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Reference: The Nature of the Physical World

This paper presents Chapter XII (section 6) from the book THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD by A. S. EDDINGTON. The contents of this book are based on the lectures that Eddington delivered at the University of Edinburgh in January to March 1927.

The paragraphs of original material are accompanied by brief comments in color, based on the present understanding.  Feedback on these comments is appreciated.

The heading below links to the original materials.

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“What is Mr. X?”

In the light of these considerations let us now see what we can make of the question, What is Mr. X? I must undertake the inquiry single-handed; I cannot avail myself of your collaboration without first answering or assuming an answer to the equally difficult question, What are you? Accordingly the whole inquiry must take place in the domain of my own consciousness. I find there certain data purporting to relate to this unknown X; and I can (by using powers which respond to my volition) extend the data, i.e. I can perform experiments on X. For example I can make a chemical analysis. The immediate result of these experiments is the occurrence of certain visual or olfactory sensations in my consciousness. Clearly it is a long stride from these sensations to any rational inference about Mr. X. For example, I learn that Mr. X has carbon in his brain, but the immediate knowledge was of something (not carbon) in my own mind. The reason why I, on becoming aware of something in my mind, can proceed to assert knowledge of something elsewhere, is because there is a systematic scheme of inference which can be traced from the one item of knowledge to the other. Leaving aside instinctive or commonsense inference—the crude precursor of scientific inference—the inference follows a linkage, which can only be described symbolically, extending from the point in the symbolic world where I locate myself to the point where I locate Mr. X.

Just like there is a continuum of substance there is also a continuum of knowledge.

One feature of this inference is that I never discover what carbon really is. It remains a symbol. There is carbon in my own brain-mind; but the self-knowledge of my mind does not reveal this to me. I can only know that the symbol for carbon must be placed there by following a route of inference through the external world similar to that used in discovering it in Mr. X; and however closely associated this carbon may be with my thinking powers, it is as a symbol divorced from any thinking capacity that I learn of its existence. Carbon is a symbol definable only in terms of the other symbols belonging to the cyclic scheme of physics. What I have discovered is that, in order that the symbols describing the physical world may conform to the mathematical formulae which they are designed to obey, it is necessary to place the symbol for carbon (amongst others) in the locality of Mr. X. By similar means I can make an exhaustive physical examination of Mr. X and discover the whole array of symbols to be assigned to his locality.

The knowledge symbolically represents what is there (the substance). This knowledge can be carried around and exchanged.

Will this array of symbols give me the whole of Mr. X? There is not the least reason to think so. The voice that comes to us over the telephone wire is not the whole of what is at the end of the wire. The scientific linkage is like the telephone wire; it can transmit just what it is constructed to transmit and no more.

It will be seen that the line of communication has two aspects. It is a chain of inference stretching from the symbols immediately associated with the sensations in my mind to the symbols descriptive of Mr. X; and it is a chain of stimuli in the external world starting from Mr. X and reaching my brain. Ideally the steps of the inference exactly reverse the steps of the physical transmission which brought the information. (Naturally we make many short cuts in inference by applying accumulated experience and knowledge.) Commonly we think of it only in its second aspect as a physical transmission; but because it is also a line of inference it is subject to limitations which we should not necessarily expect a physical transmission to conform to.

It is difficult to symbolize the substance in all its aspects. Furthermore, the interpretation of that symbolization depends on the filters the other mind may be using.

The system of inference employed in physical investigation reduces to mathematical equations governing the symbols, and so long as we adhere to this procedure we are limited to symbols of arithmetical character appropriate to such mathematical equations.* Thus there is no opportunity for acquiring by any physical investigation a knowledge of Mr. X other than that which can be expressed in numerical form so as to be passed through a succession of mathematical equations.

* The solitary exception is, I believe, Dirac’s generalisation which introduces g-numbers (p. 210). There is as yet no approach to a general system of inference on a non-numerical basis.

Mathematics is used to bypass the filters that may interfere with interpretation of symbols, but mathematics itself may act as a filter.

