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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    understanding of nature—a space which is finite; a space which is empty, so that one point differs from another solely in the properties of the space itself; four-dimensional, seven- and more dimen¬ sional spaces; a space which for ever expands; a seauence of events which follows the laws of i probability instead of the law of causation—or, alternately, a sequence of events which can only be fully and consistently described by going out¬ side space and time—all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incap¬ able of realisation in any sense which would properly be described as material. For instance, anyone who has written or lec¬ tured on the finiteness of space is accustomed to the objection that the concept of a finite space is self-contradictory and nonsensical. If space is finite, our critics say, it must be possible to go out beyond this finite space, and what can we possibly find beyond it except more space, and so on ad infinitum?—which proves that space cannot be finite. And again, they say, if space is expand¬ ing, what can it possibly expand into, if not into more space?—which again proves that what is expanding can only be a part of space, so that the whole of space cannot expand. The twentieth-century critics who make these comments are still in the state of mind of the nine¬ teenth-century scientists; they take it for granted
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