IT IS JUST TWO hundred years ago that Newton closed his eyes. It behooves us at such a moment to remember this brilliant genius, who determined the course of western thought, research and practice to an extent that nobody before or since his time can touch. Not only was he brilliant as an inventor of certain key methods, but he also had a unique command of the empirical material available in his day, and he was marvelously inventive as regards mathematical and physical methods of proof in individual cases. For all these reasons he deserves our deepest reverence. The figure of Newton has, however, an even greater importance than his genius warrants because of the fact that destiny placed him at a turning point in the history of the human intellect. To see this vividly, we have to remind ourselves that before Newton there existed no self-contained system of physical causality which was capable of representing any of the deeper features of the empirical world.
No doubt the great materialists of ancient Greece had insisted that all material events should be traced back to a strictly regular series of atomic movements, without admitting any living creature’s will as an independent cause. And no doubt Descartes had in his own way taken up this quest again. But it remained a bold ambition, the problematical ideal of a school of philosophers. Actual results of a kind to support the belief in the existence of a complete chain of physical causation hardly existed before Newton.
Newton’s object was to answer the question: Is there such a thing as a simple rule by which one can calculate the movements of the heavenly bodies in our planetary system completely, when the state of motion of all these bodies at one moment is known? Kepler’s empirical laws of planetary movement, deduced from Tycho Brahe’s observations, confronted him, and demanded explanation.1 These laws gave, it is true, a complete answer to the question of how the planets move around the sun (the elliptical shape of the orbit, the sweeping of equal areas by the radii in equal times, the relation between the major axes and the period of circulation around the sun); but they did not satisfy the demand for causal explanation. They are three logically independent rules, revealing no inner connection with each other. The third law cannot simply be transferred quantitatively to other central bodies than the sun (there is, e.g., no relation between the rotatory period of a planet around the sun and that of a moon around its planet). The most important point, however, is this: these laws are concerned with the movement as a whole, and not with the question how the state of motion of a system gives rise to that which immediately follows it in time; they are, as we should say now, integral and not differential laws.
The differential law is the only form which completely satisfies the modern physicist’s demand for causality. The clear conception of the differential law is one of Newton’s greatest intellectual achievements. It was not merely this conception that was needed but also a mathematical formalism, which existed in a rudimentary form but needed to acquire a systematic form. Newton found this also in the differential and the integral calculus. We need not consider the question here whether Newton hit upon the same mathematical methods independently of Leibnitz or not. In any case it was absolutely necessary for Newton to perfect them, since they alone could provide him with the means of expressing his ideas.
Galileo had already moved a considerable way towards a knowledge of the law of motion. He discovered the law of inertia and the law of bodies falling freely in the gravitational field of the earth, namely, that a mass (more accurately, a mass-point) which is unaffected by other masses moves uniformly and in a straight line. The vertical speed of a free body in the gravitational field increases uniformly with the time. It may seem to us today to be but a short step from Galileo’s discoveries to Newton’s law of motion. But it should be observed that both the above statements refer in their form to the motion as a whole, while Newton’s law of motion provides an answer to the question: how does the state of motion of a mass-point behave in an infinitely short time under the influence of an external force? It was only by considering what takes place during an infinitely short time (the differential law) that Newton reached a formula which applies to all motion whatsoever. He took the conception of force from the science of statics which had already reached a high stage of development. The connection of force and acceleration was only made possible for him by the introduction of the new concept of mass, which was supported, strange to say, by an illusory definition. We are so accustomed today to the creation of concepts corresponding to differential quotients that we can now hardly grasp any longer what a remarkable power of abstraction it needed to reach the general differential law by a double crossing of frontiers, in the course of which the concept of mass had in addition to be invented.
But a causal conception of motion was still far from being achieved. For the motion was only determined by the equation of motion in cases where the force was given. Inspired no doubt by the uniformity of planetary motions, Newton conceived the idea that the force operating on a mass was determined by the position of all masses situated at a sufficiently small distance from the mass in question. It was not till this connection was established that a completely causal conception of motion was achieved. How Newton, starting from Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, performed this task for gravitation and so discovered that the kinetic forces acting on the stars and gravity were of the same nature, is well known. It is the combination of the Law of Motion with the Law of Attraction which constitutes that marvelous edifice of thought which makes it possible to calculate the past and future states of a system from the state obtaining at one particular moment, in so far as the events take place under the influence of the forces of gravity alone. The logical completeness of Newton’s conceptual system lay in this, that the only things that figure as causes of the acceleration of the masses of a system are these masses themselves.