Mathematics is the model of exact inference; and in physics we have endeavoured to replace all cruder inference by this rigorous type. Where we cannot complete the mathematical chain we confess that we are wandering in the dark and are unable to assert real knowledge. Small wonder then that physical science should have evolved a conception of the world consisting of entities rigorously bound to one another by mathematical equations forming a deterministic scheme. This knowledge has all been inferred and it was bound therefore to conform to the system of inference that was used. The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character. Anyone who studied the method of inference employed by the physicist could predict the general characteristics of the world that he must necessarily find. What he could not have predicted is the great success of the method— the submission of so large a proportion of natural phenomena to be brought into the prejudged scheme. But making all allowance for future progress in developing the scheme, it seems to be flying in the face of obvious facts to pretend that it is all comprehensive, Mr. X is one of the recalcitrants. When sound-waves impinge on his ear he moves, not in accordance with a mathematical equation involving the physical measure numbers of the waves, but in accordance with the meaning that those sound-waves are used to convey. To know what there is about Mr. X which makes him behave in this strange way, we must look not to a physical system of inference, but to that insight beneath the symbols which in our own minds we possess. It is by this insight that we can finally reach an answer to our question, What is Mr. X?

Limitation of mathematics lies in the limitation of symbols being used to describe the substance. Therefore, mathematics cannot be wholly relied upon. Logic of consistency, harmony and continuity is necessary to prepare the symbols for mathematical application.

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Reference: The Nature of the Physical World

This paper presents Chapter XII (section 4) from the book THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD by A. S. EDDINGTON. The contents of this book are based on the lectures that Eddington delivered at the University of Edinburgh in January to March 1927.

The paragraphs of original material are accompanied by brief comments in color, based on the present understanding.  Feedback on these comments is appreciated.

The heading below links to the original materials.

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Cyclic Method of Physics

I must explain this reference to an endless cycle of physical terms. I will refer again to Einstein’s law of gravitation. I have already expounded it to you more than once and I hope you gained some idea of it from the explanation. This time I am going to expound it in a way so complete that there is not much likelihood that anyone will understand it. Never mind. We are not now seeking further light on the cause of gravitation; we are interested in seeing what would really be involved in a complete explanation of anything physical.

Einstein’s law in its analytical form is a statement that in empty space certain quantities called potentials obey certain lengthy differential equations. We make a memorandum of the word ”potential” to remind us that we must later on explain what it means. We might conceive a world in which the potentials at every moment and every place had quite arbitrary values. The actual world is not so unlimited, the potentials being restricted to those values which conform to Einstein’s equations. The next question is, What are potentials? They can be defined as quantities derived by quite simple mathematical calculations from certain fundamental quantities called intervals. (Mem. Explain “interval”.) If we know the values of the various intervals throughout the world definite rules can be given for deriving the values of the potentials. What are intervals? They are relations between pairs of events which can be measured with a scale or a clock or with both. (Mem. Explain “scale” and “clock”.) Instructions can be given for the correct use of the scale and clock so that the interval is given by a prescribed combination of their readings. What are scales and clocks? A scale is a graduated strip of matter which. . . . (Mem. Explain “matter”.)  On second thoughts I will leave the rest of the description as “an exercise to the reader” since \t would take rather a long time to enumerate all the properties and niceties of behaviour of the material standard which a physicist would accept as a perfect scale or a perfect clock. We pass on to the next question, What is matter? We have dismissed the metaphysical conception of substance. We might perhaps here describe the atomic and electrical structure of matter, but that leads to the microscopic aspects of the world, whereas we are here taking the macroscopic outlook. Confining ourselves to mechanics, which is the subject in which the law of gravitation arises, matter may be defined as the embodiment of three related physical quantities, mass (or energy), momentum and stress. What are “mass”, “momentum” and “stress”? It is one of the most far-reaching achievements of Einstein’s theory that it has given an exact answer to this question. They are rather formidable looking expressions containing the potentials and their first and second derivatives with respect to the coordinates. What are the potentials? Why, that is just what I have been explaining to you!

Einstein’s potentials are derived from relationships between space and time that is referenced from material-space and material-time. These potentials actually exist in field substance whose key property is quantization. Material-substance is limiting form of field-substance that is quantized. So potentials are same as quantization but from referenced from opposite ends.

