Throughout my life my preoccupation has been with science, but I also have a lifelong concern for and interest in religion. In this, and in the next and final chapter of this book I want to turn aside from the consideration of the incidents of my life, and state some ideas about science and about the relationship between science and religion.
As a necessary background for the discussion of the last-named topic, there are certain aspects of science which must be examined.
I should make it clear at the outset that by the word "science" I mean, of course, real science, basic science, such as physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and astronomy. I am not at all talking about the technology that is sometimes mistakenly referred to as scientific; and I am most emphatically not talking about the grotesque views of Madison Avenue which sometimes identify science with gadgetry, resulting in such awful bloopers as "Science produces a new vibrating toothbrush."
Science is an activity, not a catalogue of facts. Scientific curiosity, as the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) said, ". . . is a passion for an ordered intellectual vision of the connection of events." There is no single fixed and codified set of procedures which constitutes "the scientific method": in contrast, the activity known as science makes use of a highly varied and evolving set of procedures. As the educator James B. Conant has written, "there are many techniques, many ways of stating problems, many methods of analysis." The procedures of science sometimes make use of exceedingly complicated devices, and they are often guided by theoretical ideas which are expressed in a specialized vocabulary and which are based on concepts often profound and abstract. Therefore the scientific endeavor may appear esoteric, if indeed not incomprehensible, to the nonscientist.
But this is, at least to a great extent, an artifact. For the procedures of science are but refinements of the ways in which all men have, from the earliest days of the race, dealt with their environment. When primitive man learned to chip and fashion a stone to make a crude tool, he was being scientific. Suppose a house owner is confronted by a window that sticks. If he reacts by jerking it so hard that his back hurts, or by hitting it a terrible lick with a hammer, then he is being very human but not scientific. If he stops to think, examines it carefully to see if it is jammed crookedly in the frame, or if he remembers that the house has been recently painted and goes to get a sharp blade to cut free the paint seal—then he is being scientific. First the problem must be clearly recognized; decisions must be made as to what is relevant; hypotheses must be formulated and tested. It is a good many steps from freeing a stuck window to building a linear accelerator, but they are all similar steps, which can be taken one after another.
Science deals almost exclusively with the repetitive parts of our experience—with the regularities and uniformities of nature and with things that happen (or could happen) to everyone. Our lives, however, are often most significantly affected by things which happen only once and only to us. Unique events such as the nonrecurrent chance to make an important decision are often those of most significance to us individually, whereas such unique events as the advent of a Martin Luther or a Shakespeare or a Hitler are of great importance to us all collectively. Science has little or nothing to say about these single chances.
It is customary to credit science with "explaining" phenomena, and this is certainly assumed to be a great and comforting feat. But in so far as explanation is supposed to bring to light and exhibit in clear focus the real inner reason why things behave as they do, then the successes of science afford little comfort.
For—at least as far as I can see—science has only two procedures of "explanation" and they are both, in any strict logical sense, frauds. One of these procedures consists of remarks which really say: "This phenomenon X which puzzles you should no longer do so; for it is closely like a phenomenon Y with which you have long been familiar." The strange fact is that one need not really understand Y. He only needs to have been familiar with it for a long enough time so that he has the (fuzzy and unanalyzed) conviction that he understands it.
This is explanation by simile, and it is both strangely satisfying and practically useful. This is what happens when a scientist says, "Radio waves spread out, die off, are interfered with, like the expanding ripples when a stone is thrown into a pond." This is what happens when a scientist says, "The electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus as do the planets around the sun."
These explanations by simile are not trivial. Not only do they bring the personal satisfaction of one who says, "You know, I didn't understand that at all before, and now I do"; they also furnish an important motivation within science as did, in the nineteenth century, the extensive simile comparing electrical quantities and actions with mechanical quantities and actions. But from any fundamental point of view, explanation of this variety, however comforting and useful it may be, is not really explanation. To say that the voltage that "causes" electricity to flow in a wire is like the pressure that causes water to flow in a pipe is very helpful and comforting to a person who is just establishing acquaintance with electricity, and who has for so long seen water flowing in a pipe that he thinks he understands why the pressure causes this; but it is certainly no ultimate explanation.
The second procedure of explanation is very different in character. It is exhibited in pure form in mathematics and theoretical physics. A statement is established by logical derivation from one or more previously established statements. They in turn have been established from a second prior set. One backs down a sort of logical staircase, the statements on each step having been proved by those on the next lower step. If one backs all the way down this stairway he eventually lands on a step which in our modern view does not bear the caption (which Euclid might have written there); "These statements are selfevidently true," but rather bears the candid caption, "This is as far down as we presently go: the statements on this level are pure assumption."
So this second kind of explanation, like the first, does not furnish any ultimate explanation. Both kinds, or mixtures of them, end either in the illusion of familiarity that makes one content to drop the effort, or in the bafflement of pure assumption. The first kind of explanation is not the private property of science. Robert Frost, in his "Education by Poetry," stated that he "believed that metaphor, analogy, the perception of one thing in another, are at the root of understanding itself." It does not decide between a lovely poem and a stupid one. It cannot interpret a sonnet or a symphony. It cannot analyze compassion, or patience, or tolerance, or gentleness. It does in the realm where it is most successful, it answers how, but it never answers why.
Science is largely concerned with measurable phenomena, and with those aspects of experience which can usefully be dealt with by analytical and logical procedures. It is extremely good at dealing with these. But science cannot understand intuition, or shrewdness, or wisdom. Even
Science is commonly supposed to unearth and confirm things or statements known as "facts"; but this remark deserves examination. First, the "confirmations" are (with the possible exception of trivial cases) based on measurements or other observations which are not exact in any ultimate sense, and which can therefore really only be stated in terms of probabilities. This reminder is particularly important for those scientists who believe that all empirical matters of fact "boil down to meter readings," since these meter readings are always subject to error.
Furthermore, the character of the "confirmation" of a scientific theory is itself curious, and its degree of finality is often if not usually exaggerated. When one has carried out an experiment to test a theory, the most he can really say is: to a stated degree of accuracy, the theory worked this time. The confirmation can never be absolutely precise
(because error in measurement is inescapable), and it can never be complete (because there always remain tests not carried out). Sir Karl R. Popper, one of the leading experts in the philosophy of science, argued in various of his writings years ago the proposition that a scientific theory can, in sober fact, never be confirmed. He was of the opinion that the most one can hope for is that a scientific theory can be disproved. More recently Sir Karl has come to the carefully argued conclusion that even this is too much to hope for. In a strict and ultimate sense, a scientific theory can be neither proved true nor proved untrue.
This of course profoundly affects the character of the findings of science. Sir Karl has written:
"Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. Our science is not knowledge (epistème): it can never claim to have attained truth, or
even a substitute for it, such as probability. ...
"The old scientific ideal of episteme-of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge-has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement remain tentative forever. It may indeed be corroborated, but even corroboration is relative to other statements which again are tentative. Only in our subjective experiences of conviction, in our subjective faith, can we be 'absolutely certain.' " 4 This statement will undoubtedly shock those who have a naïve respect for science.
As to logic, everyone, I suppose, thinks of science as the most logical of all fields of human activity, and indeed this characterization is deserved. This use of disciplined reasoning does protect science from careless superficial errors, but it cannot furnish the austere finality, inescapability, and perfection that most people think are automatically assured by logic.
For during recent years some profound and really shocking inner flaws have been revealed in logic. I do not refer to inductive logic, the branch of reasoning that examines all the observed cases recorded in the experimental evidence and seeks to induce therefrom general laws. This is how the mind of man attempts to reach universals by the study of particulars. Inductive logic has been, and remains, something of a scandal ever since David Hume denied its propriety over two hundred years ago.
I refer to deductive logic—the unrolling through carefully controlled reasoning of the statements that follow from a body of assumed postulates. This branch of reasoning, which is at the core of theoretical science, has recently undergone penetrating analysis, and two previously unexpected difficulties have been uncovered. First, it has been shown that it is impossible (not just unpleasantly difficult, but impossible) to decide, relative to a set of postulates which has been adopted as the basis for a theory, whether or not any such set of assumptions rich enough to lead to a significant theory is or is not internally consistent. Thus, at the very central core of any theory, there may be an undiscoverable flaw. And second, it has been shown that any postulational theory is necessarily incomplete, in the sense that it is always possible to ask, within the system, questions that cannot be answered.
