Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for his quantum model of the atom, which marks the beginning of his seminal contributions to the development of the quantum theory. Crucially, however, in a stunning reversal of his intellectual forefather’s s…Bohr’s break with Newton, Descartes, and Democritus is based not in “mere idle philosophical reflection” but on new empirical findings in the domain of atomic physics that came to light during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Boh…Questioning the basis of the Newtonian tradition, Bohr refuses to take for granted the delineation of the “object” and the “agencies of observation” and makes the constitution of this “inside” boundary the centerpiece of his analysis. In pa…
Isaac Newton
scientist · 11 mentions across 7 readings
In this course
Newton appears here primarily as a representative of classical mechanistic thought—the atomistic, deterministic paradigm that Niels Bohr fundamentally challenged with quantum mechanics. The readings use Newton's intellectual legacy as a foil for understanding how twentieth-century physics required a radical epistemological rupture, moving away from the Newtonian universe of discrete, predictable particles toward probabilistic and relational models. In the course's frame of AI and cybernetics, this historical pivot matters because it establishes how scientific paradigm shifts demand new conceptual architectures rather than incremental refinement of existing ones.
Mentioned in 7 readings
Even in the first half of the 20th century, astronomers had to be content with the uniformity of nature argument confirmed by spectroscopy. In an article in Science in 1920, the American astronomer W. W. Campbell (a great opponent of Lowell…In the realm of the natural world, in the broadest sense we have only a limited number of destinies whether we like it or not. Cosmic evolution provides at least three vastly different scenarios of what the long-term human future may be. Th…
Even if the origins of the Internet device are today well known, it is not
uncalled for to highlight once again their political meaning. The Internet is a
war machine invented to be like the highway system, which was also
designed by the Am…The contemporary history of economic discourse must be looked at from the angle of this increasing problem of information. From the crisis of 1929 to 1945, economists' attention was focused on questions of anticipation, uncertainty regardin…
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Niels Bohr 3René Descartes 2Aristotle 1Claudius Ptolemy 1Dante Alighieri 1Galileo Galilei 1Harlow Shapley 1Johannes Kepler 1Nicolaus Copernicus 1Plato 1Gilbert Simondon 1Henri Bergson 1Norbert Wiener 1Adam Smith 1Friedrich von Hayek 1John von Neumann 1Karl Marx 1Oskar Morgenstern 1Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1Bertrand Russell 1Brigitte Bardot 1Carl Friedrich Gauss 1Gottlob Frege 1Paul Halmos 1Democritus 1Helge Kragh 1Percival Lowell 1William Wallace Campbell 1