'Science and Futurology in the To-Day and To-Morrow Series': Matter, Consciousness, Time and Language

Abstract

This essay considers what happens when the To-Day and To-Morrow series' project of futurology — imagining future developments across a range of disciplines — meets the sciences, and their attempt to establish prediction on a scientific basis. It concentrates on L. L. Whyte's volume Archimedes, or the Future of Physics (1927), which makes some striking predictions not only about the convergence of the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, but also about the effect of the new physics to subvert some fundamental scientific axioms about time and the reversibility of experiments. Whyte also considers where post-Relativity physics might lead in terms of the understanding of how consciousness relates to matter. The essay traces parallels with contemporary theories of language and literature, arguing that, like many volumes in the series, Archimedes confronts the problem of how to imagine the future for still-evolving humans is for human language and thought to attempt to understand the post-human.