. This has been called “aim-oriented empiricism” (Maxwell) by scholars.
Aim-oriented Empiricism finds its motivation in developing a scientific theory from using existing ideologies in order to create a practical foundation for the construction of a fundamental physical law. The beginning of this form of empiricism is with Einstein’s formulation of the theory of special relativity. Standard empiricism does not allow for the development of “radically new physical theories that are incompatible with existing theories” (Maxwell). Therefore in order to create a system that can rationally asses a unified theory aim-oriented empiricism was created by Einstein. Due to its nature Special relativity is a “law of laws”, thus it is by itself a “heuristic and methodological rule to be employed in discovering and assessing physical theories” (Maxwell). By coming up with special relativity Einstein conceptually changed a restricting principle – Galilean invariance – to make it compatible with Maxwellian electrodynamics and “he formed a new principle i.e. Lorentz invariance”(Maxwell), thus he created a set of rules that could be used to rectify other rules. While constructing General relativity aim-oriented empiricism helped him unify Newtonian gravitation and special relativity. However due to the nature of normal empiricism when comparing position and Lorentz invariance, only the former is allowed a significance of actual rule , while the later is just viewed as a theoretical construct in physics. This portrays the rather stringent and linear set of rules that govern the principles of standard empiricism and further support the need for an aim-oriented empiricist approach.
A better understanding of the factors that led to the final moment of genius during which Einstein came up with the theory of special relativity is achieved by analyzing the social, philosophical and above all ideological climate that existed in that era. Conceptually relativity seemed to always have been a part of the traditional consciousness but somehow had never gotten a scientific expression. Reflecting the true nature of its creator relativity would have repercussions in not just physics but in essentially every segment of human society. In retrospect it seems that special relativity owes its formal coming to being to not just one person, but to an atmosphere and an era that was ready to break away from the religious drudgery of the past and move onto an ideological plane that was socially equitable and did not propagate the existence of absolute postulates. Along with the conventional rigid ideals of space and time it also meant liberation from the politically and religiously suffocating fabric of western society. The torch bearers of the movement were the new generation that was infused with the revolutionary new ideas of existence and thus provided for a conclusion to the alternative line of thought that had been started by George Berkeley as an opposition to the religiously motivated and naturally hegemonic Newtonian world view that had arrested growth of the western ideology for nearly a century.











Bibliography

Philosophical Concepts in Physics – the Historical Relation between Philosophy and Scientific Theories, James T. Cushing, Cambridge University Press, London, 2000

Einstein and the Generations of Science, Lewis s. Feuer, Basic Books, New York, 1974

Albert Einstein – Philosopher and Scientist, the Library of Living Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, London, 1949

Albert Einstein – A Biography, Abrecht Folsing, Viking Penguin Books, New York, 1997

Physics and Philosophy – the Revolution in Modern Science, Werner Heisenberg, Harper and Brothers, 1958

G. H. Keswani, “Origin and Concept of Relativity (I)”, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, 1965

Nicholas Maxwell, "Induction and Scientific Realism: Einstein versus van Fraassen: Part Two: Aim-Oriented Empiricism and Scientific Essentialism”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , Vol. 44, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 81-101

W. Gordin, “The Philosophy of Relativity”, the Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 23, No. 19 (Sep., 1926), pp. 517-524

John W. Lenz, “Hume's Defense of Causal Inference”, Journal of the History of Ideas , Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1958), pp. 559-567

Mendel Sachs, "On the Mach Principle and Relative Space-Time”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , Vol. 23, No. 2 (May, 1972), pp. 117-119


M. N. Macrossan, "A Note on Relativity before Einstein”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , Vol. 37, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 232-234


Carlo Giannoni, "Einstein and the Lorentz-Poincaré Theory of Relativity”, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Vol. 1970 (1970), pp. 575-589

John Stachel, “What Song the Syrens Sang': How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?", Einstein from "B" to "Z", (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2002), pp. 157-169

Frank Wilczek, “Total Relativity- Mach”, Physics Today, March 2004
www.Physicstoday.org

www.wikipedia.org

Questions...

Isn't growing up all about self realization and understanding a better idea of reality ?

are questions about life biased because we are preinclined to believe that we should want to live ?

is it really that hard to care more about truth than security ?

often games played with the mind are real games played with the world , slowly the game world, becomes the real world, but does the game you become the real you , or is it just something you want to experience ?

questions are good friends to live with , but hardly the place of best advice.

Can Kittens Fly

probably one of my favorite written pieces...i still get lost in its organic form and ability to conform to reality yet be lost in enigma.It is another glimpse from my past , of old friends, and old loves....of journeys, people, taste , sound and smells. I read it again a few days ago , half a decade after i first wrote it. Somewhere in these confused, searching lines i found pieces of me...lost pieces, forgotten parts, but mostly it was homecoming for a young adult very nostalgic about his childhood.


The light on your hard hair; is the silk caught in their waves, or am I floating above your lap? Five seconds. Two ago, my head was beneath them, maybe over them? Could be silent mist which crept through had entered my mind. Brilliance of a mountain stream or the flash of your brown iris?

Tomorrow night. The pub burnt with yesterday's feathers roasted over the slow fire of cigarette and cole slaw. The dead branch splintered beneath autumn. Today sighs in happiness, locked beneath the wine cellar. Caught in the golden thread, of wise drops of reality. Were you naked under the pines? Or is that the moon of October weaving tears into starlight?

Blue. Caught below the point of reeds. The lake, maybe a vehicle into stillness, overbearing, the ripples into mud. A family torn apart. Five limbs cut into ten to build the lake a friend. Ten generations lost in two strokes of fire. Father, where are you? My coffee mug broke across the sky, feeling your touch. Yet you never touched my feeling?

Sands swept away. Why did a cube have six faces, but only one body? Life grew upon my shoulder;above the straw that the maid brought in. Sugar and grapes grew on my fingers. They must go on. Thursday evening Jamie brought home an amber kitten and a violin. Can kittens fly? Ask the next rainbow when you dust the rain, from the light kept over your smile.

Laugh. Wild horses singing to the North Wind. Dark legs breaking through motion, green emeralds beneath their broad toes, alive yet wishing to die. Three children died yesterday, a car, electric blue, blood, a pink hair band and last month's sunshine. Can I kiss you, reality? Why are 'nows' so rare? The moment we feel one come up to us, it becomes a 'then'. Metamorphosis. Maybe the kid next door would know. He has had cerebral palsy and the wheelchair is his best friend. Blue eyes, smoked hair, lip-gloss over his right cheek. His Mom kissed him there day before; forgot the soap yesterday. He would know 'now'. He's had so many of 'thens' playing hop and skip beneath his wheels. His ambition : to become Michael Jordan. Are you Tom Thumb or maybe Jack? Has the beanstalk reached the sky? Maybe too many fertilizers. Orange skies are brighter than the swallowtail I had last summer. Yet can it dream?

