The Crisis in Physics

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About the Book THE CRISIS IN PHYSICS, by the author of STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE, was first published in 1939,

Professor J. B. S. Haldane wrote, 'This analysis is brilliantly successful... I believe that his book will be a quarry of ideas for generations to come.'

Christopher Caudwell brings his profound social understanding to bear on the crucial problems of modern physics-Relativity, Quantum Theory, Determinism. He shows how the ideas of man are linked up with the whole manner of life of the community and therefore how the kind of analysis and the assumptions men make in that analysis reflect the social structure itself. In placing the modern crisis in physics in its social setting he succeeds at the same time in pointing the direction for its solution.

Introduction When the present international nightmare has passed, and the day of reckoning has come, Man may be able to sit down calmly to count the cost of his ignorance, his stupidity, and his social mal-organization, in terms of human suffering and social sacrifice. Not least among these will be the destruction of men of great promise- in cases, amounting to genius- on the Spanish anti-fascist front. It was no sordid motive that drove the International Brigade to take up arms. It was alien to their nature. They were individuals with a heightened social awareness. If ever men consciously sacrificed themselves that others might live, these men did. Because they were capable of this great renunciation, and because their action was dictated by intellectual conviction, they represented the flower of our youth, alive, alert, understanding, sensitive.

Christopher Caudwell was killed in Spain. A young man still in his twenties, without great educational advantages or technical training, he has nevertheless left behind him a mass of written material of such deep understanding as to mark him out, had he but lived to enjoy the society for which he died, as one of our most gifted men. It is inevitable that there should be many such buried on Spanish soil, for it was precisely men of his quality who early realized the meaning of that desperate struggle.

What had the crisis in physics to do with Christopher Caudwell? What had the crisis in physics to do with the writer of Studies in a Dying Culture and of Illusion and Reality? In what way were these linked in his mind? In What way were they related in Nature? How could the problems of technical and philosophical significance with which modern physics was wrestling-Relativity, the Quantum Theory-stir one whose mind appeared to move in a totally different plane ? In what possible sense could he have anything valuable to contribute to the solution of these complex problems?

Book's Contents and Sample Pages