Chapter XI. Faustian & Apollonian Nature-Knowledge
"Faustian physics as a dogma of force."
…Newton, whose forces-at-a-distance point to a mythic background that the devout physicist declined to examine. The possible alternative way of reaching an unequivocal definition of force…was leading…to the formulation of the concept of Energy.
"Every Natural Science depends upon a preceding Religion"
…the phenomena of radioactivity….is a picture of history and not "Nature," …one might almost say that in them mathematical number has been replaced by chronological.
particle
energy
Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
What the myth of Gotterdammerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies to-day - world's end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.