Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
In reviewing this argument, note first that the second quotation from
Kant, on which it is based, does not depend on any peculiar Kantian
doctrine. The latter of the two is in agreement with Plato as against
Aristotle.[10] In the second place, the argument assumes that Zeno
understated his argument. He should have urged it against the current
notion of time in itself, and not against motion, which involves
relations between time and space. For, what becomes has duration. But no
duration can become until a smaller duration (part of the former) has
antecedently come into being [Kant’s earlier statement]. The same
argument applies to this smaller duration, and so on. Also the infinite
regress of these durations converges to nothing—and even on the
Aristotelian view there is no first moment. Accordingly time would be an
irrational notion. Thirdly, in the epochal theory Zeno’s difficulty is
met by conceiving temporalisation as the realisation of a complete
organism. This organism is an event holding in its essence its
spatio-temporal relationships (both within itself, and beyond itself)
throughout the spatio-temporal continuum.
Footnote 10:
_Cf._ ‘Euclid in Greek,’ by Sir T. L. Heath, Camb. Univ. Press, in a
note on Points.
CHAPTER VIII
THE QUANTUM THEORY
The theory of relativity has justly excited a great amount of public
attention. But, for all its importance, it has not been the topic which
has chiefly absorbed the recent interest of physicists. Without question
that position is held by the quantum theory. The point of interest in
this theory is that, according to it, some effects which appear
essentially capable of gradual increase or gradual diminution are in
reality to be increased or decreased only by certain definite jumps. It
is as though you could walk at three miles per hour or at four miles per
hour, but not at three and a half miles per hour.
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