The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science Science and Method Part 53

The historian is obliged to make a choice among the events of the epoch he studies; he recounts only those which seem to him the most important.

He therefore contents himself with relating the most momentous events of the sixteenth century, for example, as likewise the most remarkable facts of the seventeenth century. If the first suffice to explain the second, we say these conform to the laws of history. But if a great event of the seventeenth century should have for cause a small fact of the sixteenth century which no history reports, which all the world has neglected, then we say this event is due to chance. This word has therefore the same sense as in the physical sciences; it means that slight causes have produced great effects.

The greatest bit of chance is the birth of a great man. It is only by chance that meeting of two germinal cells, of different s.e.x, containing precisely, each on its side, the mysterious elements whose mutual reaction must produce the genius. One will agree that these elements must be rare and that their meeting is still more rare. How slight a thing it would have required to deflect from its route the carrying spermatozoon. It would have sufficed to deflect it a tenth of a millimeter and Napoleon would not have been born and the destinies of a continent would have been changed. No example can better make us understand the veritable characteristics of chance.

One more word about the paradoxes brought out by the application of the calculus of probabilities to the moral sciences. It has been proven that no Chamber of Deputies will ever fail to contain a member of the opposition, or at least such an event would be so improbable that we might without fear wager the contrary, and bet a million against a sou.

Condorcet has striven to calculate how many jurors it would require to make a judicial error practically impossible. If we had used the results of this calculation, we should certainly have been exposed to the same disappointments as in betting, on the faith of the calculus, that the opposition would never be without a representative.

The laws of chance do not apply to these questions. If justice be not always meted out to accord with the best reasons, it uses less than we think the method of Bridoye. This is perhaps to be regretted, for then the system of Condorcet would s.h.i.+eld us from judicial errors.

What is the meaning of this? We are tempted to attribute facts of this nature to chance because their causes are obscure; but this is not true chance. The causes are unknown to us, it is true, and they are even complex; but they are not sufficiently so, since they conserve something. We have seen that this it is which distinguishes causes 'too simple.' When men are brought together they no longer decide at random and independently one of another; they influence one another. Multiplex causes come into action. They worry men, dragging them to right or left, but one thing there is they can not destroy, this is their Panurge flock-of-sheep habits. And this is an invariant.

X

Difficulties are indeed involved in the application of the calculus of probabilities to the exact sciences. Why are the decimals of a table of logarithms, why are those of the number [pi] distributed in accordance with the laws of chance? Elsewhere I have already studied the question in so far as it concerns logarithms, and there it is easy. It is clear that a slight difference of argument will give a slight difference of logarithm, but a great difference in the sixth decimal of the logarithm.

Always we find again the same criterion.

But as for the number [pi], that presents more difficulties, and I have at the moment nothing worth while to say.

There would be many other questions to resolve, had I wished to attack them before solving that which I more specially set myself. When we reach a simple result, when we find for example a round number, we say that such a result can not be due to chance, and we seek, for its explanation, a non-fortuitous cause. And in fact there is only a very slight probability that among 10,000 numbers chance will give a round number; for example, the number 10,000. This has only one chance in 10,000. But there is only one chance in 10,000 for the occurrence of any other one number; and yet this result will not astonish us, nor will it be hard for us to attribute it to chance; and that simply because it will be less striking.

Is this a simple illusion of ours, or are there cases where this way of thinking is legitimate? We must hope so, else were all science impossible. When we wish to check a hypothesis, what do we do? We can not verify all its consequences, since they would be infinite in number; we content ourselves with verifying certain ones and if we succeed we declare the hypothesis confirmed, because so much success could not be due to chance. And this is always at bottom the same reasoning.

I can not completely justify it here, since it would take too much time; but I may at least say that we find ourselves confronted by two hypotheses, either a simple cause or that aggregate of complex causes we call chance. We find it natural to suppose that the first should produce a simple result, and then, if we find that simple result, the round number for example, it seems more likely to us to be attributable to the simple cause which must give it almost certainly, than to chance which could only give it once in 10,000 times. It will not be the same if we find a result which is not simple; chance, it is true, will not give this more than once in 10,000 times; but neither has the simple cause any more chance of producing it.

BOOK II

MATHEMATICAL REASONING

CHAPTER I

THE RELATIVITY OF s.p.a.cE

I

It is impossible to represent to oneself empty s.p.a.ce; all our efforts to imagine a pure s.p.a.ce, whence should be excluded the changing images of material objects, can result only in a representation where vividly colored surfaces, for example, are replaced by lines of faint coloration, and we can not go to the very end in this way without all vanis.h.i.+ng and terminating in nothingness. Thence comes the irreducible relativity of s.p.a.ce.

Whoever speaks of absolute s.p.a.ce uses a meaningless phrase. This is a truth long proclaimed by all who have reflected upon the matter, but which we are too often led to forget.

