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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Sir James Jeans
We may picture the world of reality as a deep-flowing stream, the world of appearance is its surface, below which we cannot see. Events deep down int he stream throw up bubbles and eddies on the surface of the stream. These are the transfers of energy and radiation of our common life which affect our senses and so activate our minds; below these lie deep waters which we can only know by inference. These bubbles and eddies show atomicity.... Many philosophers have regarded the world of appearance as a kind of illusion, some sort of creation or selection of our minds which has in some way less existence in its own right than the underlying world of reality. Modern physics does not confirm this view; the phenomena are seen to be just a part of the real world which affects our senses, while the space and time in which they occur have the same sort of reality as the substratum which orders their motions.... Because we have only complete photons at our disposal, and these form blunt probes, the world of phenomena can never be seen clearly and distinctly, either by us or by our instruments. Instead of seeing clearly defined particles clearly located in space and execution, clear-cut motions, we see only a collection of blurs, like a badly focused lantern side....This is enough of itself to prevent our ever observing strict causality in the world of phenomena. Each blur represents the unknown entity which the particle-picture depicts as a particle, or perhaps a group of such entities. The blurs may be pictured as wave-disturbances, the intensity of the waves at any point representing the probability that, with infinitely refined probes at our disposal, we should find a particle at that point. Or again, we may interpret the waves as representatives of knowledge -- they do not give us pictures of a particle, but of what we know as to the position and speed of motion of the particle. Now these waves of knowledge exhibit complete determinism; as they roll on, they show us knowledge growing out of knowledge and uncertainty following uncertainty according to a strict causal law. But this tells us nothing we do not already know. If we had found new knowledge appearing, not out of previous knowledge but spontaneously and of its own accord, we should have come upon something very startling and of profound philosophical significance; actually what we find is merely what was to be expected, and the problem of causality is left much where it was.
Excerpted from Physics and Philosophy, by James. H. Jeans |
Mysterious Universe, by Sir James H. Jeans
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