Frame-by-Frame: How Early Twentieth Century Physics Was Shaped by Brownie Cameras and Early Cinema

We design, create, and use tools to change the world, for better or worse; but in so doing, our tools also change us, for better or worse. An important elaboration of this truth is what Otto Paans and I have called the theory of thought-shapers, or TTS for short (Hanna R, Paans O, Cosmos Hist 17(1):1–72, 2021). In this chapter, I apply TTS to early twentieth century physics, and in particular to the Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting, revolutionary physics provided by the Special Theory of Relativity and the General Theory of Relativity (SRT-GRT) and Quantum Mechanics (QM), roughly one hundred years ago.