Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965
The Physicist as Philosopher
By Stephen Toulmin
Essays 1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge
by Niels Bohr
Interscience Publishers, 100 pp., $5.00
My View of the World
by Erwin Schrödinger
Cambridge, 120 pp., $3.50
The Relevance of Science
by C.F. von Weizsäcker
Harper & Row, 192 pp., $5.00
One of the minor crosses that Albert Einstein bore through the last thirty years of his life was the way in which people of all kinds and backgrounds turned to him for pronouncements: pronouncements about democracy and liberty, about aesthetics and free love—above all, about philosophy. Just because of the intellectual penetration shown in his analysis of our spatial and temporal concepts, they hoped for a further revelation; and indeed, the term 'relativity' became for a while a catch-phrase far beyond the widest-drawn boundaries of mathematical physics. On his own side, Einstein himself was fully aware of the limitations of his experience, and felt keenly embarrassed when his personal opinions were treated with inappropriate deference. Some people may be tempted to comment, 'And quite right, too!' Yet there is a little more to the matter than this. Throughout intellectual history there has been a continuous interaction at the theoretical level between the ideas of physics and those of philosophy—between physics (one might say) and the rest of philosophy, since today's physical theory is the lineal descendant of yesterday's 'natural philosophy.' Certain genuinely philosophical problems—e.g., those at issue between Leibniz and Clarke—lose most of their force and point for twentieth-century readers if divorced from scientific considerations; and over such issues the contributions of a Poincaré or an Einstein may in fact help directly to clear our philosophical minds. The patterns of interaction between physics and philosophy are, however, not fixed timelessly: they change from generation to generation. The specific relevance of new modes of thought in physical theory to (say) epistemology or philosophical theology is something which has continually to be explored afresh. So the philosophical views of physicists of such intellectual distinction as Niels Bohr or Erwin Schrödinger must be of interest both for biographical reasons and more generally.
Review, 3022 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |