Hypotheses Are What We Lack The Least.

It Is A Misfortune For A Science To Be Born Too Late When The Means Of Observation Have Become Too Perfect. That Is What Is Happening At This Moment With Respect To Physical Chemistry; The Founders Are Hampered In Their General Grasp By Third And Fourth Decimal Places.

Most Striking At First Is The Appearance Of Sudden Illumination, A Manifest Sign Of Long Unconscious Prior Work.

So Is Not Mathematical Analysis Then Not Just A Vain Game Of The Mind? To The Physicist It Can Only Give A Convenient Language; But Isn't That A Mediocre Service, Which After All We Could Have Done Without; And, It Is Not Even To Be Feared That This Artificial Language Be A Veil, Interposed Between Reality And The Physicist's Eye? Far From That, Without This Language Most Of The Initimate Analogies Of Things Would Forever Have Remained Unknown To Us; And We Would Never Have Had Knowledge Of The Internal Harmony Of The World, Which Is, As We Shall See, The Only True Objective Reality.

Consider Now The Milky Way. Here Also We See An Innumerable Dust, Only The Grains Of This Dust Are No Longer Atoms But Stars; These Grains Also Move With Great Velocities, They Act At A Distance One Upon Another, But This Action Is So Slight At Great Distances That Their Trajectories Are Rectilineal; Nevertheless, From Time To Time, Two Of Them May Come Near Enough Together To Be Deviated From Their Course, Like A Comet That Passed Too Close To Jupiter. In A Word, In The Eyes Of A Giant, To Whom Our Suns Were What Our Atoms Are To Us, The Milky Way Would Only Look Like A Bubble Of Gas.

It May Be Appropriate To Quote A Statement Of Poincare, Who Said (partly In Jest No Doubt) That There Must Be Something Mysterious About The Normal Law Since Mathematicians Think It Is A Law Of Nature Whereas Physicists Are Convinced That It Is A Mathematical Theorem.