V Religion and Science

Religion and Science of the world. The fundamental concepts isolated by Newton had proved themselves so adequate in the applications that had been made of them that they were regarded as the key to everything. The first indication that the Newtonian concepts were not all-sufficient came when men tried to fashion a mechanical theory of light. This endeavour led to the creation of the ether, the most unsatisfactory and wasteful product of human ingenuity that science has to show. For generations this monster was elaborated. Miracles of mathematical ingenuity were performed in the attempt to account for the properties of light in terms of the Newtonian concepts. The difficulties became ever more heartbreaking until, after the publication of Maxwell’s demonstration that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, they seemed to become insuperable. For it had dawned on men of science that there was, after all, nothing sacrosanct about the Newtonian entities. After a certain amount of hesitation, and a few last desperate efforts to make electricity mechanical, electricity was added to the list of irreducible elements. This may seem to have been a simple step to take, but it was, in reality, of profound significance. For the Newtonian concepts were all of a kind that one seemed to understand intimately. Thus the mass of a body was the quantity of matter in it. Force was a notion derived from our experience of muscular effort. Nevertheless, we supposed that we knew the nature of what we were talking about. But in the case of electricity its nature is precisely what we did not know. Attempts to represent it in familiar terms—as a condition of strain in the ether, or what not—had been given up. All that we knew about electricity was the way it affected our measuring instruments. The precise description of this behaviour gave us the mathematical specification of electricity and this, in truth, was all we knew about it. It is only now, in retrospect, that we can see how