J. W. N. Sullivan

John William Navin Sullivan (22 January 1886 – 11 August 1937) was an English popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven.

• If an entity is to be considered as a scientific entity we must be able to say what physical processes would enable us to detect it. This is the basis of Einstein's objection to Newton's absolute space and absolute time. There are no physical operations, according to Einstein, which enable us to distinguish absolute space. As regards absolute time, Newton himself confessed that there may be no natural processes which enable us to measure it. We can never, in the nature of things, say whether we are dealing with absolute time or not. Both these entities, therefore, are described by Einstein as metaphysical, with no real place in science.
  • Three Men Discuss Relativity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1926. p. 6.  (233 pages; 1st edition 1925; text at archive.org)

• Galileo approached the modern scientific outlook more nearly than did Kepler. Like Kepler, he believed that Nature lent itself to mathematical description, but he does not seem to have regarded the fulfillment of mathematical relations as the cause of phenomena. He regarded mathematics rather as the one and only true key that would introduce order and coherence into our sense impressions.
  • The Bases of Modern Science. Ernest Benn Ltd. 1928. p. 10.  (246 pages)

• Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and...there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts...Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is is that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with.
  • Limitations of Science (1933) ch. 6

• Encyclopedic article on J. W. N. Sullivan on Wikipedia