ФИЗИЧЕСКАЯ КАРТИНА МИРА

Physical Picture of the World

A term which has become widespread chiefly in recent years and which denotes a conception of nature (at times, in a narrower sense, the inorganic world) proceeding from certain general principles of physics. In this sense, ancient atomism, the physics of Descartes, and the system of Newton were a Physical Picture of the World.

A feature of all attempts to construct a Physical Picture of the World in the 17th and 18th centuries was the idea that complex natural phenomena are reducible to simple mechanical motion of discrete particles of matter. The idea of specific laws irreducible to the more simple forms of motion became established in 19th century natural science. This conception was voiced in the most profound and generalised manner in Engels' Dialectics of Nature.

The 19th century Physical Picture of the World was based on a hierarchy of the forms of motion and their reciprocal transitions, and in this sense the law of conservation of motion was its most general principle. In the 20th century, the laws of Newtonian mechanics could no longer play the part of the most general laws. The laws of electromagnetic phenomena laid claim to this role, but the electromagnetic picture of the world could not embrace all physical phenomena. On the other hand, electromagnetic fields did not fit into the general theory of relativity which describes gravitational fields.

Attempts by Einstein and other physicists to construct a single theory of the field did not lead to the creation of a new and harmonious Physical Picture of the World. A single theory of elementary particles and their transmutations, the rough outlines of which are now emerging in physics, can be the basis of such a picture. Thus the development of science confirms the ideas of dialectical materialism, which, as Lenin put it, by no means "professed a 'mechanical' and not an electromagnetic, or some other, immeasurably more complex, picture of the world of moving matter." (Vol. 14, p. 280.)