Einstein's Lost Legacy

This book is, in some ways, a sequel to several publications on a single theme. The theme is that the time is now ripe for a radical change in thinking about contemporary physics, which, apart from having become too jargonised, is characterised by its philosophical rootlessness and theoretical anarchy. This book is intended to be self-contained and knowledge of Physics is not strictly a requirement. However, it will be of great interest to anyone who has come to question some of the more fanciful dogmatic notions of Modern Physics such as 'Black Holes' and 'The Big Bang' on the macro-scale and 'quarks' on the micro-scale, notions which we have, and never can have, any direct evidence for. Modern Physics and Cosmology have parted company with common sense to the extent that they now scarcely share the same language. A new opportunity presents itself, however, of rectifying this situation. This is by reconnecting Physics to its roots in Natural Philosophy by means of the method of Linguistic Analysis developed by the commonsense philosophers at the first half of the 20th century in the tradition set by Ernst Mach and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For nigh on a century since the arbitrary bifurcation of 'Physics' and 'Philosophy' was imposed, those two equally truncated thought-systems have been held apart by mutual ignorance of what was happening in each other's territory. The issue between these two factions is, basically, that of language. In the one faction is the more or less uncontrolled, centuries-long build-up of theoretical esotery and associated jargon, whereas in the other the main concern is to preserve the commonsense coherence of evolving language. This 'Linguistic' movement in Philosophy begins with the empiricism of Ernst Mach who, as a physics-philosopher, stood with a foot in each camp. Mach's approach to Physics was to discover and logically determine the most efficient, least elaborated interpretations of natural phenomena and render these in the plainest possible language. This phenomenalist approach of Mach became the inspiration for the Relativity of his philosophical protégé, Einstein. However, the way in which Einstein sought to develop Mach's phenomenalism was not approved by Mach, for whom any talk of hidden and inscrutable, 'underlying mechanisms' such as those of 'atoms' and 'light travelling' between them in vacuo was anathema. The main aim of this book is to review the relevance of Mach's physics-philosophy to both Relativity and Quantum Theory. The subject is that of the nature of fundamental physical phenomena, including matter, space, time, motion and light. This is with special attention to the concept of 'light-speed' in the Second Postulate of Einstein's Special Relativity, which asserts the constancy, for all observers, of the 'speed of light in vacuo'. Also re-examined, from the same Neo-Machian standpoint, is the notion of in vacuo 'field-forces', of 'gravitational, ' 'electrostatic', 'magnetostatic' and 'nuclear' conception.