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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    light chains of bonfires in the Sahara, to form a diagram illustrating the famous theorem of Pytha¬ goras, that the squares on the two smaller sides of a right-angled triangle are together equal to the square on the greatest side. To most of the in¬ habitants of Mars such signals would convey no meaning, but it was argued that mathematicians on Mars, if such existed, would surely recognise them as the handiwork of mathematicians on earth. In so doing, they would not be open to the re¬ proach that they saw mathematics in everything. And it seems to me that the situation is similar mutatis mutandis, with the signals from the outer world of reality which form the shadows on the walls of the cave in which we are imprisoned. We cannot interpret these as shadows cast by living actors nor as shadows cast by a machine, but the pure mathematician recognises them as represent¬ ing the kind of ideas with which he is already familiar in his studies. We could not of course draw any conclusion from this if the concepts of pure mathematics which we find to be inherent in the structure of the universe were merely part of, or had been introduced through, the concepts of applied mathe¬ matics which we used to discover the workings of the universe. It would prove nothing if nature had merely been found to act in accordance with the concepts of applied mathematics; these concepts
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