[U]ncomprimising belief carries much more weight than some special philosophical notions... [T]he great… — Werner Heisenberg
[U]ncomprimising belief carries much more weight than some special philosophical notions... [T]he great majority... can scarcely have any well-founded judgement concerning the correctness of certain important general ideas or doctrines. ...[T]he word "belief" can for this majority not mean "perceiving the truth of something" but... only... as "taking this as the basis for life." ...[T]his second kind of belief is much firmer... much more fixed... it can persist even against immediate contradicting experience... not... shaken by added scientific knowledge... sometimes... to the point where it seems completely absurd, and ends... only with the death of the believer. Science and history can teach us that this... may become a great danger... [S]uch belief has always belonged to the great forces in human history.
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But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato's Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. "All things are numbers" is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature.
The law of causality is no longer applied in quantum theory and the law of conservation of matter is no longer true for the elementary particles. Obviously Kant could not have foreseen the new discoveries, but since he was convinced that his concepts would be "the basis of any future metaphysics that can be called science" it is interesting to see where his arguments have been wrong.
The equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal, whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore, the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. Actually this is a problem which has not yet been solved.