Underlying the phrase "scientific statement of a fact" is a complex substratum of assumptions and agreements, some of them pushed down so low in the basement complex of past experience as to be out of sight and forgotten, and all of them subject to the limitations inherent in the foundations of logic. At the best, the "facts" of science represent a high level of agreement (at least within the culture in question) concerning the measured confirmations of scientific theories which are themselves based on chains of hypotheses, the more basic of which turn out, on honest examination, to be pure (or should I say impure?) assumption.
As we will see in a moment, if one makes a different start in the basic assumptions, has a different sense as to what are useful questions and satisfying answers, adopts a different system of metaphysics and a different world outlook, then he ends up with a quite different set of "facts."
There is no intention here to denigrate the usefulness of the ordinary working understandings as to the facts of science. Indeed without these (almost completely submerged) agreements, scientists could not get forward with their daily work. The game is a completely absorbing and highly rewarding one, but it is nevertheless a game. It is important to recognize that there are other games to play which start from other premises, have other rules, and come out with other sorts of results. Anyone has a right to play the game or games of his own choosing; but he does not have the right to view his own game as the only one, or as the ultimately preferred one.
Even within the professional framework of Western science, what is a fact today need not be a fact tomorrow. There was a time when any competent scientist would have confidently affirmed, "Mass is always conserved." He would also have said, "Energy is always conserved." These two rules which worked so well under such a wide range of circumstances are now, of course, replaced by a new rule which states that it is a fact that mass can be converted into energy or energy into mass (according to the Einstein formula E=mc), and what is conserved is not either separately, but rather the properly calculated sum of the two.
Thomas S. Kuhn, professor of the History of Science at Princeton University, analyzes the fascinating way in which science operates for a time on the basis of a certain standard and approved set of procedures, then is confronted by a crisis, and then shifts "the network of theory through which it deals with the world." These shifts, these scientific revolutions, are certainly not to be viewed as lamentable periods in the history of science. On the contrary, these are the great moments. Science responds nobly to challenge, just as Arnold Toynbee has pointed out is the case in social and political history. The point not to be missed here is that science does profoundly change, and by that very process shows that it never was the guardian of ultimate fact, and can indeed never be.
that science (his science of course) has unique capacity for discovering ultimate and permanent "facts" should read some of the essays of the great American student of linguistics, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941).
Any person who takes the smugly confident attitude
Whorf's argument goes like this: Those of us who are immersed in Western culture and whose competence in communication is restricted to the Indo-European languages are usually totally unaware of the deep submerged assumptions which, in a completely interlocked way, control our language, our modes of thinking, our inherent ideas as to what is natural and important, the way we dissect experience, and our general views about the realities of the universe in which we exist. We are as unconscious of these linguistic-cultural-conceptual restraints as a fish is unconscious of water.
Only by a dedicated and prolonged study that gives one some approximation to understanding the linguistic-cultural-conceptual framework of some other group of people is it possible to begin to have an externalized view of ourselves.
For example, the Hopi Indians have ideas about time, space, and motion quite unlike those we consider so obvious and necessary. In particular, they "have no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum. ..." In the Hopi view "time disappears and space is altered ... new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space." Our language has no terms, indeed no grammar, which is adequate to express the Hopi abstractions. In reverse, the Hopis are doubtless confused by the way we act, and think, and talk. Their difficulty in dealing with us is at least hinted at by the fact that their verbs have no tenses. Many conceptual entities for which we have nouns (such as lightning, wave, flame, puff of smoke) are not dealt with in their language by nouns but rather by verbs. They have a metaphysics of their own, and deal with experience and reality in ways that are quite unlike ours, but which nevertheless work entirely satisfactorily for them.
In some older views, talking was supposed merely to be the external expression of what had previously been formulated nonlinguistically, "formulation" being an independent process to be called "thought" or "thinking." If that view were significantly valid, then thought might not
depend on grammar but on something to be called the "laws of logic or reason," supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe and hence to represent a basic and universal rationale. Even if this were a correct view, it would still be true that all agreements between persons are reached by linguistic processes. If A and B are to understand each other and are to "agree," they must necessarily share (even if unsuspectingly) an amazingly complex system of linguistic patterns and classifications.
