Physics and Philosophy
James JeansPhysics and Philosophy Sözleri ve Alıntıları
Physics and Philosophy sözleri ve alıntılarını, Physics and Philosophy kitap alıntılarını, Physics and Philosophy en etkileyici cümleleri ve paragragları 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
Mr Average Man thinks over his past, and proclaims that if he were young again, he would choose a different profession. He may insist that he would be free to make his own choice, but all he means is that if, at the age of eighteen, he had had the knowledge and experience of life which he now has at fifty, he would have acted differently. Of course he would, and so would we all, but this is no evidence of freedom. If Mr Man now had to make his choice again, with precisely the same knowledge and experience as he had at eighteen, he would review the situation in the same way as he did before, the same considerations would be thrown into the scales, and the balance would again swing in the same direction as before. He will not claim a freedom to act from pure caprice, but only a freedom to yield to the strongest motive—the freedom of Newton's apple to fall towards the earth rather than towards the moon, because the earth attracted it more forcibly than the moon. And this is not freedom of any kind; it is pure determinism. As Hume said, to have made a different decision, he would have had to be a different man.
The tools of science are observation and experiment; the tools of philosophy are discussion and contemplation. It is still for science to try to discover the pattern of events, and for philosophy to try to interpret it when found.
Similar remarks may be made about the waves of the undulatory theory of light, and about the electric and magnetic forces of which we have hitherto imagined them to be constituted. Energy may be transferred from place to place, but the waves and the electric and magnetic forces are not part of the mechanism of transfer; they are part simply of our efforts to understand this mechanism and picture it to ourselves. Before man appeared on the scene, there were neither waves nor electric nor magnetic forces; these were not made by God, but by Huyghens, Fresnel, Faraday and Maxwell.