The definitions of physics proceed according to the method immortalised in “The House that Jack built” : This is the potential, that was derived from the interval, that was measured by the scale, that was made from the matter, that embodied the stress, that. . . . But instead of finishing with Jack, whom of course every youngster must know without need for an introduction, we make a circuit back to the beginning of the rhyme: . . . that worried the cat, that killed the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house, that was built by the priest all shaven and shorn, that married the man. . . . Now we can go round and round forever.

But perhaps you have already cut short my explanation of gravitation. When we reached matter you had had enough of it. “Please do not explain any more, I happen to know what matter is.” Very well; matter is something that Mr. X knows. Let us see how it goes : This is the potential that was derived from the interval that was measured by the scale that was made from the matter that Mr. X knows. Next question, What is Mr. X?

Well, it happens that physics is not at all anxious to pursue the question, What is Mr. X? It is not disposed to admit that its elaborate structure of a physical universe is ”The House that Mr. X built”. It looks upon Mr. X—and more particularly the part of Mr. X that knows—as a rather troublesome tenant who at a late stage of the world’s history has come to inhabit a structure which inorganic Nature has by slow evolutionary progress contrived to build. And so it turns aside from the avenue leading to Mr. X—and beyond—and closes up its cycle leaving him out in the cold.

From its own point of view physics is entirely justified. That matter in some indirect way comes within the purview of Mr. X’s mind is not a fact of any utility for a theoretical scheme of physics. We cannot embody it in a differential equation. It is ignored; and the physical properties of matter and other entities are expressed by their linkages in the cycle. And you can see how by the ingenious device of the cycle physics secures for itself a self-contained domain for study with no loose ends projecting into the unknown. All other physical definitions have the same kind of interlocking. Electric force is defined as something which causes motion of an electric charge ; an electric charge is something which exerts electric force. So that an electric charge is something that exerts something that produces motion of something that exerts something that produces … ad infinitum.

But I am not now writing of pure physics, and from a broader standpoint I do not see how we can leave out Mr. X. The fact that matter is “knowable to Mr. X” must be set down as one of the fundamental attributes of matter. I do not say that it is very distinctive, since other entities of physics are also knowable to him; but the potentiality of the whole physical world for awaking impressions in consciousness is an attribute not to be ignored when we compare the actual world with worlds which, we fancy, might have been created. There seems to be a prevalent disposition to minimise the importance of this. The attitude is that “knowableness to Mr. X” is a negligible attribute, because Mr. X is so clever that he could know pretty much anything that there was to know. I have already urged the contrary view—that there is a definitely selective action of the mind; and since physics treats of what is knowable to mind * its subject-matter has undergone, and indeed retains evidences of, this process of selection.

* This is obviously true of all experimental physics, and must be true of theoretical physics if it is (as it professes to be) based on experiment.

In general, the explanations pf physics are circular, and we need to break through this circle. We do this by investigating every inconsistency, disharmony and discontinuity.

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Reference: The Nature of the Physical World

This paper presents Chapter XII (section 2) from the book THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD by A. S. EDDINGTON. The contents of this book are based on the lectures that Eddington delivered at the University of Edinburgh in January to March 1927.

The paragraphs of original material are accompanied by brief comments in color, based on the present understanding.  Feedback on these comments is appreciated.

The heading below links to the original materials.

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Nature of Exact Science

One of the characteristics of physics is that it is an exact science, and I have generally identified the domain of physics with the domain of exact science. Strictly speaking the two are not synonymous. We can imagine a science arising which has no contact with the usual phenomena and laws of physics, which yet admits of the same kind of exact treatment. It is conceivable that the Mendelian theory of heredity may grow into an independent science of this kind, for it would seem to occupy in biology the same position that the atomic theory occupied in chemistry a hundred years ago. The trend of the theory is to analyse complex individuals into “unit characters”. These are like indivisible atoms with affinities and repulsions; their matings are governed by the same laws of chance which play so large a part in chemical thermodynamics; and numerical statistics of the characters of a population are predictable in the same way as the results of a chemical reaction.

