Religion and Science
5. Religion and Science
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dawned on men of science that there was,
after all, nothing sacrosanct about the
Newtonian entities. After a certain amount of
hesitation, and a few last desperate efforts to
make electricity mechanical, electricity was
added to the list of irreducible elements.
This may seem to have been a simple step to
take, but it was, in reality, of profound
significance. For the Newtonian concepts
were all of a kind that one seemed to
understand intimately. Thus the mass of a
body was the quantity of matter in it. Force
was a notion derived from our experience of
muscular effort. Nevertheless, we supposed
that we knew the nature of what we were
talking about. But in the case of electricity its
nature is precisely what we did not know.
Attempts to represent it in familiar terms —
as a condition of strain in the ether, or what
not — had been given up. All that we knew
about electricity was the way it affected our
measuring
instruments.
The
precise
description of this behaviour gave us the
mathematical specification of electricity and
