Reply to Desmet

Abstract

In this short chapter, Gary Herstein replies to Ronny Desmet’s critique of his earlier chapter, arguing that his discussion of the fifth Solvay conference highlights the underestimated maelstrom of confusion in physics at the time, and that it is not clear that Bohr even understood or adequately responded to Einstein’s arguments, and that his interpretation is based on a wilful acceptance of incoherence at the base of reality. He also argues that Lewis Ford, not being a mathematician, was heavily ‘reading in’ the concept of temporal atomism into Whitehead’s philosophy without any clear understanding of Whitehead’s mathematical habits of thought.