MODERN PHYSICS JEANS 95 



to our desire, and live lives of emotion, intellect, and endeavor. It 

 looks as thoiio;h it might form a suitable dwelling place for man, and 

 not a mere shelter for brutes. 



The new physics obviously carries many philosophical implica- 

 tions, but these are not easy to describe in words. They cannot be 

 summed up in the crisp, snappy sentences beloved of scientific 

 journalism, such as that materialism is dead, or that matter is no 

 more. The situation is rather that both materialism and matter 

 need to be redefined in the light of our new knowledge. When this 

 has been done, the materialist must decide for himself whether the 

 only kind of materialism which science now permits can be suitably 

 labeled materialism, and whether what remains of matter should be 

 labeled as matter or as something else; it is mainly a question of 

 terminology. 



What remains is in any case very different from the full-blooded 

 matter and the forbidding materialism of the Victorian scientist. 

 His objective and material universe is proved to consist of little more 

 than constructs of our own minds. To this extent, then, modern 

 physics has moved in the direction of philosophic idealism. Mind 

 and matter, if not proved to be of similar nature, are at least found 

 to be ingredients of one single system. There is no longer room for 

 the kind of dualism which has haunted philosophy since the days of 

 Descartes. 



This brings us at once face to face with the fundamental difficulty 

 which confronts every form of philosophical idealism. If the nature 

 we study consists so largely of our own mental constructs, why do 

 our many minds all construct one and the same nature? Why, in 

 brief, do we all see the same sun, moon, and stars ? 



I would suggest that physics itself may provide a possible although 

 very conjectural clue. The old particle-picture which lay within 

 the limits of space and time, broke matter up into a crowd of distinct 

 particles, and radiation into a shower of distinct photons. The 

 newer and more accurate wave-picture, which transcends the frame- 

 work of space and time, recombines the photons into a single beam 

 of light, and the shower of parallel-moving electrons into a continuous 

 electric current. Atomicity and division into individual existences 

 are fundamental in the restricted space-time picture, but disappear 

 in the wider, and as far as we know, more truthful, picture which 

 transcends space and time. In this, atomicity is replaced by what 

 General Smuts would describe as " holism " — the photons are no 

 longer distinct individuals each going its own way, but members of 

 a single organization or whole — a beam of light. The same is true, 

 mutatis mutandis^ of the electrons of a parallel-moving shower. The 

 biologists are beginning to tell us, although not very unanimously, 



