Excerpt from The Mechanism of Life: In Relation to Modern Physical Theory
It is possible that the title of this book may be misleading to some readers, and so an explanation may, very appropriately, form the subject of this introduction. Well, then, by "the mechanism of life" is meant nothing more than the results of a scientific analysis of the activities of living animals. First, we must define what is meant by "scientific method," and this is not at all difficult now that Einstein, Eddington, and the other relativists, have persuaded us to think about what we do when we investigate something "scientifically."
What we do, in that case, is to observe space-time coincidences in a four-dimensional manifold - that is really and actually our procedure, though it seems rather dreadful! It would be very inconvenient, also, to sustain oneself in this plane all the while, and so we proceed to let ourselves down to earth, so to speak. From the space coincidences that we observe (for instance, the coincidences of the top of a column of mercury in a barometer tube with certain marks on the adjoining scale) we infer space measurements, and from the coincidences of the hands of a clock with marks on the dial we infer time measurements. That simplifies the method a good deal.
Then it is only the relations between series of space-time measurements that form the data of science (its differentia] equations), but that, again, is very trying, and so we assume that there are things in nature. These things are separated from each other, at the same instant of time, by intervals of space, while they are separated from each other, in the same space, by intervals of time. Thus we have something to lean up against and sustain ourselves in this rather difficult process of apprehending nature. The things that we regard as existing apart from each other in space and time are electrons. But just yet that is rather inconvenient, and so we regard our natural things as atoms and molecules in motion in an arbitrary three dimensional space and an arbitrary one-dimensional time.
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