ABSTRACT
At the end of the nineteenth century it was generally believed that physics was essentially complete. Newton’s dynamics enabled the motions of the moon and the planets to be calculated with great accuracy, and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory unified electric and magnetic phenomena. There were a few problems that still remained, but it was confidently expected that they would soon be cleared up. The future truths of physics, an eminent scientist remarked, are to be looked for in the sixth decimal place. The young Planck was undecided whether to devote his life to physics or to philology; he was advised to choose philology because there was nothing much left to discover in physics. The twentieth century, however, has seen an unprecedented increase in our
knowledge of the world. In a few years there came Planck’s discovery of the quantum and Einstein’s theory of relativity, the discovery of the nucleus and the formulation of quantum mechanics. The structure of matter has been probed to reveal finer and finer detail: first the structure of the atom, then of the nucleus and finally of the nuclear particles themselves. At the other end of the scale, the universe as a whole has become the object of scientific study, and the knowledge of nuclear and elementary particle physics has been used to reconstruct the processes occurring in the first few instants after what is called the big bang. Our knowledge of space and time has been profoundly changed by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and experiments have revealed the strange phenomena of the quantum world. Taken together, these advances in understanding that constitute the new physics have changed our view of the world. This scientific knowledge of the world has led to a vast range of
technological developments that have changed our lives beyond all recognition. Communication and transport have brought people throughout the world closer together, and electronic computers enable us to perform with ease complicated tasks quite beyond the resources of previous generations. More profoundly, science has altered the way we think about ourselves and
our world. We know that we live on a relatively small blue ball, poised in space, orbiting the sun. Our resplendent sun is a rather undistinguished star in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of about two hundred thousand million stars, and that galaxy is but one of many billions of such galaxies spread through the unimaginable vastness of space. We understand to some extent how we have arrived here by a long process of cosmic and biological evolution. This is the stage on which the drama of our salvation is enacted. Our ideas of space and time, determinism and causality, have been changed, inevitably affecting the imagery of theology.
