Modern Physics Abuse Syndrome is nothing new and can be found in
literature throughout the ages. By far, the most
flagrant abuse (prior to the contemporary age) is that of the
Age of Reason.
Alexander Pope had a few examples of this immortalized in his poetry:
Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law,
Admir'd such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And showed a Newton as we show an Ape.
Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind,
Describe or fix one movement of his mind?
Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend,
Explain his own beginning, or his end?
Alas what wonder! Man's superior part
Uncheck'd may rise, and climb from art to art;
But when his own great work is but begun,
What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.
Essay on Man: Epistle 2, lines 31 to 42
Pope again invoked
Newton with a couplet which was intended to be
Newton's
epitaph.
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, let Newton be! and all was light.
From the
Principia in which Newton published the equations that explained the force of
gravity and made all of the
solar system work in a giant clockwork mechanism.
Some would even accuse the Founding Fathers of the United States of this same syndrome when they wrote:
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
...
The beginning of the
Declaration of Independence echos those beliefs of the time that
science and
philosophy can
and will find all of the answers to the universe - that it is Nature's
law that
all men are created equal, just as much a law as that which states
F = G * M1 * M2
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d2
The expectation of Newton and those like him ("A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law" and "Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind") was to solve all the problems - if the universe is so orderly, certainly everything is explained and there are laws governing all planetary and human interaction.