Article May 7, 1927 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Kerr Boyce Tupper, Charles W. Gordon

[From the Times, London, England]

Lord Balfour, as Chancellor of Edinburgh University, presided at the first of the course of Gifford lectures by Prof. A. S. Eddington, Plumian Professor of Astronomy in Cambridge University, on "The Nature of the Physical World." Professor Eddington said he was convinced that a just appreciation of the physical world as it was conceived to-day carried with it a feeling of open-mindedness towards the deeper significances behind it which might have seemed illogical a generation ago. Between 1905 and 1911 our views of space, time, and matter in physics underwent revolutionary change. Comparing the universe as now understood with the universe as conceived before 1905, the most arresting change was, he thought, not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein, but the new theory of matter originated by Rutherford, by which all that we regarded as most solid was dissolved into tiny specks floating in a void. That had given an abrupt jar to those who had been accustomed to think that things were more or less what they seem.

The atom was as porous as the solar system. If we eliminated all waste space and collected the particles which remained into one ball, a man would be reduced to a tiny speck just visible with a magnifying glass. That was not foreshadowed by the atomic theory, nor by the electrical theory of matter as originally stated. It was introduced by Rutherford's nucleus theory. A reversion to the old solid type of atom was now unthinkable. Evidently the conception of substance, which played so great a part in our familiar idea of the world and in our philosophy of matter, had become greatly reduced in its domain, and, in fact, physics had found so little scope left for substance that it had abolished the conception altogether.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Signs of the Times

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access