Observations placeholder

Arthur Stanley Eddington - The Nature of the Physical World

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room.

It is a complicated business.

In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen
pounds on every square inch of my body.

I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun a fraction of a second too early or too late,  the plank would be miles away.
I must do this whilst hanging ifrom a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies.

Shall I not slip through?

No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence.

Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door.

And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.