The nature of the physical worldEddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Philosophy
The nature of the physical world
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Physics -- Philosophy; Science -- Philosophy
the generation of the random element in a special locality of the brain
should not proceed fairly uniformly. In that case there will not be too
great a divergence between the passage of time in consciousness and the
length of the corresponding temporal relation in the physical world.
[Pg 103]
The Scientific Reaction from Microscopic Analysis. From the
point of view of philosophy of science the conception associated
with entropy must I think be ranked as the great contribution of
the nineteenth century to scientific thought. It marked a reaction
from the view that everything to which science need pay attention is
discovered by a microscopic dissection of objects. It provided an
alternative standpoint in which the centre of interest is shifted
from the entities reached by the customary analysis (atoms, electric
potentials, etc.) to qualities possessed by the system as a whole,
which cannot be split up and located—a little bit here, and a little
bit there. The artist desires to convey significances which cannot be
told by microscopic detail and accordingly he resorts to impressionist
painting. Strangely enough the physicist has found the same necessity;
but his impressionist scheme is just as much exact science and even
more practical in its application than his microscopic scheme.
Thus in the study of the falling stone the microscopic analysis reveals
myriads of separate molecules. The energy of the stone is distributed
among the molecules, the sum of the energies of the molecules making
up the energy of the stone. But we cannot distribute in that way
the organisation or the random element in the motions. It would be
meaningless to say that a particular fraction of the organisation is
located in a particular molecule.
There is one ideal of survey which would look into each minute
compartment of space in turn to see what it may contain and so make
what it would regard as a complete inventory of the world. But this
misses any world-features which are not located in minute compartments.
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we
[Pg 104]
know all about two, because “two” is “one and one”. We forget
that we have still to make a study of “and”. Secondary physics is the
study of “and”—that is to say, of organisation.
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