The Origin of Scientific Realism: Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein

Abstract

Scientific realism today is an issue much debated by philosophers of science.² However, to the best of my knowledge it was invented by physicists, and this is a fact that seems to have fallen into oblivion. Moreover, scientific realism emerged in a period where there was a general turn in the attitude of the physicists in matters of the philosophical foundations of their science. In obvious connection with the establishment of theoretical physics as a new discipline at the end of the 19^th century, we see the new theoretical physicists becoming engaged in a lively debate on various philosophical questions concerning physics. And not only did this happen but it was also immediately noticed — from without and within. In the years before the First World War the theologian Adolf v. Harnack is said to have said on occasion: “People complain that our generation has no philosophers. Quite unjustly: it is merely that today’s philosophers sit in another department, their names are Planck and Einstein.”³ And as early as 1901 Wilhelm Ostwald in his lectures on natural philosophy testified to the change: ‘The mental operations by which scientific work is organized... are not essentially different from those that are investigated in philosophy. The awareness of this situation was indeed obscured for some time during the second half of the 19^th century; but in our days it has awakened to a most vivid efficacy, and everywhere the spirits are aroused in the scientists’ camp to make their contribution to the whole of philosophical knowledge.”⁴

A French version of Scheibe’s talk at the 1995 Parma Conference has been already published in Les savants et Vépistémologie, M. Panza and J.C. Pont eds., Editions Albert Blanchard, Paris 1995. The French Publisher and the Editors are hereby gratefully acknowledged for the permission of including this paper in its English version in the present Collection.