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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    view was bound to prove a misfit in the end— that the phenomenal universe would never make sense until it was projected on to a screen of pure mathematics: had they brought forward a convinc¬ ing argument to this effect, science might have been saved much fruitless labour. If the philosopher now says—“What you have found is nothing new: I could have told you that it must be so all the time,” the scientist may reasonably inquire— “Why, then, did you not tell us so, when we should have found the information of real value ? ” Our contention is that the universe now appears to be mathematical in a sense different from any which Kant contemplated or possibly could have contemplated—in brief, the mathematics enters the universe from above instead of from below. In one sense it may be argued that everything is mathematical. The simplest form of mathe¬ matics is arithmetic, the science of numbers and quantities—and these permeate the whole of life. For instance, commerce, which consists largely of the arithmetical operations of book-keeping, stock¬ taking and so on, is in a sense a mathematical occupation—but it is not in this sense that the universe now appears to be mathematical. Again, every engineer has to be something of a mathematician; if he is to calculate and predict the mechanical behaviour of bodies with accuracy, he must use mathematical knowledge and look at
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