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Lecture 25: Creation
The 20th century dawned with physics at its zenith. Not one, but several famous luminaries
made predictions that all the basic physics was understood and mathematically described with
a few minor puzzles that just needed a little tidying up. This triumphalism meshed perfectly
with the spirit of the age. In Germany, Hegel could write about the high spiritual attainment
of civilization. In England, hymnwriters were extolling the immanent arrival of the
Millenium, the 1000 years of peace and prosperity promised in the final book of the Bible.
Mark Twain commented on the turn of the century as "the gilded age", when net world
trade had reached a peak not exceeded until the late 1980's. So it is not surprising that
physicists should have gotten so cocky, everyone was.
So in 1905, when Albert Einstein published his papers on "special relativity" and "the photoelectric
effect", it had the impact of a bombshell on smug scientific complacency. The world was not
as advertised, indeed, not even as it appeared. The full consequences of these two papers were
not appreciated by the young, 24-year old Einstein, but grew greater with each passing year
culminating 40 years later in a fireball that outshone the sun in the high desert of New Mexico.
Although the full significance wasn't immediately appreciated, nonetheless, all of the
great physicists of those decades: Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, Pauli, Heisenberg, were unsettled
by the metaphysics revealed in these discoveries. For both papers deeply undermined
scientific materialism.
Last modified, April 29, 2002, RbS