116 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



continuous field, the more important part of 

 which is comprised within a small radius, but 

 which does not become zero at any finite dis- 

 tance. So the mass of the electron, which is 

 supposed to reside in the field, is not all con- 

 centrated near the center, but could only be 

 comprised mthin a sphere of infinite radius. 



By historical accident the charge of the elec- 

 tron is usually assumed to reside entirely at or 

 near the center, but we should probably have 

 a more consistent picture if this too were re- 

 garded as continuousl}'^ distributed, so that the 

 center of the electron would have no properties 

 left except the purely spatial one of being the 

 central point in this infinitely extended field. 

 Thus each electron exists everywhere. I am 

 afraid that if such a notion had been advanced, 

 not by scientists, but by philosophers, it would 

 have been characterized as pure mysticism, but 

 after all is not this picture of electrons as mere 

 points of discontinuity embedded in the contin- 

 uum of their fields remarkably like our view of 

 the integers as singular points in the continuum 

 of numbers .f^ 



The atom and the molecule and the electron 

 were therefore well on their way toward adop- 

 tion into the old order of things, when Planck 



