by Albert Einstein
On the one hundredth anniversary of Maxwell's birth. Published, 1931, in James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemoration Volume, Cambridge University Press.
The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions – that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics – in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically. Actually a glance at the development of physics shows that it has undergone far-reaching changes in the course of time.
The greatest change in the axiomatic basis of physics – in other words, of our conception of the structure of reality – since Newton laid the foundation of theoretical physics was brought about by Faraday's and Maxwell's work on electromagnetic phenomena. We will try in what follows to make this clearer, keeping both earlier and later developments in sight.
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