Arthur Eddington and Space-Time

In April 1931, Butts records having read Eddington’s Nature of the Physical World (1928). ¹ Eddington’s book resurfaces in September in Butts’s theorisation as she attempts to find an explanatory framework for the ‘observable fact’ of ‘sudden releases, outbursts of […] energy’. ² She is aware of the ‘dangers […] of relying on a theory of inspiration’, and that ‘necessity ties man to facts’ which leads her to Francis Bacon’s ‘inductive reasoning’. ³ At this point, however, she is tripped up by Immanuel Kant’s ‘statement about the unknowableness of reality’. ⁴ She concludes that none of the above ‘positions’ is adequate for explaining the contemporary situation – which she succinctly annotates as ‘Sullivan’s analysis. Non-Euclidean geometry: relativity mathematics’ – and which takes her ‘round again to Kant’. ⁵ But reality, to Butts, is not unknowable, as Kant believed, merely esoteric. She asserts that: ‘Now known to mathematicians only, & only mathematically, there is a new universal generalization in existence’; this is followed by a parenthetical remark that points to her source material, ‘enlarge Eddington’. ⁶ It is Butts’s belief that ‘we have to discover that conception in human terms’. ⁷ This is clearly a project of great importance to her for she repeats, in more concise terms, that ‘a new generalization or simplification’ is demanded by ‘the new physics’ and will manifest as ‘a new perception’. ⁸ Then, she reiterates of this ‘new simplification’ that: ‘Its symptom is a sense of momentary release from time. And this world has its correspondence in the new physics’. ⁹ Butts is maddeningly vague, but a perusal of The Nature of the Physical World provides some clarification. According to Eddington:

We shall have to sweep away the frames of space before we can see Nature’s plan in its real significance. She herself has paid no attention to them, and they can only obscure the simplicity of her scheme. […] science has many tasks to perform, besides that of apprehending the ultimate plan of structure of the world. But if we do wish to have insight on this latter point, then the first step is to make an escape from the irrelevant space-frames.

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