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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    This statement can hardly hope to escape chal¬ lenge on the ground that we are merely moulding nature to our preconceived ideas. The musician, it will be said, may be so engrossed in music that he would contrive to interpret every piece of mechanism as a musical instrument; the habit of thinking of all intervals as musical intervals may be so ingrained in him that if he fell downstairs and bumped on stairs numbered 1, 5, 8 and 13 he would see music in his fall. In the same way, a cubist painter can see nothing but cubes in the indescribable richness of nature—and the unreality of his pictures shews how far he is from under¬ standing nature; his cubist spectacles are mere blinkers which prevent his seeing more than a minute fraction of the great world around him. So, it may be suggested, the mathematician only sees nature through the mathematical blinkers he has fashioned for himself. We may be reminded that Kant, discussing the various modes of perception by which the human mind apprehends nature, concluded that it is specially prone to see nature through mathematical spectacles. Just as a man wearing blue spectacles would see only a blue world, so Kant thought that, with our mental bias, we tend to see only a mathematical world. Does our argu¬ ment merely exemplify this old pitfall, if such it is ? A moment’s reflection will shew that this can hardly be the whole story. The new mathematical
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