The Onion Kand the Moebius Strip*

It has been said that “man is the measure of all things.”4 We might add that he is both the producer as well as the product of his environment. As a matter of fact, the difficulty of distinguishing between man and his environment has occupied many current writers in psychology as well as in modern physics, where, for example, Niels Bohr has written, “The present day situation in physics brings forcefully home to us the old adage that we are actors as well as spectators of the grandest drama of existence.”2 Our tools of observation are inextricably linked to our capacity for comprehension, and an explanation, like a model, describes one phenomenon in terms of another more familiar phenomenon. However, “if …there does not exist in the environment of the individual, or among the items of his mental equipment [italics added], some familiar pattern which would correspond to the new situation, then no amount of explaining will explain…. Thus, what may strike us today as a perplexing innovation may be regarded as an excellent model by the next generation.”2

Our generation can truly be said to be struggling with many “perplexing innovations.” Twentieth-century science has introduced a non-Newtonian world which is no longer predicated upon a simple