The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science Science and Method Part 40

See what we owe to the continuum and consequently to physical nature.

Fourier's series is a precious instrument of which a.n.a.lysis makes continual use, it is by this means that it has been able to represent discontinuous functions; Fourier invented it to solve a problem of physics relative to the propagation of heat. If this problem had not come up naturally, we should never have dared to give discontinuity its rights; we should still long have regarded continuous functions as the only true functions.

The notion of function has been thereby considerably extended and has received from some logician-a.n.a.lysts an unforeseen development. These a.n.a.lysts have thus adventured into regions where reigns the purest abstraction and have gone as far away as possible from the real world.

Yet it is a problem of physics which has furnished them the occasion.

After Fourier's series, other a.n.a.logous series have entered the domain of a.n.a.lysis; they have entered by the same door; they have been imagined in view of applications.

The theory of partial differential equations of the second order has an a.n.a.logous history. It has been developed chiefly by and for physics. But it may take many forms, because such an equation does not suffice to determine the unknown function, it is necessary to adjoin to it complementary conditions which are called conditions at the limits; whence many different problems.

If the a.n.a.lysts had abandoned themselves to their natural tendencies, they would never have known but one, that which Madame Kovalevski has treated in her celebrated memoir. But there are a mult.i.tude of others which they would have ignored. Each of the theories of physics, that of electricity, that of heat, presents us these equations under a new aspect. It may, therefore, be said that without these theories we should not know partial differential equations.

It is needless to multiply examples. I have given enough to be able to conclude: when physicists ask of us the solution of a problem, it is not a duty-service they impose upon us, it is on the contrary we who owe them thanks.

IV

But this is not all; physics not only gives us the occasion to solve problems; it aids us to find the means thereto, and that in two ways. It makes us foresee the solution; it suggests arguments to us.

I have spoken above of Laplace's equation which is met in a mult.i.tude of diverse physical theories. It is found again in geometry, in the theory of conformal representation and in pure a.n.a.lysis, in that of imaginaries.

In this way, in the study of functions of complex variables, the a.n.a.lyst, alongside of the geometric image, which is his usual instrument, finds many physical images which he may make use of with the same success. Thanks to these images, he can see at a glance what pure deduction would show him only successively. He ma.s.ses thus the separate elements of the solution, and by a sort of intuition divines before being able to demonstrate.

To divine before demonstrating! Need I recall that thus have been made all the important discoveries? How many are the truths that physical a.n.a.logies permit us to present and that we are not in condition to establish by rigorous reasoning!

For example, mathematical physics introduces a great number of developments in series. No one doubts that these developments converge; but the mathematical cert.i.tude is lacking. These are so many conquests a.s.sured for the investigators who shall come after us.

On the other hand, physics furnishes us not alone solutions; it furnishes us besides, in a certain measure, arguments. It will suffice to recall how Felix Klein, in a question relative to Riemann surfaces, has had recourse to the properties of electric currents.

It is true, the arguments of this species are not rigorous, in the sense the a.n.a.lyst attaches to this word. And here a question arises: How can a demonstration not sufficiently rigorous for the a.n.a.lyst suffice for the physicist? It seems there can not be two rigors, that rigor is or is not, and that, where it is not there can not be deduction.

This apparent paradox will be better understood by recalling under what conditions number is applied to natural phenomena. Whence come in general the difficulties encountered in seeking rigor? We strike them almost always in seeking to establish that some quant.i.ty tends to some limit, or that some function is continuous, or that it has a derivative.

Now the numbers the physicist measures by experiment are never known except approximately; and besides, any function always differs as little as you choose from a discontinuous function, and at the same time it differs as little as you choose from a continuous function. The physicist may, therefore, at will suppose that the function studied is continuous, or that it is discontinuous; that it has or has not a derivative; and may do so without fear of ever being contradicted, either by present experience or by any future experiment. We see that with such liberty he makes sport of difficulties which stop the a.n.a.lyst.

He may always reason as if all the functions which occur in his calculations were entire polynomials.

Thus the sketch which suffices for physics is not the deduction which a.n.a.lysis requires. It does not follow thence that one can not aid in finding the other. So many physical sketches have already been transformed into rigorous demonstrations that to-day this transformation is easy. There would be plenty of examples did I not fear in citing them to tire the reader.

I hope I have said enough to show that pure a.n.a.lysis and mathematical physics may serve one another without making any sacrifice one to the other, and that each of these two sciences should rejoice in all which elevates its a.s.sociate.

CHAPTER VI

ASTRONOMY

Governments and parliaments must find that astronomy is one of the sciences which cost most dear: the least instrument costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, the least observatory costs millions; each eclipse carries with it supplementary appropriations. And all that for stars which are so far away, which are complete strangers to our electoral contests, and in all probability will never take any part in them. It must be that our politicians have retained a remnant of idealism, a vague instinct for what is grand; truly, I think they have been calumniated; they should be encouraged and shown that this instinct does not deceive them, that they are not dupes of that idealism.

