Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1698

Taping by Mrs. Frances Norton Manning at her home, 312 Halesworth Street, Santa Ana, California, of conversation with Jim Backman, a physics student at Pomona College and son of Mr. and Mrs. Bill Backman, of Santa Ana, California

February 24, 1962

/Mrs. Manning opens the discussion as follows: “Mr. Heath, according to Mr. Boggs, you have ideas on physics, as well as ideas on a whole lot of other things, and I know you have been wanting to talk to some students in physics and some faculty in physics. John Boggs said that you have a whole book in your system that you should be getting out, that you have some absolutely new approaches to the subject. What about? Is he overestimating it?”/

I think physics should have high priority in all the sciences, possibly the highest priority, because it deals with the simplest events or phenomena that we experience in our bodily lives. /Some arguing ensued here with Mrs. Manning, Heath wanting to get rid of the recording apparatus/ I’ve done a lot of talking with Jim; I wanted to ask you, Jim, if you feel as though you had any questions you wanted to ask me about the things I’ve said about physics, so that we can make that the framework … you wondered what I meant by things, and …

/“Why don’t we start out by you just giving your basic ideas on why it is important, or any ideas you have, and I’ll try to ask questions on that.”/

Presuming you wouldn’t want to begin with a question. You don’t have one framed in your mind, perhaps?

/“Not right now.”/

Well all right, let’s go ahead.

 /Interrupted here by some minutes of arguing with Mrs. Manning about not recording this, ending by his words, “All right, let it go.”/

I am not a professionally qualified physicist, but I’ve done considerable reading in that field, as well as in other fields of the sciences, for a good many years. So I have no authority to speak as a physicist. But from the over-all view that I have gathered of this science, as well as some others, I do feel inclined to predict something of the direction and manner in which the further development of the science is likely to go. I think in the first place, that physicists are going to make the subject matter of their science not particles or structures, as they have done mainly in the past, and not abstract conceptions, like velocity, force, time, and those things. But they are going to gradually, and I hope rapidly, they are going to discover that the subject-matter of physical science is happenings, or events, or what they call in nearly all of their books, phenomena — phenomena being the general term for the word event, which occurs on almost every third or fourth page in almost every book that’s ever been written on physics, that is, this term, event, or phenomena. But I’ve never been able to find anywhere an event, or events in general, either of them, being taken as the subject-matter for physical investigation. I believe that in the near future, physicists will largely abandon the conception of mass, or particles, or structures, or bodies, objects, as the subject-matter of their investigation, and will come to examine happenings, or events, or as I have said, phenomena — all of those things which act upon or which react with our physical senses. I think we are going to find out that these physical senses are finally reducible to three, a sense that responds to the three basic elements of an event, or of action, a senses that respond in a way that give us perceptions of what is happening about us. /Sentence? check original?/ This sensory response is what I believe gives the title to the science, physics. It is not metaphysics; it is not subjectivism; it is whatever it is that goes on in the world inhabited by our bodies. In this sense, physics is the correlate of metaphysics — that which we have learned to understand, to build images in our minds corresponding with the events that transpire outside of our minds in connection with our bodies. We are going to find it very fruitful to examine these, and we will find that our senses respond to three things which are considered the elements of physical science — the elements of action. Action seems to be taken, and it is an appropriate term, to apply to whatever happens. I should have included it when I spoke of phenomena. Whatever happens is action. An action consists in three elements, or aspects, which we measure by the gram, the centimeter and the second. And when we find these three aspects of an event combined, we have the event. When we consider them separately, we have the breakdown, or analysis, of the event. It so happens that the three aspects, or elements, of an event are measurable in units. So science has devised three basic units called the fundamental units of the physical science. We have the unit we call the gram; we have the unit we call the centimeter; and the third unit, we call the second. We call these the units of mass; of motion, or velocity; and time. So if we examine anything that impinges upon our senses in those three aspects, we have a quantitative analysis — so many units of mass, force, inertia, or whatever it is that we measure by the gram, so many units of that combined with a certain number of units of motion, which we call centimeters, or motion, sometimes length, and so many units of durational time, elapsed time, in so many seconds. Now when physics, I believe, I do believe that in perhaps the near future, physics will be put upon the basis of measuring and thereby now analyzing what happens in the physical world. We are so constructed that we have animal bodies that react as other animal bodies do, perceive things, and perceive events, but never perceive anything but a wholly integrated event, never perceive mass without motion, never perceive motion without time, without … so much motion per unit of time, which we call velocity, and never proceed without some period of duration of this velocity. So with that basis, we can take the three numbers that represent those aspects of an event, and we can manipulate them mathematically. We discover the ratios between these observed and experienced elements constituting events, and by manipulating them rationally, we can discover other relationships. We can conceive of other kinds of events having the same basic rationale, and then we can construct hypothetical events on the basis of rationalizing the experienced events. When we do that, and then look back into the world of physical experience and verify, by sensory experience, whether or not such events can happen. And if the verification is sustained, we now have a natural law, by which we can create events in our minds, and then upon verifying them in our sensory experience, we can then bring those events to pass. We know what the requirements are /that/ we should combine so many units of mass, so many units of motion, so many units of time, and the ratio between the first two will determine the quality of the event — in what proportion the mass and the motion, or the mass and the velocity are combined. And then we can multiply that by the number of seconds through which it continues — durational time — and that will give us the magnitude of the event, or the action, that we have been analyzing.

