Essays in Science (3 page)

We have ascertained that inductive physics asks questions of deductive, and vice versa, to answer which demands the exertion of all our energies. May we soon succeed in making permanent progress by our united efforts!

On Scientific Truth

(1)
IT IS DIFFICULT
even to attach a precise meaning to the term “scientific truth.” So different is the meaning of the word “truth” according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition or a scientific theory. “Religious truth” conveys nothing clear to me at all.

(2) Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and survey things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order.

(3) This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as “pantheistic” (Spinoza).

(4) Denominational traditions I can only consider historically and psychologically; they have no other significance for me.

On the Method of Theoretical Physics

IF YOU WANT TO
find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don’t listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities.

These words sound like an invitation to you to walk out of this lecture. You will say to yourselves, the fellow’s a working physicist himself and ought therefore to leave all questions of the structure of theoretical science to the epistemologists.

Against such criticism I can defend myself from the personal point of view by assuring you that it is not at my own instance but at the kind invitation of others that I have mounted this rostrum, which serves to commemorate a man who fought hard all his life for the unity of knowledge. Objectively, however, my enterprise can be justified on the ground that it may, after all, be of interest to know how one who has spent a life-time in striving with all his might to clear up and rectify its fundamentals looks upon his own branch of science. The way in which he regards its past and present may depend too much on what he hopes for the future and aims at in the present; but that is the inevitable fate of anybody who has occupied himself intensively with a world of ideas. The same thing happens to him as to the historian, who in the same way, even though perhaps unconsciously, groups actual events around ideals which he has formed for himself on the subject of human society.

Let us now cast an eye over the development of the theoretical system, paying special attention to the relations between the content of the theory and the totality of empirical fact. We are concerned with the eternal antithesis between the two inseparable components of our knowledge, the empirical and the rational, in our department.

We reverence ancient Greece as the cradle of western science. Here for the first time the world witnessed the miracle of a logical system which proceeded from step to step with such precision that every single one of its propositions was absolutely indubitable—I refer to Euclid’s geometry. This admirable triumph of reasoning gave the human intellect the necessary confidence in itself for its subsequent achievements. If Euclid failed to kindle your youthful enthusiasm, then you were not born to be a scientific thinker.

But before mankind could be ripe for a science which takes in the whole of reality, a second fundamental truth was needed, which only became common property among philosophers with the advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics—indeed, of modern science altogether.

If, then, experience is the alpha and the omega of all our knowledge of reality, what is the function of pure reason in science?

A complete system of theoretical physics is made up of concepts, fundamental laws which are supposed to be valid for those concepts and conclusions to be reached by logical deduction. It is these conclusions which must correspond with our separate experiences; in any theoretical treatise their logical deduction occupies almost the whole book.

This is exactly what happens in Euclid’s geometry, except that there the fundamental laws are called axioms and there is no question of the conclusions having to correspond to any sort of experience. If, however, one regard Euclidean geometry as the science of the possible mutual relations of practically rigid bodies in space, that is to say, treats it as a physical science, without abstracting from its original empirical content, the logical homogeneity of geometry and theoretical physics becomes complete.

We have thus assigned to pure reason and experience their places in a theoretical system of physics. The structure of the system is the work of reason; the empirical contents and their mutual relations must find their representation in the conclusions of the theory. In the possibility of such a representation lie the sole value and justification of the whole system, and especially of the concepts and fundamental principles which underlie it. These latter, by the way, are free inventions of the human intellect, which cannot be justified either by the nature of that intellect or in any other fashion a
priori
.

These fundamental concepts and postulates, which cannot be further reduced logically, form the essential part of a theory, which reason cannot touch. It is the grand object of all theory to make these irreducible elements as simple and as few in number as possible, without having to renounce the adequate representation of any empirical content whatever.

The view I have just outlined of the purely fictitious character of the fundamentals of scientific theory was by no means the prevailing one in the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. But it is steadily gaining ground from the fact that the distance in thought between the fundamental concepts and laws on one side and, on the other, the conclusions which have to be brought into relation with our experience grows larger and larger, the simpler the logical structure becomes—that is to say, the smaller the number of logically independent conceptual elements which are found necessary to support the structure.

Newton, the first creator of a comprehensive, workable system of theoretical physics, still believed that the basic concepts and laws of his system could be derived from experience. This is no doubt the meaning of his saying,
hypotheses non fingo
.

Actually the concepts of time and space appeared at that time to present no difficulties. The concepts of mass, inertia and force, and the laws connecting them seemed to be drawn directly from experience. Once this basis is accepted, the expression for the force of gravitation appears derivable from experience, and it was reasonable to hope for the same in regard to other forces.

