It
thus supplies the bricks for building the edifice of science, and it says,
'Any building that you want to erect, whatever it may be, must somehow be
constructed with these bricks, and with these alone.' (Just as with the
number-system we must be able to write down any number we wish, so with the
system of mechanics we must be able to write down any proposition of
physics that we wish.)
6.342 And now we can see the relative position of logic and mechanics. (The
net might also consist of more than one kind of mesh: e.g. we could use
both triangles and hexagons.) The possibility of describing a picture like
the one mentioned above with a net of a given form tells us nothing about
the picture. (For that is true of all such pictures.) But what does
characterize the picture is that it can be described completely by a
particular net with a particular size of mesh. Similarly the possibility of
describing the world by means of Newtonian mechanics tells us nothing about
the world: but what does tell us something about it is the precise way in
which it is possible to describe it by these means. We are also told
something about the world by the fact that it can be described more simply
with one system of mechanics than with another.
6.343 Mechanics is an attempt to construct according to a single plan all
the true propositions that we need for the description of the world.
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