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What is Matter?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

P. J. van Heerden
P. J. van Heerden*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

1. Introduction. It is an amazing thing that, unlike pebbles, clouds and stars, the smallest building stones of Nature—the electrons, the protons and the neutrons—are all completely uniform. There seems to be a necessity in Nature for systems of a very special form, and one can wonder now what kind of necessity this is. I believe that this can only be a mathematical necessity, that consequently the principle of Nature is a mathematical one. How else could Nature obey the mathematical laws of physics if it were not because of her own principle? It can be argued that these mathematical laws, like Newtonian mechanics, the classical theory of electromagnetism and the quantum theory of the electron are all some form of beginner's luck, and that continued investigation will reveal Nature as more and more mysterious and irrational. If that were true, one might as well give up the pursuit of physics completely! But on one hand modern physics has discovered what we believe to be the elementary particles of the material world, and on the other hand it comes out that at least a part of these elementary forms obey mathematic laws to a very high degree of accuracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 1953 , pp. 276 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © 1953, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

1 Sophus Lie—Scheffers—“Continuerliche Gruppen”. Leipzig, 1893.

2 Note added in proof: The solution for an eigenvalue tensor with off diagonal terms zero can be found in a straightforward way by transforming to angular coordinates. It comes out then that this interpretation of the λij's can not be maintained. The value of angular momentum in the Z direction, for instance, should rather be found by the eigenvalue of the operator:

This makes the physical interpretation of the eigenvalue of (λ) somewhat obscure.

3 C. E. Shannon, W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, Illinois, 1949.

4 L. Brillouin, J. Appl. Phys., 22, 338, 1951.

5 See for instance D. Bohm, Phys. Rev., 85, 166, 1952.