On the strength of the foundation here briefly sketched Newton succeeded in explaining the motions of the planets, moons and comets down to the smallest details, as well as the tides and the precessional movement of the earth—a deductive achievement of unique magnificence. The discovery that the cause of the motions of the heavenly bodies is identical with the gravity with which we are so familiar from everyday life must have been particularly impressive.
But the importance of Newton’s achievement was not confined to the fact that it created a workable and logically satisfactory basis for the actual science of mechanics; up to the end of the nineteenth century it formed the program of every worker in the field of theoretical physics. All physical events were to be traced back to masses subject to Newton’s laws of motion. The law of force simply had to be widened and adapted to the type of event under consideration. Newton himself tried to apply this scheme to optics, assuming light to consist of inert corpuscles. Even the wave theory of light made use of Newton’s law of motion, after it had been applied to the mass of a continuum. Newton’s equations of motion were the sole basis of the kinetic theory of heat, which not only prepared people’s minds for the discovery of the law of the conservation of energy but also led to a theory of gases which has been confirmed down to the last detail, and a more profound view of the nature of the second law of thermodynamics. The development of electricity and magnetism has proceeded right down to our own day along Newtonian lines (electrical and magnetic substance, forces acting at a distance). Even the revolution in electrodynamics and optics brought about by Faraday and Clerk Maxwell, which formed the first great fundamental advance in theoretical physics since Newton, took place entirely under the aegis of Newton’s ideas. Clerk Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Lord Kelvin never wearied of tracing the electromagnetic fields and their reciprocal dynamic actions back to the mechanical action of hypothetical continuously diffused masses. As a result, however, of the hopelessness or at any rate the lack of success of those efforts, a gradual revolution in our fundamental notions has taken place since the end of the nineteenth century; theoretical physics have outgrown the Newtonian frame which gave stability and intellectual guidance to science for nearly two hundred years.
Newton’s fundamental principles were so satisfactory from the logical point of view that the impetus to overhaul them could only spring from the imperious demands of empirical fact. Before I go into this I must insist that Newton himself was better aware of the weaknesses inherent in his intellectual edifice than the generations of scientists which followed him. This fact has always roused my respectful admiration, and I should like therefore to dwell on it for a moment.
I. In spite of the fact that Newton’s ambition to represent his system as necessarily conditioned by experience and to introduce the smallest possible number of concepts not directly referable to empirical objects is everywhere evident, he sets up the concept of absolute space and absolute time, for which he has often been criticized in recent years. But in this point Newton is particularly consistent. He had realized that observable geometrical magnitudes (distances of material points from one another) and their course in time do not completely characterize motion in its physical aspects. He proved this in the famous experiment with the rotating vessel of water. Therefore, in addition to masses and temporally variable distances, there must be something else that determines motion. That “something” he takes to be relation to “absolute space.” He is aware that space must possess a kind of physical reality if his laws of motion are to have any meaning, a reality of the same sort as material points and the intervals between them.
The clear realization of this reveals both Newton’s wisdom and also a weak side to his theory. For the logical structure of the latter would undoubtedly be more satisfactory without this shadowy concept; in that case only things whose relations to perception are perfectly clear (mass-points, distances) would enter into the laws.
II. The introduction of forces acting directly and instantaneously at a distance into the representation of the effects of gravity is not in keeping with the character of most of the processes familiar to us from everyday life. Newton meets this objection by pointing to the fact that his law of reciprocal gravitation is not supposed to be a final explanation but a rule derived by induction from experience.
III. Newton’s teaching provided no explanation for the highly remarkable fact that the weight and the inertia of a body are determined by the same quantity (its mass). The remarkableness of this fact struck Newton himself.
None of these three points can rank as a logical objection to the theory. In a sense they merely represent unsatisfied desires of the scientific spirit in its struggle for a complete and unitary penetration of natural events by thought.
