![]() ![]() As if that were not enough, Einstein himself (1917) had the intellectual daring to apply his general theory of relativity to the overall Universe, thus creating cosmology as an authentically scientific and predictive field. For example, this theory helped explain how it was possible that radioactive elements (uranium, polonium, radium, thorium) that had been studied for the first time by Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) and Marie (1867-1934) and Pierre Curie (1859-1906), emit radiation in a continuous manner with no apparent loss of mass.Īnd then there was the general theory of relativity, which explained gravity by converting space-actually, four-dimensional space-time-into something curved, and with variable geometry! It was immediately apparent that, compared to Newton’s universal gravitation, Einstein’s new theory made it much easier to understand perceptible phenomena in the solar system (it solved, for example, a century-old anomaly in the movement of Mercury’s perihelion). ![]() c2, where c represents the speed of light), opened new doors for understanding the physical world.The result, in which measurements of space and time depend on the state of movement of the observer, and mass, m, is equivalent to energy, E (the famous expression E= m Created to resolve the increasingly evident “lack of understanding” between Newtonian mechanics and the electrodynamics of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), the special theory of relativity imposed radical modifications of ideas and definitions that had been in force ever since Isaac Newton (1642-1727) included them in the majestic structure contained in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)-concepts as basic from a physical, ontological and epistemological viewpoint as space, time and matter (mass). ![]() Much has been written, and will be written in the future, about the importance of those theories and their effect on physics as a whole, even before the middle of the century. They are respectively related to the special and general theories of relativity (Einstein 1905a, 1915), and quantum mechanics (Heisenberg 1925, Schrödinger 1926). Those cognitive cataclysms took place in physics, and are known as the relativist and quantum revolutions. The great revolutions of the Twentieth Centuryĭuring the first half of the twentieth century-actually, the first quarter-there were two major scientific revolutions. ![]()
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