Science was one of the chief pillars underlying the optimistic
and rationalistic view of the world that many
Westerners shared in the nineteenth century. Supposedly
based on hard facts and cold reason, science offered
a certainty of belief in the orderliness of nature that
was comforting to many people for whom traditional
religious beliefs no longer had much meaning. Many
optimistically believed that the application of already
known scientific laws would give humanity a complete
understanding of the physical world and an accurate picture
of reality. The new physics dramatically altered that
perspective.
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Westerners
adhered to the mechanical conception of the universe
postulated by the classical physics of Isaac Newton.
In this perspective, the universe was a giant machine in
which time, space, and matter were objective realities
that existed independently of the parties observing them.
Matter was thought to be composed of indivisible, solid
material bodies called atoms.
These views were first seriously questioned at the end
of the nineteenth century. Some scientists had discovered
that certain elements such as radium and polonium
spontaneously gave off rays or radiation that apparently
came from within the atom itself. Atoms were therefore
not hard material bodies but small worlds containing
such subatomic particles as electrons and protons that behaved
in a seemingly random and inexplicable fashion.
Inquiry into the disintegrative process within atoms became
a central theme of the new physics.
Building on this work, in 1900, a Berlin physicist, Max
Planck (1858–1947), rejected the belief that a heated
body radiates energy in a steady stream but maintained
instead that it did so discontinuously, in irregular packets
of energy that he called “quanta.” The quantum theory
raised fundamental questions about the subatomic realm
of the atom. By 1900, the old view of atoms as the basic
building blocks of the material world was being seriously
questioned, and Newtonian physics was in trouble.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), a German-born patent
officer working in Switzerland, pushed these new theories
of thermodynamics into new terrain. In 1905, Einstein
published a paper, “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
setting forth his theory of relativity. According to
relativity theory, space and time are not absolute but relative
to the observer, and both are interwoven into what
Einstein called a four-dimensional space-time continuum.
Neither space nor time has an existence independent
of human experience. Moreover, matter and energy
reflect the relativity of time and space. Einstein
concluded that matter was nothing but another form of
energy. His epochal formula E mc2—each particle
of matter is equivalent to its mass times the square of
the velocity of light—was the key theory explaining the
vast energies contained within the atom. It led to the
atomic age.
World History
