Showing results by author "John T Sanders" in All Categories

Einstein overthrew Newtonian physics but like Newton he still believed that physical events have definite causes. Then Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, joined others in describing a strange new world of uncertainty and mystery. Quantum mechanics has intrigued and confounded many by joining keen insights with apparent contradictions and indeterminacy. Quantum theory also was later used to create semiconductors, the technology of the computer revolution.

We think of science as a way of discovering certainty in an unpredictable world; experiments are designed to objectively measure cause and effect. Yet science often produces more new questions than answers, and all scientific theories can change with new and better observations. Scientific philosophers say that "objective" observations actually depend heavily on the observer's intuition and point of view.

Isaac Newton's world had operated in a fixed, rigid, "absolute" framework of space and time. Yet discoveries about electromagnetism in the late 19th century created new and troubling inconsistencies. In 1905, Einstein's name became synonymous with "genius" when his Special Theory of Relativity challenged old concepts in physics. Hertz, Lorentz, Mach, Poincare, and others illustrated the ideas that so captivated Albert Einstein and shook our conventional ideas about space and time.