XVIU JAMES A. WEISHEIPL 



up the science program in schools of all sizes. Despite the fact 

 that Soviet students of science are thoroughly indoctrinated 

 with the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism, some American 

 educators urged diminishing, and eliminating if possible, courses 

 in the humanities in a frantic effort to produce more trained 

 scientists. The panic instilled by Sputnik I almost obliterated 

 the vision and hope of wiser educators: the molding of a human 

 being, whether he be a theoretician or a technician. Before 

 Sputnik I many educators realized the inherent danger to 

 society and to the individual of excessive specialization, which 

 neglects history, literature, culture, sound philosophy, religion 

 and even ordinary grammar. These educators tried to give 

 potential scientists an appreciation of the real dignity of science 

 through the history of science, the philosophy of science, or a 

 study of the Great Books of mankind. Because of Sputnik I 

 this movement has suffered a temporary set-back. Perhaps 

 after the fear and panic have subsided, there may still be the 

 possibility of educating human beings intelligently devoted to 

 science, rather than technicians unaware of the dignity of their 

 pursuit. 



Long before the atom bomb came to the attention of the 

 ordinary man, an important revolution had been taking place 

 within science itself, a theoretical revolution which, in fact, 

 made the atom bomb possible. The story of this transition from 

 the mechanical age of physics to the age of relativity and 

 quantum mechanics has been written many times in this gener- 

 ation. The path which leads from Clerk Maxwell's hypothesis 

 identifying magnetic and luminiferous media to the theories of 

 relativity and quantum was constructed by many experimental 

 and theoretical physicists. It is a path which leaves far behind 

 the assurances of Newtonian solids in a void, the fallacy, as 

 Whitehead called it, of " misplaced concreteness." The tran- 

 sition from classical mechanics to the two principal theories 

 of modem physics, relativity and quantum, had an unsettling 

 effect on philosophers of physical theory. Before the end of the 

 nineteenth century Carl Neumann, Ernst Mach and Karl Pear- 



