90 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 34 



If we ask the new physics to specify an electron for us, it does not 

 give us a mathematical specification of an objective electron, but 

 rather retorts with the question : " How much do you know about 

 the electron in question? " We state all we know, and then comes 

 the surprising reply, " That is the electron." The electron exists only 

 in our minds — what exists beyond, and where, to put the idea of 

 an electron into our minds we do not know. The new physics 

 can provide us with wave-pictures depicting electrons about which 

 w^e have varying amounts of knowledge, ranging from nothing at all 

 to the maximum we can know with the blunt probes at our command, 

 but the electron which exists apart from our study of it is quite 

 beyond its purview. 



Let me try and put this in another way. The old physics im- 

 agined it was studjang an objective nature which had its own exist- 

 ence independently of the mind which perceived it — which, indeed, 

 had existed from all eternity whether it was perceived or not. It 

 would have gone on imagining this to this day, had the electron 

 observed by the physicists behaved as on this supposition it ought 

 to have done. 



But it did not so behave, and this led to the birth of the new physics, 

 with its general thesis that the nature we study does not consist so 

 much of something we perceive as of our perceptions; it is not the 

 object of the subject-object relation, but the relation itself. There 

 is, in fact, no clear-cut division between the subject and object; 

 they form an indivisible whole which now becomes nature. This 

 thesis finds its final expression in the wave-parable, which tells us 

 that nature consists of waves and that these are of the general 

 quality of waves of knowledge, or of absence of knowledge, in our 

 own minds. 



Let me digress to remind you that if ever we are to know the true 

 nature of waves, these waves must consist of something we already 

 have in our own minds. Now knowledge and absence of knowledge 

 satisfy this criterion as few other things could; waves in an ether, 

 for instance, emphatically did not. It may seem strange, and almost 

 too good to be true, that nature should in the last resort consist of 

 something we can really understand; but there is always the simple 

 solution available that the external world is essentially of the same 

 nature as mental ideas. 



At best this may seem very academic and up in the air — at the 

 worst it may seem stupid and even obvious. I agree that it would 

 be so, were it not for the one outstanding fact that observation 

 supports the wave-picture of the new physics whole-heartedly and 

 without hesitation. Whenever the particle-picture and the wave- 

 jiicture have come into conflict, observation has discredited the 



