World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature

Book excerpt: This book is the theological opus of Professor Max Bernhard Weinstein, probably best known as a physicist teaching at the prestigious University of Berlin, and as an early skeptic of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In addition to these activities, he carried a strong interest in theology and the history of religion, delivering several lectures on the relationship between those topics and the study of physics, culminating in his 1910 publication of Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis (World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature). And so, it is something of a lost classic, one able to be thoroughly eyebrow-raising to the German reader, and prospectively equally so to the English reader. Translating this fascinating book to a more widely spoken language-and enabling its republication in that form-has been a step towards preserving an almost-lost treasure chest of knowledge and analysis for a vast swath of the world. We hope to regenerate Weinstein's forward-thinking observations, keeping them and their context alive for a new generation of the world. Every effort has been made to match the content to the pagination of the original, so that when you cite to a passage in this translation, the page holding that content will exactly correspond to the page in Weinstein's original work. With a few exceptions made necessary by typesetting conventions, even the sentence breaks match those of the original. Naturally, this has led to some unusual points of division between the pages, but we feel this is worth it to fully replicate the feel of reading Professor Weinstein's original work as it was originally laid out.In addition to the translation of Professor Weinstein's text, an excellent and enlightening Foreword has been provided by the esteemed Danish historian of science, Professor Helge Kragh, currently Professor Emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute. Here, Professor Kragh-who has previously examined Professor Weinstein's philosophy in his own 2008 book, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology-has painted in a few pages an encapsulating picture of the scientific milieu of Professor Weinstein's day, vital to understanding a book drawn from that period.