Chocolates stewed over charcoal fire. Remember the last time I loved you? Eyeliner over your warm body. I drew Mickey Mouse on your arm, you called him your sweetheart. In South America a three year old got a semi automatic as a birthday gift. Five million hectares of virginity raped in 365 days. Are you still my own? Can you breathe into whiskey mixed with blood? Or am I a dreamer born of sentiment below the scent of jasmine and you broken knee? You're life, my life. Can you love me? The Benz you drive has made me ten years younger. Yet the years seem to have grown old.

I will walk beneath your sky. The fisherman you loved, he ran away. Russell, his son, cancer loved him. Affection on your part, it melts away like rancid butter. You jump up on the net I bought for mosquitoes. You can't fish with it. Are you alive? No joke. It seems the neon light on the drugstore shone on the torn wrapper of a sex gum. It stuck a nation together, respect it. A wolf carried away my dream. Poor thing was starving. At least it ate a dream, not a bullet.

Will you sleep tonight? It's too cold to open the window. My hair feels like Saturday's spent together, yet away and far. Do you love the waterfall, the torn sock, and my goodbye kiss? Can worlds be born of impotent men who believe in running races against a lame hare, and a silver tortoise? It's up to you. Both lose.
The lollipop in your cheek is sweeter than truth. Yet it costs so less. Which do you want to buy? My love or the lighted panorama of the carnival? Where you do the cabaret and I shout obscenities. Deserve the cake I baked for you. I warmed it over my love and burnt my little finger. Tear up last year's promise, I still love you. Now is all you are. Then is what you can never be.

Remember

so i found this looking through old books and letters. memories are beautiful teachers, they show you evolution and tell you who you have become. Its old, its naive, but its a loved version of me....

Remember the time when the sun felt soft ,
And the pain tremored with tenderness,
The time when the small blade of grass,
Sparkled like a lone lost dream,
A night on which subdued moonlight
Kissed you softly drenching you in mist.

Remember that little boy who ran ,
With legs he never owned,
The quiet butterfly whose life was,
As short as summer rain,
The dark rose of yesteryear whose thorns
Grew grey with solitude.

Remember the friend you made ,
On a lost winter afternoon ,
Remember his sunny smile beating on you ,
A dew drop drenched in creation ,
A freedom to seek a life.

Wondering (Mostly postmodern)

I wonder often as I sit and stare at celluloid screens where phosphor dots create meaning with E and M signals and somewhere a neural pathway registers consciousness as normal, open and static....its a weird reality where phenomenon governs my idea of what should be, when the reverse makes more creative sense...

so, i think, since I spend millions of neuron firings everyday, trying to encapsulate an idea of limitless freedom into polysyllabic script, it might as well be an attempt devoid of social bias and past acquired instinct....or is that even a human ability ?

all this just meshes into the dilemma which screams for identity and is easiest to smother....we start living lives out of boxes, wrapped in bubble dreams and often starved of ingenuity....but, if a correlation is to be drawn, between what is and what isn’t....the is wins out...

maybe the is wants me to read papers, feed the dog, take out the trash and believe that the world is formed of isolated stations manned by egomaniacal, self rooting mammals that don’t know the first thing about compassion or deliverance or liberation.......

somehow, rowing the boat against that proverbial stream always eludes those that spend too much time in the tavern with a pint....in my pintless life, this need to create the worst possible idea of reality seems to be elusive and mostly shadow like...it appeals, grovels, whines and then settles down, like a middle class family, with that picket fence and direct TV....

yet, if I have to pick a notion to live by, maybe its the believer in me that reaches out to the stars, rationally subversive people might be able to find a reason for even murder, but reason when aborted of spirituality lacks that essential fuel that ruins empires and establishes miracles...at the end of the day, if I can hold my body and mind in contempt of the ideal, then its a regressive life I have, which seeps away at illusions as I wander aimlessly in search of desire and appreciation...and I say let it all go, and within that primal atom of me that came from stardust from the cosmological birth is a hope, that essence will return to man, in a way so enthralling that just believing in it will liberate you from the ordinary and it will be because you matter, because you did it ....no one else, not the milk man, the president, your mother, or even GOD....just plain and simple tissues, bone and consciousness...you!

Of Poetry

Of poetry, the kind I write,
As often tomorrow as
Today.


You’re faded over words and rhyme,
A question asked to
Forget

Filling spaces on grave starched sheets,
May I begin and
Write.

Is it memory or child vision?
Locked together or maybe
Alone.

Determinism and Indeterminism in the Physical World and the Influences of Quantum Theory on the Nature of Causality

