Physics and philosophy are at most a few thousand years old, but probably have lives of thousands of millions of years stretching away in front of th… - James Hopwood Jeans

Then the theory of relativity came and explained the cause of the failure. Electric action requires time to travel from one point of space to another, the simplest instance of this being the finite speed of travel of light... Thus electromagnetic action may be said to travel through space and time jointly. But by filling space and space alone [excluding time] with an ether, the pictorial representations had all supposed a clear-cut distinction between space and time.

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

A second conspicuous landmark... is the enunciation of the fundamental law of radioactive disintegration by Rutherford and Soddy in 1903. This law was in no sense a consequence or development of Planck's theories; indeed fourteen years were to elapse before any connection was noticed between the two. The new law asserted that the atoms of radioactive substances broke up spontaneously, and not because of any particular conditions or special happenings. This seemed to involve an even more startling break with classical theory than the new laws of Planck; radioactive break-up appeared to be an effect without a cause, and suggested that the ultimate laws of nature were not even causal.