It is the scale and proportion of the circumstance and those affected that determines the significance. It also depends on the priorities and the thresholds of the group or individual. While we have many of the same ongoing anxieties now as we did early in the twentieth century, it was the dramatic impact of an event such as WWI and the death toll that it took that created common uncertainties and anxieties shared by the masses all over the world, especially in Europe. With that, the anxiety was collectively heard and felt with its louder voice and remembered to define an era. So in actuality, we have just as many uncertainties and anxieties today that push our thresholds, but nothing to the scale of world war has caused an upheaval that would leave us in shambles with an immediate need to question and restructure our way of living. .
The common uncertainties we were left with after the Great War gave rise to many new ways of thought and practice that inevitably shaped the world we live in today. The search for certainty branched into many different areas of life and made room for improvement making way for new discovery. Albert Einstein was undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of his time. He formulated the equation E=MC2, which converted energy and mass which he discovered were part of the same reality. He also proposed the still functional theory of relativity, which stated that space and time were relative to the observer. Werner Heisenberg was also one of the greatest providers of answers in the search for certainty. His uncertainty principle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, speculated that there were many more uncertainties in science, but we can and must live knowing such. The uncertainties that caused a mass anxiety attack also stirred the philosophical reality of the time. The revolution was ignited by the observation that for Philosophy to be an efficient tool for achieving knowledge, it must limit itself to matters of experience or matters of logic.
