engleski

Modern Physics and Scientism

Successes of classical physics in the 19th century seemed to give decisive support to the positivist philosophy and its derivatives, e.g. in the form of «scientific» materialism or scientism. Deterministic character and causality implicit in the Newtonian mechanics, emphasis on matter and its transformations, together with the successful application of the reductionist method seemed to announce unlimited powers of reason, which would, applying the «scientific method», eliminate the need for and the possibility of any other approach to reality, and particularly all metaphysics. However, modern science at the beginning of 20th century soon started shaking the basic assumptions of this ideological construction. Quantum mechanics and relativity questioned the idea of determinism, locality, local causality, role of the observer and even the realism of our theories. Matter seemed to lose its unchanging character, and the extension of reductionism from the method to the general ideology was shown to be dubious. Arrogant announcements of the final theory («Theory of Everything») suffered a mortal blow from Godel and his theorem, though it could have been anticipated even from the analysis of the character of scientific theories. Finally, extension of research from linear to nonlinear systems opened a whole new field of complex phenomena where emergent properties appear and characterize the behaviour of higher level system, thus making the reductionist programme impossible. Many people today – including scientists - are still unaware of these results of modern physics, and thus possibly subject to certain philosophical and ideological prejudices.

classical physics; determinism; scientism; fideism; quantum mechanics; relativity; causality; (non)locality; reductionism; complexity; realism

nije evidentirano