Now the effect of such a theory on our philosophical views of the significance of life does not depend on whether the Mendelian atom admits of a strictly physical explanation or not. The unit character may be contained in some configuration of the physical molecules of the carrier, and perhaps even literally correspond to a chemical compound; or it may be something superadded which is peculiar to living matter and is not yet comprised in the schedule of physical entities. That is a side-issue. We are drawing near to the great question whether there is any domain of activity—of life, of consciousness, of deity—which will not be engulfed by the advance of exact science; and our apprehension is not directed against the particular entities of physics but against all entities of the category to which exact science can apply. For exact science invokes, or has seemed to invoke, a type of law inevitable and soulless against which the human spirit rebels. If science finally declares that man is no more than a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the blow will not be softened by the explanation that the atoms in question are the Mendelian unit characters and not the material atoms of the chemist.

It seems that exact science requires less number of variables in a relationship compared to the variables present in reality.

Let us then examine the kind of knowledge which is handled by exact science. If we search the examination papers in physics and natural philosophy for the more intelligible questions we may come across one beginning something like this: “An elephant slides down a grassy hillside. . . .” The experienced candidate knows that he need not pay much attention to this; it is only put in to give an impression of realism. He reads on: “The mass of the elephant is two tons.” Now we are getting down to business; the elephant fades out of the problem and a mass of two tons takes its place. What exactly is this two tons, the real subject-matter of the problem? It refers to some property or condition which we vaguely describe as “ponderosity” occurring in a particular region of the external world. But we shall not get much further that way; the nature of the external world is inscrutable, and we shall only plunge into a quagmire of indescribables. Never mind what two tons refers to; what is it? How has it actually entered in so definite a way into our experience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing-machine. Let us pass on. “The slope of the hill is 6o°.” Now the hillside fades out of the problem and an angle of 6o° takes its place. What is 6o°? There is no need to struggle with mystical conceptions of direction; 6o° is the reading of a plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor. Similarly for the other data of the problem. The softly yielding turf on which the elephant slid is replaced by a coefficient of friction, which though perhaps not directly a pointer reading is of kindred nature. No doubt there are more roundabout ways used in practice for determining the weights of elephants and the slopes of hills, but these are justified because it is known that they give the same results as direct pointer readings.

And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings. If then only pointer readings or their equivalents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? But that is just what we do grind out. The question presumably was to find the time of descent of the elephant, and the answer is a pointer reading on the seconds’ dial of our watch.

The triumph of exact science in the foregoing problem consisted in establishing a numerical connection between the pointer reading of the weighing-machine in one experiment on the elephant and the pointer reading of the watch in another experiment. And when we examine critically other problems of physics we find that this is typical. The whole subject-matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications. We cannot enter here into the definition of what are to be classed as similar indications. The observation of approximate coincidence of the pointer with a scale-division can generally be extended to include the observation of any kind of coincidence—or, as it is usually expressed in the language of the general relativity theory, an intersection of world-lines. The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement.

Perhaps you will object that although only the pointer readings enter into the actual calculation it would make nonsense of the problem to leave out all reference to anything else. The problem necessarily involves some kind of connecting background. It was not the pointer reading of the weighing-machine that slid down the hill! And yet from the point of view of exact science the thing that really did descend the hill can only be described as a bundle of pointer readings. (It should be remembered that the hill also has been replaced by pointer readings, and the sliding down is no longer an active adventure but a functional relation of space and time measures.) The word elephant calls up a certain association of mental impressions, but it is clear that mental impressions as such cannot be the subject handled in the physical problem. We have, for example, an impression of bulkiness. To this there is presumably some direct counterpart in the external world, but that counterpart must be of a nature beyond our apprehension, and science can make nothing of it. Bulkiness enters into exact science by yet another substitution; we replace it by a series of readings of a pair of calipers. Similarly the greyish black appearance in our mental impression is replaced in exact science by the readings of a photometer for various wave-lengths of light. And so on until all the characteristics of the elephant are exhausted and it has become reduced to a schedule of measures. There is always the triple correspondence—

(a) a mental image, which is in our minds and not in the external world;

(b) some kind of counterpart in the external world, which is of inscrutable nature;

(c) a set of pointer readings, which exact science can study and connect with other pointer readings.

