Heinrich Hertz: de la física a la filosofía de la física

In his “process of conversion to Hertzian waves”, starting from his stud-ies on electrodynamics, Hertz elaborated a philosophical reflection, of Kantian roots, on the status, objectives, purpose, results, and limits of a physical theory, ultimately traced back to simple laws of mechanics. Since the samephysical phe-nomena can be described by a multiplicityof theories —which are “images”or “representations”of the legal structure of the causal relations of real objects —, they do not say how nature ontologically is, but how we dress it to correctly knowthe experimental predictions, without ambiguity. Consequently, experiments test only the correctness(validity) of a theory and not its veracity. To choose between image-theories and arrive at their simplest and most common nucleus, Hertz pre-sents three methodological criteria, demanding, at the same time, that the theoretical structure of the principles of mechanics be hypothetical-deductive. His proposal consists, then, in joining a phi-losophy with a geometrization of mechanics.