This is my prediction, based on the data that is given us in all the standard works on the subject. I have taken the elements of events separately in order to bring the abstract into the concrete world. Because a single measurement is abstract; you can’t experience it alone. You can’t experience mass alone, because it always is associated with motion. We can’t experience motion alone, because it’s always correlated with time. So we have the three aspects of an event, the mass aspect, a velocity aspect, and then the time aspect. The velocity is how frequently a certain amount of motion occurs during one unit of time. The durational aspect is how many units of time are contained within a given event, in other words, how long does it, last. These two aspects of motion are reciprocal, velocity being the number of motion units within a time unit, and the durational aspect being the number of motion units contained within a single time unit.

I think that will put physics on a much more realistic basis. It will I think eventually eliminate static conceptions. Since physics has to do with bodily senses, and bodily senses do not respond to anything that is not an event, cannot respond to anything that is static, or that contains any less than the three necessary ingredients that constitute an event, then so long as we do not correlate the three, or integrate, the three, we are dealing in the extra-physical, or meta-physical world, a world which we can inhabit very fully by the gift of imagination, which is characteristic of the mind. The body has sensation. It has sensation of mass, sensation of motion, and sensation of rhythm, or time. But it doesn’t have any experience of any of those separately, either any one or combined with any two. Those rest in the world of imagination, and this world is one in which there are no limitations as to mass, motion or time. Imagination has full range, through all magnitudes. One magnitude is little more difficult to conceive than another. A million miles is just as easy to think about as one mile is — but not quite as easy to walk, let us say.

So I predict that physics is going to gravitate soon or late, and I hope soon, into the examination of events, leaving the consideration of things that do not happen to the body, to the extra-physical or metaphysical world — a very proper and often very beautiful world to examine, but made up entirely of mental pictures which cannot be experienced in bodily experience. However, there is an exception to that. When we can build a metaphysical picture that corresponds, can be verified, in physical phenomena, bodily experience, then we accept it as a law of nature. We might perhaps even define a law of nature as a mode of happening which has been duplicated in the imagination. Then the imagination can turn around and impose its pictures upon the physical world. That gives us scientific technology.

 

In what I have said, I have eliminated a great deal that is contained in standard books on physics. And I sometimes think that one way of investigation, perhaps a very desirable one, is by elimination — taking out the surplus conceptions which are not necessary. Excess baggage, you might call it. In some fields, that has been done a great deal. It has been done quite a good deal in the various theologies, the various works on metaphysics. But if we are going to talk about physics, we must base it on something that is physical. So our a-prioris, and our premises, our basic, fundamental conceptions must be physical a priori, physical premises. Otherwise, whatever we deduce from our premises cannot be verifiable in the physical world, or of the senses. As physical science has come down to us from antiquity, it has been closely related to geometry, and geometry as we all know is based on premises which are not capable of being experienced, like the point and the line. We can think about them, but we can’t experience them except as we take them out of their static nature and give them the attributes’ of mass, or force, or inertia, combined with the perception of motion and the perception of time. Motion, we can perceive it in our bodies, in our sensory system, and time of course is the rhythm of motion. We have it in our heartbeats and other physiological phenomena, and modern physics has taught us also that motion, like everything else, is discontinuous, made up of jerks, so to speak, which is a well-known characteristic of the Planckian unit that always repeats itself, and that repetition of any event, like a wave or a cycle, that repetition is called frequency. But when the repetition is very very slow, so that many units of time elapse while these are occurring, then we call it duration. Frequency is the converse of duration. When the period of the wave is very short, the frequency is high. When the period of the wave is very, very very long, the frequency of the cycle, or wave, is very low.