An important aspect of understanding a quantitative scientific process is evaluating the qualitative conclusions it leads to. Arguably this evaluation is subjective. It is statistically within the hypothetical sphere of reality that an individual constructs. Therefore in retrospect the nature of this procedure lacks the objective ability to be determinate due to unaccounted variables of personal ideology which drive hypothesis construction in the scientific world. This situtation brings up questions of causality and chance, determinism and the indeterminate and even explores the real extent of human free will. In the history of ideas, Natural philosophy was a discipline concerned with discerning the true identity of reality; however with the specialization of knowledge, physics and philosophy were separated. Physics retained the experimental and factual structure of developing the truth, while philosophers delved into the metaphysical and moralistic aspects that constructed our world. However the effect of one discipline on the other is irrefutable. This paper offers an analysis of the “local” effects that philosophy had on physics and vice-versa. An effort is also made to understand the ideals that led to the construction and subsequent domination of a certain natural view. Thus in some ways it is a critique of the elastic and evolving nature of reality and the conflicting attributes of varied thought mechanisms that have tried to define it.
The Greek idea of Natural philosophy was steeped in traditional mythology. Mythology dismissed as trivial by most modern scientists allowed for the assigning of defining forms to most of natural phenomenon. In essence it was the first, relatively primitive efforts at creating an understanding of the nature of nature. Therefore “the intuitive phase of myths provided for a set of terms for use in the conceptual phase of early science” (Sambursky). Even in antiquity or first impulse was to put a determinate form to the projected phenomenon which existed beyond a human realm. Constructing a working, predictable idea of the physical world may not have been the Grecian priority. Working within the Aristotelian framework there was little room for objective understanding of the manifest destiny that was a part of every natural thing. The rudimentary physics that came out of classical antiquity followed a chain of thought that had its basis in a faith axiom – the human world of senses could never perceive of the heavenly “absolute” world of the gods. Theoretical constructs of the nature of the universe were essentially devoid of actively employed scientific experiments. The need was to preserve natural science as an interpretation of the human conception of reality which could never aspire to parallel and predict the celestial world. There were two views of reality in conflict. The “teleological” which propagated by Aristotle explained that “the universe was a sum total of events that tend towards a goal in which an earlier events happens for the sake of a later” (Sambursky). The “structural”, which abided by the presupposition that everything in existence could be explained numerically and therefore, was “form”. It is important to understand the connection here between the teleological ideologies of the Aristotelians to the Laplacian world view of the Newtonian era. Laplace postulated using Newton’s laws that “by following Newton’s method men would be able to predict every event in a whole range of phenomenon” (Sambursky) The connecting value here is the belief that a causal explanation for a future event can be derived from an occurrence in the present. The Greeks, who lacked the advanced degree of mathematical expertise that the Newtonians did, had propagated (in the 5th and 6th century B.C.) for a similar world view where events occurring in one time frame were causally connected to the ones that would occur in another. A logical deduction of this premise is the idea that one could always decipher the future from the present. Even though the scientific communities of the Newton-Laplacian era, allowed for a seemingly Grecian concept of reality drive their scientific ventures, they differed in an important aspect. Mechanical Determinism, which was the greatest product of this era, was lacking in Grecian thought. Therefore it can be argued that the Greeks even though believing “nature does nothing in vain” confined themselves to understanding the effects of nature and not its form. Causality was restricted to phenomenon that was easily observable and even though conjectures were available about the nature of reality, it was widely accepted that nature was, for all human purposes, indeterminable by sensory data. (Cushing, Boorstin)
Sensory data was the foundation of the Cartesian world view (introduced in the16th century) which postulated a mechanistic reality. However even within the confines of this concept of reality there were two schools of thought – the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that the human “mind was a blank page” on which experience created ideas, while the rationalists were of the belief that even the first experiences were acquired through “innate pre-existing ideas” in the mind (Sambursky). In the context of this paper, the point of ideological friction was between the factual and the conceptual. Therefore reality emerged as a fusion of these two instruments or rival methodological tools of description. It is interesting to note the existence of the same conflict in modern physics. Philosophically Einstein could not accept the quantum mechanical world view due to its innate lack of determinism. Due to the lack of irrefutable facts during the earlier days of quantum theory, its critics were often conceptualists that found the non-locality of effective force and the existence of a statistical probability when describing a natural event to be a theoretical improbability. Einstein believed in a “rational causal world that could be comprehended in terms of an objective reality”, while Pauli (in his earlier days) was of the opinion that “there was no point discussing quantities that cannot in principle be observed” (Cushing) It would seem obvious to ideologically group Pauli and Einstein. However a closer inspection reveals the contradicting nature of their refutation of quantum mechanics. Einstein disfavored quantum mechanics because it departed from the classical mechanical idea of determinism (“[God] is not rolling the die”) (Cushing). Pauli’s argument rests on the lack of a factual framework that can used to construct a workable physical law. In essence Pauli’s skepticism was derived from the lack of experimental data that would justify quantum mechanics. Thus Einstein appears to be conceptual and Pauli factual. It can be argued Pauli’s lack of interest in the progression of the Quantum ideology could have led to his “conceptual” disregard for the area .Thus he didn’t assume it prudent to focus the efforts of the scientific community towards the development of experimental methods which would provide for more concrete facts.
Even though the methodological developments in doing science coupled with advanced instrumentation allowed for the availability of precise data, it was the philosophically revolutionary ideas of the Quantum theory which made it controversial. The theory of relativity asserted for a correction to the classical framework and was revisionist and unifying in nature. Einstein made “the greatest demands on the ability of abstract thought (but) still fulfilled the traditional requirements of science” (Sambursky). In his efforts to create an epistemological foundation to the world of physics, Einstein modified classical physics to adhere to Maxwell’s equations. In the relativistic world the traditional axiom that divided the physical universe into “subject” and “object” were prominent. Frames of observation for the observer were discussed in his thought experiments with gravity and inertia, however the effect that the observation had on the state of the phenomenon was never considered. Philosophically this can be attributed to the formulation of causality in physics. It has now been recognized that the theory of relativity was the epitome of the classical world view. The foundational principle of Newtonian mechanics, causality, formed the core ideology of relativity. (Sambursky, Bohm, Carnap)
