PHYSICAL theory may be said to have had its starting point around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when scholastic philosophers translated into Latin the Arabic version of Greek mathematics and natural science. Since then an interplay of speculation and observation has resulted in the corpus of knowledge known as modern physics. I shall try to indicate some features of the thinking of scientists that enabled them to construct the present theory of the physical world.

Cornelius Lanczos is professor emeritus at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Hungarian-born he made significant contributions to the development of relativity and quantum theory in the earlier decades of this century, and during the past twenty years he has established himself as an authority on numerical analysis. In addition he has a deep appreciation of literature from the Old Testament onwards, of music and of the arts. His writings in recent years have consisted largely in philosophical speculations on aspects (...) of physics. The present book is an historical account of man’s investigation of the nature and properties of space. Lanczos’ gift of clear exposition and his broad culture have made it a readable and valuable review of the development of the notion of space throughout the ages. (shrink)

The origins of this book are described in the Preface.

It is perhaps difficult to realize that quantum theory is nearly sixty years old, though the successful attempts to give it a precise mathematical formulation date back only to 1925. The concepts and implications of quantum mechanics, in particular the uncertainty relation, were so revolutionary that they led to a vast literature on the philosophy of physics. The continual publication of philosophical works on modern physics indicates that there are still no agreed solutions to the fundamental questions posed by quantum (...) theory. (shrink)