Nature’s Plan of Structure. Let us now return to the observer who was so anxious to pick out a “right” frame of space. I suppose that what he had in mind was to find Nature’s own frame—the frame on which Nature based her calculations when she poised the planets under the law of gravity, or the reckoning of symmetry which she used when she turned the electrons on her lathe. But Nature has been too subtle for him; she has not left anything to betray the frame which she used. Or perhaps [Pg 28] the concealment is not any particular subtlety; she may have done her work without employing a frame of space. Let me tell you a parable. There was once an archaeologist who used to compute the dates of ancient temples from their orientation. He found that they were aligned with respect to the rising of particular stars. Owing to precession the star no longer rises in the original line, but the date when it was rising in the line of the temple can be calculated, and hence the epoch of construction of the temple is discovered. But there was one tribe for which this method would not work; they had built only circular temples. To the archaeologist this seemed a manifestation of extraordinary subtlety on their part; they had hit on a device which would conceal entirely the date when their temples were constructed. One critic, however, made the ribald suggestion that perhaps this particular tribe was not enthusiastic about astronomy. Like the critic I do not think Nature has been particularly subtle in concealing which frame she prefers. It is just that she is not enthusiastic about frames of space. They are a method of partition which we have found useful for reckoning, but they play no part in the architecture of the universe. Surely it is absurd to suppose that the universe is planned in such a way as to conceal its plan. It is like the schemes of the White Knight— But I was thinking of a plan To dye one’s whiskers green, And always use so large a fan That they could not be seen. If this is so we shall have to sweep away the frames of space before we can see Nature’s plan in its real significance. She herself has [Pg 29] paid no attention to them, and they can only obscure the simplicity of her scheme. I do not mean to suggest that we should entirely rewrite physics, eliminating all reference to frames of space or any quantities referred to them; science has many tasks to perform, besides that of apprehending the ultimate plan of structure of the world. But if we do wish to have insight on this latter point, then the first step is to make an escape from the irrelevant space-frames.