Newton’s doctrine of motion, considered as the key idea of the whole of theoretical physics, received its first shock from Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electricity. It became clear that the reciprocal actions between bodies due to electric and magnetic forces were affected, not by forces operating instantaneously at a distance, but by processes which are propagated through space at a finite speed. Faraday conceived a new sort of real physical entity, namely the “field,” in addition to the mass-point and its motion. At first people tried, clinging to the mechanical mode of thought, to look upon it as a mechanical condition (motion or force) of a hypothetical medium by which space was filled up (the ether). But when this interpretation refused to work in spite of the most obstinate efforts, people gradually got used to the idea of regarding the “electromagnetic field” as the final irreducible constituent of physical reality. We have H. Hertz to thank for definitely freeing the conception of the field from all encumbrances derived from the conceptual armory of mechanics, and H. A. Lorentz for freeing it from a material substratum; according to the latter the only thing left to act as a substratum for the field was physical, empty space (or ether), which even in the mechanics of Newton had not been destitute of all physical functions. By the time this point was reached, nobody any longer believed in immediate momentary action at a distance, not even in the sphere of gravitation, even though no field theory of the latter had been clearly sketched out owing to lack of sufficient factual knowledge. The development of the theory of the electro-magnetic field—once Newton’s hypothesis of forces acting at a distance had been abandoned—led to the attempt to explain the Newtonian law of motion on electro-magnetic lines or alternatively to replace it by a more accurate one based on the field-theory. Even if these efforts did not meet with complete success, still the fundamental concepts of mechanics had ceased to be looked upon as fundamental constituents of the physical cosmos.
The theory of Clerk Maxwell and Lorentz led inevitably to the special theory of relativity, which ruled out the existence of forces acting at a distance, and resulted in the destruction of the notion of absolute simultaneity. This theory made it clear that mass is not a constant quantity but depends on (indeed it is equivalent to) the amount of energy content. It also showed that Newton’s law of motion was only to be regarded as a limiting law valid for small velocities; in its place it set up a new law of motion in which the speed of light in vacuo figures as the critical velocity.
The general theory of relativity formed the last step in the development of the program of the field-theory. Quantitatively it modified Newton’s theory only slightly, but for that all the more profoundly qualitatively. Inertia, gravitation, and the metrical behavior of bodies and clocks were reduced to a single field quality; this field itself was again placed in dependence on bodies (generalization of Newton’s law of gravity or the field law corresponding to it, as formulated by Poisson). Space and time were thereby divested not of their reality but of their causal absoluteness (absoluteness affecting but not affected) which Newton had been compelled to ascribe to them in order to be able to give expression to the laws then known. The generalized law of inertia takes over the function of Newton’s law of motion. This short account is enough to show how the elements of Newtonian theory passed over into the general theory of relativity, whereby the three defects above mentioned were overcome. It looks as if the law of motion could be deduced from the field law corresponding to the Newtonian law of force. Only when this goal has been completely reached will it be possible to talk about a pure field-theory.
In a more formal sense also Newton’s mechanics prepared the way for the field-theory. The application of Newton’s mechanics to continuously distributed masses led inevitably to the discovery and application of partial differential equations, which in their turn first provided the language for the laws of the field-theory. In this formal respect Newton’s conception of the differential law constitutes the first decisive step in the development which followed.
The whole evolution of our ideas about the processes of nature, with which we have been concerned so far, might be regarded as an organic development of Newton’s ideas. But while the process of perfecting the field-theory was still in full swing, the facts of heat-radiation, the spectra, radio-activity, etc., revealed a limit to the serviceableness of the whole intellectual system which today still seems to us absolutely insuperable in spite of immense successes at certain points. Many physicists maintain—and there are weighty arguments in their favor—that in the face of these facts not merely the differential law but the law of causation itself—hitherto the fundamental postulate of all natural science—has collapsed. Even the possibility of a spatio-temporal construction, which can be unambiguously coordinated with physical events, is denied. That a mechanical system is permanently susceptible only of discrete energy-values or states—as experience so to speak directly shows—seems at first sight hardly deducible from a field-theory which operates with differential equations. The de Broglie-Schrödinger method, which has in a certain sense the character of a field-theory, does indeed deduce the existence of only-discrete states, in astonishing agreement with empirical fact, on a basis of differential equations operating with a kind of resonance theory, but it has to do without a localization of the mass-particles and without strictly causal laws. Who would presume today to decide the question whether the law of causation and the differential law, these ultimate premises of the Newtonian view of nature, must definitely be given up?
1 Today everybody knows what prodigious industry was needed to discover these laws from the empirically ascertained orbits. But few pause to reflect on the brilliant methods by which Kepler deduced the real orbits from the apparent ones—i.e., from the movements as they were observed from the earth.