David Hume, the skeptical genius, pointed out a major flaw in the extrapolation process of causality. According to him it was impossible to know that certain laws of cause and effect would always apply. In essence, just because the sun has risen everyday till today, does not lead us to the logical conclusion that it will rise tomorrow. Even though Hume’s teachings were motivational for the relativistic theory, the point here is that he postulated for a break in the continuity of physical law. Thus he brought in statistical reality into the domain of what was actual existent truth. It should be noted that Hume even though instrumental in propagating skepticism about the necessity of causality was in no way directly related to the development of the philosophical structures of Quantum mechanics. However his ideas were influential to scientists like Heisenberg and Bohr that finally constructed the plane of statistical reality (Sambursky, Carnap)
Statistical reality created an order of answers that could never be definite. The classical physical world relied heavily on the causality axiom where, “Causal relations (meant) predictability” (Carnap) However work done by Bohr, Plank and Heisenberg created instances in the microsphere where causality would give answers that failed to account for all variables and essentially lacked the tools to define a system that was innately indeterministic. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has a simple numerical form – Δp Δx > ħ/2. Here p is the momentum, x the position of a particle and ħ = h /2Π. Ideologically this relationship along with the “collapse of the wave function” (talked about later) was the most revolutionary idea in the development of Quantum mechanics and created the final separation between classical physics. Heisenberg’s principle denied the need for determinism by predicting the impossibility of correctly evaluating the nature of both the position and the velocity of an electron simultaneously. The argument was linked to the interference caused by the deliverance of a certain amount of energy due to the light quanta that was essential to observe the electron. This relationship transcends into all forms of measurements. Philosophically the claim was that nature was inherently indeterminate. In essence an answer could only statistically predict the outcome of a measurement. For the first time in the western scientific school , it was hypothesized that the lack of precision data was not due to a lack of advancement in instrumentation or experimental methods , but due to “the indeterminacy relationships...which operate throughout the whole of natural law”(Bohm).Thus according to proponents of the quantum theory “there existed a fundamental limitation ...at the quantum mechanical level...such that we are unable to obtain the data needed to specify completely initial values...”(Bohm) this made causality a philosophical and pragmatic impossibility. Due to the lack of causality the mechanical universe which had been the dominant world view since the Newton-Laplacian construction, was replaced with the observer dependant statistical reality of the indeterminate universe.
The rise of indeterminism was philosophically fuelled by the work of Edwin Schrödinger. His life as a scientist was just as controversial and progressive as his personal life, in which Schrödinger preferred living with his wife and his mistress. Using De Broglie’s ideas of wave aspects of matter he came up with the Schrödinger wave equation. Historically this was another instance of mathematical and structural form being imparted to a conceptual framework that had been hypothesized earlier. This was similar to Newton’s work on Galileo’s assumptions and Maxwell’s equations using Faraday’s ideas of field theory. With the publication of the wave equation in 1925, Schrödinger created a mathematical tool that could be employed to describe the area of probability of finding a particle in a specific area in space. Philosophically this reduced matter to collective sensation of waves. This revolutionary concept reduced matter to extensions of waves in space. Einstein whose theory of general relativity incorporated for this idea of matter said, “Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept 'empty space' becomes replaced by the notion of undifferentiated energy” (Einstein). This ideology was detrimental to the understanding of matter as particular. The possibility of being explainable by waves may have been scientific progression the scientific community was not prepared for. However fully understanding the nature of the Schrödinger wave equation is constructive to a more productive view about the need for this progression. It sets up the scene for probably the most controversial aspect of quantum theory – the collapse of the wave function. In an experimental setup it has been repeatedly observed that the identity of a particle remains ambiguous till it is observed. In essence the observation systematically “forces” the particle to assume a certain identity. Two phenomenons are in question here - inherently the particle lacks the subjective ability to decide which state to conform to. Thus for example, an electron does not know whether it has a spin up or a spin down (this is discussed later on) and the subsequent destruction of the wave function along with which a non-local (instantaneous) force is seen at work. Conceptually this aspect of quantum mechanics violated Einsteinian relativity. As postulated in the theory of special relativity, the speed of light is the highest velocity for propagation of any electromagnetic signal, thus locality (finite speed of propagation) had to be preserved. Therefore (for example) the moment an electron was observed to be spin up; the corresponding electron had to be spindown (for more details look up the EPR paradox).The idea that somehow these two particles were communicating with each other, instantaneously was propagated by quantum theory. Einstein was opposed to this idea of physical reality since it violated one of the fundamental principles of relativity. However, the fundamental concepts and physical existence of non-locality at the quantum level have been experimentally consistent for close to seventy years now.
Non-locality is probably the most counterintuitive concept in quantum mechanics. To most early twentieth century physicists it was a philosophical impossibility especially due to one of the central postulates of special relativity. The transmission of a cause at a distance which produced at effect, instantaneously sounded characteristically like Newton’s propositions of the instantaneous propagation of gravity. Philosophically non-locality resembled an ideological problem to the einsteinian world view which held the speed of light as the upper constant of velocity. The propagation of non-locality would in some ways allow for the existence of some inherent ability of particles to send signals to each other about their information. Without a medium of transmission and experimentally unobservable phenomenon of this signaling a majority of the physicists of the post-einsteinian era found this phenomenon conceptually hard to accept. While writing this paper an important assumption has been made. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics has been considered to be the valid understanding of quantum theory. It should be noted that there are other interpretations of quantum theory and constructive criticism about the Copenhagen interpretation abound, however that is beyond the scope of this paper. This point is brought up since in the Bohm Interpretation (an attempt at maintaining the classical integrity of deterministic analysis), a non-local hidden variable theory is postulated, which is elemental in explaining the instantaneous effects seen. Attempts at creating a theory based on “local realism” (that Einstein was pushing for) are rendered pointless after the work of John Bell and the subsequent publication of the Bell Theorem in the 1960s which predict that “any theory accounting for violations in Bell’s inequality must be non-local” (Cushing).
