Word: newtonian
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That doctrine rests firmly on the basis of eighteenth century Newtonian science. According to that conception, there are certain laws in nature which man can learn through experiment. For Rusk, the experience at Munich in 1938 represents a "laboratory exercise in the anatomy and physiology of aggression" from which certain "eternal truths" emerged, namely, that "aggression" must be stopped by force. Modern scientific thought would hardly call its laws "eternal truths," yet Rusk continues to pride himself on the scientific nature of his thinking...
...professionals agree, into the greatest experimental scientist who ever lived. He induced the first electric current, developed the first dynamo and with it the possibility of electric power, created the science of electrochemistry and with it a primary implement of modern industry, blasted the first big breach in the Newtonian universe and laid down the foundations of both classical and contemporary field theory...
Einstein shared Loeb's conviction that scientific truths illuminate some real world, and were not merely postulates of convenience. Yet Einstein's own work, like Loeb's contributed to the overthrow of that position. In 1927, the physicist Percy Bridgman questioned how it was possible that Newtonian theory, which had been accepted throughout the nineteenth century, could be overthrown. He answered, in brief, that Einstein had replaced Newton's absolute concepts--absolute space, absolute motion, absolute time--with concepts defined in terms of particular observers, such as time and length relative to an observer. The truth arrived at by these...
...years passed, color rang in his work like chimes. His palette brightened past the impressionists, past the Fauves. Kupka frequently visited Chartres Cathedral, where he sat hour on hour soaking in the rainbow radiance of its stained-glass windows. He studied Newtonian color theory, and like Kandinsky, who was five years his senior, he quit coloring nature and began illustrating the nature of color. He wanted anything, he wrote, but "the postcard photograph...
...cobalt were spinning more in one direction than in the other.) Physicists had assumed a law to be true in a situation where they had no right to. This was the second such faulty assumption which has been corrected in the twentieth century. Until 1926 physicists assumed that Newtonian mechanics (applicable to gloves and planets) was valid on the atomic level. In 1926 quantum mechanics appeared as a more valid description of mechanics upon the atomic level. In both cases the significance is hardly abstruse. Scientists who extend their laws to situations other then where they were originally derived should...