We can indeed see from Newton’s formulation of it that the concept of absolute space, which comprised that of absolute rest, made him feel uncomfortable; he realized that there seemed to be nothing in experience corresponding to this last concept. He was also not quite comfortable about the introduction of forces operating at a distance. But the tremendous practical success of his doctrines may well have prevented him and the physicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from recognizing the fictitious character of the foundations of his system.

The natural philosophers of those days were, on the contrary, most of them possessed with the idea that the fundamental concepts and postulates of physics were not in the logical sense free inventions of the human mind but could be deduced from experience by “abstraction”—that is to say by logical means. A clear recognition of the erroneousness of this notion really only came with the general theory of relativity, which showed that one could take account of a wider range of empirical facts, and that too in a more satisfactory and complete manner, on a foundation quite different from the Newtonian. But quite apart from the question of the superiority of one or the other, the fictitious character of fundamental principles is perfectly evident from the fact that we can point to two essentially different principles, both of which correspond with experience to a large extent; this proves at the same time that every attempt at a logical deduction of the basic concepts and postulates of mechanics from elementary experiences is doomed to failure.

If, then, it is true that this axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented, can we ever hope to find the right way? Nay more, has this right way any existence outside our illusions? Can we hope to be guided in the right way by experience when there exist theories (such as classical mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to experience, without getting to the root of the matter? I answer without hesitation that there is, in my opinion, a right way, and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.

In order to justify this confidence, I am compelled to make use of a mathematical conception. The physical world is represented as a four-dimensional continuum. If I assume a Riemannian metric in it and ask what are the simplest laws which such a metric system can satisfy, I arrive at the relativist theory of gravitation in empty space. If in that space I assume a vector-field or an anti-symmetrical tensorfield which can be inferred from it, and ask what are the simplest laws which such a field can satisfy, I arrive at Clerk Maxwell’s equations for empty space.

At this point we still lack a theory for those parts of space in which electrical density does not disappear. De Broglie conjectured the existence of a wave field, which served to explain certain quantum properties of matter. Dirac found in the spinors field-magnitudes of a new sort, whose simplest equations enable one to a large extent to deduce the properties of the electron. Subsequently I discovered, in conjunction with my colleague, that these spinors form a special case of a new sort of field, mathematically connected with the four-dimensional system, which we called “semivectors.” The simplest equations to which such semivectors can be reduced furnish a key to the understanding of the existence of two sorts of elementary particles, of different ponderable mass and equal but opposite electrical charge. These semivectors are, after ordinary vectors, the simplest mathematical fields that are possible in a metrical continuum of four dimensions, and it looks as if they described, in an easy manner, certain essential properties of electrical particles.

The important point for us to observe is that all these constructions and the laws connecting them can be arrived at by the principle of looking for the mathematically simplest concepts and the link between them. In the limited nature of the mathematically existent simple fields and the simple equations possible between them, lies the theorist’s hope of grasping the real in all its depth.

Meanwhile the great stumbling-block for a field-theory of this kind lies in the conception of the atomic structure of matter and energy. For the theory is fundamentally non-atomic in so far as it operates exclusively with continuous functions of space, in contrast to classical mechanics, whose most important element, the material point, in itself does justice to the atomic structure of matter.

The modern quantum theory in the form associated with the names of de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Dirac, which operates with continuous functions, has overcome these difficulties by a bold piece of interpretation which was first given a clear form by Max Born. According to this, the spatial functions which appear in the equations make no claim to be a mathematical model of the atomic structure. Those functions are only supposed to determine the mathematical probabilities of the occurrence of such structures if measurements were taken at a particular spot or in a certain state of motion. This notion is logically unobjectionable and has important successes to its credit. Unfortunately, however, it compels one to use a continuum the number of whose dimensions is not that ascribed to space by physics hitherto (four) but rises indefinitely with the number of the particles constituting the system under consideration. I cannot but confess that I attach only a transitory importance to this interpretation. I still believe in the possibility of a model of reality—that is to say, of a theory which represents things themselves and not merely the probability of their occurrence.

On the other hand it seems to me certain that we must give up the idea of a complete localization of the particles in a theoretical model. This seems to me to be the permanent upshot of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. But an atomic theory in the true sense of the word (not merely on the basis of an interpretation) without localization of particles in a mathematical model, is perfectly thinkable. For instance, to account for the atomic character of electricity, the field equations need only lead to the following conclusions: A portion of space (three-dimensional) at whose boundaries electrical density disappears everywhere, always contains a total electrical charge whose size is represented by a whole number. In a continuum-theory atomic characteristics would be satisfactorily expressed by integral laws without localization of the formation entity which constitutes the atomic structure.