CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY
PROF. J. K. ROBERTSON, professor of physics, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada de-livered on May 21, 1945, argues that the notions of continuity and discontinuity as used in physics and other sciences are complementary and not just contradictory. When, in the eighteenth century, physical theory was occupied with the continuous aspect of things it was natural to suppose that the structure of the world must be either continuous or discontinuous, not both. Therefore, since continuity was apparent, there could be no discontinuity anywhere, as Leibniz argued. The chemical atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gases of the nineteenth century brought out the aspect of discontinuity for the first time, and recent sub-atomic physics has gone a stage further. At every stage, however, as Prof. Robertson emphasizes, theory really requires both continuity and discontinuity. This was first realized in the case of light, which in some aspects is continuous, and in others discontinuous ; and, later, electrons were found to play a similar dual part. Granted that the single electron is discrete, indefinite and indeterminate, it should not be inferred that the continuity, definiteness and strict causality found in the behaviour of large numbers of electrons are not equally genuine aspects of the physical world. Prof. Robertson refers briefly to the way in which the biological theory of evolution requires both a continuous long-term aspect and a discontinuous short-term one ; and he ends by asking the question, whether new discoveries in science which look like discontinuities in the historical development of thought are not also in other respects examples of the continuity of thought.
Routledge eBooks•Sep 22, 1994•2 citations