Science and Reality

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth discoveries were made in physics that could not be fitted easily into our pre-existing image of reality. That the speed of light must appear the same to all observers led to Relativity Theory; that energy must accrue in steps led to the varieties of Quantum Theory. The two theories, or groups of theories, did not appear to fit together. Relativity Theory was the more explicable, though it was thought at first to be difficult to understand, and was never in fact completely understood. In the case of Quantum Theory the results of experiment and calculation appeared so bizarre that physicists gave up the attempt to fit them in, shrugged, and said ‘the quantum world is different’. It should have been obvious that this was not the case since the quantum world lies at the root of all our experience. It generates it, is part of the same thing, and must necessarily be able to be fitted in with any comprehensive image we elaborate of the whole. With the advent of specialisation and the partitioning of our intellectual world into something resembling water-tight compartments, philosophy was not called upon to pla