Sociologically, the reason for this lay simply in the fact that during the late nineteenth century, standard physics (which was still overwhelmingly Newtonian) was believed to be a theoretical model of the world that had almost reached completion. Theoretical physics, by contrast, was a marginal research area for cranks and lonely eccentrics, and it offered little funding, little prestige, and few career opportunities. While ethnic Germans were commonly allotted the most prestigious chairs and research positions in standard physics, work in theoretical physics was often left to Jews, or to
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