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

50 CHAPTER 10. BIRTH OF MODERN PHYSICS
Figure 10.1: A mathematical theory with a contradiction is useless, because
from a contradiction everything can be proved and a theory where everything
is true is useless.
A contradiction in science threatens to collpse the whole building, and
thus has to be handeled one way or the other. The best is of course to
simply eliminate the contradiction by showing that it is only apparent, and
not real. If this is impossible, the contradiction can temporarily be tolerated
by referring to it as an (interesting) “paradox”, but eventually also such
a “paradox” becomes intolerable. If the paradox cannot be resolved, the
cover-up starts with the objective of finding a way of viewing the paradox
instead as a non-contradicting “duality”. We shall meet several examples
of such cover-up operations below, and we shall come to understand that
they represent Deals with the Devil, demonstrated by the agony striking the
scientists making the deals.
10.2 Contradiction of Missing Uniqe Aether
Physicists were also deeply troubled by a problem related to the the mathematical
model of electromagnetics formulated by Maxwell in 1865:
• what is the nature of the aether as the medium through which electromagnetic
waves propagate?
Maxwell’s equations is a set of differential equation expressed in a certain
standard space-time coordinate system, and the question to be answered