The Logic of Modern Physics
The Logic of Modern Physics
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作者：
H. Jeffreys
THE author of the latest discussion of the foundations of physics, Prof. P. W. Bridgman, of Harvard University, is a highly distinguished experimenter in a branch of physics with a peculiarly difficult technique, most of which he has developed himself, while his experimental work has repeatedly been greatly aided by his capacity for doing his own incidental theory. His main attitude in the present work may be called a qualified phenomenalism; that is, apart from the material objects of ordinary observation, he is prepared to admit other concepts, but anxious to keep their number down to a minimum. His test of the validity of a concept is that the old facts co-ordinated must outnumber the new assumptions made. The fundamental analysis in terms of sensations is not attempted, but the view is consistently maintained that a physical magnitude is defined by the operations that measure it and not by any prior considerations. The opening discussion of the meaning of length, in application to atomic and electronic distances on one hand, and stellar distances on the other, where the ordinary methods based on measuring scales are useless for opposite reasons, brings out extremely well the nature of the logical problems involved. On this point of view it is simply meaningless to assert or deny a physical proposition without some means of verifying it experimentally; thus the statement that space on a small scale is Euclidean is meaningless.