Along with the concept of non-locality it is important to mention the “observer effect”. Ideologically this places immense importance on methodology and relates to the rather vital aspect of human free will. As observed in atomic experiments, the statistical probability of finding the information about a certain attribute of a particle is reduced to a singular identity when observed. The best example of this is the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment (refer to Cushing, pg.311- 312). However epistemologically it can be argued even in this situation that on opening the box and finding a dead cat and doing an autopsy it could be predicted that the cat had died a few days ago , thus removing any effect that the observer actually had on the final conclusion of the cat’s “state”. The effects of observation on a certain system become inherently important to the final outcome of the experiment, but unlike classical physics it is impossible to gauge the actual effect an observer is going to have on the final result. The emphasis here is on the innate inability to predict the effect of observation in the quantum world. In light of this a moral and philosophical issue is raised. According to the philosopher Reichenbach “ if physics had retained the classical position of strict determinism, we could not meaningfully speak of making a choice, uttering a preference, making a rational decision, being held responsible for out acts...”(Carnap). The ideological reflection here is on the Laplacian world view of a pre-determined future and past and its predictability, an evaluation of a “temporal cross section of the world” (Carnap). The quantum mechanical world view provides factors other than the ones controllable by human understanding, saying essentially that the natural world inherently lacks a sense of determinism. This provides for a situation (philosophically) where an individual is subjected to empowerment that is created due to the lack of a pre-decided structure to the universe. In retrospective the lack of an accurate final conclusion in the indeterminate quantum world reduces this ephemeral sense of “control” to slightly more than a random selection of reality. In conclusion, the lack of a certainty in the final outcome ensures that whether it is the calculated macro effects of classical physics or the random micro effects of quantum physics, the effect of free will on the character of reality is similar. In both instances “Man can predict the results of his actions not with certainty but with some degree of probability” (Carnap).
Probability is the idea that differentiates the two major views of the world: classical and quantum. An understanding of this concept requires a closer inspection of causality. After the evolution of quantum mechanics the very form of causality had to be modified in order to account for the phenomenal and theoretical arguments of Bohr and Heisenberg. Thus the system of cause and effect is split into – mechanical causality and statistical causality. In classical physical theory a system is described “in terms of its state” (Cushing). Certain variables are assigned to ensure that the time evolution of them will help to predict the values of the future. In most of classical physics state variables are also the “observable physical quantities” (Cushing). Therefore as defined, the classical view of the world postulates for a system which is changed from present to future by a set of variables and “the agency responsible for this event-by-event causal structure” (Cushing) does not propagate faster than light. As opposed to this in quantum mechanics, the wave function (state-vector) of a system is not “itself directly observable” (Cushing). Therefore the Schrödinger equation governance of the time evolution of this state vector instead of displaying definite values for positions and momentum , presents one with probabilities of “various allowed outcomes(eigenvalues)”(Cushing). Thus in the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, there is no “event-by-event causality and particles do not follow well defined space time trajectories” (Cushing). In conclusion, the classical world view of mechanistic causality is replaced by the quantum world view of statistical causality. Thus the concrete existence of causality in Quantum mechanical analysis is justified by Max Born’s statement that, “statistical elements are thoroughly strict statements and the probabilities are by no means indefinite since they are determined by the formalism of quantum theory” (Cassirer)
The formative change in the world view from deterministic to indeterministic has arguable been the greatest revolution in physical thought in the history of ideas. Even though quantum physics has sought to abandon the more mechanical causal structure of the universe, many of its governing principles are still drawn from classical physics. Philosophically the influence of Aristotle, Kant, Mach, and Hume (to name a few) cannot be disregarded when constructing a realistic picture of the evolution of physical thought. Often the motivational idea behind searching for a rationalization of the world view has been a search for “the ultimate reality”(Sambursky). Ideologically, as a race, that has been our destination and each generation correspondingly has tried to reconstruct a better picture than its predecessor. Going from a world view fuelled by mythological stories of ambiguous actions to a mechanically predisposed universe to finally the inherent indeterminable nature of the universe there has been a constant conceptual synthesis of phenomena to theoretical practice. Interestingly sometimes progression has ideologically lead us to re-investigate certain ideas. For instance , “if the speed of transmission signals is assumed to be infinite, not finite, the classical picture of absolute space and time and the discarded concept of an absolute simultaneity of events is restored” (Sambursky). It is important to realize that even though the Newtonian world view advocated for an infinite idea of space, they never thought it would be mortally possible to investigate the nature of it. With the advent of modern philosophy and physics the prominent world view has experienced a heightened respect for human ability and recognized that understanding the fundamental nature of reality, space and time are within our abilities.
The change in the nature of causality marks a prominent paradigm shift in the understanding of the universe. Accommodating for a probabilistic answer frame has evolved causality from an absolute idea of the universe, to one that is numerically more accurate in its interpretation, though seemingly less definite. The development of statistical reality and its implications on a universal scale are undoubtedly conceptually significant when understanding the epistemological construct of reality. Even as acceptance of our observation of the innate randomness in nature has increased, the idea has been subtly differentiated from the fact that nature itself does not display a pattern at the quantum level. This theory even though concrete in structure leaves room for conjecture, regarding the nature of variables that could be affecting it , but are still to be experimentally ratified.
The greatest philosophical effect of Quantum mechanics has been the revision of the understanding of phenomenon. The duality of the “objective phenomenon” and the observer is a constant in the world view proposed by quantum mechanics. To understand the effects of quantum theory on the world consciousness it is important to return to probably its most holistic thinker – Niels Bohr. According to him describing human experience using the principles of quantum theory lead to the conclusion that there is “a wholeness” (Sambursky) in the physical world that cannot be partially observed. Thus human consciousness cannot divide a phenomenon into segments without affecting it in some way. The rather vague line between the subject and the object of “physical phenomenon” (Sambursky) is omnipresent in the physical world. To understand the division between a phenomenon and the observer is slowly becoming impossible, as the consciousness of the affected person is constantly merging into the actual experience. This rather dynamical system is susceptible to variations at any given instant that along with being unpredictable, define the actual position of humans in the physical world.
Bibliography

