The Electron, As It Leaves

Observation And Theory Get On Best When They Are Mixed Together, Both Helping One Another In The Pursuit Of Truth. It Is A Good Rule Not To Put Overmuch Confidence In A Theory Until It Has Been Confirmed By Observation. I Hope I Shall Not Shock The Experimental Physicists Too Much If I Add That It Is Also A Good Rule Not To Put Overmuch Confidence In The Observational Results That Are Put Forward Until They Have Been Confirmed By Theory.

We Have Found That Where Science Has Progressed The Farthest, The Mind Has But Regained From Nature That Which The Mind Has Put Into Nature. We Have Found A Strange Foot-print On The Shores Of The Unknown. We Have Devised Profound Theories, One After Another, To Account For Its Origin. At Last, We Have Succeeded In Reconstructing The Creature That Made The Foot-print. And Lo! It Is Our Own.

The Helium Which We Handle Must Have Been Put Together At Some Time And Some Place. We Do Not Argue With The Critic Who Urges That The Stars Are Not Hot Enough For This Process; We Tell Him To Go And Find A Hotter Place.

In The Most Modern Theories Of Physics Probability Seems To Have Replaced Aether As "the Nominative Of The Verb 'to Undulate'."

But It Is Necessary To Insist More Strongly Than Usual That What I Am Putting Before You Is A Model-the Bohr Model Atom-because Later I Shall Take You To A Profounder Level Of Representation In Which The Electron Instead Of Being Confined To A Particular Locality Is Distributed In A Sort Of Probability Haze All Over The Atom.