Lancelot Law Whyte - Physical Quotes

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Systematic errors of theory can seldom be discovered by direct attack; it is easier to uncover them by studying how and why physical theory took the path it did. That is why a clue to the future can sometimes be found in the past, and this is my reason for studying the history of atomism.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries: the näive assumption of objectively real indivisible pieces of matter, and the sophisticated view that "atom" is merely a name given to abstractions which it is convenient to assume in simplifying complex phenomena. The second perhaps stems from Ockham, who wrote in 1330 of "the fiction of abstract nouns"; from John Troland, who in 1704 interpreted material particles as mental fictions; and from countless others down to Ernst Mach, who after starting as a physical atomist came to regard atoms as "mental artifices" or "economical ways of symbolizing experience."
Both views have advantages...

Lancelot Law Whyte
Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.... This functional priority... may not have been reflected in the history of the development of reason in all human communities.... But it is relevant for the West that the Pythagoreans, with their discrete integers and point patterns, came before Euclid, with his continuous metrical geometry, and that physical atomism as a speculative philosophy preceded by some two thousand years the conception of a continuous physical medium with properties of its own.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Only a certain probability remains of a one-to-one association of any spatial feature now with a similar feature a moment later. It is sheer luck, in a sense, that any physical apparatus stays put, for the laws of quantum mechanics allow it a finite, though small, probability of dispersing while one is not looking, or even while one is.

Lancelot Law Whyte