The Nature of the Physical World
by . New York: Macmillan Co. 1928. 8vo. 361 pp. $3.75.
PROFFESSOR EDDINGTON is a scholar of the first magnitude; his book is the product of a profound and cultured mind. The charm of its style, as a popular exposition of an abstruse topic, has never, perhaps, been equaled —and this is said with a lull realization of what Thomas Henry Huxley has done in the service of Charles Darwin. The difficulty with his work goes deeper.
Professor Eddington seems to find himself in the dilemma that is typical for any tolerant and receptive mind. He finds, first of all, that the ideas of classical science are insufficient to explain many modern observations and conceptions. Then he finds that, the quantum theory leads slowly but inevitably to Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy, which can be stated so: a particle may have position or it may have velocity, but it cannot in any precise sense have both.
Obviously the laboratory difficulties which the relativity theory creates are nothing compared to the chaos which this apparently inevitable dictum brings about. And so Professor Eddington goes on: ’ The conditions of the exploration of the secrets of nature are such that the more we bring to light the secret of position the more the secret of velocity is hidden. They are like the old man and woman in the weather glass; as one comes out the door the other retires behind the other door. When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts: but there is a second possibility — that we have been trying to find out something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the æther. When the concealment is found to be perfectly systematic, then we must banish the corresponding entity from the physical world. There is really no option. The link with our consciousness is completely broken.’
It becomes increasingly disquieting to observe how many entities science is becoming insistent upon banishing, to the entire confusion of our physical senses. With scientific detachment Professor Eddington refuses to regard the impasse as a cause for an emotional breakdown. But I suspect him, as a human being, of being deeply distressed at the possibility that we have gone so far off the course in our intellectual interpretations of what our senses and our supposedly ingenious aids to them have been showing us.
The distress and confusion of the layman are bound to be even greater. Thermodynamics has brought itself out to the prediction of the slowing up and eventual stoppage of the entire universe; on the way it has succeeded in conferring the boon of electric refrigeration. Science now comes out frankly and confesses its impotence; before it did so it obliged with the means toward radio sunshine hours and cheap aluminum. Science wears two faces; not the least of the layman’s confusion lies in trying to determine whether to look at the tragic or the comic masque.
Once Professor Eddington finds himself involved in a denial of strict causality, his book pretty generally deserts mathematics. He takes refuge in a sort of Halve mysticism. He tries to set up, with his own apparatus, a new epistemology. Even this he finally abandons in the realization that he will not get anywhere without an elaborate discussion of reality, causation, and consciousness in general. All the elaborate laboratory observations and data come down in his own splendid hut dispiriting words to this: ‘Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.’ And he likens this modern scientific theory to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock. Here is but one of many places where his frustration can find an outlet only in jocosity. It is typical of his art of writ ing whicli makes his book the magnificent reading that it is. It involves him, unfortunately, in the accusation of occasionally escaping from an intellectual quagmire by the device of turning a phrase.
The lay reader will make his own deductions from this book; hoping or despairing according to the complexion of his mind, which he can no more change than the color of his eyes.
In any event, this is a book that must be read. It is impossible to imagine how anyone could write more beautiful and luminous prose upon so abstruse and obscure a topic. Professor Eddington’s magnificent gift for exposition never once deserts him; his ability to draw comparisons, set analogies, create metaphors, find the perfect illustration, stays with him unfalteringly from his first page to his last. Science has come out by that same door wherein it went. No matter how unprofitable the journey, it is worth while to have made it with a guide so witty, urbane, companionable, and profound.
ERIC HODGINS