Exactly one hundred years ago, World War I wiped out nineteenth-century Europe of kings and emperors and the devastating twentieth century began. But the certainties of the old days were already disappearing before that, partly due to the many new scientific insights at the turn of the century.
Soon it will be exactly one hundred years ago that the First World War broke out. From 1914 to 1918 he sowed death and destruction in large parts of Europe. Millions of soldiers died in appalling conditions in muddy trenches. The 'Great War' was the bloody beginning of the twentieth century and a prelude to the much more devastating Second World War.
The First World War put an end to old Europe, the idyllic time of the grandeur of kings and emperors of the nineteenth century:a world of noble hierarchy, stability and security. The Habsburg Empire, the Russian Tsar Empire, the German Empire and the Ottoman Sultanate were destroyed by the war. None of these ancient empires proved to be able to withstand the vast forces of the modern world.
But even before the war, in the period from 1900 to 1914, the old certainties were rapidly disappearing. The old monarchs and their aristocratic officials still determined European politics. But meanwhile, drastic changes, partly due to the rapid technological changes at the time, were the talk of the town.
In the barely fifteen years between the turn of the century and the outbreak of war, new scientific discoveries turned all the old certainties upside down. Thanks to the unprecedented progress, many people felt a sense of excitement, fear, speed and vertigo. The world suddenly turned out to be much stranger, more turbulent and more uncertain than anyone ever thought possible. These are all uncertainties that, in addition to countless other factors (more about which soon on Kennislink), also contributed to the outbreak of war in August 1914.
Einstein's miracle year
It was none other than Albert Einstein who shook up the scientific world at that time with his sharp insights. The German physicist experienced his "year of miracles" in 1905, in which he published four physics articles. Almost every one of them worthy of a Nobel Prize, but it was mainly his theory of relativity that showed that the universe was stranger than anyone could have imagined.
Because if something seems constant, it is the ticking of time. Einstein argued with his theory that this is not the case:the passage of time, like space, is relative and dependent on the speed of the observer.
Einstein drew this conclusion from the work of James Clerk Maxwell, among others, who had shown that the speed of light has a finite value. Einstein came to his theory when he realized that if you fly away from a clock at nearly the speed of light, you will see that clock ticking slower.
The special theory of relativity has absurd consequences, which became known to the general public through popularization in the mass media (also a new phenomenon at the time). Einstein discovered that time actually passes more slowly for a spaceman in a fast rocket than for someone who stays behind on earth.
An example. Someone who travels to the nearest star at 90 percent of the speed of light Proxima Centauri flies and immediately flies back, sees on his on-board computer that this journey has taken about 4 years. However, when he returns to Earth, he sees that more than nine years have passed here! He has become five years younger compared to his friends and family.
Although Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for the discovery of the photoelectric effect, he was most famous for the special theory of relativity (1905) and general relativity (1916).
New light and a new atom
Einstein's theories of relativity fascinated the public, although they mainly affected the largest structures in the universe. At the same time, scientists were working on theories that attempted to describe the behavior of particles and radiation at the tiniest level. Even atoms and light particles did not seem to obey the familiar laws of nature in our daily lives.
Nobel laureate Max Planck became the founder of quantum mechanics in 1900 by stating that light consists of particles, or photons. He came to this conclusion when he tried to explain why every object with a certain temperature emits specific wavelengths of light.
And that while experiments about a hundred years earlier had already clearly shown that light was a wave. The curious conclusion that physicists drew was that light both a wave was like a particle.
Not only the old theories about light were in jeopardy, the atomic model was also overhauled. Those responsible were the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford and the Dane Niels Bohr. Rutherford stated in 1911 that all atoms should have a small nucleus in which almost all of the mass is contained. The rest of the atom was virtually empty and occupied only by the electrons swarming around the nucleus.
Rutherford came to this conclusion by experimenting with a thin foil of gold at which he fired so-called alpha particles (in fact nuclei of the element helium). Expecting that these particles would fly right through the foil, he was astonished to see that some did not and even bounced back. He later describes his experiment:"It's like bouncing a bullet off a tissue paper."
Superconductivity and radioactivity
In addition to the theory of relativity, the basis of quantum mechanics and the new atomic model, physics experiments in the first years of the 20th century provided plenty of food for thought. There was a lot of experimentation with phenomena such as radioactivity and X-rays. These had been discovered at the end of the 19th century, and proved useful in further experiments (such as Rutherford's) and in the medical field.
Another remarkable discovery was made in Leiden in 1911. The Dutchman Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered that when metals are cooled to almost absolute zero, they no longer have any electrical resistance. And that while theorists had correctly predicted that the resistance would have to increase around that temperature. A few years later, Onnes was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of superconductivity. It was not until the 1950s that a theory for this phenomenon would be developed.
Technological progress
But developments were not only rapid in physics. From a technological point of view it also went well. Thus, better and better combustion engines were produced, which were also made in increasing numbers. No sooner had the one speed record been established than it was broken again. Car manufacturer Ford came up with the principle of the assembly line, which enabled a revolution in the car industry. Both transport and communication went faster and faster and over ever greater distances.
At the same time, this period was the time of aviation pioneers. For example, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin built the first zeppelin in 1900 and in America the Wright brothers performed their famous powered flight in 1903. Incidentally, it would take until the 1920s before civil aviation really got off the ground.
During this period, passenger transport by water between Europe and America intensified due to immigrants seeking refuge elsewhere and tourism. Shipping companies tried to outdo each other with increasingly larger and more luxurious ships. The Titanic, which sank in the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, was the most famous example. Thanks to more and more telephone connections (already 750,000 in the Netherlands in 1915), people were able to communicate with each other over immeasurable distances.
The truth no longer exists
All these developments made it seem as if even the most fundamental things – such as time and space – were changing. The discovery of atoms of radioactivity and X-rays had opened up a whole new, invisible world. Increasingly improved film and photography techniques enabled scientists to capture and freeze time, as it were. All kinds of new perspectives were possible. They photographed bullets in high-speed flight and captured moments on film for endless replay.
The unique moment in time and space seemed like something of the past. A generation earlier, if a piece of music could only be heard by those present in the concert hall, now that piece could simply be recorded and played.
Because of all these new insights, in a short time nothing was what it seemed. The world suddenly turned out to be infinitely more complex, and there turned out to be far more perspectives than people ever thought possible. That also seeped through in the philosophy of the time. The American philosopher William James simply stated that truth is what works. Bertrand Russell stated that the concept of truth itself is based on a misunderstanding. Ludwig Wittgenstein went one step further and asked the question whether language can have meaning at all.
For many people it was all difficult to keep up with. To give the world some structure again, more and more people clung to pseudoscientific or downright racist ideas. The theories of, for example, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy (well known from the 'free school'), became extremely popular.
Even without retrospective knowledge of the devastating war that would break out in 1914, the first years of the twentieth century were 'dizzying', as Philip Blom describes them in his book The dizzying years. Europe 1900-1914. It is not for nothing that he chooses the dynamo as a symbol for this time; huge revolving behemoths that were exhibited at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris and generated a wonderful new energy:electricity.
1900-1914 was an exciting, dynamic but also uncertain and alienating time. Many people loved the new techniques and the possibilities they brought. But something gnawed under the skin. Where was the world going, now that the old predictability suddenly disappeared at a rapid pace?