What Is Science About?

The linkage between epistemological and ontological claims, between calling a theory true because it correctly accounts for experimental data and claiming that therefore it is true of reality, became an issue in nineteenth-century physical science. In particular, Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat explicitly set aside the ontological question of what heat was in reality in favor of a mathematical account that correctly described and predicted how heat behaved. The founders of thermodynamics set aside the question of what matter really was, in favor of a mathematical theory that described how matter behaved in its interactions with energy. Maxwell proposed a mathematical theory of electromagnetic waves propagated through a space-filling aether, without identifying a physical structure for the aether or a causal mechanism for its action. Finally, the millennial acceptance of Euclidean geometry as a true account of space because of its deductive logical character was undermined by the creation of non-Euclidean geometries.