BY W. H. MCCREA, F. R. S. 'THE only justification for our concepts
and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex
of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. ' So
Einstein writes on page 2 of this book. Most present-day physicists
would agree, and many before Einstein must have held the same
opinion. Einstein, however, put the opinion into practice to better
purpose than any physicist before him. And for Einstein it
evidently meant what it means for most of us today: a theory is the
construction of a theoretical model of the world of physics; all
the mathematical discussion applies to the model; the model
embodies the 'system of concepts', and it serves 'to represent the
complex of our experiences' if the experience of the theoretical
observer in the theoretical model can be put into satisfactory
correspondence with the experi- ence of the actual observer in the
actual physical world. Classical mechanics and classical
electromagnetism pro- vide models that are good representations of
two sets of actual experiences. As Einstein was the first fully to
appreciate, however, it is not possible to combine these into a
single self-consistent model. The construction of the simplest
possible self-consistent model is the achieve- ment of Einstein's
theory of special relativity. The theory is found, in particular,
to give a satisfactory representation of the electromagnetic
interaction between charged particles through its use of the
concept of the electromagnetic field.
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