Abstract
THE Rede lecture delivered by Sir James Jeans at Cambridge on Tuesday last, on “The Mysterious Universe”, was marked by the clarity and suggestiveness to which we have grown accustomed in his welcome utterances. Starting with the conception of mankind as the product of an accident in a universe the main course of which was quite other than towards the production of human life, he reviewed the successive ideas which these chance creatures have held of the universe outside themselves. He enumerated three stages, represented by an anthropomorphic, a mechanical, and a mathematical view of the nature of the reality behind phenomena. The last of these has lately been introduced by the advance of physics, and Sir James regards it as a far closer approximation than its predecessors to the ‘ultimate reality’, with which, however, we are not yet in contact. He made no attempt to evade issues which are the subjects of acute differences of opinion. “We discover”, he said, “that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has some-thing in common with our own individual minds—not, so far as we have discovered, emotion, morality, or sesthetic appreciation, but the tendency to think in the way which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical.” “This concept of the universe as a world of pure thought”, he went on, “implies, of course, that the final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it; so long as there is no imperfection in this, our knowledge of the phenomenon is complete.”
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News and Views. Nature 126, 731–736 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126731b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126731b0