Whorf, moreover, was convinced by his studies that thinking, even if it can in fact proceed without words, is not free from linguistic control. The "background linguistic system (in other words the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing system for voicing ideas, but rather is itself a shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade ... we dissect nature along lines laid down by our natural languages ... we cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is of course an implicit and unstated one BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY: we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and clarification of data which the agreement decrees."
In previous passages we have seen that science cannot be viewed as perfect and permanent. The excursion into linguistic considerations greatly enlarges our view. Not only does our science have very human weaknesses; our science is only one example of what a "science" can be. There can be and are others, so fundamentally different that anyone must devote years of study before he has learned enough to begin to understand and appreciate the alternatives.
I am sure that some readers will react by thinking: It is curious and somewhat interesting that the Hopi Indians do not share our grammar, our ideas, and our way of dealing with experience. But after all, let's not be too impressed! Look at the Hopi Indians! Did they ever cure a disease, or prove a theorem, or invent television?
These questions cannot be reasonably posed in this way. Indeed a Hopi Indian (excluding those who have shifted over into our culture) would undoubtedly fail to understand these queries and would probably feel sorry for the questioner.
The Hopi Indians, moreover, have been used here as an example simply because Whorf studied them so long and so profoundly that he could, at least in some measure, bridge the gap between them and us. Whorf takes us a little way out on that bridge and gives us glimpses of the strange land on the other side. There are, of course, many other cultures that could be used as examples-Semitic, Tibetan, African-if only each of these had its Whorf. Modern Chinese and Turkish scientists, as Whorf mentions, describe the world in the same terms as Western scientists. That they do so "means, of course, only that they have taken over bodily the entire Western system of rationalizations, not that they have corroborated that system from their native posts of observation." I have a Turkish biochemist friend who writes me, from Istanbul, letters which could as well be postmarked Cambridge (Massachusetts or England).
And there are other examples. The distinguished Eng- lish biochemist and Orientalist Joseph Needham has devoted years to the study of Chinese language and culture, and he is producing an heroic series of volumes on the older "non-Western" aspects of Chinese science. Writing about Needham's great works, an English-trained Yale professor of history of science has said, "There can be no doubt that Chinese science and technology have been just as inventive, just as good, just as bad, as the science and technology of the ancient and medieval West."
The moment one realizes that our views about the realities of the world about us and the way in which we dissect experience are controlled by unrecognized linguisticcultural restraints, then he also realizes that man, in attempting to understand the universe, inescapably tries to deal with it in his own terms. Man is what he is, and taking thought will not permit him to be submicroscopically small any more than it will add cubits to his stature.
Of the two basic physical entities of length and time, man quite naturally, in the early and unsophisticated stages of science, drew upon his own direct personal experience. A cubit is the distance from the tip of the elbow to the end of the middle finger. A span is the distance, when the hand is fully extended, from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger. The dimensions of the adult human body are, very roughly, 200 centimeters in height, roughly 66 centimeters in width across the shoulders, and roughly 35 centimeters in thickness through the chest. The average of these three basic human dimensions is about 100 centimeters; so that this distance of 100 centimeters, or 1 meter, is one of which each human being has a direct personal comprehension. It is, within our anthromorphically controlled culture, perfectly natural, simple, and directly
meaningful to talk about a distance of 100 centimeters, or of any mild multiple or submultiple thereof, such as 50 meters or one fiftieth of a meter. But, except to the scientist, such phrases as "6 billion billion meters" and "a billionth of a billionth of a meter" simply have no natural, homely, direct meaning. Such language is not part of our normal linguistic usage, since our culture does not have any normal and frequent contact with such distances. From a billion billion meters and a billionth of a billionth of a meter are completely exotic, totally removed from our normal experience.
From the point of view of familiar "man-sized" dimensions, a bilexperience.
