OBSERVING THE UNIVERSE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 2 January 1931, Page 8

OBSERVING THE UNIVERSE

“Man is a biassed observer of the universe,” says Dr. L. P. Jacks, in a re-/ cently-published book. He suggests that observation is concentrated on things visible and that things audible, tactual, olfactory are unnoted. The grand question may well be, “Is the universe a fortuitous concourse of noises or an ordered symphony of tones?” By way of illustration he takes a sheet of printed music. “The score as read off by the eye on a sheet of paper is abviously a very different thing from the audible music when Kreisler is rendering it on his violin. Nobody in his senses would maintain that the score which we see is identically the same as the music which we hear; the score is a translation into the language of the eye of something that speaks in the language of another 6ense. Our astronomy and our physics, with their space-pictures and diagrams, their formulae, their measurements and their general technique, bear much the same kind of relation to the realities they deal with as the musical scoro printed on a she-et of paper and the theory of music behind it bear to tho actual music as we may hear it at a concert. It translates the continuous flow of the sounds as they go on in time, into fixed characters, which do not flow, but stand immovably there on a [sheet of paper. It translates the dynamic into the static.”-