13. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects III

When you see a physical process, let us say how, under the influence of the warming of a body, that which the physicist says is released as heat, heat that was previously latent, that was, so to speak, hidden inside the body, when you see that and then look at the ideas that the physicist has of such a release of heat, which under certain conditions had not previously appeared externally but was bound internally to the body, then you will say: it would not occur to the physicist, when he sees heat heat, which was previously latent and now becomes free heat, to speak only of a straight-line development and to say that the appearance of the free heat is based on the fact that what was there before developed to include the free heat. One gets used to not speaking in abstract terms here, but trying to gain concrete insights into the process. Much in such processes may still be unexplained, many a hypothesis may still be needed, but one tries, at least in the field of physics, not to simply put forward such abstract ideas as “development”, but one tries to penetrate into what has actually happened when free heat from latent heat, from bound heat arises.