Page:Eddington A. Space Time and Gravitation. 1920.djvu/165

IX] moderate estimates of the mass of the stellar system. Some physicists have predicted a distant future when all energy will be degraded, and the stellar universe will gradually fall together into one mass. Perhaps then these strange conditions will be realised!

The law of gravitation, the laws of mechanics, and the laws of the electromagnetic field have all been summed up in a single Principle of Least Action. For the most part this unification was accomplished before the advent of the relativity theory, and it is only the addition of gravitation to the scheme which is novel. We can see now that if action is something absolute, a configuration giving minimum action is capable of absolute definition; and accordingly we should expect that the laws of the world would be expressible in some such form. The argument is similar to that by which we first identified the natural tracks of particles with the tracks of greatest interval-length. The fact that some such form of law is inevitable, rather discourages us from seeking in it any clue to the structural details of our world.

Action is one of the two terms in pre-relativity physics which survive unmodified in a description of the absolute world. The only other survival is entropy. The coming theory of relativity had cast its shadow before; and physics was already converging to two great generalisations, the principle of least action and the second law of thermodynamics or principle of maximum entropy.

We are about to pass on to recent and more shadowy developments of this subject; and this is an appropriate place to glance back on the chief results that have emerged. The following summary will recall some of the salient points.

1. The order of events in the external world is a four-dimensional order.

2. The observer either intuitively or deliberately constructs a system of meshes (space and time partitions) and locates the events with respect to these.

3. Although it seems to be theoretically possible to describe phenomena without reference to any mesh-system (by a catalogue of coincidences), such a description would be cumbersome. In