The Emergence of a Relational Paradigm in Modern Physics and Philosophy

Abstract

The domination of Newton’s natural philosophy over physics and philosophy did not come to an end all at once. Although it is relatively safe to date the birth of modern as opposed to classical physics at the year 1900, and although the conceptual revolution which brought modern physics into being did so abruptly, it is important to remember that there preceded it a period of preparation created by the failure of Newtonian theory to account for major anomalies in physical research in the nineteenth century. The popularity of the wave theory of light in the nineteenth century entailed the rejection of Newton’s corpuscular theory of light advanced in his Opticks, and this rejection led to a neglect of this document which had been so important for eighteenth- century physics.