“Philosophical Concepts in Physics: The Historical Relation between Philosophy and Scientific Theories” (Paperback), James T. Cushing, Cambridge University Press (January 29, 1998)

“Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science” (Great Minds Series) , Werner Heisenberg, Harper, New York, (May 1958)

“Physical thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum physicists: An anthology”, Shmuel Sambursky, PICA Press, New York, 1976

“Philosophical Foundations of Physics” (Hardcover), Rudolf Carnap , Basic Books; 1st edition (1966)

“Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: historical and systematic studies of the problem of causality”, Ernst Cassirer, (Translated by) O. Theodor Benfey, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956

“Causality and Chance in Modern Physics”, David Bohm (foreword by Louis De Broglie), Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, London, 1959

“Physicists in Conflict – from antiquity to the new millennium”, Neil A. Porter, Taylor & Francis; 1 edition (June 1998)

“The Character of Physical Law”, Richard Feynman, Modern Library (November 8, 1994)

Scientific Determinism and the Newtonian World

A “philosophically materialistic” (Cushing) world view relies on relegating matter and its interactions in the universe to be the source of all form and structure. The slow evolution of understanding and predicting the nature of matter was given concrete mathematical definitions by the scientists of the Newtonian and post –Newtonian era. Scientific determinism removed uncertainty from the physical world and offered scientists the avenue to understand the different variables that affect the physical world. Moving past a more theologically governed world view the world entered an era where it was mechanically characterized. Quantifying the immense effect that Newton had on revolutionizing the scientific world with his ideas on force and gravity and shedding light on his Hermeticism and megalomania, is essential in grasping the nature of this change. The paper analyses the growth of the idea of scientific determinism and also Newton’s effects on the scientific community.
The essential motivation in Western science has always been the need to “reduce the phenomena of nature to a few simple laws or principles” (Cushing). An explanation of the physical world using mechanistic forces and determinable outcomes was at the helm of development. The Ionians in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. attempted to provide an explanation of physically observed events in a form that used the tools of natural science rather than mythology. Prominent Ionians were Thales – the introducer of abstract geometry in Greek thinking, Anaximander- propagator of the infinite universe hypothesis and Leucippus – the initiator of atomism.
The Pythagorean school of thought was dedicated to understanding the whole universe “numerically”. As Pythagoras believed, “all is number” (Cushing), his ideology rejected that the composition of natural objects required matter, and instead “form” was all they needed. Reducing the natural world to groupings of numbers allowed the Pythagoreans to have a monopoly over this system of thought. Irrational numbers due to their lack of precision and imperfect nature weren’t supposed to exist, and their discovery was heavily guarded by the “Pythagorean Brotherhood”. This concept of whole/rational numbers and their ability to explain the natural world in perfect harmony proved to be rather influential. Plato and Aristotle who were students of the Pythagorean school of thought believed in the mathematical finite nature of the world and thus never strayed from the ideas numerical and structural uniformity. However the essential theme here was the need for a simplistic universal view. Thus the emergence of a simplistic system to formatively describe the existence of all matter was what the Pythagoreans were after. This concept of reductionism was ultimately metaphysically concerned. Proof of the Pythagorean love for the rejection of sensory data and acceptance of the invisible “reality” is obvious in the Pythagorean statement that “pure knowledge” and thus “purification of the soul” could only be achieved by “rising above the data of the human senses”. (Boorstin)
A rejection of the Aristotelian world view of “form” and the “independent existence of universals” was propounded by William of Ockham and his conceptually revolutionary, Nominalism. His theory rejected Aristotle’s idea of the existence of absolutes in an abstract realm of the universe which was hidden from human sight. In essence Ockham substantially reduced the “unknown” in the nature of reality. Using tools from Ockham’s theory and insights of his own Francis Bacon in The New Organon stated the need to “resist the need of human nature to impose wishes and expectations on empirical data”. Bacon’s statement relayed the new ideology of the western scientific community; rejection of the Pythagorean construct and acceptance that “sense data had primacy over theoretical constructs”. (Cushing)
Scientists of the Renaissance were greatly influenced by Galileo. Galileo “assumed the existence of a simple, ordered world possessing regularity” (Cushing). The vital adverb there is regularity. Since antiquity scientists had looked for connections and patterns. Repeating sequence of characteristics or form inherently reduced the vastly misunderstood natural world into understandable quantized constructs. Metaphysics and theology slowed down this process of growth. This was due to two man reasons – the church still regulated a majority of the economic wealth and most natural philosophers were also deep rooted theologians. Therefore Copernicus’ forays into cosmology, Tycho Brahe’s gathering of monumental data and Kepler’s analysis of the heliocentric world view was made possible due to generous contributions from the church authorities. As rather dramatically put by one scholar, “Copernicus led his whole working life comfortably in the bosom of the church” (Boorstin). Even with religious restrictions and personally mandated theological motivations the idea of a “mechanistically” understandable world was making great progress. The single most important contribution came from the impoverished son of an English farmer born in 1642.
Isaac Newton, born to a farmer and raised by his maternal grandmother till he was 11, was modern science’s first “hero”. A colossus like Newton had an impact on a plethora of different scientific factions and ideological constructs. However the point on focus here is his contributions to the creation of a deterministic world view. It has been said that “after Newton the material universe came to seen as completely deterministic in principle” (Cushing). Newton’s first interaction with this “mechanical” philosophy happened at Cambridge where Rene Descartes was changing the traditional Aristotelian world view. The ideology that the “physical world consisted of invisible particles of matter in motion in ether” was being propagated by Descartes. Thus everything as postulated by the new world view could be “explained by mechanical interaction of these particles”. (Boorstin) Newton felt the need to follow this new avenue of scientific understanding due to two prominent reasons. Newton was a staunch Christian and the principle of Absolute Determinism was in essence a mathematical route for explaining “divine foreknowledge” which was central in his faith system. (Cushing) The second and lesser understood reason which was universally present in the scientific community since antiquity was one associated with the social power dynamic. “Priority Became the Prize”(Boorstin), therefore scientists found it more important to claim an “idea” as their own rather than investing time in careful explanation of causation and its social and scientific applications. Newton being a megalomaniac in the scientific climate and a brilliant evaluator of social change, wanted to achieve a lasting recognition by adopting what he realized would soon become the accepted world view replacing the ancient Greeks.
Newton’s Principle of Conservation of the Centre of Mass and Principle of conservation of the Moment of Momentum or Principle of Areas (Forbes, Dijksterhuis) and probably his most effective and popular equation – F = ma (Force is equal to mass of the object and acceleration of the object), helped reduce the chaotic universe of seemingly disconnected events and objects into an understandable and determinable system. To understand the “mechanistic” tradition which became the model in the post-Newtonian era it is important to dissect his force equation.

F (force) = m (mass) a (acceleration),
Theoretically this meant that “given the exact initial positions and velocities of all particles, the law F = ma determines the trajectories forever in the future as long as the forces F are known” (Cushing). Therefore if the initial conditions r0 and v0 are available then the “trajectory of r(t) of an object is completely determined for the future. This result can then be applied to a set of N particles.
Mathematically, rj (t), j = 1, 2..., N, when rj(t0) , vj(t0), Fj = mjaj
In the fig 1, as time t increases beyond zero we have less and less idea about the exact location of the particle, however according to Newtonian Mechanics we can predict its presence to be within a certain area of space. In the figure that space is represented by the virtual cone constructed by the movement of the particle. Thus the “uncertainty” represented in the logistical experiment below is due to the limited means of data collection rather than one rooted in concept. A rather subtle but fundamental concept of the Newtonian world view which ascribed to the presence of an absolute determination and divine causation behind all motion , and any vagueness about the position or movement of a particle was due to the fallible nature of human sensory data collection.





