„Gespensterfelder“

Abstract

Einstein’s discovery of the equivalence between mass and energy¹ could have brought to a great unification of the scientific world-view. Since energy and momentum are always conserved while mass can be created and destroyed, the old idea that matter is an irreducible substance of the world had to be substituted with the idea that everything is really made of energy-momentum. This allowed one to understand in an unified way, at least in principle, matter itself, light, electromagnetic and gravitational fields and so on, briefly all of the objects of physical investigation. If this unification in practice did not take place it was because of good reasons, starting from the fact that Einstein himself in the same year 1905 was forced to admit the existence of something real (in the sense that it was assumed to propagate causally in space and time) but containing neither matter, nor energy-momentum. This was a necessary consequence of his dualistic picture of the electromagnetic radiation².