XIV 



THE UNIVERSE A GREAT THOUGHT^ 

 By Sir James Jeans 



OUR remote ancestors tried to interpret na- 

 ture in terms of anthropomorpliic concepts 

 of their own creation, and failed. The 

 efforts of our nearer ancestors to interpret nature on 

 engineering lines proved equally inadequate. Nature 

 has refused to accommodate herself to either of these 

 man-made moulds. On the other hand, our efforts 

 to interpret nature in the concepts of pure mathe- 

 matics have, so far, proved brilliantly successful. It 

 would now seem to be beyond dispute that in some 

 way nature is more closely allied to the concepts of 

 pure mathematics than to those of biology or of en- 

 gineering, and even if the mathematical interpretation 

 is only a third man-made mould, it at least fits nature 

 incomparably better than the two previously tried. 



Fifty years ago, when there was much discussion 

 on the problem of communicating with Mars, it was 

 desired to notify the supposed Martians that thinking 

 beings existed on the planet earth, but the difficulty 

 was to find a language understood by both parties. 

 The suggestion was made that the most suitable lan- 

 guage was that of pure mathematics; so it was pro- 

 posed to light chains of bonfires in the Sahara, to 



1 From The Mysterious Universe, by James Jeans. By permission 

 of the Macmillan Company, publishers. 



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