Thoughts on Physics After Scientific Determinism

The principal object of Galileo’s Shadow is to bring physics back from the vastness of stellar and intergalactic space (farored by relativity) and the infinitely small space of subatomic particles (the realm of quantum mechanics), so that it can once more deal with the many problems of our natural world.  Of course, our world will never loom as large in physics again, as it did in the age of Newton.  We must now place this ordinary world of our sense experience into the much larger framework which physics has been exploring for the last ninety years or so.  For this reason, the book seeks to expand the very narrow and constricting focus on just matter and motion, into which it was forced by Galileo. 

For this purpose, the book follows A.N. Whitehead’s suggestion to subject the foundation concepts of our age of science to a “philosophical criticism”.  The book is therefore philosophical rather than mathematical, so that nobody, who never got beyond simple arithmetic at school, need fear it.  It does, however, deal with subjects that might be called unusual in a book about physics, namely our experiences of reality, our consciousness (and specially how Galileo’s consciousness differed from that of medieval man), certain ethical terms like purpose and the world of origins.

By enlarging the arena of debate, the book reaches conclusions in mnay areas which many will consider radical.  For those who are embroiled in the controversy between evolutionary theory and creationism, one of these radical conclusions might be that this rift between science and faith, having been caused by Galileo’s philosophical errors, has now been eliminated simply because these errors have been corrected. 

But the reintroduction of the concept of objective reality into physics, from which it has been absent since the 1920s, might be considered by many to be the most significant of the conclusions reached in the book.  The far-reaching results of this suggestion are carefully examined and would have a considerable influence on the future of this science, if taken seriously.

The final result that the book tries to approach is a series of new ideas that might serve to construct a new model of the universe, generally understood by a large number of educated people (instead of just a few specialists), to take the place of the last one, scientific determinism, which had to be abandoned in the 1920s.