And so we have our schedule of pointer readings ready to make the descent. And if you still think that this substitution has taken away all reality from the problem, I am not sorry that you should have a foretaste of the difficulty in store for those who hold that exact science is all-sufficient for the description of the universe and that there is nothing in our experience which cannot be brought within its scope.

I should like to make it clear that the limitation of the scope of physics to pointer readings and the like is not a philosophical craze of my own but is essentially the current scientific doctrine. It is the outcome of a tendency discernible far back in the last century but only formulated comprehensively with the advent of the relativity theory. The vocabulary of the physicist comprises a number of words such as length, angle, velocity, force, potential, current, etc., which we call “physical quantities”. It is now recognised as essential that these should be defined according to the way in which we actually recognise them when confronted with them, and not according to the metaphysical significance which we may have anticipated for them. In the old textbooks mass was defined as “quantity of matter”; but when it came to an actual determination of mass, an experimental method was prescribed which had no bearing on this definition. The belief that the quantity determined by the accepted method of measurement represented the quantity of matter in the object was merely a pious opinion. At the present day there is no sense in which the quantity of matter in a pound of lead can be said to be equal to the quantity in a pound of sugar. Einstein’s theory makes a clean sweep of these pious opinions, and insists that each physical quantity should be defined as the result of certain operations of measurement and calculation. You may if you like think of mass as something of inscrutable nature to which the pointer reading has a kind of relevance. But in physics at least there is nothing much to be gained by this mystification, because it is the pointer reading itself which is handled in exact science; and if you embed it in something of a more transcendental nature, you have only the extra trouble of digging it out again.

It is quite true that when we say the mass is two tons we have not specially in mind the reading of the particular machine on which the weighing was carried out. That is because we do not start to tackle the problem of the elephant’s escapade ab initio as though it were the first inquiry we had ever made into the phenomena of the external world. The examiner would have had to be much more explicit if he had not presumed a general acquaintance with the elementary laws of physics, i.e. laws which permit us to deduce the readings of other indicators from the reading of one. It is this connectivity of pointer readings, expressed by physical laws, which supplies the continuous background that any realistic problem demands.

It is obviously one of the conditions of the problem that the same elephant should be concerned in the weighing experiment and in the tobogganing experiment. How can this identity be expressed in a description of the world by pointer readings only? Two readings may be equal, but it is meaningless to inquire if they are identical; if then the elephant is a bundle of pointer readings, how can we ask whether it is continually the identical bundle ? The examiner does not confide to us how the identity of the elephant was ensured; we have only his personal guarantee that there was no substitution. Perhaps the creature answered to its name on both occasions; if so the test of identity is clearly outside the present domain of physics. The only test lying purely in the domain of physics is that of continuity; the elephant must be watched all the way from the scales to the hillside. The elephant, we must remember, is a tube in the four-dimensional world demarcated from the rest of space-time by a more or less abrupt boundary. Using the retina of his eye as an indicator and making frequent readings of the outline of the image, the observer satisfied himself that he was following one continuous and isolated world-tube from beginning to end. If his vigilance was intermittent he took a risk of substitution, and consequently a risk of the observed time of descent failing to agree with the time calculated.* Note that we do not infer that there is any identity of the contents of the isolated world-tube throughout its length; such identity would be meaning- less in physics. We use instead the law of conservation of mass (either as an empirical law or deduced from the law of gravitation) which assures us that, provided the tube is isolated, the pointer reading on the schedule derived from the weighing-machine type of experiment has a constant value along the tube. For the purpose of exact science “the same object” becomes replaced by “isolated world-tube”. The constancy of certain properties of the elephant is not assumed as self-evident from its sameness, but is an inference from experimental and theoretical laws relating to world-tubes which are accepted as well established.

* A good illustration of such substitution is afforded by astronomical observations of a certain double star with two components of equal brightness. After an intermission of observation the two components were inadvertently interchanged, and the substitution was not detected until the increasing discrepancy between the actual and predicted orbits was inquired into.

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