Spencer Heath Archive

Item 40

Penned by Heath in a notebook containing originals for Items 37-40 and 1155.

About 1960

 

Original is in item 37

 

 

     When a layman looks at physics, it is apt that before all else he acknowledge his vast indebtedness to the goodly number of men and women who, from Galileo on, have so far unraveled the erstwhile mysteries of nature as to place it in the hands of men.

     In looking at physics, the first thing for the layman to observe is that physics is not physical at all. It is, rather, a structure of thought having in its processes an objectively verifiable correspondence with and thus being, so far as it has developed, a meta-physical counterpart of the physical world. This layman therefore looks not at the physical but at the metaphysical world of the physicist. And he fixes his attention, comments and asks questions only concerning those a prioris and posterioris, those assumptions and conclusions, which he finds to be of general tenure and acceptance among present-day physicists themselves.

     The primary postulate for the rational mind is that nature can be understood, that the events of the objective natural world have a rational composition and coherency not unlike that of the human mind and thus accessible to it — and that the material body, through its sensitive sensory system is the medium of communication between the metaphysical consciousness and the objective physical world of mankind.

     This sensory experience, when carefully checked, discloses that the natural world (cosmos) is not a “blob” but an orderly composition and organization of parts as units giving rise to numbers and ratios between them, the rationality of numbers. Thus the rationality of the natural world consists in the numerical ratios in which the units of its various organizations are composed. And so if nature is inherently rational — a cosmos and not a meaningless chaos — there are of necessity some fundamental units in related numbers of which all organization is composed.

     The testimony of the senses is that all the varied forms and kinds of events which constitute the phenomena — work, action, energy — of the objective physical world have three and only three unlike distinguishable and measurable elementary or compositional aspects.

     Lacking immediate access to these fundamental and therefore indivisible units, in order to measure each of the three elements or aspects comprising any objective event, there are in use three objectively defined units, namely the gram (or dyne), for mass, centimeter, for motion and second for time

                                          /Breaks off/