TEANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 



Section A.— MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

 Peesident of the Section — Professor W. M, Hicks, M.A., D.Sc, F.R.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



In making a choice of subject for my address the difficulty is not one of finding 

 material but of making selection. The field covered by this Section is a wide one. 

 Investigation is active in every part of it, and is being rewarded with a continuous 

 stream of new discoveries and with the growth of that co-ordination and correla- 

 tion of facts which is the surest sign of real advancement in science. The ultimate 

 aim of pure science is to be able to explain the most complicated phenomena of 

 nature as flowing by the fewest possible laws from the simplest fundamental data. 

 A statement of a law is either a confession of ignorance or a mnemonic conveni- 

 ence. It is the latter if it is deducible by logical reasoning from other laws. It 

 is the former when it is only discovered as a fact to be a law. While, on the one 

 hand, the end of scientific investigation is the discovery of laws, on the other, 

 science will have reached its highest goal when it shall have reduced ultimate 

 laws to one or two, the necessity of which lies outside the sphere of our cognition. 

 These ultimate laws — in the domain of physical science at least — will be the 

 dynamical laws of the relations of matter to number, space, and time. The ulti- 

 mate data will be number, matter, space, and time themselves. When these 

 relations shall be known, all physical phenomena will be a branch of pure mathema- 

 tics. We shall have done away with the necessity of the conception of potential 

 energy, even if it may still be convenient to retain it ; and — if it should be found 

 that all phenomena are manifestations of motion of one single continuous medium 

 — the idea of force will be banished also, and the study of dynamics replaced by 

 the study of the equation of continuity. 



Before, however, this can be attained, we must have the working drawings of 

 the details of the mechanism we have to deal with. These details lie outside the 

 scope of our bodily senses ; we cannot see, or feel, or hear them, and this, not 

 because they are unseeable, but because our senses are too coarse-grained to trans- 

 mit impressions of them to our mind. The ordinary methods of investigation here 

 fail us ; we must proceed by a special method, and make a bridge of communica- 

 tion between the mechanism and our senses by means of hypotheses. By our 

 imagination, experience, intuition we form theories ; we deduce the conse- 

 quences of these theories on phenomena which come within the range of 

 our senses, and reject or modify and try again. It is a slow and laborious pro- 

 cess. The wreckage of rejected theories is appalling; but a knowledge of 

 what actually goes on behind what we can see or feel is surely if slowly being 



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