-number, which is a way of saying that it is not a number at all.
I venture to think that there is an idea implied in Dirac’s treatment which may have great philosophical significance, independently of any question of success in this particular application. The idea is that in digging deeper and deeper into that which lies at the base of physical phenomena we must be prepared to come to entities which, like many things in our conscious experience, are not measurable by numbers in any way; and further it suggests how exact science, that is to say the science of phenomena correlated to measure-numbers, can be founded on such a basis.
One of the greatest changes in physics between the nineteenth century and the present day has been the change in our ideal of scientific explanation. It was the boast of the Victorian physicist that he would not claim to understand a thing until he could make a model of it; and by a model he meant something constructed of levers, geared wheels, squirts, or other appliances familiar to an engineer. Nature in building the universe was supposed to be dependent on just the same kind of resources as any human mechanic; and when the physicist sought an explanation of phenomena his ear was straining to catch the hum of machinery. The man who could make gravitation out of cog-wheels would have been a hero in the Victorian age.
Nowadays we do not encourage the engineer to build the world for us out of his material, but we turn to the mathematician to build it out of his material. Doubtless the mathematician is a loftier being than the engineer, but perhaps even he ought not to be entrusted with the Creation unreservedly. We are dealing in physics with a symbolic world, and we can scarcely avoid employing the mathematician who is the professional wielder of symbols; but he must rise to the full opportunities of the responsible task entrusted to him and not indulge too freely his own bias for symbols with an arithmetical interpretation. If we are to discern controlling laws of Nature not dictated by the mind it would seem necessary to escape as far as possible from the cut-and-dried framework into which the mind is so ready to force everything that it experiences.
I think that in principle Dirac’s method asserts this kind of emancipation. He starts with basal entities inexpressible by numbers or number-systems and his basal laws are symbolic expressions unconnected with arithmetical operations. The fascinating point is that as the development proceeds actual numbers are exuded from the symbols. Thus although
and
individually have no arithmetical interpretation, the combination
