IN THIS LITTLE STUDY of one of Eddington's lectures about just what the most accomplished field of modern science has achieved my motive is to point out just how limited that very impressive accomplishment is and what it consists of. And their limits.
Other sciences, chemistry, biology, are often said to rely entirely on what physics has shown and that's true to some extent but I would bet that in their study of complex molecules and what they do, what might be effectively the more infinitely complex study of living organisms, their bodies, their lives, their species, genera,etc. their environment, etc. what is of most pressing interest to theoretical and even particle physics is probably of next to no importance.
I suspect that the ideology of materialist reductionism that has a faith that everything real is reducible to the smallest unit is wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out there is no single smallest unit, as a start. Previously and as recently as the turn of the 20th century that neo-atomist ideology was a philosophical-ideological position that even some of the finest people working as scientists and philosophers of science didn't hold (you could go look at Ludwig Boltzmann and his opponents for that). From how the science developed it's only reasonable to believe that what they study is real, though I doubt their view of those tiny bits of matter-energy is as nearly complete and comprehensive as they like to believe it is, but I think the higher levels dealing with larger objects and plants and creatures not really well thought of as objects are as real, and the physical aspects of those studies are as real as the presumably more enduring realities of electrons, protons, and even their smaller constituent particles which are, as well, not relevant to the most important aspects of human life. I think our material culture would have been quite different, no doubt our use of electronics and some of the aspects of the use of things like X-rays in medicine, etc. would have been different if physics had not developed in the way it did. If atomic theory had not been developed we would certainly not have developed nuclear weapons and nuclear power which may yet kill us all, for example. But if our material culture had not developed the way it did human lives and cultures would still have most of its pressing problems to fix else we all perish. I kind of think that our species surviving and living a decent life is what we are more properly concerned with than the speculations of recent and, pretty much, totally theoretical physics and cosmology. I think that the culture of college-credentialed lefties and even many of the vestiges of traditional American style liberalism - NOT the same thing as 18th century European style liberalism - has been rotted out by being distracted from what it should be doing.
It was one of the most shocking things going online and being exposed to the thinking of college credentialed people, unedited, in such large numbers just how daffy some of the most conceited of those people are. That the "new atheism" came in with the attacks of 911 opened up the problem that ideological atheism, which as it developed is intrinsically tied to the atomic theory first invented with the motive of promoting atheism in ancient Greece and India and, no doubt elsewhere and the reductionist materialism that arose with the human invention of scientific methods in the late medieval period and gained steam in the miscalled "enlightenment". I will admit I was also kind of shocked at how superficial a level of thinking so much of the contemporary culture consists of. I think that is related to the nihilism of materialism but I won't go into that again right now.
And it is so practically counterproductive. I had to conclude from what the new atheists said that their obsessive hatred of religion and God and, especially Christianity was more important to so many of these college credentialed people that they really had no interest in winning elections and establishing the egalitarian democracy that they pretended to care about, otherwise, why would they so gratuitously alienate so many voters over totally unimportant and largely make believe offenses. I did come to the conclusion that that was a major aspect of a larger, overriding aspect of class and, to some extent, regional snobbery which did nothing to expand the Democratic voter base, either. But it was one my reading and interest helped me to see through not long into my reading of the unedited thoughts of such college-credentialed snobs. My long study of the relationship of Darwinism with eugenics in opposition to the post-WWII lie that those had nothing to do with each other, and as soon as I started reading the primary literature, the relationship of Darwinism to Nazism was a branch of the same study in self-defeating lefty idiocy which was one of the results of observing American lefties unedited, unfiltered thinking.
Life is complicated, I think too complicated to be dealt with comprehensively by science and certainly not reducible in the way that atheist-materialist-scientism insists it is. Even if their hunch is true, human science has certainly not come anywhere close to a beginning of demonstrating that, though even now it is the absolutist faith of most atheists that it is known to be true and that they have come close to knowing the non-mind of their no-god, and, as it turns out, that mind is not expressed in the absolutes that would be necessary to produce the absolute material base of everything but in the mathematics of vague probability.
I needed to get that off my chest, the ever calm and not frustrated Eddington continued with a vegan - and sheep - unfriendly example of very real human experiences that science can't begin to touch.
We shall refer to this abstraction as the mathematical concept of structure, or briefly as the concept of structure. Since the structure abstracted from whatever posses the structure can be exactly specified by mathematical formulae, our knowledge of structure is communicable, whereas much of our knowledge is incommunicable. I cannot convey to you the vivid knowledge which I have of my own sensation and emotions. There is no way of comparing my sensation of the taste of mutton with your sensation of the taste of mutton. I can only know what it tastes like to me, and you can only know what it tastes like to you. But if we are both looking at a landscape, although there is no way of comparing our visual sensations as such, we can compare the structures of our respective visual impressions of the landscape. It is possible for a group of sensations in my mind to have the same structure of a group of sensations in your mind. It is possible also that a group of entities which are not sensations in anyone's mind, associated together by relations of which we can form no conception, may have this same structure. We can therefore have structural knowledge of that which is outside of everyone's mind. This knowledge will consist of the same kind of assertions as those which are made about the physical universe in the modern theories of mathematical physics. For strict expression of physical knowledge, a mathematical form is essential, because that is the only way in which we can confine its assertions to structural knowledge. Every path to knowledge of what lies beneath the structure is then blocked by an impenetrable mathematical symbol.
