Readers Elaborate on Fashion and Truth, Fact and Theory

Arthur Eddington, in his book The Philosophy of Physical Science (U. of Michigan Press, 1958), posed the question whether Ernest Rutherford had found or manufactured the atomic nucleus. If he were still alive, I suspect Eddington would be asking a similar question about quarks. The kind of approach to physics that concerns Michael Riordan was alive and well before World War II and was not without its critics then.

Herbert Dingle, philosopher and historian of science, wrote a Nature article entitled “Modern Aristotelianism,” ¹ in which he attacked the ideas of P. A. M. Dirac, Eddington, and E. Arthur Milne, for many of the same reasons as Riordan attacks what he calls Platonic physics. Dingle’s article provoked many responses. ² Omitting the three from the people criticized, the replies were roughly equally divided for and against Dingle’s point of view. Eddington’s belief that dimensionless ratios of the constants of nature could be deduced by pure reason was, of course, part of Dingle’s target. That belief is sometimes thought of as the preoccupation of Eddington’s old age, but in 1937 he was only in his fifties. And the correspondence is evidence that he was not alone in thinking along those lines, even if he did pursue the idea more single-mindedly than others did. Perhaps this alternative kind of science will be ever with us.