ABSTRACT
It is a curious fact that, just when the man in the street has begun to believe thoroughly in science, the man in the laboratory has begun to lose his faith. When I was young, most physicists entertained not the slightest doubt that the laws of physics give us real information about the motions of bodies, and that the physical world does really consist of the sort of entities that appear in the physicists’ equations. The philosophers, it is true, threw doubt upon this view and have done so ever since the time of Berkeley, but since their criticism never attached itself to any point in the detailed procedure of science, it could be ignored by scientists, and was in fact ignored. Nowadays, matters are quite different; the revolutionary ideas of the philosophy of physics have come from the physicists themselves, and are the outcome of careful experiments. The new philosophy of physics is humble and stammering, where the old philosophy was proud and dictatorial. It
is, I suppose, natural that every man should fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of belief in physical laws as best he may, and that he should use for this purpose any odds and ends of unfounded belief which had previously no room to expand. When the robustness of the Catholic faith decayed at the time of the Renaissance, it tended to be replaced by astrology and necromancy, and in like manner we must expect the decay of the scientific faith to lead to a recrudescence of pre-scientific superstitions.
