The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method. Henri Poincare

sense tells me), my first finger which just now touched the object A touches at present the object B. I could have used other criteria; for instance another finger or the sense of sight. But the first criterion is sufficient; I know that if it answers yes, all the other criteria will give the same response. I know it by experience, I can not know it a priori. For the same reason I say that touch can not be exercised at a distance; this is another way of enunciating the same experimental fact. And if, on the contrary, I say that sight acts at a distance, it means that the criterion furnished by sight may respond yes while the others reply no.

      And in fact, the object, although moved away, may form its image at the same point of the retina. Sight responds yes, the object has remained at the same point and touch answers no, because my finger which just now touched the object, at present touches it no longer. If experience had shown us that one finger may respond no when the other says yes, we should likewise say that touch acts at a distance.

      In short, for each attitude of my body, my first finger determines a point, and this it is, and this alone, which defines a point of space.

      To each attitude corresponds thus a point; but it often happens that the same point corresponds to several different attitudes (in this case we say our finger has not budged, but the rest of the body has moved). We distinguish, therefore, among the changes of attitude those where the finger does not budge. How are we led thereto? It is because often we notice that in these changes the object which is in contact with the finger remains in contact with it.

      Range, therefore, in the same class all the attitudes obtainable from each other by one of the changes we have thus distinguished. To all the attitudes of the class will correspond the same point of space. Therefore to each class will correspond a point and to each point a class. But one may say that what experience arrives at is not the point, it is this class of changes or, better, the corresponding class of muscular sensations.

      And when we say space has three dimensions, we simply mean that the totality of these classes appears to us with the characteristics of a physical continuum of three dimensions.

      One might be tempted to conclude that it is experience which has taught us how many dimensions space has. But in reality here also our experiences have bearing, not on space, but on our body and its relations with the neighboring objects. Moreover they are excessively crude.

      In our mind pre-existed the latent idea of a certain number of groups—those whose theory Lie has developed. Which group shall we choose, to make of it a sort of standard with which to compare natural phenomena? And, this group chosen, which of its sub-groups shall we take to characterize a point of space? Experience has guided us by showing us which choice best adapts itself to the properties of our body. But its rôle is limited to that.

Ancestral Experience

       Table of Contents

      It has often been said that if individual experience could not create geometry the same is not true of ancestral experience. But what does that mean? Is it meant that we could not experimentally demonstrate Euclid's postulate, but that our ancestors have been able to do it? Not in the least. It is meant that by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world, that it has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species: or in other words the most convenient. This is entirely in conformity with our conclusions; geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

      

PART III

       FORCE

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER VI

       Table of Contents

The Classic Mechanics

       Table of Contents

      The English teach mechanics as an experimental science; on the continent it is always expounded as more or less a deductive and a priori science. The English are right, that goes without saying; but how could the other method have been persisted in so long? Why have the continental savants who have sought to get out of the ruts of their predecessors been usually unable to free themselves completely?

      On the other hand, if the principles of mechanics are only of experimental origin, are they not therefore only approximate and provisional? Might not new experiments some day lead us to modify or even to abandon them?

      Such are the questions which naturally obtrude themselves, and the difficulty of solution comes principally from the fact that the treatises on mechanics do not clearly distinguish between what is experiment, what is mathematical reasoning, what is convention, what is hypothesis.

      That is not all:

      1º There is no absolute space and we can conceive only of relative motions; yet usually the mechanical facts are enunciated as if there were an absolute space to which to refer them.

      2º There is no absolute time; to say two durations are equal is an assertion which has by itself no meaning and which can acquire one only by convention.

      3º Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two durations, but we have not even direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in different places: this I have explained in an article entitled La mesure du temps.[3]

      4º Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.

      Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.

      We might try to enunciate the fundamental laws of mechanics in a language independent of all these conventions; we should thus without doubt get a better idea of what these laws are in themselves; this is what M. Andrade has attempted to do, at least in part, in his Leçons de mécanique physique.

      The enunciation of these laws would become of course much more complicated, because all these conventions have been devised expressly to abridge and simplify this enunciation.

      As for me, save in what concerns absolute space, I shall ignore all these difficulties; not that I fail to appreciate them, far from that; but we have sufficiently examined them in the first two parts of the book.

      I shall therefore admit, provisionally, absolute time and Euclidean geometry.

      The Principle of Inertia.—A body acted on by no force can only move uniformly in a straight line.

      Is this a truth imposed a priori upon the mind? If it were so, how should the Greeks have failed to recognize it? How could they have believed that motion stops when the cause which gave birth to it ceases? Or again that every body if nothing prevents, will move in a circle, the noblest of motions?

      If it is said that the velocity of a body can not change if there is no reason for it to change, could it not be maintained just as well that the position of this body can not change, or that the curvature of its trajectory can not change, if no external cause intervenes to modify them?

      Is the principle of inertia, which is not an a priori truth, therefore an experimental fact? But has any one ever experimented on bodies withdrawn from the