Abstract
Fokker's physical worldpicture: Dutch physics and philosophy in the interwar period During the early twenties the Dutch physicist Adriaan Daniël Fokker, erstwhile pupil of Lorentz and collaborator of Einstein, disseminated a view of nature that was firmly rooted in Einstein's theory of relativity. Fokker, however, vested the
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theory with a highly personal interpretation by giving ontological primacy to the four-dimensional space-time, and its basic elements, events. He consequentially downplayed the meaningfulness of matter as well as space and time taken separately. By highlighting the inextricable connection between past and future, as well as their symmetry, he believed to have liberated physics of 'the imagined chains and straitjacket' of causality. He presented his own view of causality as a synthesis of the older notion and teleology. His belief that future events are contributory to the present was reflected in his theoretical use of advanced potentials, which he believed to obviate the need for electromagnetic fields. Fokker's specific views may have found little resonance among Dutch physicists, his interest in philosophy and his repudiation of causality were hardly singular at the time. In many ways Dutch physicists conform to the picture that Paul Forman has given us of German physicists during the early years of the Weimar republic. Forman attributes their rejection of causality to a hostile intellectual climate and a resulting eagerness to incorporate the lebensphilosophische notions and values of the German cultural elites in their physics. Critics have contested his thesis by pointing to specific problems within atomic physics as internal reasons for a rejection of causality. A comparison of the Dutch and the German cases, however, tends to support Formans view that these repudiations cannot fully be explained in this manner: atomic physics played no visible role in the Dutch questioning of causality, whereas expressions of Lebensphilosophie abound. On the other hand, as in the case of some German physicists, philosophical concerns among Dutch physicists, including the issue of causality, clearly antedate the interwar period. Expressions of such doubts are best understood as belonging to a general concern among Dutch intellectuals in the early twentieth century with the role of the 'living' and the 'spiritual' in an increasingly naturalistic and materialist world. The war did little more than magnify these concerns. Therefore, the views of these physicists are better seen as an integral part of a cultural movement than as a 'capitulation' to a suddenly hostile environment.
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