Having exposed the weaknesses in the descriptive approach to ontology, I now take up the argument for a revisionary approach based on modern physics. In this chapter, I therefore investigate the influence of electromagneticism, relativity theory and the early quantum theory on the development of the event ontology in the 1920s with particular focus on Whitehead's view. These were the three key ideas that led to a transformation of our view of reality. The two main themes of this chapter include: (1) physical evidence in support of an ontology of events, and (2) the increasing unification of physical theory until we arrive at the current state of two highly successful, unified theories that are presently disunited within the search for a comprehensive, unified theory.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The essence of Whitehead's theory of the physical universe is perhaps best grasped in contrast to the views expressed by the founders of the seventeenth-century cosmology, Galileo, Descartes and Newton, who advanced the doctrine of mechanistic materialism, the clock-like view of the universe as matter in motion. Newton provided the grand unification of terrestrial and celestial motions with his law of universal gravitation and his laws of motion and, in doing so, achieved a synthesis of everything known about the motions on earth and in the heavens. The centrepiece of this view is Newton's idea of the independence of space and time as defined in the Scholium of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ([1687] 1995). Objects in motion are understood within a three-dimensional space existing at different times. As Newton defined space in his Principia, he writes: ‘Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.’ ‘Absolute, true, mathematical time’, he writes, ‘of itself, and from its own nature flows equally without regard to anything external …’ (ibid.: 13). As time advances from one instant to another, the whole universe is conceived to exist at once, complete and determinate.