Did Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker compromise with the Nazis? The story begins with Albert Einstein, who became a target for conservative physicists like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark who could not follow Einstein’s physics, and the early Nazi Party that rejected Einstein as a Jew as well as his pacifism and internationalism. When Hitler came to power, Lenard and Stark gained great influence. Stark in particular tried to accumulate power but steadily lost influence through conflicts with other Nazis. When Stark’s nemesis, the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, was going to retire and be succeeded by Werner Heisenberg, Stark launched a vicious attack on Heisenberg in the SS newspaper. Heisenberg appealed to SS Leader Heinrich Himmler and thanks to support from the aeronautical engineer Ludwig Prandtl was eventually rehabilitated by the SS. The established physics community then launched a counterattack against the “Aryan Physics” of Lenard and Stark, which included writing Einstein out of the history of relativity theory. This was arguably Heisenberg’s greatest compromise with Nazism.

This essay considers religion in Pirandello’s oeuvre from a historical point of view, that is to say, as firmly anchored in a post-Copernican modernity in which, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and relativity came to be understood as scientific fact in the wake of Albert Einstein’s investigations. The essay asks whether a consistent meditation on religion can be found in Pirandello’s oeuvre and therefore considers several works, among them, The Late Mattia Pascal; Shoot!; Lazarus; and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Particular focus is given to the ways in which these writings demonstrate Pirandello’s interest in mysticism, a non-dogmatic Catholic Modernism, and his rejection of any transcendent God, a belief which corresponded to his humoristic view of life more generally, tied as they both were to his uneasiness over life’s lack of certainty.

Two scientists more than anyone else have contributed in defining our understanding of gravity: Newton in 1679 and Einstein in 1915. The mathematical frameworks the two have developed and proposed, however, are very different. Newton’s gravity is the one we learn at school and is normally taught at university. It provides a very natural interpretation of what we experience - the apple falls from the tree because the Earth attracts it! Einstein’s gravity is studied only in the most advanced courses at the university and provides a very counterintuitive explanation, requiring the concepts of spacetime and curvature. This chapter will provide a first description of the Einstein equations and, although it will not enter into the mathematical aspects of the equations, it will explain the basic concepts behind them. Acquiring a first qualitative understanding of Einstein equations will be useful to comprehend better the concept of spacetime curvature discussed in Chapter 4.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, used by Galileo to demonstrate the simplicity of science, is also a testament to the complexity of science. Over an 800-year period, multiple attempts were made to fix the errors in the tower’s construction that caused it to lean. Often, the fixes had unanticipated consequences, necessitating additional compensating fixes. Climate models face a similar problem. The models use approximate formulas called parameterizations, with adjustable parameters, to represent processes like clouds that are too fine to be resolved by the model grids. The optimal values of these parameters that minimize simulation errors are determined by a trial-and-error process known as “model tuning.” Tuning minimizes errors in simulating current and past climates, but it cannot guarantee that the predictions of the future will be free of errors. This means that models can be confirmed, but they cannot be proven to be correct.

This chapter examines the changing relations between Mach’s epistemology and his mechanics to offer a new perspective on the diverse respects in which Einstein built on Mach’s work. Considering Mach’s early psychophysical research on sensations of space and time indicates foundations both for Mach’s later research on physical space and time and for his search for an epistemology capable of encompassing conceptions and perceptual experience, but also psychology, physics, and psychophysics, as well as the social world: all knowledge. I show that Mach’s critical studies of mass and inertia emerged from his perceptual studies and were intimately linked to bodily experience and experiment. Considering his well-known Mechanics indicates that Mach sought to train the imagination as well as stimulate critique in the attacks on absolutes that are now usually taken to define his anti-metaphysical empiricism. I argue that while celebrating the role of Mach’s criticism, Einstein remained unaware of the extent to which his initial approach to general relativity was shaped by a pedagogical thought experiment on action and reaction in which Mach linked gravitation and acceleration. Finally, when he turned explicitly to epistemology, rather than emphasising positivist empiricism, Mach offered a study of the psychology of research in practice.

Facing a complex set of global threats to our future, how do we find a way forward? It is clearly necessary to strengthen the capacity to enforce international law, to reform legal institutions and current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be largely inadequate to manage the challenges that we face. Indeed, the United Nations itself and the specialized agencies created to attend to a variety of global problems find themselves increasingly unable to respond to crises, partly due to the lack of appropriate jurisdiction or mandate to act, sometimes because they are inadequately endowed with resources or because, within the limits of existing conceptual frameworks, they simply do not know what to do. A substantial and carefully thought-through reform effort is needed to enhance dramatically the basic architecture of our global governance system, grounded on fundamental points of law already agreed by states worldwide, and upon foundational principles embedded in the current international order. Such efforts need to strike the right balance between proposals that are so ambitious as to have negligible chances of being seriously considered and proposals that are seen as more “politically feasible” but that fail to find meaningful solutions to urgent contemporary problems.

In addressing Deleuze’s “New Bergson,” the chapter argues for reading Bergson, and his ontology of time in particular, in light of what we need to think today. The reading proposed here brings out Bergson’s consistent privileging of concrete experience over abstraction, his thinking of life, in particular in relation to time. To rectify his image as an anti-philosopher, the chapter highlights how his thought resonates both with the work of earlier philosophers (Schelling and Ravaisson in particular) and the task of thinking today. Rereading Duration and Simultaneity against Deleuze’s interpretation, which evacuates consciousness from universal time, the chapter stresses the central importance of consciousness, along with observation, perception, and lived experience, to Bergson’s philosophical challenge to Einstein. By no means, then, is Bergson’s achievement in the confrontation with Einstein some kind of abstract articulation of the virtual and the actual; rather, it lies in expanding his ontology of time from individual living beings to a universe that lives, in spelling it out in terms of a philosophy of livingness.