In Kosmos, written near the end of his life, he re-affirms most strongly his principle that “there is nothing an orthodox physicist abhors more than metaphysics.” Dingle, for his part, accepts early on the positivist use of the verifiability principle to eliminate metaphysics from science, and continuously wields the principle as a weapon against those errant cosmologists who would sacrifice science for a sort of mysticism.
Yet, when it came to their philosophy of science, these two otherwise-so-different men were united against a common enemy, those they both called the “metaphysicians.” Right from 1917, de Sitter attempted always to keep cosmology tightly bound to real observations made upon a real world. It would be hard to find two more radically different personalities than the irascible Herbert Dingle and the courtly Willem de Sitter.
0 kommentar(er)
