For these reasons Mach, although he criticized Newton’s views on absolute space and time, proposed that the inertia of an object is the result of the interaction between the object and other celestial bodies in space (i.e.; “Mach’s principle.”) Standing on the threshold of relativity theory, Mach failed to discover the principle of relativity. Poincare, another pioneer of the theory of relativity, also thought that the principle was merely an experimental law which could be falsified by a single negative case. He argued that the speed of light is constant only within the ether, not universally, and that the apparent invariance within inertial systems is caused only by Lorentz’s contraction effect. Because he could not shake off the bonds of narrow empiricism, Poincare failed to formulate these two hypotheses, derived from a great number of experimental effects, into universal principles. The Critical School did not understand that scientific theories are by no means simple descriptions or classifications of experiential facts. They constantly reveal the true nature which is hiding behind phenomena. Moreover, theories themselves all have the nature of speculation. The richer the content of a theory, the profounder it is, the more abstract and the farther away from perceptual experience. If we really eliminate “metaphysics”, i.e., rational thinking, from science, then science will lose its soul and will become dead, dry bones.
Lenin once said that when natural science “is undergoing intense revolutionary reform in all areas…it can by no means abandon philosophy.”62 During periods of scientific revolution, old scientific concepts which have served as the guiding ideology for scientific research are on the verge of collapse, but new scientific perspectives have not yet appeared or have not yet been established. Scientists lack ideological weapons to break the old and establish the new, so they must turn to philosophical analysis to guide reform. At this critical point, further development of natural science is impossible without philosophy. The revolution in physics at the turn of the century clearly demonstrates this.
The above discussion shows that, unlike the Mechanical School, the Critical School played a positive role in the physics revolution at the turn of the century. However, philosophical limitations prevented the physicists of this school from completing the revolution. As early as the 1840s, Marx and Engels established dialectical materialism. Unfortunately, this revolutionary theory did not spread among physicists. Dialectical materialism was preceded by Hegel’s theory of dialectics and scientists, repelled by the Hegelian style of “natural philosophy”, eventually completely ignored it. Therefore, the arduous task of revolution ultimately fell on the shoulders of scientists who absorbed the advantages of both schools, Planck and Einstein among others.
When Planck devoted himself to science, he firmly believed that “the external world is an absolute which exists independently, and the search for the laws which apply to this absolute is the most beautiful task in a scientific career.”63 In his Kiel period (1885-1889), Planck can be considered to have been a disciple of Mach. At that time, he criticized the mechanistic viewpoint. Later on, in the struggle against energetics, under the influence of Boltzmann, Planck realized that Mach’s philosophy could not possibly eliminate all the metaphysical elements from the epistemology of physics. Therefore, in the 1890s he abandoned Mach’s narrow empiricism. In 1897, guided by the materialist ideology which is the heritage of natural scientists, Planck shifted to the study of black body radiation. He was searching for sighs of “the absolute” within the radiation spectrum. In October, 1900, he developed an empirical formula for black body radiation based on the available experimental data. After a number of attempts to deduce the formula theoretically, he was eventually forced to reverse his indifference to atomic theory. Formerly a critic of Boltzmann’s statistical view of the second laws of thermodynamics, he now became a supporter and groped his way to the correct approach. However, unlike the representatives of the Mechanical School, Planck was not constrained by the mechanistic viewpoint and did not regard Boltzmann’s classical theory as dogma. Rather, he made breakthroughs in two key areas (the expression of the relationship between entropy and probability and the quantum hypothesis) and finally, on 14 December 1900, Planck made his epoch-making discovery. Of course, he was not entirely conscious of his pioneering role. Rather, to a large extent, his recognition of reality forced him to move in that direction. Nevertheless, Planck’s work in fact raised the curtain on the revolution in physics, although for some time even he himself failed to realize this. However, Planck’s criticism of the mechanistic perspective was not thorough enough. He believed that “it may still be possible to use the mechanistic view to accomplish our research goal…There is no need to be frightened of the possibility of a mechanistic explanation.”64 Thus, Planck hesitated after taking the first critical step. He suspected his own reasoning and tried very hard to reconcile quantum theory with classical theory, thus staging two tragic retrogressions in 1911 and 1914.
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