"The 'dialectical' way of looking at things" (Rosenfeld)
Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2020 10:59 am
A couple of good lines from the Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld:
—Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld, Review of J. D. Bernal's Science in History (1956) p. 13If the development of the theory of atomic phenomena initiated by the discovery of the quantum of action and the elementary constituents of atoms does not represent one of the major dialectical processes in the whole dialectical growth of scientific thought, and if quantum mechanics is not its crowning synthesis, frankly it is hard to say what a dialectic process could well be.
—Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld, "The Velocity of Light and the Evolution of Electrodynamics" (1956) p. 148[T]he 'dialectical' way of looking at things ... was quite foreign to mechanistic thinking; indeed, it has remained so until our own days, when it has been finally forced upon physicists by the advent of quantum theory.