The mysterious universe / by Sir James Jeans.

  • James Hopwood Jeans
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mysterious universe / by Sir James Jeans. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    some extraneous standards against which to com¬ pare them. For this reason, to borrow Locke’s phrase, “the real essence of substances” is for ever unknowable. We can only progress by discussing the laws which govern the changes of substances, and so produce the phenomena of the external world. These we can compare with the abstract creations of our own minds. For instance, a deaf engineer studying the action of a pianola might try first to interpret it as a machine, but would be baffled by the continuous reiteration of the intervals 1, 5, 8, 13 in the motions of its trackers. A deaf musician, although he could hear nothing, would immediately recognise this succession of numbers as the intervals of the com¬ mon chord, while other successions of less frequent occurrence would suggest other musical chords. In this way he would recognise a kinship between his own thoughts and the thoughts which had re¬ sulted in the making of the pianola; he would say that it had come into existence through the thought of a musician. In the same way, a scientific study of the action of the universe has suggested a con¬ clusion which may be summed up, though very crudely and quite inadequately, because we have no language at our command except that derived from our terrestrial concepts and experiences, in the statement that the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.
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