Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
With the advent of the relativity theory science has entered a transformative period in which previous certainties are undergoing critical scrutiny and renovation. Critical movements in science arise at periods of its history when its foundations are brought into question. True it is that natural philosophers still regard science as a growing body of propositions dealing with natural events enabling them to find the structural laws of the external world. But this “external world” about them changes in significance, interpretation, and meaning as new epoch-making theories are propounded and experimental verification of some of their consequences tend to give them scientific plausibility.