We might indeed speak to them of navigation, of which no one can underestimate the importance, and which has need of astronomy. But this would be to take the question by its smaller side.

Astronomy is useful because it raises us above ourselves; it is useful because it is grand; that is what we should say. It shows us how small is man's body, how great his mind, since his intelligence can embrace the whole of this dazzling immensity, where his body is only an obscure point, and enjoy its silent harmony. Thus we attain the consciousness of our power, and this is something which can not cost too dear, since this consciousness makes us mightier.

But what I should wish before all to show is, to what point astronomy has facilitated the work of the other sciences, more directly useful, since it has given us a soul capable of comprehending nature.

Think how diminished humanity would be if, under heavens constantly overclouded, as Jupiter's must be, it had forever remained ignorant of the stars. Do you think that in such a world we should be what we are? I know well that under this somber vault we should have been deprived of the light of the sun, necessary to organisms like those which inhabit the earth. But if you please, we shall a.s.sume that these clouds are phosph.o.r.escent and emit a soft and constant light. Since we are making hypotheses, another will cost no more. Well! I repeat my question: Do you think that in such a world we should be what we are?

The stars send us not only that visible and gross light which strikes our bodily eyes, but from them also comes to us a light far more subtle, which illuminates our minds and whose effects I shall try to show you.

You know what man was on the earth some thousands of years ago, and what he is to-day. Isolated amidst a nature where everything was a mystery to him, terrified at each unexpected manifestation of incomprehensible forces, he was incapable of seeing in the conduct of the universe anything but caprice; he attributed all phenomena to the action of a mult.i.tude of little genii, fantastic and exacting, and to act on the world he sought to conciliate them by means a.n.a.logous to those employed to gain the good graces of a minister or a deputy. Even his failures did not enlighten him, any more than to-day a beggar refused is discouraged to the point of ceasing to beg.

To-day we no longer beg of nature; we command her, because we have discovered certain of her secrets and shall discover others each day. We command her in the name of laws she can not challenge, because they are hers; these laws we do not madly ask her to change, we are the first to submit to them. Nature can only be governed by obeying her.

What a change must our souls have undergone to pa.s.s from the one state to the other! Does any one believe that, without the lessons of the stars, under the heavens perpetually overclouded that I have just supposed, they would have changed so quickly? Would the metamorphosis have been possible, or at least would it not have been much slower?

And first of all, astronomy it is which taught that there are laws. The Chaldeans, who were the first to observe the heavens with some attention, saw that this mult.i.tude of luminous points is not a confused crowd wandering at random, but rather a disciplined army. Doubtless the rules of this discipline escaped them, but the harmonious spectacle of the starry night sufficed to give them the impression of regularity, and that was in itself already a great thing. Besides, these rules were discerned by Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, one after another, and finally, it is needless to recall that Newton it was who enunciated the oldest, the most precise, the most simple, the most general of all natural laws.

And then, taught by this example, we have seen our little terrestrial world better and, under the apparent disorder, there also we have found again the harmony that the study of the heavens had revealed to us. It also is regular, it also obeys immutable laws, but they are more complicated, in apparent conflict one with another, and an eye untrained by other sights would have seen there only chaos and the reign of chance or caprice. If we had not known the stars, some bold spirits might perhaps have sought to foresee physical phenomena; but their failures would have been frequent, and they would have excited only the derision of the vulgar; do we not see, that even in our day the meteorologists sometimes deceive themselves, and that certain persons are inclined to laugh at them.

How often would the physicists, disheartened by so many checks, have fallen into discouragement, if they had not had, to sustain their confidence, the brilliant example of the success of the astronomers!

This success showed them that nature obeys laws; it only remained to know what laws; for that they only needed patience, and they had the right to demand that the sceptics should give them credit.

This is not all: astronomy has not only taught us that there are laws, but that from these laws there is no escape, that with them there is no possible compromise. How much time should we have needed to comprehend that fact, if we had known only the terrestrial world, where each elemental force would always seem to us in conflict with other forces?

Astronomy has taught us that the laws are infinitely precise, and that if those we enunciate are approximative, it is because we do not know them well. Aristotle, the most scientific mind of antiquity, still accorded a part to accident, to chance, and seemed to think that the laws of nature, at least here below, determine only the large features of phenomena. How much has the ever-increasing precision of astronomical predictions contributed to correct such an error, which would have rendered nature unintelligible!

But are these laws not local, varying in different places, like those which men make; does not that which is truth in one corner of the universe, on our globe, for instance, or in our little solar system, become error a little farther away? And then could it not be asked whether laws depending on s.p.a.ce do not also depend upon time, whether they are not simple habitudes, transitory, therefore, and ephemeral?

Again it is astronomy that answers this question. Consider the double stars; all describe conics; thus, as far as the telescope carries, it does not reach the limits of the domain which obeys Newton's law.

Even the simplicity of this law is a lesson for us; how many complicated phenomena are contained in the two lines of its enunciation; persons who do not understand celestial mechanics may form some idea of it at least from the size of the treatises devoted to this science; and then it may be hoped that the complication of physical phenomena likewise hides from us some simple cause still unknown.