I am at a determinate point in Paris, place du Pantheon for instance, and I say: I shall come back _here_ to-morrow. If I be asked: Do you mean you will return to the same point of s.p.a.ce, I shall be tempted to answer: yes; and yet I shall be wrong, since by to-morrow the earth will have journeyed hence, carrying with it the place du Pantheon, which will have traveled over more than two million kilometers. And if I tried to speak more precisely, I should gain nothing, since our globe has run over these two million kilometers in its motion with relation to the sun, while the sun in its turn is displaced with reference to the Milky Way, while the Milky Way itself is doubtless in motion without our being able to perceive its velocity. So that we are completely ignorant, and always shall be, of how much the place du Pantheon is displaced in a day.

In sum, I meant to say: To-morrow I shall see again the dome and the pediment of the Pantheon, and if there were no Pantheon my phrase would be meaningless and s.p.a.ce would vanish.

This is one of the most commonplace forms of the principle of the relativity of s.p.a.ce; but there is another, upon which Delbeuf has particularly insisted. Suppose that in the night all the dimensions of the universe become a thousand times greater: the world will have remained _similar_ to itself, giving to the word _similitude_ the same meaning as in Euclid, Book VI. Only what was a meter long will measure thenceforth a kilometer, what was a millimeter long will become a meter.

The bed whereon I lie and my body itself will be enlarged in the same proportion.

When I awake to-morrow morning, what sensation shall I feel in presence of such an astounding transformation? Well, I shall perceive nothing at all. The most precise measurements will be incapable of revealing to me anything of this immense convulsion, since the measures I use will have varied precisely in the same proportion as the objects I seek to measure. In reality, this convulsion exists only for those who reason as if s.p.a.ce were absolute. If I for a moment have reasoned as they do, it is the better to bring out that their way of seeing implies contradiction. In fact it would be better to say that, s.p.a.ce being relative, nothing at all has happened, which is why we have perceived nothing.

Has one the right, therefore, to say he knows the distance between two points? No, since this distance could undergo enormous variations without our being able to perceive them, provided the other distances have varied in the same proportion. We have just seen that when I say: I shall be here to-morrow, this does not mean: To-morrow I shall be at the same point of s.p.a.ce where I am to-day, but rather: To-morrow I shall be at the same distance from the Pantheon as to-day. And we see that this statement is no longer sufficient and that I should say: To-morrow and to-day my distance from the Pantheon will be equal to the same number of times the height of my body.

But this is not all; I have supposed the dimensions of the world to vary, but that at least the world remained always similar to itself. We might go much further, and one of the most astonis.h.i.+ng theories of modern physics furnishes us the occasion.

According to Lorentz and Fitzgerald, all the bodies borne along in the motion of the earth undergo a deformation.

This deformation is, in reality, very slight, since all dimensions parallel to the movement of the earth diminish by a hundred millionth, while the dimensions perpendicular to this movement are unchanged. But it matters little that it is slight, that it exists suffices for the conclusion I am about to draw. And besides, I have said it was slight, but in reality I know nothing about it; I have myself been victim of the tenacious illusion which makes us believe we conceive an absolute s.p.a.ce; I have thought of the motion of the earth in its elliptic orbit around the sun, and I have allowed thirty kilometers as its velocity. But its real velocity (I mean, this time, not its absolute velocity, which is meaningless, but its velocity with relation to the ether), I do not know that, and have no means of knowing it: it is perhaps, 10, 100 times greater, and then the deformation will be 100, 10,000 times more.

Can we show this deformation? Evidently not; here is a cube with edge one meter; in consequence of the earth's displacement it is deformed, one of its edges, that parallel to the motion, becomes smaller, the others do not change. If I wish to a.s.sure myself of it by aid of a meter measure, I shall measure first one of the edges perpendicular to the motion and shall find that my standard meter fits this edge exactly; and in fact neither of these two lengths is changed, since both are perpendicular to the motion. Then I wish to measure the other edge, that parallel to the motion; to do this I displace my meter and turn it so as to apply it to the edge. But the meter, having changed orientation and become parallel to the motion, has undergone, in its turn, the deformation, so that though the edge be not a meter long, it will fit exactly, I shall find out nothing.

You ask then of what use is the hypothesis of Lorentz and of Fitzgerald if no experiment can permit of its verification? It is my exposition that has been incomplete; I have spoken only of measurements that can be made with a meter; but we can also measure a length by the time it takes light to traverse it, on condition we suppose the velocity of light constant and independent of direction. Lorentz could have accounted for the facts by supposing the velocity of light greater in the direction of the earth's motion than in the perpendicular direction. He preferred to suppose that the velocity is the same in these different directions but that the bodies are smaller in the one than in the other. If the wave surfaces of light had undergone the same deformations as the material bodies we should never have perceived the Lorentz-Fitzgerald deformation.

