1965 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 245

THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE

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coherent concepts, which are adequately related to the features of the object. This conception means that the objectivistic as well as the subjectivistic interpretation of physical knowledge have both to be rejected, as being tendencies to ignore or anyhow to minimize the significance of one of the two poles between which the knowledgerelation is established. Of course, I do not want to make objections against the common statement that physical science, in comparison with other sciences, may be called pre-eminently objective. However, in this statement, the term objective does not mean „independent of the subject", but points to the fact that physical knowledge can be formulated in such intelligible and logical coherent concepts, that it can be transferred in a convincing way from one individual subject to another. In this connection it should be kept in mind, that the object of physical science is not the full reality of the perceptible world but only a special aspect of it. Physical observation is specifically directed to the aspect of constancy and reproduceability, which, already in daily experience, can be distinguished in the stream of ever changing phenomena, and which is the indispensable condition for our cultural life. Whereas the phenomena are different from place to place and changing from day to day and their significance and value is different for each individual human being, common experience already leads to the conviction that there must be some kind of infrastructure of time- and space-independent relations, the validity of which can be recognized by each individual human being. It is the most essential discovery of physics that this permanent infrastructure lies in the quantitative aspect of the phenomena and can be formulated as mathematical relations between „physical quantities". Already in our daily experience we have learned to use qualitative distinctions, referring to differences in character, appearance and action, combined with quantitative distinctions, referring to differences in extension or intensity. We do the same in the physical approach of the phenomena, however in a much more consequent and stringent way. In building up our scheme of qualitative distinctions and in defining the corresponding physical concepts, we put beforehand the condition, that to each quality a numerical value can be attached which expresses its

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