Appearances and Realities

The empirical nature of science is contrasted with studying unobservables. There are several types of unobservables in the book: some are scientific theories that haven't or can't be falsified (they are only "comforting weakness" until they are). Another is religious faith (and the host of intangibles accompanying it). As to the former--science, physics in particular--one of the novel's central ironies is the revolutionary turn physics took after Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905 (the time of the novel is 1912). The narrator speaks with today's knowledge--Einstein is correct--while one of the novel's characters, Professor Flowerdew, voices the concerns of the physicists who remain unconvinced. Like the real scientist Mach, he urges his colleagues to regard the atom as a "provisional idea." It isn't until the solar eclipse in 1918 that Einstein's theories are empirically tested (it takes months of lab work before the British Royal Society...