The order and uniformity of nature (which renders predictability possible) remains not only unexplained by measurement, but also unperceived by measurement.[1]
Empiriological physics seeks to generalize its measured facts. E = MC2, for example, is not put forth as a single fact, limited to a single case and having no validity beyond that single fact. Rather, it is put forth as a general principle having universal applicability. Generalizations of measured data are called laws by empiriological physics. But laws involve a problem. For possible grounds are there for extending a fact, measured several times, into a generality? How can we safely conclude that a measurement in one part of the world will hold for a measurement in another part? How do we know that Ohm's law, to use Smith's idea, measured in Paris in 1998 will hold in New York in 1999? For the empiriological physicist extrapolates his facts, and he does so within the framework of nature's uniformity. But this uniformity and ability to extrapolate he cannot explain. Extrapolation and prediction (based on uniformity-i.e. a moving thing will always move in the same way) lie beyond the physicist's instruments and his ability to measure. So, physics must recognize its dependence upon a rational knowledge outside itself (philosophical physics) or fall into a complete skepticism (i.e. that of David Hume).[2]
Measurement does not measure order. It cannot pronounce on the relation between what is measured and what the future will bring. Measurement is only of fact--actually, measurement is really only of quantifiable fact, or quantity. Tendencies, ends, teleology, intelligible structure, are all beyond the scope of measurement. These latter have to do with quality, not quantity. For there is indeed something prior to quantity, namely, essential quality or intelligible structure. Pure quantity is unintelligible. For only an intelligible thing has quantity (even mathematics does not deal in pure quanities. Intelligible matter is the substrate of mathematical entities). Measurement stops at quantity. It leaves the nature of the thing untouched. Measurement can neither perceive nor touch the essence of a thing. But it was Descartes who identified material substance with quantity,[3] and since that time some empiriological physicists have tended to regard quantity as the basis of reality. But Max Planck was not one of them. He clearly understood the secondary character of measurement. He writes:
The ideal aim before the mind of the physicist is to understand the external world of reality. But the means which he uses to attain this end are what are known in physical science as measurements, and these give no direct information about external reality. They are only a register or representation of reactions to physical phenomena. As such they contain no explicit information and have to be interpreted.[4]
Notes
1See Smith. Philosophical Physics, 101. Smith also treats of the secondary character of measurement in his Science and Philosophy, (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1965), 221-25. Cf. Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 184-185.
2See F. F. Centore. Being and Becoming: A Critique of Post-Modernism, Appendix, 229-235.
3"Quantity differes from the extended substance, not in actuality, but only as regards our way of conceiving them; just as number does from what is numbered." Descartes: Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr. by e. Anscombe and P. T. Geach (London: Nelson, 1966), 201. A material thing, according to Descartes, is its quantitative extension. See also F. F. Centore. "Potency, Space, and Time: Three Modern Theories," The New Scholasticism, Vol. LXIII, 4, Autumn, (1989): 436-39.
4"Where
is Science Going?" The New Science (New York, 1959), p. 43.
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Douglas
P. McManaman
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