The philosophical significance of modern physics [1930e]

Hans Reichenbach

pp. 304-323

in: Maria Reichenbach, Robert S. Cohen (eds), Selected writings 1909–1953, Berlin, Springer, 1978

Abstract

Alienation between the world of science and the world of everyday life has emerged in our time with a force never known before. The extraordinary refinement of scientific methods has brought about such a transformation in the stores of knowledge, both in the physical and in the biological sciences, that the non-scientist is no longer able to relate scientific knowledge to his daily experience. He hears, no doubt with astonishment, of the results of relativity theory or biochemistry, nor does he dare to question what is presented to him with authoritative claims to learned scientific truth, yet he is unable to make anything of these reports about alien worlds. He does not see how they are supposed to relate to the objects of experience that he calls world, environment, reality, life, and, no matter how greatly he admires them, he is unable to overcome a feeling of emptiness that prevents him from developing a sympathetic concern for the fruits of science, however sincere his desire to do so. This bewilderment and alienation is the lot not so much of the educated man, who through extensive training has become all too accustomed to divorcing affairs of the mind from affairs of the heart, but of that large class of people who have continued to be excluded from higher education by social privation and who, with a sound instinct, cannot become used to leading a double life, alternating between the world of science and the workaday world.