214 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1952 



deduce the richest law content. His aim is to take what was formerly 

 half a dozen apparently unrelated empirical statements and represent 

 them all as a consequence of perhaps two empirical statements. 



It is perhaps well, in this connection, to recognize two degrees of 

 empiricism. There is the empiricism characteristic of the situation 

 up to and including atomic processes, and there is the empiricism of 

 the correlation of the atomic processes themselves, which second form 

 of empiricism most physicists would not be willing to count as empiri- 

 cism at all, but as a getting down to the last elements of understanding. 



Taking the first realm of empiricism, however, the complete story 

 of the content of a law is, as I have remarked, contained in mathemati- 

 cal form, which it is not easy to simplify to a form applicable to all 

 cases. However, the practical need of getting matters down to a 

 degree which enables a large number of people to use the principle 

 results in seeking some kind of simplification which is sufficient to 

 cover a fairly wide realm of practical experience. Here the laboratory 

 man or the practical engineer takes hold, and after a time his intuitions 

 become sharpened so that he adopts a kind of thinking which simulates 

 a more exact frame of thinking but is, as it were, a self-contained set 

 of laws of its own. One has an example of this in matters pertaining to 

 electrical circuits where, provided that the wavelength of any oscilla- 

 tions concerned in the circuits is long compared with the dimensions 

 of the circuit, we can think in terms of a certain type of simplification. 

 There grow the concepts of capacity, inductance, impedance, to which 

 the practical engineer, stimulated perhaps by rivalry with the medical 

 profession, feels the urge to add another number of Godforsaken words, 

 such as admittance, transconductance, etc. In this connection, I have 

 thought of a new term, "abuttance." Although this may seem like the 

 doctor's discovery of a "cure" for which there is no disease, I present 

 it to the radio engineers in the hope that they will find a meaning for it. 



In terms of the simplified laws, the practical man proceeds to manip- 

 ulate these various quantities and to become very clever at predicting 

 what will happen in this case and in that. Occasionally, however, 

 situations arise in which the simplified laws no longer are adequate. 

 The practical man does something about this by making some kind of 

 correction as far as possible in the language of his old formulation. 

 As knowledge advances, however, more and more of such cases arise 

 and the patches on the patched-up framework become more obvious 

 than the framework itself. 



And now, superposed upon all that I have spoken of so far, which 

 has concerned itself for the most part with what we may call the 

 classical physics of matter in bulk, we have, in the last few years, 

 encountered a realm in which the fundamentals of physics are no 

 longer diluted so as to show their effects only as averaged quantities — 



