ABSTRACT
Discoveries in the field of energy and electromagnetism were important theoretical innovations, but they also figured in more metaphysical debates about the nature of reality. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century included not least a radical new vision of natural reality. The notion that knowledge of elementary building blocks meant knowledge of reality as such was in essence the ideal of seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy, but in the twentieth century it turned out to have lost none of its power. Research into radiation and the particles it emitted developed rapidly into a fully fledged field of research, for which all kinds of new methods and instruments were invented. To understand phenomena in the depths of space, Newton's theory is in many cases inadequate and the theory of relativity comes into play. For the general public, quantum mechanics was embodied most of all by what is known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
