Matter

Abstract

Matter has always been and will always be one of the main objects of physics. By speaking on “matter as an aspect of the nature of things,” I intend therefore to give you an impression of how laws of nature concerning matter and belonging to physics can be found and how they gradually develop. It is true that these laws and our ideas of reality which they presuppose are getting more and more abstract. But also, for a professional, it is useful to be reminded that behind the technical and mathematical form of the thoughts underlying the laws of nature, there remains always the layer of everyday life with its ordinary language. Science is a systematic refinement of the concepts of everyday life revealing a deeper and, as we shall see, not directly visible reality behind the everyday reality of colored, noisy things. But it should not be forgotten either that this deeper reality would cease to be an object of physics, different from the objects of pure mathematics and pure speculation, if its links with the realities of everyday life were entirely disconnected.

First published in English in Man’s Right to Knowledge, 2nd Series, p. 10 (Columbia University, New York 1954).