In either case, it is not a question of absolute magnitude, but of the measure of this magnitude by means of some instrument; this instrument may be a meter, or the path traversed by light; it is only the relation of the magnitude to the instrument that we measure; and if this relation is altered, we have no way of knowing whether it is the magnitude or the instrument which has changed.

But what I wish to bring out is, that in this deformation the world has not remained similar to itself; squares have become rectangles, circles ellipses, spheres ellipsoids. And yet we have no way of knowing whether this deformation be real.

Evidently one could go much further: in place of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald deformation, whose laws are particularly simple, we could imagine any deformation whatsoever. Bodies could be deformed according to any laws, as complicated as we might wish, we never should notice it provided all bodies without exception were deformed according to the same laws. In saying, all bodies without exception, I include of course our own body and the light rays emanating from different objects.

If we look at the world in one of those mirrors of complicated shape which deform objects in a bizarre way, the mutual relations of the different parts of this world would not be altered; if, in fact two real objects touch, their images likewise seem to touch. Of course when we look in such a mirror we see indeed the deformation, but this is because the real world subsists alongside of its deformed image; and then even were this real world hidden from us, something there is could not be hidden, ourself; we could not cease to see, or at least to feel, our body and our limbs which have not been deformed and which continue to serve us as instruments of measure.

But if we imagine our body itself deformed in the same way as if seen in the mirror, these instruments of measure in their turn will fail us and the deformation will no longer be ascertainable.

Consider in the same way two worlds images of one another; to each object _P_ of the world _A_ corresponds in the world _B_ an object _P'_, its image; the coordinates of this image _P'_ are determinate functions of those of the object _P_; moreover these functions may be any whatsoever; I only suppose them chosen once for all. Between the position of _P_ and that of _P'_ there is a constant relation; what this relation is, matters not; enough that it be constant.

Well, these two worlds will be indistinguishable one from the other. I mean the first will be for its inhabitants what the second is for its.

And so it will be as long as the two worlds remain strangers to each other. Suppose we lived in world _A_, we shall have constructed our science and in particular our geometry; during this time the inhabitants of world _B_ will have constructed a science, and as their world is the image of ours, their geometry will also be the image of ours or, better, it will be the same. But if for us some day a window is opened upon world _B_, how we shall pity them: "Poor things," we shall say, "they think they have made a geometry, but what they call so is only a grotesque image of ours; their straights are all twisted, their circles are humped, their spheres have capricious inequalities." And we shall never suspect they say the same of us, and one never will know who is right.

We see in how broad a sense should be understood the relativity of s.p.a.ce; s.p.a.ce is in reality amorphous and the things which are therein alone give it a form. What then should be thought of that direct intuition we should have of the straight or of distance? So little have we intuition of distance in itself that in the night, as we have said, a distance might become a thousand times greater without our being able to perceive it, if all other distances had undergone the same alteration.

And even in a night the world _B_ might be subst.i.tuted for the world _A_ without our having any way of knowing it, and then the straight lines of yesterday would have ceased to be straight and we should never notice.

One part of s.p.a.ce is not by itself and in the absolute sense of the word equal to another part of s.p.a.ce; because if so it is for us, it would not be for the dwellers in world _B_; and these have just as much right to reject our opinion as we to condemn theirs.

I have elsewhere shown what are the consequences of these facts from the viewpoint of the idea we should form of non-Euclidean geometry and other a.n.a.logous geometries; to that I do not care to return; and to-day I shall take a somewhat different point of view.

II

If this intuition of distance, of direction, of the straight line, if this direct intuition of s.p.a.ce in a word does not exist, whence comes our belief that we have it? If this is only an illusion, why is this illusion so tenacious? It is proper to examine into this. We have said there is no direct intuition of size and we can only arrive at the relation of this magnitude to our instruments of measure. We should therefore not have been able to construct s.p.a.ce if we had not had an instrument to measure it; well, this instrument to which we relate everything, which we use instinctively, it is our own body. It is in relation to our body that we place exterior objects, and the only spatial relations of these objects that we can represent are their relations to our body. It is our body which serves us, so to speak, as system of axes of coordinates.

For example, at an instant [alpha], the presence of the object _A_ is revealed to me by the sense of sight; at another instant, [beta], the presence of another object, _B_, is revealed to me by another sense, that of hearing or of touch, for instance. I judge that this object _B_ occupies the same place as the object _A_. What does that mean? First that does not signify that these two objects occupy, at two different moments, the same point of an absolute s.p.a.ce, which even if it existed would escape our cognition, since, between the instants [alpha] and [beta], the solar system has moved and we can not know its displacement.

That means these two objects occupy the same relative position with reference to our body.