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Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 96, 20 October 1934, Page 8

The lines which' Pope wrote on Sir Isaac Newton' are well known, though they never reached their destination in Westminster Abbey: Nature and Nature's Laws lay liid in Night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light. Mr. Squire's reply to a suggestion that Einstein ought to be provided with an epigram as a companion to Newton's deserves to be equally familiar: It did not last: the Devil, howling "Ho! Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo. Einstein has. certainly not made for the simplicity or the. intelligibility of the universe. When he first came to England, there were said to be half a dozen people in the country who understood him. Sir James Jeans and some of his Cambridge friends accounted for half or perhaps two-thirds of them. Oxford, that "home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties," and perhaps including the Newtonian philosophy among them, shared with other inferior places the two or three other British understanders of Einstein. In addition to achieving a popular success to which Einstein >has never aspired, and which, probably as he has had the wireless to help him, no scientific man of any age has ever equalled, Sir James Jeans himself has. since been elevated by the popular judgment to a place beside Einstein in the class list of the unintelligible. The dual aspect of Sir James Jeans's genius may be illustrated by the fact that, though his book on "The Mysterious Universe" was popular enough, with a sale of 20,000 copies within a fortnight of publication, to make "science a bestseller," and is now in its 128 th thousand, it nevertheless contains such a passage as this:. "We shall not measuro time in ordinary soconds, but in terms of a. mysterious unit equal to a second multiplied by the square root of minus 1. ... If we are asked why we adopt these woird nuiethods of measurement, the answer is that they appear to be Nature's own system. . . . The universe appears to have been designed by a« pure mathematician. If Miss Gertrude Stein were to talk in this way the plain man might suspect her of a desire to pull his leg and be moved to throw something at her. But, as it is impossible for him to relieve his feelings at the expense of one of the most eminent of the world's men of science in this way, he is glad to find some comfort in "The Lesson of the Universe" as deduced by Sir Henry Norman from the passage we have quoted: Millions, and galaxies, and grains of sand, And universes, and —above all— Jeans, But how amid the whirling waves we stand, He hesitates to guess, or what the puzzle means. Yet it seems clear, when the last page is rea.d, The lesson is, after all said and done— "Lift up your heart, and bow your puzzled head, Boforo the non-existent root of minus one." Though Sir James Jeans's address to the Aberdeen meeting of the British Association on September 5 included nothing quite so appalling as "the square root of minus one" passage, we have found much of it unintelligible. We are fortified in this confession by the speaker's admission that his ■ thoughts were straining the resources of language, that the truths of Nature "can only be made comprehensible in the form of parables," and that "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not to be conveyed by parables." . It would take a Sir James Jeans, said the- "Spectator," to comment adequately on tho presidential address by Sir James Jeans at the British Association meeting on "Wednesday. It soared into regions whevo only minds of tho typo of Sir Arthur Eddington's or Dr. Einstein's could follow it, and it eamo down to the solid earth of tho common man (if what tho common man thinks solid earth is solid earth at all) when Sir James spoke of the relation of scionco to unemployment. The essential distinction that Sir James Jeans draws between the old physics and the new is that the former "imagined it was studying an objective Nature which had its own existence independently of the mind which perceived it," while, according to the letter, tho Nature we study does not consist so much of something w<s perceive as of our perceptions; it is not the objoct of tho subject-object relation, but tho relation itsolf. Thero is, in fact, no clear-cut division between the subject and object; they form an indivisible whole which now becomes Nature. To the old school the universe was v collection of particles; to the new it is a system of waves, and "these lire of the general quality of waves

of knowledge or of absence of knowledge in our own minds." In general, says Sir James,

ordinary time and space do not provide an adequate canvas for the wavepicture. The wave-picturo of two currents of electricity, or even of two electrons moving independently, noeds a largor canvas—six dimensions of spaco and one of time. There can bo no-logical justification for identifying any particular three of these six dinionsions with ordinary space, so that we must regard the wave-picturo as lying ontirely outsido space. The whole picture, and tho manifold dimensions of spaco in which it is drawn, become pure mental constructs —diagrams and frameworks wo make for ourselves to help us understand phenomena. While the general attitude of public opinion to this address, as to the previous speculations of the same great authority, appears to have been that of acquiescence and admiration, it is a pleasant change to find that one critic has had the audacity to throw a brick at him, and that it has not altogether missed the mark. That Sir James's argument, "so far as it is intelligible" is merely an application of the old subjective idealist philosophy to modern physics, and is not based on physics at all is declared by the "Glasgow Herald" and maintained with refreshing vivacity. The physicist's need for six dimensions is, it says, used by Sir James Joans in support of his thesis, but all it proves is that the world is different from what wo had thought, not that it is dependent on mind. Why should the old-fashioned four dimensions leave the world apparently independent of niinil and six make it mental? If the physicists required seven dimensions, would the world bo still more mental or. would it bo proved indopondont again? Either answer seems as inconsequent as the other. After referring to Sir James Jeans's "extraordinary statement that the behaviour of the electron shows that physics is not the study of a Nature independent of the perceiving mind" as coming nearest to what he needs for his position, the "Glasgow Herald's" critic proceeds: How could a physicist's observation of an electron show whether it was mind-dependent or not? Can tho physicist provo by observation that when he is not observing an electron it does not exjst? Or can he provo by experiment that the observed behaviour of an electron is different from the way in which tho samo eloctron would behave if it wero not observed, and that one difference is that only in the former case does it exist? ... It would be well if men of science who feel a duty on a great occasion to transcend their wonted themes would remember that they have no more authority to talk nonsense about philosophy than they would grant a mere philosopher who professed to settle a question in pure science. . Thero is a palpable hit in the "Glasgow Herald's" series of questions. The issue is really one of philosophy and not of physics, as indeed Sir James had in part admitted without providing more than a vague hint at a solution. He conceded that in holding the universe to consist of "little more than constructs of our own minds"—that "little more" is hardly scientific—"modern physics has moved in the direction of philosophic idealism." ' If tho Nature we study consists so largely of our own mental constructs, why do our many minds all construct one and the same Nature? "Why, in brief, do we all see- the same sun, moon, and stars? Sir James has no answer except the suggestion that "physics itself may provide a possible although very conjectural clue." Oxford seems to score this time with the negative answer implied in Father Ronald Knox's epigram:

There once was a man who said: "God Must think it exceedingly odd If Ho finds that this troo Continues to bo When there's no one about in the , Quad." •