Greifswald 2024 – scientific programme

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 8: Closing Session

GP 8.2: Talk

Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 17:00–17:30, ELP 3: HS 2.33

Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead — •Christian Thomas Kohl — Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Modern physics consists not only of new discoveries and inventions through relativity and through quantum physics. Modern physics has also produced new foundations and new ways of thinking, pointed out especially by Albert Einstein and Alfred North Whitehead. Modern physics has abandoned the cliché of black-and-white thinking, for which there are only separate things, without smooth transitions. Since Faraday and Maxwell, there has been a shift in the objects of study: since about 1850, the thought models of modern physics no longer revolve around separate, isolated bodies or building blocks floating in nothingness, but around the flexible webs of relationships between things and around the networks that surround things. Important clues to the modern ways of thinking about physics came from Albert Einstein (1879-1955) when he wrote about Faraday and Maxwell and the newness of physics in the last years of his life: *A courageous scientific imagination was needed to realize fully that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them, that is, the field, may be essential for ordering and understanding events*.

Keywords: Einstein; Whitehead; Geschichte; Physik