Social scientists ritualistically over-cite physics to justify new time theories

Evidence

The same holds true for the “new” concepts of time that are forming in the natural sciences. In the social-scientific literature it has almost become an obsession to make reference to the relativization and revision of the linear, abstract Newtonian concept of an “absolute mathematical time” and the importance of the insights of, in particular, Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory, quantum physics, and Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures as well as the discovery of a number of forms of intrinsic biological temporalities (biologischer Eigenzeiten). Repeated stereotypically here is the assertion that these insights revolutionize our understanding of time and have powerful consequences for society and hence also for any social-scientific conception of time. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s pattern-sources where prestige concepts (physics, eugenics, race science) get borrowed to legitimate claims in adjacent fields.