Abstract

In previous centuries, physicists applied the Scientific Method to learn the nature of the world, understand natural processes, and discover some things about the origin, age, and nature of the cosmos. Whatever forces and structures that existed in observable matter were assumed to apply to objects ranging in size from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy of stars. Most physicists believed an orderly universe existed that is governed by inviolable laws of causality, reality, and unity. Taken together, these worldview principles convinced both philosophers and physicists that knowledge gained by observation of the visible in earthly laboratories would apply uniformly to the invisible world of the small atom and the distant world of the heavens.