How Percy Williams Bridgman might approach Physics
Let us begin, as we must, by asking the fundamental question: What operations define the concept of "physics"? If we cannot answer this, we are merely playing with words. Physics is not a body of revealed truth, nor a collection of elegant mathematical structures. It is, first and foremost, a set of human activities—specific, concrete operations performed in a laboratory.
I do not start with a theory and then seek to verify it. I start with a measurement. I place a sample in my pressure apparatus; I turn the screw; I read the gauge. That sequence of operations *is* the meaning of the pressure I am studying. Physics, therefore, is the sum total of all such operational procedures and the correlations we discover between them. It is the art of asking nature a question in a language she cannot misunderstand—the language of a pointer reading, a photographic plate, a calibrated resistance.
We must be ruthless in our operational critique. The moment a physicist speaks of "absolute space" or "the wave function of the universe," I demand: Show me the operation by which you measure it. If you cannot, you have left the domain of physics and entered that of metaphysics or poetry. My own work on high pressure taught me that the properties of matter are not fixed essences; they are what we find when we perform the operation of compressing them. There is no "real" volume behind the measured volume.
Thus, physics is not a description of a pre-existing reality. It is a set of rules for predicting the outcomes of our operations. It is what scientists do. And if we remember that, we will never be misled by the comfortable fictions of language.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Percy Williams Bridgman’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.