Concerning the Nature of Things

Only fragments of the writings of the founders of the atomic theory have come to us. The views of these philosophers are preserved, and doubtless amplified and modified, in a Latin poem. Concerning the Nature of Things, written by Lucretius, who was bom a century before the beginning of our era. Let us consider the picture given in that poem of... 

Concerning the Nature of Things. Concerning the Application of Things. 

Generally the first thing to be done in preparation for the photochemical study of a compound is to determine the visible and ultraviolet absorption spectrum of the compound. Besides furnishing information concerning the nature of the excited state potentially involved in the photochemistry (see Section 1.4), the absorption spectrum furnishes information of a more applied nature as to the wavelength range in which the material absorbs and its molar absorptivity e. From this information it is possible to decide what type of light source to use for the irradiation, what solvents can be used to... 

It is in this spirit that we shall examine the scope and achievements of physical chemistry, and see what views about the nature of things it refiects. We shall attempt to show the subject in a continuous development which reveals its structure and displays the relation of its parts. We shall therefore not pay much attention to the accidents of history, but we shall be very much concerned with the methods by which an inquiring mind can penetrate the secrets of nature. In this sense the treatment may reasonably be called humanistic. 

The issue of constancy concerns the conditions under which the current active control trial is being conducted compared to the conditions under which the active control was established historically. Things may well have changed. For example, the nature of the underlying disease or the effectiveness of ancillary care may be such that the active control performs rather differently now than it did when the original placebo-controlled trials were undertaken. This may well be true, for example, for antibiotics where populations of patients will have developed resistance to certain treatments. If this were the case then the current non-inferiority trial could lead to a misleading conclusion of effectiveness for the new active when in fact the comparator treatment is ineffective. 

These views are based on anthroposophy, a multifarious worldview, inspired by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) with the core opinion that any thing, any occurrence in the world has its cause in a spiritual world that is actually present and can fundamentally be an object of human awareness. Anthroposophy, insofar as it concerns the perception of nature, understands itself as giving an additional dimension, the spiritual one, which in no case would replace or deny any basic natural law. The way to develop the ability to attain knowledge of this spiritual world... 

---