Summary Of "The Crisis Of The Mechanistic-Materialist Conception Of The Universe" By Werner Heisenberg (UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES) / UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES (ePub)

We have summarized the essential of this book by the author.

THE CRISIS OF THE MECHANISTIC-MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF THE UNIVERSE

With Newton's physics, the material world began to be understood under the model of a clockwork mechanism. The way in which material elements came into relationship, the laws that governed these relationships, were understood by analogy with machines (it is not by chance that mechanism is the way of understanding the world at the time of the industrial revolution).
Newton's physics is indebted to the scientific investigations of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, among others. Now we are going to study how this conception lost its validity.
Hertz's Principles of Mechanics (1876) serves as a document showing how physics is no longer considered the true picture of the world and is being conceived instead as what we now call "a model."
In this book Hertz maintains that physical concepts, which make up a structure, are nothing more than IMAGES whose presumed correspondence with reality we cannot fully prove. At best, what can be done to establish a match between those images and reality itself is the following: the images (which have the form of sentences of physics) have LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES, that is, other sentences that are deduced from them logically. These logical consequences describe particular phenomena. What is sought is that these logical consequences of the images coincide with the EMPIRICAL CONSEQUENCES of the corresponding phenomena.