Isaac Newton “ was held to be not only the greatest mind ever to enter the kingdom of science but also appropriately a man of noble type : pillar of morality, defender of Christian faith, a very model of behavior and Christian thought” (Cohen). Understanding this statement rests on formulating an idea of the broad spectrum of influence Newton had on not just the scientific but the religious, cultural and ideological milieu. Newton’s rise to clergy and nobility supported glory is rather insipid. In 1665 as he came out of Trinity College, he sought to differ from the popular world view then being accepted by the literate academia. The Cartesian structure of non-demonstrable instruments of philosophy which relied heavily on hypothesis did not appeal to Newton. Fundamentally using mathematics Newton constructed his “experimental philosophy”. Using his advanced experimental methods and keen intuitive sense he described the nature of white light and “reduced the qualitative differences of color to quantitative differences” (Boorstin). As his critics implemented his own arguments against his work on light, he proceeded to advocate that he had simply explained the properties of light and not how those properties came to be or what regulated them. Newton’s rejection of the hypothesis method of doing science when trying to establish truth (reality or the true nature of the physical world) seems contradictory to his concept of absolute space. The dichotomy of logic here is evident from his conclusion about the existence of a certain form of space based on just non-demonstrable data and mostly thought experiments, thus employing the same hypothesis method that he vehemently protested against. However Newton seemed to believe that “absolute space was a logical and ontological necessity” (Cushing); the justification for his beliefs can be ascribed to : the writings of Christian philosopher John More and the Descartian view of space. John More wrote extensively on the similarities between “infinite space and god”, thus for him “space was immaterial and hence a spirit” (Cushing). This need to include God in the cosmological construct of the universe was embedded in the science of reformation. Newton used this ideology when formulating his ideas of space. Rene Descartes postulated that all space was essentially extensions of matter. In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes talked about the geometric identity of matter as the only valid one. Therefore Newton’s concepts on space which were built on more advanced mechanical principles and “dynamics” rather than “kinematics” tended to stray away from the Descartian view. With the rise of logical empiricism in the early 1890s Newton’s concepts of absolute space suffered a slow demise. The “positivists” or the “logical empiricists” believed that “a theory should contain no entities that are in principle unobservable or for which a procedure of measurement cannot be specified” (Cushing). With the ushering of this new school of thought, the Aristotelian ideals of inventing ad-hoc quantities and the belief in physically undetectable scientific ideas were rejected. Now, for the first time in Western scientific ideology a consciously organized movement arose to separate natural science from metaphysics and theology.
A lot of Newton’s life and work is a study of extremes. While his mathematical genius “finally offered one common scheme for terrestrial and celestial dynamics” (Boorstin), his need to maintain a draconian hold over the Royal Society of London exposed his penchant for megalomania. His concepts on cosmology were rather similar to Copernicus. Newton’s mathematical explanations according to him did little more than provide a mathematical formula of the physical world. Just as Copernicus had never believed that natural science would ever lead to a revelation about the laws of the universe, Newton’s life was marred with his “Hermeticism” (a belief in the bible and prophecy) and an undermining of the value of the scientific method. Due to his deep rooted theological and mystical foundations, the motivation for his science rested in coming up with physical laws that would further justify his religious convictions. Like most of the scientists of his age, he was schooled in theology and also made deep forays into alchemy. A lot of Newton’s mystic treatises were forcibly kept from publication by the royal society in order to ensure that his modern scientific image did not get tarnished. However recent publications of Newton’s ideas on Christianity and Alchemy help shed light on the very non-scientific aspects that were fundamental to Newton’s ideology.
Understanding the Newtonian influence on science requires the knowledge of the instruments that were used to ensure this dominance by Newton’s ideals. In 1703 Isaac Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society, a post he would occupy for a quarter century. His election to such an important position was in some ways detrimental for 18th century science. Newton with time had grown exceedingly “Christian” and his works on alchemy (650,000 words) and those on the Bible (1,300,000 words) simply in volume far exceeded his scientific endeavors. Along with each accomplishment came prestige and power – this changed Newton’s attitude towards the overall scientific progress of society. Newton exercised an almost militant monopoly over the ruling of the Royal society. Thus the lack of a power structure to keep him in check allowed him to expedite only the ideas that were important to him and kept up with his value system and theological world view. Newton slowly assembled this rather intricate system which would allow him to remain in power and crush any rival ideologist that wished to threaten his position. (Boorstin)
Among the many ideological “uprisings” that Newton put down, none affected his reputation or personal life more than his scientific and conceptual clashes with Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz. The publication of Newton’s Principia brought to light the fact that he had not given credit to Hooke for certain conceptual ideas that he had generously borrowed. After Hooke’s protests Newton decided to delete the sections of his work that bore resemblance to Hooke’s ideas rather than publicize them and acknowledging Hooke. This train of dyspepsic behavior would continue for the rest of Newton’s tenure at the Royal Society. However the rather vindictive fashion in which Newton sought to treat Leibniz brought out the true nature of Newton, the scientific dictator. Due to Newton’s constant attacks on Leibniz’s reputation and the lack of support from the German Scientific Institution Leibniz died a broken man.
Leibniz was a prodigy. Before he turned 26 he had devised a plan for legal reform for the Roman Empire, designed a calculating machine and advocated the construction of the Suez Canal. His differences with Newton were augmented from the dispute they had while trying to explain “the distinction between physical space and mathematical space” (Cushing). Newton’s idea’s of Euclidean space was in direct dissension with Leibniz’s ideas of non-Euclidean space (Leibniz believed that physical space could not exist without matter). The argument started over a basic ideological disagreement, escalated into the biggest rivalry of 18th century science with the publication of Newton’s “fluxions”. How much of the “calculus” which revolutionized the world of math came from Newton is a debatable topic; later research into Leibniz’s work showed that he had very little if any idea of Newton’s formulations on the topic. Newton did everything within his power to defame, discredit and destroy both Leibniz’s proposals on Calculus and his reputation and working as a scientist. Being in control of the organization that awarded credibility and recognition to the works of science, he ensured that his personally selected “board” found Leibniz guilty of plagiarism and granted Newton the title of “inventor of Calculus”.
In retrospect it is important to understand the impacts Leibniz and Newton had on the social, cultural and scientific community of the era. Leibniz encouraged a free flow of ideas and focused on creating implementable policies both in the fields of natural and social science. His demeanor was one of collective growth. Thus with the invention of his number machine and his ideas on legal reform, Leibniz made his ideas available to the common masses. He worked to ensure that the intellectual forum was not limited to those that were in select circles. Infused with a desire to help in the evolution of the scientific climate as opposed to pure personal prestige, he embodied the spirit of a “humanist” much more than Newton ever did. The extent of Newton’s mental gifts were never a point of conjecture , however the methods he employed to use them with age became more a struggle to ensure that his idea of “truth” rather than a questioning, evolving idea of “truth” was the prevailing view in society. Newton actualized a monumental number of scientific ideas; however their spread and certain revision were restricted by the Royal Society and what has now been understood as Newtonian mandate. An almost Pythagorean methodology of “hiding” the facts or ideals and then ensuring that people overlooked the constructive fallacies became staple for Newton. The damage Newton did by restricting the acceptance and growth of certain ideas due to personal strife and power dynamics is arguable. In the light of his activities as the head of the Royal Society and his interactions with the stalwarts of his age that did not conform to his belief spectrum, it seems possible that along with advancing the field of math and science with his ideas on “fluxions”, gravity and light, he retarded the growth of a social scientific community which would collaborate on understanding the physical universe. (Boorstin, Cushing)
Newton’s treatise on gravity had presented the notion of “force at a distance”. Therefore the next logical step was in understanding how this force was propagated. This brought scientists to the age old problem about understanding the nature of the medium of propagation. The Cartesian ideal of space permeating everywhere and being an extension of matter seemed to postulate (just like Galileo) that a void was impossibility. Going against the prevailing Newtonian concepts of “force” the Cartesians believed that “instantaneous action at a distance was senseless” (Cushing). Along with space, light was fast becoming an object of interest and debate among prominent scientists.
