Fin-de-siècle Physics and the Turmoil of Scientific Knowledge

While science proceeds in understanding our world, it's not always a path of unremitting forward progress. Sometimes, there are some missteps. The regularities behind how knowledge grows and changes is discussed in my upcoming book The Half-Life of Facts, but doing a deep dive into a single time period in order to understand how this really works can be very illuminating.

In a paper recently posted to the arXiv, Helge Kragh explores the turmoil in physics in the Fin-de-siècle period, around the end of the Nineteenth Century. While many physicists felt that the mechanistic approach to physics, based on Newtonian mechanics, was sufficient and that physics was nearly complete, this was by no means the only view. Numerous scientists had noticed certain cracks in these theories, such as Newton's law of gravitation's inability to explain certain aspects of Mercury's orbit.

But there was much more uncertainty than that; there were numerous physical concepts bandied about, that, with the benefit of hindsight, were monumental dead ends. For example, when confronted with the possibility that atoms were not indivisible, some scientists simply sidestepped this problem and said that everything is energy, and that thinking about matter was no longer necessary. This concept was known as energetics, and had many high-profile supporters.

And there are many other examples. As the Physics arXiv Blog discusses this paper:

One theory widely discussed for several years was put forward by William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin, who believed that atoms were vortices in the ether. Curiously, physicists never proved this idea wrong. Instead, it simply ran out steam.Then there were the various discoveries that turned out to be little more than wishful thinking. The discovery of X-rays by William Roentgen in 1895 led to the announcement of a bewildering range of other rays, for example N-rays, black light, rays of positive electricity, Moser rays, selenic rays and magnetic rays.

All of these turned out to be figments of the fertile imaginations of the physicists involved; the result of a kind of ray hysteria.

This time period was extremely productive, and yet much work did not stand the test of time. As Kragh concludes:

As seen in retrospect, the enduring and really important contributions of the fin-de-siècle period to modern physics were not the ambitious attempts to create a new unified foundation of physics. They are rather to be found in the period’s experimental discoveries of, for example, X- rays, the electron, and radioactivity. These discoveries were initially interpreted within the framework of fin-de-siècle physics, but, with the possible exception of the electron, they were not products of it.

This is by no means the exception. Truly fundamental and enduring scientific discoveries are relatively rare, yet the entire process is important. Hypotheses and theories must be proposed, if only to be tested and discarded. We asymptotically approach the truth, along the way contending with the half-life of facts.

For further details, see the original article or the discussion at the Physics arXiv Blog. |* Thanks to Richard Fisher for the pointer!*

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