1965 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 248

204

G. J. SIZOO

I do not think that this is the right christian evaluation of scientific knowledge; on the contrary, I am convinced that it is wrong and that is has done much harm to the christian belief. It has occurred from time to time that views and ideas that science had operated with for years and even for centuries and which seemed almost to have become unshakable truths, had to be abandoned or revised in order to do justice to new observations. At such times people will soon speak of a crisis or revolution in physical thought and semi-popular books use to be published under such titles. However, it is always seen that such a crisis will clear indeed physical thought of pre-judgement based upon non-physical grounds and of extrapolations not justified by observations, but that the revolution never goes so far that the whole building of physical knowledge is destroyed. The theory of relativity freed physical thought from the classical concept of absolute „simultaneity at distance", because it was understood that, due to the non-availability of signals with infinite velocity, this concept did not fuUfill the condition of empirical verifiability. This asked for a revision of Newtonian mechanics, not, however, because it was false or untrue knowledge, but because it was recognized as only an approximation to a still more correct theory. Wave mechanics has freed physical thought from the logical prejudgement that a physical phenomenon should either be described in terms of continuity or in terms of discontinuity and has taught us how to use in the physical approach of nature both concepts in a complementary way. This does not mean, that the wave-theory of light and the particletheory of matter were false, but only that they were incomplete in the sense that they referred to only one side of the dual behaviour of their object. As a matter of fact, the so called „revolution" caused by the introduction of wave mechanics has solved a lot of discrepancies between the older quantum-theory and the experimental data and it has resulted in an enormous enrichment of our knowledge of microphysics. It is worthwhile to notice that in the theory of relativity, as well as in wave-mechanics the advancement of physical knowledge was gained by the recognition that the previous theories had claimed

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