iv. Proceedings. [October igth, 1920. 



The President referred sympathetically to the loss the 

 Society had sustained by the death of Dr. D. Lloyd Roberts, 

 F.R.C.P., F.R.S.E., on September 27th. Dr. Lloyd Roberts was 

 elected an Ordinary Member of the Society in 1880. The 

 Meeting Resolved that a message, expressing the Society's 

 sincere sympathy at their loss, be communicated to the relatives 

 of the late member. 



Mr. C. E. Stromeyer, O.B.E., Mem.Inst.C.E., read a paper 

 entitled "An Attempt to Explain the Real Nature of 

 Time, Space and Other Dimensions." 



The author pointed out that in the remote past doubts seem 

 to have been entertained about the reality of time and space, 

 and of matter it seems always to have been believed that it 

 could be made to appear and disappear. Kant and Schopen- 

 hauer, who lived in the early part of the last century, were 

 converts to the belief in the indestructibility of matter, but 

 asserted of time and space that they were functions of the 

 brain. They may, therefore, be looked upon as being the 

 innocent originators of the modern idea that the world is mind 

 and matter. In their days energy and its conservation or 

 indestructibility had not been discovered, but they suspected 

 that besides matter there was another reality which they 

 respectively called " das Ding an sich " — the real thing — and 

 " der Wille zum Leben " — the will to live. They did not 

 explain what they meant by reality, and the author pointed out 

 that they should have said that time and space were relatively 

 unreal to matter and to the " real thing," in the same way as 

 length, breadth and depth, are relatively unreal to space, if 

 this be taken as the standard of reality. Mr. Stromeyer then 

 said that dimensions, using the term in its widest sense so as 

 to include time, space, velocity, work, pressure, all the electric, 

 thermometric, and chemical dimensions, were unquestionably 

 factors of energy. Energy always appears as a product of these 

 factors, never as a factor. It stands in marked contrast to 

 every one of its factors in being indivisible quantitatively until 

 it has been divided qualitative^. It also differs from them in 

 that it cannot be located in the sense that length may be said 

 to be located in space, or a Volt in an Ampere. When electric 

 energy has been poured as it were into water, splitting it up 

 into hydrogen and oxygen, that energy is neither in the water, 

 nor in the oxygen, nor in the l^drogen. Thus energy in 

 contrast to its factors or dimensions seems to be the only "real 

 thing " ; all its factors, our world, are relatively unreal, but 

 amongst each other the}^ appear relatively real. Thus, con- 



