Newton represents another extremity using the idea of an instantaneous “action at a distance”. According to his theory, gravitation can act instantly even from infinite distance. Newton “left to… [his] readers” to decide whether that agent caused gravity was “material or immaterial.” [Newton: letters to Bentley] This “action at a distance” was regarded to be too mysterious and too similar to the magical forces to his contemporaries, but thanks to Laplace’s, Lagrange’s and others’ interpretation of physics as a pure mathematical description the problem seemed to be vanish [Roland Omnés: Quantum Philosophy 1999, p. 35].
Einstein’s world different from his forerunners’. Newton believed in absolute space and absolute time – they functioned as the base of a reference system and motion happened relative to it.
Opposite to this interpretation, Einstein voted for the speed of light as the maximum speed of anything can reach in our Universe, and it was absolute to any inertial frame of reference. Thus neither space nor time, but this constant (speed of light) was absolute as a barrier. It was a solution for the result of the Michelson – Morley experiment which originally aimed to verify the existence of ether as the medium of light waves, but it was a failure (notice that even Maxwell’s equation based on his confidence in the existence of ether [Omnés, p. 44]).
Einstein’s model is surely more counterintuitive than Aristotle’s or Newton’s (and it is not an accident that this appeared finally). On the other hand, it is surprisingly simple: there is no a body with mas which can reach the speed of light; and a particle with zero rest mass moves with the speed of light. That’s all. Notice that Einstein’s solution is instrumentalist in a certain sense, since it doesn’t explain why the speed of light is so special – it simply accepts its absoluteness. An instrumentalist approach can results a working model (see the Ptolemaic worldview), but it is not connected to the physical reality, since its subject is not the real world, but only a description of the real world. This means that it can be proven false at any time (as it happened in Ptolemy’s case).
There are some possible scenarios at this point.
We can believe that Einstein’s model is flawless. Obviously, it is the simplest solution. Although it is true that all the previous models proved to be incorrect, it is not a necessity that this theory will be proven to be false. Similarly, we cannot be sure that because it seemingly immaculate, it well be unchallengeable in the future. In fact, there are critics of Einstein’s theory today: according to Joseph Lévy, “the speed of light was erroneously found to be constant” [From Galileo to Lorenz… and Beyond 2002, p. 2]. In the age of Galileo the Aristotelian science was replaced by the “New Physics” within some decades, but the institutional system of research was in embryotic form at that time. So the opinion of those who have some doubt about the flexibility of our textbook – academy – big science based system is understandable. After all, a theory’s acceptance is only its respect’s indicator, but not surely of its truth.
On the other hand, the simplicity of this mass means slower than light, zero mass means speed of light equation urges caution. The ancient Greeks believed, inter alia, in the harmony, beautifulness and mathematical nature of “natural laws.” I don’t believe that the adaptation of the mental organs of our hunter-gatherer ancestors to their environment prepared us to understand the physics (after all, we have to use higher mathematics and other tricks), so it is reasonable to introduce an anti-Ockham rule. According to it, nature is not necessarily organized by simple and transparent laws, and it is always suspicious if an explanation is too elegant, too regular etc. Circle is perfect – but the orbit of a planet isn’t a circle. The history of physics is the history of the appearance of more and more complicated theories.
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