It is therefore astronomy which has shown us what are the general characteristics of natural laws; but among these characteristics there is one, the most subtle and the most important of all, which I shall ask leave to stress.

How was the order of the universe understood by the ancients; for instance, by Pythagoras, Plato or Aristotle? It was either an immutable type fixed once for all, or an ideal to which the world sought to approach. Kepler himself still thought thus when, for instance, he sought whether the distances of the planets from the sun had not some relation to the five regular polyhedrons. This idea contained nothing absurd, but it was sterile, since nature is not so made. Newton has shown us that a law is only a necessary relation between the present state of the world and its immediately subsequent state. All the other laws since discovered are nothing else; they are in sum, differential equations; but it is astronomy which furnished the first model for them, without which we should doubtless long have erred.

Astronomy has also taught us to set at naught appearances. The day Copernicus proved that what was thought the most stable was in motion, that what was thought moving was fixed, he showed us how deceptive could be the infantile reasonings which spring directly from the immediate data of our senses. True, his ideas did not easily triumph, but since this triumph there is no longer a prejudice so inveterate that we can not shake it off. How can we estimate the value of the new weapon thus won?

The ancients thought everything was made for man, and this illusion must be very tenacious, since it must ever be combated. Yet it is necessary to divest oneself of it; or else one will be only an eternal myope, incapable of seeing the truth. To comprehend nature one must be able to get out of self, so to speak, and to contemplate her from many different points of view; otherwise we never shall know more than one side. Now, to get out of self is what he who refers everything to himself can not do. Who delivered us from this illusion? It was those who showed us that the earth is only one of the smallest planets of the solar system, and that the solar system itself is only an imperceptible point in the infinite s.p.a.ces of the stellar universe.

At the same time astronomy taught us not to be afraid of big numbers.

This was needful, not only for knowing the heavens, but to know the earth itself; and was not so easy as it seems to us to-day. Let us try to go back and picture to ourselves what a Greek would have thought if told that red light vibrates four hundred millions of millions of times per second. Without any doubt, such an a.s.sertion would have appeared to him pure madness, and he never would have lowered himself to test it.

To-day a hypothesis will no longer appear absurd to us because it obliges us to imagine objects much larger or smaller than those our senses are capable of showing us, and we no longer comprehend those scruples which arrested our predecessors and prevented them from discovering certain truths simply because they were afraid of them. But why? It is because we have seen the heavens enlarging and enlarging without cease; because we know that the sun is 150 millions of kilometers from the earth and that the distances of the nearest stars are hundreds of thousands of times greater yet. Habituated to the contemplation of the infinitely great, we have become apt to comprehend the infinitely small. Thanks to the education it has received, our imagination, like the eagle's eye that the sun does not dazzle, can look truth in the face.

Was I wrong in saying that it is astronomy which has made us a soul capable of comprehending nature; that under heavens always overcast and starless, the earth itself would have been for us eternally unintelligible; that we should there have seen only caprice and disorder; and that, not knowing the world, we should never have been able to subdue it? What science could have been more useful? And in thus speaking I put myself at the point of view of those who only value practical applications. Certainly, this point of view is not mine; as for me, on the contrary, if I admire the conquests of industry, it is above all because if they free us from material cares, they will one day give to all the leisure to contemplate nature. I do not say: Science is useful, because it teaches us to construct machines. I say: Machines are useful, because in working for us, they will some day leave us more time to make science. But finally it is worth remarking that between the two points of view there is no antagonism, and that man having pursued a disinterested aim, all else has been added unto him.

Auguste Comte has said somewhere, that it would be idle to seek to know the composition of the sun, since this knowledge would be of no use to sociology. How could he be so short-sighted? Have we not just seen that it is by astronomy that, to speak his language, humanity has pa.s.sed from the theological to the positive state? He found an explanation for that because it had happened. But how has he not understood that what remained to do was not less considerable and would be not less profitable? Physical astronomy, which he seems to condemn, has already begun to bear fruit, and it will give us much more, for it only dates from yesterday.

First was discovered the nature of the sun, what the founder of positivism wished to deny us, and there bodies were found which exist on the earth, but had here remained undiscovered; for example, helium, that gas almost as light as hydrogen. That already contradicted Comte. But to the spectroscope we owe a lesson precious in a quite different way; in the most distant stars, it shows us the same substances. It might have been asked whether the terrestrial elements were not due to some chance which had brought together more tenuous atoms to construct of them the more complex edifice that the chemists call atom; whether, in other regions of the universe, other fortuitous meetings had not engendered edifices entirely different. Now we know that this is not so, that the laws of our chemistry are the general laws of nature, and that they owe nothing to the chance which caused us to be born on the earth.

But, it will be said, astronomy has given to the other sciences all it can give them, and now that the heavens have procured for us the instruments which enable us to study terrestrial nature, they could without danger veil themselves forever. After what we have just said, is there still need to answer this objection? One could have reasoned the same in Ptolemy's time; then also men thought they knew everything, and they still had almost everything to learn.