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1 'To see is my dower, to look my employ. Words of the Tower-Watcher in Faust, II, 5, through which Goethe echoes his own relation to the world. 2 The last chapter but two in the edition of 1924. 3 For the drastic and as such very enlightening way in which Eddington presents the problem, the reader is referred to Eddington's own description. 4 Konfession des Verfassers.
Then we have a new experimental discovery, To this analogy Eddington adds the following even more drastic one: 'Procrustes, you will remember, he says, 'stretched or chopped down his guests to fit the bed he constructed. But perhaps you have not heard the rest of the story.
Much as one admires the superiority of the minds of these present-day physicists, yet one cannot help but think that if our present rate of progress meets no serious obstacle, then in another five hundred years, the attitude of awe of Jeans and Eddington towards the vastness of our universe will be held in some similar position to which Jeans and Eddington now hold the misguided conception of Halley's comet in the year 1456.
Eddington starts by asking: 'When Lord Rutherford showed us the atomic nucleus, did he find it or did he make it? Whichever answer we give, Eddington goes on to say, makes no difference to our admiration for Rutherford himself. But it makes all the difference to our ideas on the structure of the physical universe.
Similarly with the cosmic consciousness expressed in the writings of Jeans, Eddington, and Whitehead. With characteristic disregard for the truth certain modern theologians have grasped this cringing attitude of the above-mentioned men and have stressed their viewpoints by a dishonest interpretation that these men actually give a scientific certitude to their own theologic creeds and dogmas.
None the less, Eddington claimed to have found the exact number of particles composing the universe a number with 80 figures by using a special calculus, but this number is valid only on the supposition that the particles cannot be counted because they are indistinguishable!9
'Was it in this way', Eddington asks, 'that Rutherford rendered concrete the nucleus which his scientific imagination had created? One thing is certain: 'In every physical laboratory we see ingeniously devised tools for executing the work of sculpture, according to the designs of the theoretical physicist. Sometimes the tool slips and carves off an odd-shaped form which he had not expected.
On the heights, near Eddington, were shewn not long since the intrenchments, which, it was asserted, the Danes had thrown up in the battle with Alfred. On the plain near Ashdon, in Essex, where it was formerly thought that the battle of Ashingdon had taken place, are to be seen some large Danish barrows which were long, but erroneously, said to contain the bones of the Danes who had fallen in it.
Moreover, as Eddington shows, the question whether the optical contrivance 'sorts out' from the chaotic light a particular periodicity, or whether it 'impresses' this on the light, becomes just 'a matter of expression'.11 So here, too, the modern investigator is driven to a resigned acknowledgment of the principle of Indeterminacy.
Those who saw in the constitution of our universe an impersonal Supreme Power, who had created the universe, but who had not given us any revelation, and thus has no need for worship by prayer and sacrifice. Those who very recently conceived of the deity as a "cosmic force," an "ultimate," or as a mathematical or physical law. Such are the hypotheses of Jeans and Eddington.
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