In order for physics to be useful to other sciences in a theoretical way, other than in the invention of instruments, the science in question must supply to the physicist a description of the object in a physicist’s language. They can say “why does a frog jump?” and the physicist cannot answer. If they tell him what a frog is, that there are so many molecules, there is a nerve here, etc., that is different. If they will tell us, more or less, what the earth or the stars are like, then we can figure it out. In order for physical theory to be of any use, we must know where the atoms are located. In order to understand the chemistry, we must know exactly what atoms are present, for otherwise we cannot analyze it. That is but one limitation, of course.

There is another kind of problem in the sister sciences which does not exist in physics; we might call it, for lack of a better term, the historical question. How did it get that way? If we understand all about biology, we will want to know how all the things which are on the earth got there. There is the theory of evolution, an important part of biology. In geology, we not only want to know how the mountains are forming, but how the entire earth was formed in the beginning, the origin of the solar system, etc. That, of course, leads us to want to know what kind of matter there was in the world. How did the stars evolve? What were the initial conditions? That is the problem of astronomical history. A great deal has been found out about the formation of stars, the formation of elements from which we were made, and even a little about the origin of the universe.

There is no historical question being studied in physics at the present time. We do not have a question, “Here are the laws of physics, how did they get that way?” We do not imagine, at the moment, that the laws of physics are somehow changing with time, that they were different in the past than they are at present. Of course, they may be, and the moment we find they are, the historical question of physics will be wrapped up with the rest of the history of the universe, and then the physicist will be talking about the same problems as astronomers, geologists, and biologists.

Finally, there is a physical problem that is common to many fields, that is very old, and that has not been solved. It is not the problem of finding new fundamental particles, but something left over from a long time ago—over a hundred years. Nobody in physics has really been able to analyze it mathematically satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister sciences. It is the analysis of circulating or turbulent fluids. If we watch the evolution of a star, there comes a point where we can deduce that it is going to start convection, and thereafter we can no longer deduce what should happen. A few million years later the star explodes, but we cannot figure out the reason. We cannot analyze the weather. We do not know the patterns of motions that there should be inside the earth. The simplest form of the problem is to take a pipe that is very long and push water through it at high speed. We ask: to push a given amount of water through that pipe, how much pressure is needed? No one can analyze it from first principles and the properties of water. If the water flows very slowly, or if we use a thick goo like honey, then we can do it nicely. You will find that in your textbook. What we really cannot do is deal with actual, wet water running through a pipe. That is the central problem which we ought to solve some day, and we have not.

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of juice.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough, we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition, we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

مواضيع ذات صلة

The uncertainty principle

A probability distribution

The random walk

Fluctuations

Long times

Short times

Other forms of energy

?What is energy

The Relation of Physics to Psychology

The Relation of Physics to Geology

Physics before 1920

Basic Physics