On June 9, 1938 Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture titled "The Establishing by Metaphysics of the Modern World Picture" as the last of a series arranged by the Society for Aesthetics, Natural Philosophy, and Medicine at Freiburg im Breisgau. In the essay "The Age of the World Picture" - developed from this lecture - Heidegger inscribes the modern age within a philosophical discourse concerned primarily with the problem of representation with respect to the subject-object split inaugurated with Descartes. Among the "essential phenomena of the modern age" are listed science, machine technology, art's transformation into the "purview of aesthetics", the conception and consummation of human activity as culture, and the loss of the gods [Entgötterung]. Yet it is the phenomena of modern science that becomes the focus of the body of the essay, and it is in its particular manifestation as research that characterizes what for Heidegger comes to describe the modern condition.

The process of research, of coming to know something about something else, is here inextricably linked to the researching subject: the subject projects a (fixed) Grundriss onto the object of study by which that object is measured and through which the attainment of "true" knowledge about that object is acquired. Modern man as centralized subject, gathers the world about him in the form of representations measured against his projective thought. This projection, and the "sphere" it subsequently opens, become the frame through which that which is being studied is perceived. Through the rigorous adherence to this frame, knowledge is ensured. One can know. Further, this process of research is understood by Heidegger to "adjust" itself over time. As knowledge is acquired, the initial projection (Grundriss, frame) is adjusted in light of previous discoveries in an iterative process of what might be compared to tuning a piano, or adjusting the site of a rifle.

What is significant about this model is that 'what can be known' is circumscribed by 'what can be represented', which is to say that knowing is dependent upon the way in which something allows itself to be represented given the frame through which it is apprehended. For example, in discussing the mathematical basis of modern physics, Heidegger refers to numbers as representations of the most striking of the "always-already-knowns":

"If we come upon three apples on the table, we recognize that there are three of them. But the number three, threeness, we already know."

For Heidegger, modern physics becomes the strongest instance of a research in which the projected Grundriss (in this case mathematics) stipulates in advance that which is already known. To know the world through the frame of physics thus presents a representation where:

"Motion means change of place. No motion or direction of motion is superior to any other. Every place is equal to every other. No point in time has preference to any other . . . Here all events, if they are to enter at all into representation as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatiotemporal magnitudes of motion. Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation."

It is this drive toward an exact, absolute, empirical knowledge and the subsequent 'fitting' of the world into a series of representations - the form of which are established a priori through the projected Grundriss - that for Heidegger situates the essence of the modern age in scientific research.