KNOWLEDGE TODAY

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 102, 27 October 1934, Page 21

KNOWLEDGE TODAY

NEW WORLD-PICTURE

A SCIENTIST'S PHILOSOPHY

JEANS AND HIS CRITICS

"In his brilliant presidential address, delivered at Aberdeen to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir James Jeans discussed not only .the new world-pic-turo of modern physics, on which there is no higher living authority, but also a philosophical problem,' 1 says "The Times." "When Sir James Jeana says that modern science has provod that the physical universe itself is a system of thought, or at least has thought as an ingredient in it, it is obvious that he is much less competent in philosophy than in physics; for such a doctrine is purely philosophical, and so beyond the compass of. physics,.however.modem," saya the "Glasgow Herald." "Most of the arguments by which Sir James Jeans tries to prove this position in his address have nothing whatever to do with physics. "No one I;who knew anything about philosophy would argue in these days, for example, that only what is mental can be known, a doctrine enough to be used as a cock-shy for beginners in philosophy, and requiring much more subtlety in its presentation than the president shows to make them think it worth the trouble of a refutation.'

"Yet it is made the basis of the following argument, which begins at least with modern physics. The intensity of a wave in any region is the measure of the propriety of picturing an atom therej but since this propriety is relative to our knowledge • the physicist's waves are waves of knowledge, and therefore in our minds in a sense in which waves in ether were not.

"It would be difficult to count the assumptions made in this proposterous argument, but it is sufficient to point out that so far as it is intelligible it is merely an application of the old subjective idealist philosophy to modern physics, and not an argument based on physics at all. "MORE MENTAL"? "The physicist's need for six dimensions is used by Sir James Jeans in support of his thesis, but all it proves is that tho world is different from what we had thought, not that it is dependent on mind. Why should the old-fashion-ed four dimensions leave the world apparently independent of mind ; and six mako it mental? If the physicists required seven dimensions would the world be still more mental, or would it be proved independent again? Either answer seems as inconsequent as the other. '' The passage in the address that comes nearest to what Sir James Jeans needs.for his position is the extraordinary statement that the behaviour of the electron shows that physics is not the study of a nature independent of the perceiving mind. "How could a physicist's observation of ,an electron show whether it was mind-dependent or "not? Can the physicist prove by observation that when he is not observing an electron it does not exist? Or can he prove by experiment that tho observed behaviour of an electron is different from the way in which the same electron would behave if it were not observed, and that one difference \s that only in tho former case does it exist? .-■ T , "Now whether Sir James Jeans 7s view that mind is an ingredient in nature is true or false is not at the moment the question. The point is that tho president of the British Association has urged in its support arguments which are both fallacious and irrelevant. The idealistic position is a philosophical one, and the philosophers who hold it nowadays use arguments very different from those of Sir James Jeans. 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 pnilosophy than they would grant to a mere philosopher who professed to settle a question in pure science." ONE THING. "Is it so certain," aska "The Times," "that we must also accept, or indeed that Sir James Jeans himself fully accepts, the further conception that nature and mind are identical, that, as Swinburne wrote, they are " 'The search, and the sought, and the seeker'? , "Undoubtedly it is true, and, so far as can bo guessed, must alway3 be true, that we cannot know what is not in our minds, and that if there bo an external reality our picture of it must be determined, limited, doubtless confused and distorted, by the limitations of our mind. "But even Sir James Jeans talks of tho 'mysterious world outside ourselves,' of our picture being distorted by some inherited kink in our minds, and of space and time and the space-time product being tho 'frameworks along which our minds receive their whole knowledge of the outer world.' "He talks of theoretical physics being like a building, which, since the last meeting of the British Association in Aberdeen, has been 'brought down in ruins by a succession of earthquake shocks.' Whence came tho earthquake shocks which have destroyed the worldpicture of physics of last century? Can there be any certainty that the present world-picture will not meet a similar fate from new earthquake shocks'. "The plain man may be persuaded that his picture of the rose is a product of his own mind. But as he is gazing at it, a puff of wind may remove some of it's petals or a shining beetle creep out of its golden heart and drone into tho air. His picture of the falling petals and of the beetle's heavy flight has to be interpreted by his own senses and his own mind, and may be interpreted wrongly. NOT TO BE CONVINCED. "But nothing will persuade him that the unexpected changes are products of his mind or other than indications of a reality that is not him. And so we may continue to believe that the new discoveries and new observations of science present us with a certainty that there is a reality, which our minds must always interpret and always interpret incompletely and erroneously, but which, none the less, is not us.", . "Sir James Jeans does not say," comments the "Scotsman," "that the new physics proves the existence of free will; he merely asserts that free will may be possible. In other words, he allows the philosophers to continue their debate. If they retort that for all the revolution in scientific thought scientists as a whole are mere babes in philosophy, the scientists might contrast the progress made in scientific knowledge with the comparatively static conditions of philosophy. "The mind can control the results of its actions; it cannot control their direction," asserts the "Daily Telegraph." "Those who advance the frontiers of our knowledge do not themselves know whether the applications of their work will found new industries or render old industries superfluous. "But this much can bo said, that if there were no movement there would be no results either, and the final vindication of progress along whatever ways science may be compelled to take is to be found in the menace which lies iv a mechanical conception of society."