Man's immediate experience with extension in space varies from, say, the size of a needle point used to pick out a thorn in his finger to, say, the circumference of the earth— a range from about 10-2 centimeters to about 109 centimeters. It's all very well to ask him to look at the moon or the with them. Man can, to be sure, extend his sight by looking through a telescope or a microscope, but what he really sees
In his experience with time there are similar limitations. Years, days, hours, minutes, seconds—these are directly experienced. Indeed, as he watches a close play at first base, the umpire may have to distinguish the time order of two events (the arrival of the ball in the first baseman's mitt and the touching of the base by the runner's foot) which may be separated by as little as one or two hundredths of a second. This is about as "fine" as one can sharpen his direct sense of time and is slightly finer-grained than our ordinary appreciation of time events—the reaction time of individuals averages a few hundredths of a second. (I may be in mild error in some of these estimates, but that does not affect my conclusions.) Thus our direct experience with time ranges from roughly 10-2 seconds to about 108 seconds—which rather curiously comes out the same as the range for distance.
With experimental equipment to extend his senses, man has vastly increased the ranges stated. A reasonable upper limit for length is the estimate of the so-called diameter of the universe. This is of the order of 1010 lightyears, on 1028 centimeters.
As to very small lengths, it is noteworthy that Coulomb's Law for the force acting between two electrical charges was verified in 1911 for distances as small as 10-12 centimeters, in 1933 for distances down to 10-13 centimeters, and in 1954 for distances down to 10-14 centimeters. For an experimentalist, the lower limit of length appears at the moment to be 10-15 centimeters, which is the wavelength associated with a 30 Bev accelerator, the largest now operating. This figure will be reduced to 10-17 when the
* This is roughly the average number of seconds from the birth of a man to the birth of his offspring—a "generation" of time.
† A light-year is the distance that light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, goes in one year. I once heard it defined by a student as "a year in which very few stars are discovered."
200 Bev accelerator at Weston, Illinois, has been successfully completed.
* I will express all quantities, as scientists tend to do, in centimeter gram-second units. For any reader not familiar with exponential notation, it is necessary only to know that 105, for example, means 1 followed by 5 zeroes: thus it is an abbreviation for 100,000. Similarly 107 means 10,000,000, or 10 million, 108 means 1 billion, and 1018 1 billion billion. To express small numbers, 10-5 is 1 divided by 105, and is thus equal to 0.00001.
At least one theoretical physicist, however, dares to contemplate distances which are many, many times more fine-grained than those dealt with by the experimentalists. Professor John A. Wheeler of Princeton, the physicist who was so closely and importantly associated with Niels Bohr during the atomic fission days, has elaborated an imaginative and daring theory of the "geometrodynamics" of empty, curved superspace, which views larger-scale entities such as electric charges as being the manifestation, up at the level of 10-15 or larger, of topological characteristics of multiply connected superspace. Wheeler's theory involves what he calls "the Planck distance" which is numerically equal to the square root of hG/c, h being the Planck constant for angular momentum, G the gravitational constant, and c the speed of light. This Planck's distance has the value of 1.6 X 10-33 centimeters, and is the distance within which quantum fluctuations of a typical gravitational potential are appreciable.
This "Planck's distance," of the order of 10-33 centimeters, is, as far as I know, the smallest distance which has as yet been contemplated in physical theory.
As to the maximum range of times that enter into modern theories, this extends from the half-life of the most evanescent particles-something of the order of 10-18 seconds, up to the estimates of the age of the galaxies.-say, 1017 seconds.
Thus instrumental and theoretical extensions have pushed the realm of small distance down some 10-18 (the reciprocal of 10 million million) times, or perhaps even down 10-31 times, as compared with the smallness directly
accessible to our senses; and have pushed the realm of large with the largeness with which we have direct experience. For time, as contrasted with space, the corresponding factors distances up some 1018 (a billion billion) times, as compared are 10-14 and 108.
Is this much condensation and stretching of man's immediate experience meaningful? One's first reaction is to say that we must trust science, and whereas it may indeed be difficult—or even impossible—to imagine the smallness and the largeness of these numbers, we must nevertheless accept them.
