An Idea that will never be proven wrong

SI was just going to write this in a comment to Graham's last post, but then i decided it was deserving of it's own post. Graham talked about connecting his idea of 'the absurd' to the particle theory of matter. I don't know anything about science (and i am quite proud of my 14 percent in chemistry 12... which i blame on Josh Mann), but i do realize that good philosophy needs to be based on science.

Immanuel Kant, who was a philosopher/political theorist/ racist german/ genius, put forth some really good ideas. His political theory often rested between a battle between the individual and the state. How can you be an individual, when you need the state to protect you? How can we have an orderly state, when everyone wants to be an individual?

In answering these problems, he based his theories on Newtonian Physics. At his time in the late 1700's, it looked quite clearly that Newtonian Physics explained the universe perfectly. His ideas were held in high esteem, until about 1898 when science similar to Einstein's relativity, proved that Newtonian Physics did not explain the world in a universal way; rather everything was relative. We haven't disregarded Newton's theories, rather we just accept the fact that there are 2 good scientific ideas.

Most people looking for a grand unification theory (a theory that combines Einstein relativity and Newton), want to go to something along the lines of quantum mechanics (or string theory or something like that). We live in really weird times because we don't have a science that explains our world universally anymore. Rather, everything has to be a dualism between these two competing views.


I don't remember where i was going with this.