Abstract

Quantum theory emerged the victor of the last Scientific Revolution even though relativity theory had a more progressive view of reality to offer science. As a result, the physical aspects and properties of the gravitational field were never fully explored or exploited and science went through several decades of denial concerning the relevance of general relativity and its physical implications. The only small victory that relativity theory could claim before the 1960s was in cosmology with the expanding universe. The victory was small because the expanding universe was far from the everyday needs of a science more concerned with the atom and the nucleus. Under these circumstances, the theory of relativity had no practical applications in the everyday real world, so its theoretical implications were largely ignored. However, the 1970s brought something of a resurgence of good fortunes and everyday relevance for relativity theory and quantum theorists finally accepted the possibility that unification was the primary goal of physics, albeit a unification based upon the quantum concept of discrete particles rather than the Einsteinian concept of field continuity: According to quantum field theory, the gravity field could be reduced to an exchange of gravitons. But what at first seemed a resurgence of general relativity under the quantum paradigm in the 1970s has slowly evolved into a surge of physical relevance resulting in the emergence of general relativity as a dominating field of research in physics. And the story does not end there. The recent discoveries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy are about to push physics and relativity theory into a Third Scientific Revolution in which a unification with the quantum will be made on relativity's terms. The quantum will not emerge out of the mathematics as a constraint on the continuous field as Einstein had hoped, but it will emerge as a field constant that limits the continuous field as described by general relativity.