The two different ideologies that prevailed were the corpuscular nature and the wave nature of light. Hooke was the propagator of the Wave theory which was later supported by Huygens and finally confirmed by Young. The medium of propagation it was defined as the “aether”. This aether permeated all space and was used for the propagation of light. A theoretically constructed ideology about the nature of electricity and magnetism, the nature of the medium and finally the nature of light was lacking. This changed with the hypothesis made by the son of a poor blacksmith from the outskirts of London.
Michael Faraday is the unrecognized and unparalleled colossus of theoretical physics. He conceptually took on the staggeringly dominant Newtonian world and almost intuitively laid the groundwork on which electromagnetism was conceived. Ideologically the “Fields revolution” fostered-in by Faraday’s groundbreaking ideas about lines of force was “just as radical as the Newtonian Revolution and even more difficult for the lay mind to grasp” (Boorstin). His scientific career which began as an apprentice and helper to Humphry Davy was nothing spectacular till he found a way to liquefy chlorine and was nominated to the Royal Society. However his moment of enlightenment came while experimenting with a beaker of mercury and two cylindrical bar magnets, using his observations from his demonstrations and intuitive ideas he “elegantly demonstrated electromagnetic rotation” (Boorstin). From his forays in gravity, static electricity, electric currents and magnetism came his hypothesis that electricity and magnetism were somehow convertible. In a rush of intellectual creativity Faraday went ahead and formulated definitions and vocabulary terms such as “cathode”, “electrode” and “electrolysis”. After Thomson found some success in giving mathematical form to Faradays theories, he found enough emphasis experimentally to formulate the defining nature of his theory. From postulating “lines of force” to “diamagnetics” to finally the revolutionary concept that the “energy of the magnet was not in the magnet itself but in the magnetic field” (Boorstin), Faraday changed forever the Newtonian concept of centers of force. The fundamentally interesting aspect of Faraday’s work was his almost total ignorance of mathematics. Where he lacked in structural representation of ideas in mathematical form he made up for lucid definitions of his concepts in simple intuitive terms. It has often been said that Faraday would not have been able to achieve all he did, had he been a sophisticated mathematician. This rather counter-intuitive concept is explained by the prevalence of Newtonian math in the 18th and 19th centuries and the linear and conventional conclusions it led to. Thus due to Faraday’s rudimentary understanding of Newtonian centers of force he was not limited by their scope or misled by the ideology of force being a point source rather than a field. Therefore “once again a revolution in science would depend on the defiance of common sense” (Boorstin).
Understanding the rather strange aspect of Faraday’s methods of achieving results need to be discussed. In the past it was the lack of adequate math which retarded the proper representation of ideas in the natural sciences. Galileo struggled for years with the primitive Grecian geometry to give form to his concepts of force and motion; the same can be said for Ptolemy, Copernicus and even Kepler. However, Faraday actually gained from being outside the prevailing mathematical climate and formulating his ideas using just intuitive principles and experimental data (whenever possible). This proves that even though it was the lack of advanced math which proved to slow down the growth of western scientific ideology, at times being out of a system of conventional mathematical wisdom allowed a person to construct theoretically a more “improbable” view of the physical world than the rigorous mathematical system would warrant. Faradays ideas proved to be the demise of the Newtonian ideas of force at a distance. However just as Newton had given mathematical definition to the Galilean ideas of force and motion, a mathematician was needed that would recreate Faraday’s “Field Force” ideas. This need was fulfilled by the “father of electromagnetism”.
James Clerk Maxwell was an exceptionally gifted mathematician with a keen sense of accepting what made “sense” rather that the existing world view. His contributions to the arena of science range from Kinetic theory to the laws of Electromagnetism, to accurately predicting the constitution of Saturn’s rings. Maxwell was “guided by elegance and brevity and aimed to encapsulate in precise mathematics an idea or theory whose form he could already perceive” (Lindley). The point in focus here is arguably his greatest achievement. Prior to Maxwell’s stellar synthesis of the fundamental laws of the separate fields of electricity and magnetism there existed “Coulomb’s law for the electric field and Biot-Sarvat law for the magnetic field” (Cushing). After Maxwell’s conjugation of these separate laws a treatise was formulated which implied that “in empty space electric and magnetic fields satisfy a wave equation” (Cushing). Another great achievement of this theory was the accurate prediction that the speed of propagation of the electromagnetic waves is numerically equal to the square root of the ratio of the proportionality constant of Coulomb’s law and the Biot-Sarvat law. In addition Maxwell finally provided the dream of someday understanding an “absolute reference frame” since the speed of light (c) had to constitute the speed in relation to a certain reference frame.
Even though Maxwell’s ideas of “wave” propagation of light and the electromagnetic synthesis were influential and showed an ideological progression, he still remained a firm believer of the “aether”. Even though it might seem that his concept of the electromagnetic aether would have led him onto a retardation of methodological evolution, it is this very idea of an “electromagnetic aether being a genuine physical substance” (Cushing) that allowed Maxwell to formulate his equations. This brings up an important detail about the evolution of scientific thought. Due to the nature of the progression of ideas sometimes believing in a concept, that later was found to be realistically improbable, actually helped in the generation of the next step of thought. Kepler’s faith in Newtonian Mechanics and the application of that while coming up with his laws of planetary motion is a great example. As later discovered the perturbative effects due to the other bodies in the solar system on the orbit of Mercury actually led to the creation of a path that was not exactly an ellipse. Had Kepler known about this ideological fallacy in the Newtonian construct than it can be argued that he would have found it excruciatingly difficult to come up with his laws and might even have not persevered in providing enough justification for the Copernican model of the solar system. Thus the lack of a proper understanding of a system led to the process which finally resulted in the correct understanding.
Newton’s constructs of mathematics and science dominated the scientific atmosphere of the renaissance and the enlightenment. His dictatorship over the Royal Society ensured his lasting influence on the fundamental logic scientists applied to derive solutions. Even though his mathematics was revolutionary, his ideas of theology, alchemy and sociology displayed his rather conservative Christian faith and low expectations from the field of science. The nature of science which was tied in with recognition and achievement was cemented during this era. A mentality which had been present in a dormant form was finally actualized as scientists cared more about the accolades and less about understanding the process. Economics was a major factor in the formation of this structure, thus credibility was obtained by gaining recognition from the clergy and the nobility. Therefore instead of spending time devising new thought processes for the progression and understanding of the universe, eminent scientists spent years working on whims of the nobility. An example of this tragic reality was Gottfried Leibniz. In hopes of being recognized and subsequently funded he spent the last two years of his “gout-ridden life” (Boorstin) trying to finish the genealogical history of King George the first’s family.
With the progression in mathematics ushered in by Newton and Leibniz older ideas about understanding the variables that governed the universe were in demise. The universe was a lot more scientifically definite. Newton’s laws of force and understanding of gravity laid the foundation for scientific determinism. Thus Aristotle’s ideas of pre-concieved motions in control of the “Unmoved Mover” were replaced with divine determination. Moving into a mechanistic world view from the more organic Aristotelian world view was in some ways the premature beginnings to a separation of science and theology. Interestingly Newton favored his ideas of force only because they made sense in the biblical understanding of destiny. After Newton with scientists like Faraday and Maxwell the form of the physical world was separated forever in the scientific community from the influences of religion. In propagating the field theory, Faraday and Maxwell, gave physical identity to forces present in the universe that can’t be seen, but are always felt.
The western scientific structure moved away from the clergy and the nobility and universities became the epicenter of the avant garde. In accepting and propagating this change the scientific community took a monumental step towards removing religious and political bias from the very nature of doing science. Moving past the restrictions and the limitations imposed by theology and royal tribute scientists were finally free and “building up a library which had no other limits that the world itself – Erasmus” (Boorstin). With the implementation of conceptual constraints that could control different variables scientific determinism became the fundamental view of the physical universe.
Bibliography

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