Physical science consists of purely structural knowledge so that we know only the structure of the universe which it describes. This is not a conjecture as to the nature of physical knowledge; it is preciesly what physical knowledge as formulated in present-day theory states itself to be. . .
I'll break in here to point out that Eddington is not only saying but admitting that there are real and important limits in what science deals with for the motive of coming up with knowledge of some things which can then be communicated with fewer ambiguities to other scientists. In that he is recapitulating the development of scientific methods, the measurement of closely observed phenomena in order to come up with desired, though inevitably limited seemingly objective knowledge of them - leaving aside the fact that the act of observation introduces an inevitably subjective activity within that, not to mention those coming into it through measurement - perhaps the uncertainty that modern physics finds comes into their activities through observation and measurement are them coming up against the hard fact that what they do is not totally objective. I would point out that it also means that though they might agree on everything, their agreement on what they observe and measure can never be total no more than the photons that someone is receiving when they look at the landscape he posits will be the same one coming in at the same angle will be to the person standing next to him. Even the closest science is only held to be uniform, one person to another, in so far as they agree to agree on that. That's not a problem if they are careful not to try to use their agreed to abstractions to make stuff up, especially stuff made up out of ideological or other motives and scientists have been doing that from almost the start. Today, especially in the theoretical branches of science, it's totally out of hand, entire branches of science and especially the pseudo-sciences coming up with stuff that is not observed at all, the numbers being more imaginary than the square root of negative one is considered to be.
In fundamental investigations the conception of group-structure appears quite explicitly as the starting point; and nowhere in the subsequent development do we admit material not derived from group-structure.
The fact that structural knowledge can be detached from knowledge of the entities forming the structure gets over the difficulty of understanding how it is possible to conceive a knowledge of anything which is not part of our own minds. So long as the knowledge is confined to assertions of structure, it is not tied down to any particular realm of content. It will be remembered that we have separated the question of the nature of knowledge from the question of assurance of its truth. We are not here considering how it is possible to be assured of the truth of knowledge relating to something outside of our minds; we are occupied with the prior question how it is possible to make any kind of assertions about things outside our minds, which (whether true or false) has a definable meaning.
I would go on to say that here Eddington is being quite unrealistic about what science in reality is because science is only what scientists say it is at any given point in any given area. Sometimes it is as careful and precise and modest in its assertions as Eddington, rightly, says it SHOULD be, in reality it is far less true now than it was even when Eddington gave this lecture in 1938, during which time science was chock full of racist, class-driven (especially in Britain) notions of the application of natural selection to the human population, eugenics. I don't know what Eddington thought of eugenics but it was (and remains) firmly embedded in science. In 1938 scientists who had arrived at a professional agreement on eugenics due to their total belief in the reality of natural selection were looking hopefully on the Nazi's applications of it, Charles Davenport and other American scientists were fully on board and cooperating with the Nazis. Yet the existence of natural selection was known only in the communications of scientists, it has never been observed except in the most ambiguous of self-interested assertion by scientists and, when their claims are rigorously considered, major flaws in their claims arise in what they left out. It is hardly a rigorous example of the scientific method that Eddington claimed for his branch of science along with his modest claims for it.
I think what Eddington also has done here is to bring modern science back to the ambitions of Descartes and those in his generation to give the study of nature the same level of agreed to finality that can be achieved in pure mathematics, the level of mathematics that consists of tight proofs of claims about numbers and objects. I have pointed out any number of times that there is something extremely interesting in the fact that the only things for which human beings have that level of tight proof, universally agreed on - when those who can understand it understand the claims and have tested them out - are for things which are not known to exist anywhere but in the imagination of human beings. But the limits of what can be done in that way were almost instantly ignored in claiming the total potency of the methods of science to make it a totalizing system of ideology, economics, politics, etc. Mathematics is what Thomas Hobbes, the evangelist of violent depravity, constructed his faith from, As John Wallis noted that was "the mathematics from which he takes his courage" but which he understood certainly far less than the Reverend Wallis did. Karl Marx, in his second evaluation of natural selection - after he started having qualms that it was not merely the boon to the promotion of atheism and materialism that made him first recommend it to Engels - noted that natural selection was a reproduction of the British class system, turning Malthus on its head to assert that his economics is inverted and applied to all of nature. Marx correctly noted that natural selection is a recapitulation of Hobbes' "war of all against all." If you want to see how right he was, read Haeckel's The History of Creation to see just how depraved and totalizing a claim it was, Haeckel declared Darwinism to assure the total victory of his own materialist monism, apparently with no objection from Darwin who endorsed that book as science in the highest possible terms.
At the same time Eddington was giving his lectures, physicists and chemists in a number of other countries were about to embark on the application of recent physics to produce atomic bombs based on the same science that Eddington had collaborated in. He would certainly have suspected they were doing that. I am not that close a student of the Quaker, Eddington, to have any idea what he thought of that as he gave his lectures.
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