Einstein and the Generations of Science
By: David Abshire
Edition: Second edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 390
ISBN-13: 9781351312080
Subjects: Physicists; Biography; Relativity (Physics); Science; History
Description: "This absorbing intellectual history vividly recreates the unique social, political, and philosophical milieu in which the extraordinary promise of Einstein and scientific contemporaries took root and flourished into greatness. Feuer shows us that no scientific breakthrough really happens by chance; it takes a certain intellectual climate, a decisive tension within the very fabric of society, to spur one man's potential genius into world-shaking achievement. Feuer portrays such men of high imaginative powers as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie, influenced by and influencing the social worlds in which they lived."--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Prologue; 1 THE SOCIAL ROOTS OF EINSTEIN'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY; Zurich: The Peaceful Cradle of European Revolution; Friedrich Adler and Albert Einstein; Ernst Mach: The Genesis of the Relativist Standpoint; The Appeal of Mach's Philosophy to the New Revolutionary Generation; The Olympia Academy: A Scientific Countercommunity; Countercultures and Isoemotional Lines; The Sublimation of Revolutiojiary Emotion into Physical Theory; Einstein as a Generational Revolutionist.; title: Social and Ideological Contrast of the Zurich-Berne Circle with the Cantabrigians and ParisiansHermann Minkowski: Architectural Formalist of the Theory of Relativity; The Subsidence of the Relativist Spirit: Einstein as a Generational Conservative; 2 SOCIAL, GENERATIONAL, AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES OF QUANTUM THEORY; Niels Bohr: The Ekliptika Circle and the Kierkegaardian Spirit; Werner Heisenberg and the Revolt against Determinism; Louis Victor, Prince de Broglie, Aristocratic Revolutionist; 3 GENERATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS; title: The Idea of Scientific Revolution.; title: The Disanalogy of Scientific Revolution: The Absence of Revolutionary SituationsGenerational Collaboration in Scientific Revolutions; Classical Systems as Limiting Cases of Revolutionary Systems: The Absence of Qualitative Negation in Scientific Revolutions; The Non-Immanent, Epigenetic Development of Novel Sciences; The Complementarity of Subjective Generational Revolution and Objective, Cumulative Evolution; 4 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENTIFIC SCHOOLS; The Notion of Isomorpheme; The Emotional Character of Scientific Schools.; title: The Tragedy of Ludwig Boltzmann: A Case Study in the Consequences of Generational, Methodological FanaticismThe Planck-Macb Controversy; Generational Movements and the Scientific Community; Generational Relativism and Intergenerational Invariance; Generational Evolution from Empirical Contingency to Rational Necessity; Conclusion; INDEX.