The Genesis of the Second Scientific Revolution

The present book elicits the reasons for the second scientific revolution. According to Chapter 1, one has to abandon the “great genius” approach in favor of mundane Heidegger’s existential analytic with Dasein as “a way of life shared by the members of scientific community”. Scientific revolutions should be considered as clashes of diverse “mathematical projections of nature” consisting of bundles of practices. In Chapter 2, it is revealed that Quantum and the Relativistic revolutions had a common origin – a skirmish between the Newtonian mechanics, Maxwellian electrodynamics, Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and Thomson’s thermodynamics. The skirmish was disclosed by Planck who stressed that the paradigms “must be modified to remain compatible”. Planck took the first step, while Einstein took the next ones owing to light quanta and special relativity. According to Chapter 3, general relativity was better than its rivals for the reason that it encompassed them all.