Werner Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, tr. Arnold J. Pomerans (London: Hutchinson & Co.: 1958), 8-12.

The Problem of Nature

Changes in the Investigator’s Attitude to Nature

Let us first look back at the historical roots of modern science. When it was founded by Kepler, Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century, there still prevailed the idea of nature of the Middle Ages. Nature was seen as God’s creation. Nature was God’s Work and it would have been thought senseless to ask questions about the material world without reference to God. As a document of the times, I should like to quote Kepler’s concluding remarks in his Cosmic Harmony: ‘Thanks be to Thee, Oh Lord our Creator, who hast granted me visions of beauty in Thy creation, and with the work of these Thy hands I give praise. Lo, I have completed the work to which I have been called; I have exploited the gifts Thou hast bestowed upon me; I have proclaimed the splendour of Thy work unto those who will read these proofs, in as much as I, in the limitations of my mind, have been able to grasp them.’

Yet, within the course of a few decades, man’s attitude to nature was to change radically. As scientists delved more deeply into the details of natural processes they realized, as in fact Galileo had been the first to do, that individual natural processes can be isolated from their context in order to be described and explained mathematically. At the same time it became clear how immense was the task confronting this new science. Thus, Newton no longer looked upon the world as a whole that could only be understood as God’s work, and his attitude to nature is best summed up by bis well-known statement; ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of undiscovered truth lay all undiscovered before me.’

This change in the scientists’ attitude to nature is perhaps best understood if we consider that, to Christian thought of the time, God seemed to be in a Heaven so high above the earth, that it became significant to look at the earth without reference to God. In this respect we may even be justified in speaking of modem science—as Kamlah appears to do—as a specifically Christian form of Godlessness, and so explain why there has been no corresponding development in other cultures. It is hardly accidental that in the creative arts of that time nature was being represented without any reference to religious notions. The scientist was conforming with this tendency when, considering nature not only independently of God but even independently of man, he aimed at its ‘objective’ description or explanation. Yet it must be stressed that even for Newton the shell was important only because it stemmed from the great ocean of truth. Its observation was not yet a purpose in itself, but derived its significance from its connection with the ocean.

In the ensuing years the methods of Newtonian mechanics were applied successfully to ever greater realms of nature. Attempts were made to discover the details of natural processes by means of experiments, to observe them objectively and to understand the laws governing them. Scientists tried to formulate relationships mathematically, and to arrive at ‘laws’ which would hold without restriction in the entire cosmos. In this way they finally managed to harness the forces of nature to man’s purposes. The magnificent development of mechanics in the eighteenth century, and of optics, thermodynamics and heat technology at the beginning of the nineteenth century are all evidence of the power of this approach.

Changes in the Meaning of the Word ‘Nature’

Inasmuch as this kind of science was successful, it spread beyond the realm of daily experience into distant realms of nature, which could only be opened up properly by means of techniques which arose out of the development of science itself. Even in Newton’s case, the decisive step had been his realization that the same laws of mechanics which governed the fall of a stone determined the motion of the moon about the earth; in other words, they could also be applied on a cosmic scale. In the period that followed, science began its victorious march on a broad front even into those distant realms of nature which could only be entered through technology, i.e., by means of more or less complicated instruments. Astronomy, making use of ever better telescopes, conquered ever wider cosmic spaces. From the behaviour of matter during chemical changes, chemistry tried to fathom processes on the atomic scale. Experiments with the induction machine and the Voltaic cell provided the first common knowledge of electrical phenomena not yet understood. Thus, there took place a slow change in the significance of ‘nature’ as a subject for investigation by science. It became a collective concept for all those realms of experience into which man could penetrate by means of science and technology, regardless of whether or not they appeared as ‘nature’ to his immediate perception. Even the phrase ‘description of nature’ lost more and more of its original significance of a living and meaningful account of nature. Increasingly it became to mean the mathematical description of nature, i.e., an accurate and concise yet comprehensive collection of data about relations that hold in nature.

This semi-conscious extension of the concept of nature must not yet be considered a basic departure from the original aims of science, since, even in this wider field, the crucial concepts were still the same as those of ordinary experience. In the nineteenth century nature still appeared as a set of laws in space and time in which man and man’s intervention in nature could be ignored in principle, if not in practice.

Matter was thought of in terms of its mass, which remained constant through all changes, and which required forces to move it. Because, from the eighteenth century onwards, chemical experiments could be classified and explained by the atomic hypothesis of ancient times, it appeared reasonable to take over the view of ancient philosophy that atoms were the real substance, the immutable building-stones of matter. Just as in the philosophy of Democritus, the differences in material qualities were considered to be merely apparent; smell or colour, temperature or viscosity, were not actual qualities of matter but resulted from the interaction of matter and our senses, and had to be explained by the arrangements and movements of atoms, and by the effect of these arrangements on our minds. It is thus that there arose the over-simplified world-view of nineteenth-century materialism: atoms move in space and time as the real and immutable substances, and it is their arrangement and motion that create the colourful phenomena of the world of our senses.

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Return to Lesson 8: Against Atomism & Mechanicism