Physics Lournal

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Another issue, particularly for the historian, is that "one...finds the science of great scientists, taken in the name of those science, for views and attitudes wholly foreign and sometimes repulsive to them", which presents an additional load of meta-work: not only must you trace the genealogy of the idea in terms of the gestational environment, but you must differentiate the abuses of the scientific concept, from the intention of the concept itself, which may in many cases result in a higher level of understanding, as the scientist who produced the abused concept, may not have ever caught wind of it, or bothered to acknowledge it if he did.

Newton was a victim of this, in that his work was heralded by members of the enlightenment, who had an entirely different perspective on the nature of reality and existence with regards to the significance of religion: Newton was thoroughly religious and even ventured into the areas of esotericism, notably Alchemy, and likely did not see the efficacy of his work as proof of the value of reason over religion, or as a detractor for the value of religion entirely.

Another victim was Einstein, whose theory put forth the nature of space and time as relative, as opposed to absolute, which philosophers took as evidence for the position of relativism, which confers less objectivity to things than would be conferred to them without it.

The contradiction here is that while relativity may have shown us that space and time are not absolute, that lack of absoluteness is in fact the objective truth of the world, which as per Spinoza, is the highest objective of man. Relativity is still arguing an objective truth, albeit one about the relative nature of things.

 Additionally, there seems to be a jump made by such philosophers, which is that if the most fundamental aspects of reality are relative, how can anything contained in them have any true objectivity, which is a semi-logical deduction, but the issue is that relativity theory only makes claims about the base layers of physical reality, and the nature of that which is assumed to be relative by way of the theory, exists far and away from where the theory does.