Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

Chapter 33
Motives
Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor
and human creations. (Einstein)
In a criminal case, a prime first question is why? Why was the crime
committed? What was the motive to breach the law and risk punishment.
In a criminal investigation this is often the key to resolving the case.
So why then did Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein and Bohr sell out their
scientific souls? To get fame and glory? Maybe to some part, but the main
motive must have been different, because the suffering was bigger than the
glory and in fact the glory received largely added to the pain.
So what was then the main motive? We shall find that the sacrifice was
made in the name of science, to save science from collapse, a necesssary act
to remove an intolerable threat.
We shall describe the development of modern physics in physical terms
of force and reaction to force. The forces present themselves as apparent
paradoxes of theoretical physics, which have to be solved to save physics from
credibility collapse. The forces are strong because a collapse of credibility
has to be avoided, by any means at any price.
Like in a true Greek tragedy the paradoxes seem to be unsolvable without
a monumental sacrifice and the drama concerns the fight between the
necessity to resolve the paradox and the agony of the monumental sacrifice.
It is a true Faustian drama of selling the soul in order to liberate the soul.
The forces in the form of paradoxes were:
1. Reversibility of Hamiltonian mechanics: Loschmidt’s paradox.
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