E. A. Milne on James Jeans

“He pointed out that amongst the hindrances to a joint discussion by philosophers and physicists are differences of idiom, if not language. He stated that, whether one understands the meaning of a sentence in Newton or not, one knows at least the meaning of the words, whereas philosophy has no agreed terminology. He was right in pointing out that various old problems in philosophy owed their existence to imperfections of language... he argued that the philosopher thinks and speaks in the subjective, the scientist in objective, terms.”

“He then embarked on a criticism of causality, as expressed by Kant or Bertrand Russel. He says that there is no scientific justification for supposing that the happenings of the world can be divided into detached events, and 'strung in pairs, like a row of dominoes, each being the cause of the event which follows and at the same time the effect of that which precedes.' He warned... at the same time against the other extreme... it was not necessary for all previous events in the history of the world to be considered as separate causes. For one thing, the effects of the earlier of them were already taken into account in the later...”

“Two particular cross-sections, he claimed, were of special interest: first, a cross-section near the beginning of time (the creation of the world); secondly, a cross-section only slightly differing from the present. In the latter case, all those parts of the universe not in our immediate vicinity could be disregarded...”