If it indeed is the case that our man-size, average-size one possibly have a theory for structure and events at that
This disregards, it seems to me, the necessarily anthropomorphic character of all man's activities and concepts. It may easily be that our scientific concepts are wholly inapplicable when the scale of events is made so infinitesimally small, or so astronomically large. It may be, indeed, that our language, our syntax, and our logic are all so locked into our experience, our necessarily man-sized experience, that they are useless at these extreme scales. When the theoretical physicists tell us that the density in nuclei may be as high as 10,000 million tons per cubic inch, and ask, "Is that not surprising and wonderful?" we should in fact reply, "No, on the contrary I think the particular sounds you just made are meaningless. And when you talk about 'the diameter of the universe, I think that those words are nonsensical also."
concepts are inapplicable to the description of the indefinitely small world inside the nucleus of an atom, how could level? If we truly believe that elementary events—that is, events in which the actors are elementary particles-are
basic, and that all the rest is statistical elaboration, then we should not start in the middle and try to work in both directions; we should start at the bottom and work up.
It was considerations such as these which led Max Mason and myself, early in the 1920s, to try to think about a wholly new starting point for physical theories. It was our idea that in the ultimately small world there would be nothing corresponding to our ordinary concepts of distance or of time, these being supposedly inappropriate for unitary events. At some mature stage of the theory certain quantities would emerge, probably as statistical averages of unitary quantities, and among those emergent large-scale quantities would be one which would be recognized to correspond to our ordinary gross concept of distance—another to our ordinary gross concept of time. This might be similar to the situation with respect to the pressure exerted by a gas. When one descends to the molecular level there is nothing that can be called "pressure": the individual molecules are flying about helter-skelter, colliding with one another in all types of glancing or direct encounters. When one analyzes the totality of these collisions, the large-scale concept of pressure emerges, built up out of the average effect of all the collisions. And this large-scale quantity, pressure, can be thus demonstrated to depend in a smooth and predictable way upon other large-scale quantities such as "temperature" which also have emerged as statistical averages of smaller-scale events.
Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that ultimate theories must be built "up," not "down." That is, it does not seem possible to break up the large-scale averaged quantities into meaningful bits, for we simply have no idea what those bits are. The kinetic theory of gases, which explains
the properties and behavior of gases in terms of the motions of the particles composing the gas, appears to contradict this remark, but the fact is that kinetic theory is not an ultimate theory: it is a two-stage large-scale theory. The "molecules" of kinetic gas theory are really not unitary objects, but a surprisingly successful imaginary substitute therefor—tiny elastic perfect spheres; and kinetic theory is therefore in actuality not really a good illustration of what I am talking about. Kinetic theory is a successful instance of a theory which successfully descends on two steps of a macroscopic scale, whereas our position was that the ultimate theory of matter must start at the bottom, as regards scale, and then ascend.
This, however, forces one starkly to confront the difficulty. Our man-sized experiences have given us no concepts, no words, no syntax, no logic suitable to the scale of these events. How does one get started with such a theory?
If I knew the answer to that question, I would be writing another book, not this one. But I continue to be convinced that a proper theory of ultimately small affairs cannot successfully penetrate down to that level, drilling from above, but must arise within those affairs. That quantum theory does penetrate from above, using the linguistic machinery of the man-sized world to describe the microworld is, in my judgment, its basic weakness and the origin of its internal contradictions and of the general messiness of the theory. I realize that my esthetic dislike of quantum theory should be canceled out and translated into admiration by the magnificent sweep of the detailed successes of the theory. But try as I will, I cannot change my stubborn prejudice.
Ideas of the sort advanced here are expressed from
time to time by some of the ablest physicists. John A. Wheeler entitled his address as the retiring president of the American Physical Society "The End of Time." The news report of this lecture contained the remark "Is there a scale of distances and events so small that time loses its meaning?" "On the very-small-distance scale," said Dr. Wheeler, "there would be no such thing as before and after."
In 1963, Geoffrey F. Chew of the Department of Physics of the University of California at Berkeley wrote a paper in which he said: "Twentieth century physics already has undergone two breath-taking revolutions—in relativity and in quantum mechanics. We are standing on the threshold of a third."
At the stage of going over the manuscript of this book for the final time, one more piece of evidence has come to the surface. This, to my great delight, comes from a poet!
In the opening poem of The Blue Swallows, Howard Nemerov says:
Below the ten thousand billionth of a centimeter Length ceases to exist. Beyond three billion light years The nebulae would have to exceed the speed of light no universe.
In order to be, which is impossible:
The long and short of it seems to be that thought Can make itself unthinkable.