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In fact, physical science is essentially, as Professor Eddington put it, a 'pointer-reading science'. Looking at this fact in our way we can say that all pointer instruments which man has constructed ever since the beginning of science, have as their model man himself, restricted to colourless, non-stereoscopic observation.
Mrs Eddington asked. "She was very fond of Harry. I think she does remember." Persistently, in her mind recurred an episode of the last day of her husband's life. He had carried his little daughter, laughing and prattling to him, down from the nursery, and had put her in her mother's arms. The child, when he turned to go, had clung to him. "Don't leave Milly, daddy. Take Milly too," she cried.
No familiar conceptions can be woven round the electron; it belongs to the waiting list. The only thing we can say about the electron, if we are not to deceive ourselves, Eddington concludes, is: 'Something unknown is doing we don't know what.'4 Let us add a further detail from this picture of the atom, as given in Eddington's Philosophy of Physical Science.
Once, the child, who lay for the better part of the half-mile to her home in a kind of stupor, opened her eyes again beneath her mother's frightened gaze and was heard to mutter something about some flowers. "She is asking for the primroses she had gathered!" Mrs Eddington whispered, in a tone of intensest relief. "Did you bring them, nurse?"
It was Kiss in the Ring, the old world favourite they chose, and they formed themselves into a circle, putting the littlest boy boys were scarce among them, and very small in the centre. It was in the midst of much laughing and chatter and noise that the two little girls on either side of Milly Eddington felt her hands turn ice-cold in theirs, and slowly slip from their grasp.
Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon "Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguished English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him deliver before the Royal Institution. I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue "The world is not as we think it is therefore everything we think impossible is possible in it."
What has thus come to him as a question finds a definite answer in the picture of electricity we have been able to develop. It is again Eddington who has drawn attention particularly to this question: see the chapter, 'Discovery or Manufacture? in his Philosophy of Physical Science.
The pertinence of Eddington's statement is shown immediately one considers what a person would know of the world if his only source of experience were the sense of sight, still further limited in the way Eddington describes. Out of everything that the world brings to the totality of our senses, there remains nothing more than mere movements, with certain changes of rate, direction, and so on.
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