A Quarter Century in the Natural Sciences

Abstract

SPEAKING KOUGHLY, one may say that the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries formed the period in which physical science learned how to analyze two-variable problems.Dur¬ ing that 300 years, science developed the ex¬ perimental and analytical techniques for han¬ dling problems in which one quantity.say,a gas pressure.dependsprimarily upon a second quantity.say,the volume of the gas.The es¬ sential character of these problems rests in the fact that, at least under a significant range of circumstances, the first quantity depends wholly upon the second quantity, and not upon a large number of other factors.Or in any event, and to be somewhat more precise, the behavior of the first quantity can be described with a use¬ ful degree of accuracy by taking into account only its dependence upon the second quantity, and by neglecting the minor influence of other factors.These two-variable problems are essentially simple in structure, this simplicity resulting largely from the fact that the theories or the experiments need deal with only two quantities, changes in one of which cause changes in the other.The restriction to two variables, and in most cases to simple relations between the vari¬ ables and their first and second derivatives, kept the theoretical system well within the then analytical and computational capacity of mathematics.Correspondingly, there could be

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