Abstract

In Roger Boscovich’s Theory of Natural Philosophy, the dynamics of matter is described by the curve of forces, either attractive or repulsive – depending on the distances of the centres of forces. At great distances, the curve of forces is manifested similar to Newton’s gravitation. The gravitation is integrative for the visible universe, but not for the hypothetical multitude of universes that possibly parallelly exist separated by a repulsive force, comparable to the contemporary concept of the dark energy. In the concept of continuous forces in a discontinuous matter, Faraday recognises the idea of a dynamic electromagnetic field, completed by Maxwell, while Einstein later predicted the existence of gravitational waves recently detected. The wave-nature of real space-time matter is found in Boscovich’s model at the small scale of the curve of forces, while the atomic-corpuscular dynamics of classical mechanics is found at the large scale.