The Collapse of a Mechanical Universe

The decades preceding World War I witnessed a profound transformation in humanity’s understanding of the natural world. As Bertrand Russell observed in 1914, “For the physics of relativity, space and time are no longer part of the fundamental furniture of the universe. They are now recognized as structures.” This seismic shift represented the disintegration of the Newtonian worldview that had dominated scientific thought since the 17th century—a universe governed by immutable laws, comprehensible through reason and sensory experience.

The crisis emerged from multiple fronts: the puzzling behavior of electromagnetic waves, the failure to detect the hypothetical “luminiferous ether,” and the growing recognition that classical physics could not explain phenomena at atomic scales. When Albert Michelson and Edward Morley’s 1887 experiment failed to measure Earth’s motion through this supposed ether, it created what historian Gerald Holton called “the most famous null result in physics”—a result so contradictory to established theory that scientists repeated the experiment for decades, always with the same outcome.

Quantum Leaps and Relativity: The New Physics

The year 1900 marked a turning point with Max Planck’s quantum theory, proposing that energy existed in discrete packets rather than continuous waves. This radical idea, initially applied to blackbody radiation, soon extended to all atomic processes. Meanwhile, Albert Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity abandoned the ether concept entirely, demonstrating that the speed of light remained constant regardless of the observer’s motion—a notion that defied common sense but explained Michelson-Morley’s results elegantly.

These breakthroughs shared a disturbing quality for many contemporaries: they required abandoning intuitive, mechanical models of reality. As Planck later reflected, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents…but rather because its opponents eventually die.” The physics community split between those clinging to classical determinism (including Planck himself) and those embracing the new paradigm’s probabilistic nature.

Mathematics in Crisis: From Certainty to Paradox

Parallel upheavals occurred in mathematics. Georg Cantor’s set theory revealed infinities of different sizes—a concept so counterintuitive that Cantor wrote, “I see it, but I don’t believe it.” The foundational crisis deepened with Kurt Gödel’s 1931 incompleteness theorems, proving that no mathematical system could be both consistent and complete.

This intellectual turmoil reflected broader cultural anxieties. The secure, progressive 19th-century worldview—embodied in the Industrial Revolution’s triumphs—was fracturing. Mathematics, once the language of absolute truth, now dealt in paradoxes and unprovable propositions. As Russell quipped, mathematics became “the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”

Biology’s Ideological Battleground

While physics and mathematics grappled with abstraction, biology became entangled with social ideologies. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s heredity laws in 1900 sparked conflicts between:
– Biometricians (like Karl Pearson) advocating continuous variation
– Mendelians (like William Bateson) emphasizing discrete genetic units

These scientific debates mirrored political divisions. Eugenics movements—promoting selective human breeding—gained traction across the political spectrum, from British Fabian socialists to German racial theorists. As geneticist H.J. Muller admitted, his interest in genetics stemmed from its “bearing upon the nature of man and the methods of his improvement.”

The Cultural Impact: Science and the Crisis of Certainty

The scientific revolution permeated avant-garde culture. Modernist artists like Picasso (influenced by non-Euclidean geometry) and composers like Schoenberg (with his atonal system) mirrored science’s abandonment of traditional frameworks. Philosophers like Edmund Husserl argued that positivist science had obscured “the genuine questions of humanity.”

This epistemological crisis extended beyond academia. As Thomas Kuhn later analyzed, scientific paradigms don’t evolve gradually—they collapse under anomalies until new frameworks emerge. The pre-WWI period exemplified this process, with multiple disciplines simultaneously questioning their foundations.

Legacy: The Enduring Revolution

The scientific transformations of 1870-1914 established the conceptual framework for 20th-century technology—from nuclear energy to digital computers. Yet their deeper legacy lies in redefining knowledge itself:
1. Reality became non-intuitive (quantum mechanics)
2. Truth became provisional (Gödel’s theorems)
3. Science became specialized, inaccessible to laypeople

Einstein’s relativity, though barely understood, entered popular culture as a symbol of modernity’s disorienting pace. The revolution’s psychological impact persists—we inhabit a world built upon these discoveries yet still struggle to reconcile them with human experience. As Planck noted, the new physics was accepted existentially before being understood intellectually.

This period reminds us that scientific progress isn’t linear. It emerges from crises—when old explanations fail, when experiments contradict theory, and when bold thinkers dare to imagine the unimaginable. The architects of this revolution, working in isolation across Europe, collectively reshaped humanity’s relationship with the cosmos, leaving a legacy more transformative than any political upheaval of their era.