Post-Newtonian

THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE--Sir James Jeans--Macmillan ($2.25).

If you are not a mathematician, stick to your muttons. So hints Astronomer Sir James Jeans. "It is true, in a sense somewhat different from that intended by Galileo, that 'Nature's great book is written in mathematical language.' So true is it that no one except a mathematician need ever hope fully to understand those branches of science which try to un ravel universe--the theory fundamental of nature of relativity, the the theory of quanta and the wave-mechanics."

But some mathematicians, like Jeans, are bilingual, can also make themselves understood in fairly plain English. Cautious, Jeans concepts does can not be admit that translated; math says the most you can do is to talk in analogies that must not be taken too literally. "A scientific study of the action of the uni verse appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician. . . . The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."

Like most scientists nowadays, Jeans is not dogmatic about science. "We cannot claim to have discerned more than a very faint glimmer of light at the best . . . our main contention can hardly be that the science of today has a pronouncement to make, perhaps it ought rather to be that science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself."

The Author. Sir James Hopwood Jeans, 53, onetime (1905-09) professor of Applied Mathematics at Princeton, Research Associate of Mt. Wilson Observatory, sitter in many a mathematical chair, holder of many a scientific medal, has written numerous mathematical, astronomical treatises, one other book telling the plain man what science is up to: The Universe Around Us.

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