In our modern world, we consider science to naturally go hand in hand with progress.1 These two concepts are almost perceived as synonyms. Science is progress; I believe in science as I believe in progress. We then consider ourselves progressive, as supporters of progress, “moving forward” in the etymological sense of the word. Progress is often opposed to conservation, with the latter being seen as a symbol of inertia, i.e., resistance to change.
In the eyes of the general public and progressive intellectuals, science—which is constantly advancing—cannot be conservative. By conservative, I mean preserving, safeguarding, and maintaining things, structures, and unchanging ideas. But is science only progressive?
Scientific ideas are often seen as revolutionary, wiping away the past, the tabula rasa.
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However, while ideas evolve, change, and modify, they still preserve certain older ideas that inspire the new ones. In this sense, we will see that science preserves more than it changes. But this is not opposed to progress. Actually, the foundation of science itself obeys a law of conservation, despite being in constant motion. As for scientists, Albert Einstein is the famous symbol of both scientific and political progress (Person of the Century 1999). We often hear that he revolutionized physics and our understanding of nature.
However, the historical reality is more complex than we think. Einstein could be a staunch conservative in many aspects, while other scientists who are perceived as more conservative were more open to progress.
This article examines the contradictions and hesitations between progress and conservation inherent to science and the people who shape it through the illustrious example of Einstein. We will defend the thesis that sciences are built in the image of nature, i.e., preserving what needs to be preserved and constantly evolving to endure. At the end, we will support the idea of the existence of a complementarity rather than a dichotomy between progress and conservation in the construction of science.
Einstein vs. Bohr: Revolutionaries or Conservatives?
As compared to his theory of relativity, Einstein is less known to the general public for his work in quantum physics, which nevertheless earned him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. His interpretation of the photoelectric effect in one of his four articles in 1905 introduced the idea of light particles, or light quanta, now known as photons (Einstein 1905a). Building upon the 1899 work of Max Planck, another illustrious German physicist, and the experimental research of Heinrich Hertz in 1897, Einstein wrote, in my opinion, his best article in 1905 because he was able to demonstrate a property of nature that was still being debated at the time, namely the existence of elementary particles.
Although the hypothesis of energy quanta had been proposed by Planck in 1899, Einstein was the first to take the decisive step and embrace the quantum nature of matter on a microscopic scale. His explanation, simple and elegant, was the most convenient way to describe nature, that is, the observation of phenomena. Yet he was not among those who completely revolutionized atomic physics. He strongly opposed the work of the Copenhagen school and its leader, Niels Bohr. Did he oppose the theoretical results? No, he opposed the philosophical interpretation of those results.
Quantum physics is based on the idea of intrinsic randomness in nature. The uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg (1971) in 1927, provides the clearest formulation of this concept. The statement of this principle tells us it is impossible to simultaneously know the position and velocity of a moving particle.
Furthermore, if we know the uncertainty in the measurement of position, then the uncertainty in the measurement of velocity is at least equal to a certain value that is inversely proportional to the first uncertainty. Due to this fundamental uncertainty, the classical description of matter no longer works. We can no longer, as Newton did, describe a particle as a material point. Another representation is therefore necessary.
In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger proposed an equation, now bearing his name, that describes the dynamics of a particle using a wave function. Thus, a particle is seen as a wave on an atomic scale and as a particle on our scale. What is surprising is that, conversely, in the case of light, it was first shown to behave like a wave (according to the works of Thomas Young in 1804, James Clerk Maxwell in 1850, and Heinrich Rudolf Hertz in 1898), and then in 1905, it was shown to behave as a particle, the famous photon. This seems contradictory: light is both a wave and a particle. As for atomic matter, we face a similar problem. Indeed, a particle behaves like a wave, but when we observe this particle, we see it as a particle. To resolve this problem in the interpretation of quantum physics, the physicist Niels Bohr formulated in 1928 one of the greatest ideas in the philosophy of science of the twentieth century: the principle of complementarity (Bohr 1928).
Source: Free Inquirer
to be continued in the next issue