What I have said so far has been based exclusively on the conception of the Planckian unit, the so-called building block of the universe. This unit is commonly defined as an exceedingly small fraction of an erg second. And so defined, we must deduce from that definition that it has all of the characteristics of the larger units of which it is a fraction — a very small fraction. So there can be as many compositions contained within the Planckian unit as there are different compositions contained within the erg second, simply because the one is a tiny fraction of the other, the difference between the two being only quantitative and not a qualitative difference — just as within the erg-second there are many different compositions, a large mass acting with a low velocity, or a very small mass acting with a very high velocity, equals the same unit, whether it be the Planckian or the larger unit from which the Planckian unit is by division derived. We are getting into a new approach, a new way of examining events, when we do this. I think that way is going to grow. I think we’re going to discover, too, that there are not only ____________________________________ arbitrary, conventional units that we have made — the gram, the centimeter and the second — but that there /there are?/fundamental units in nature, less than which will not unite with their other two to constitute an event, because if there are units so small that they cannot constitute an event, then they can’t be turned into numbers; they can’t be used as the basis of numbers in order to have ratios between the numbers. Because in an erg second, and also in the quantum, the mass element is so many units per unit of motion, and the motion element is so many units of motion per unit of time — which we call velocity. But through how many units of time this extends, how long it endures, is not ratio times the absolute. It doesn’t reverse itself. It just keeps on going. It only measures the quantity of repetition, quantity of the event, or cycle, by how many times it repeats. So whenever we want to find out the total amount of energy or action, we take the rate — how much of it transpires in one unit of time — and then multiply that by the total number of units of time through which it extends or endures, and that gives the quality of the energy or, more properly, the action.

/More argument about shutting off the recorder/

 

/“In physics, we study reaction .. ”/

 

Between what?

/“Between anything — but we study it in terms of the particle and the distances. Do you mean that instead of studying the electron, we should study the reactions between two electrons?”/

An electron, when we take the mass of it, that’s one aspect of it as an event. All things, as I see it, are going to be considered as events. Whatever we study is going to be an event — a cycle, or an event — and then we are going to find that it has these three aspects. The electron has the three aspects; it has a mass, it has a velocity, and it continues to move through a certain period of time. And that makes the entire action of the event. It is common to say energy, for action, when we mean the rate of action. We can examine in our minds these three aspects of an electron or any other event; we cannot experience them except as they are integrated in a whole event. Like a wave, or Planck’s quantum, a certain unit of action, a certain unit of happening. Now you suggest that we study electrons in terms sometimes of their mass? And other times of their velocities? And other times on how long they continue to move during a certain period or cycle, or wave?

/Assent/

And that’s what we do. But we’re not examining an electron as such; we’re examining a whole event. We don’t seem to recognize that. That reduces all phenomena to waves, or cycles, in which these three elements of reality join up to constitute events. Some events have a very high frequency, like electro-magnetic waves. Some are very high frequencies, some are very low frequency. When the frequency gets very low, our senses respond much more vigorously to it, because a body, overlooking the fact that it had moved and that it had to continue to move … it had to move at some velocity and that velocity had to be maintained for some time. In any examination that we make, I think we should think rather that we need to examine the whole event, rather than to say that the event is changed by any act of our examination, which is the current conception, as you know.

/“Yes, it is.”/

 

There must be something you must want to contradict me or interrogate me, or something.

/“But if we study anything, then we have to study it over a period of time. There has to be a time factor in it. So if we study an electron, for instance, it will go over a certain range of space. But if we say two different electrons, it will be different events, and they will not be identical, in this conception. So if everything is different every time you study an electron, it is something different, so how can you build up a science out of that? If we study just the body, just the mass, it’s always the same. The fact that it’s the same has enabled us to build up a science, to find out some defin­ite quantities about it. But the event, if it happens over a period of time, it seems like it would not have this regularity.”/

If we have examined it and find it has certain mass today and the same mass tomorrow, or any time, and then we think we are examining the same electron, perhaps we are; but remember that we can’t examine an electron if we eliminate motion, if we eliminate time, because they are never dissociated. That’s a characteristic of an electron to have these three aspects. And when you examine any one of those aspects, or any two without the third, you are entertaining conceptions that your body doesn’t respond to — ultra — or extra-physical conception. If your mass is considered apart from the motion that it has, and apart from the time which it occupies or endures, then you’re considering something in which your body cannot participate. You can conceive these things separately, but you can’t experience them except in integrated, unitary events, one of which is Planck’s quantum — one of which, I say, in terms of magnitude, because it has been ascertained to have a constant magnitude, the same as an erg second has a constant magnitude. But it does not have a constant composition. Like the erg-second, it can be a large mass element and a low velocity element in it, or conversely, a very small mass element, and a very high velocity. And if it is ascertained, which I predict it will be, that there are fundamental units in nature — units of mass, motion and time — then when we have an event in which the mass element is at its absolute limit, then the motion element must be at its absolute maximum — because otherwise, you would change the magnitude of the event. So if all quantum events are of one single over-all magnitude, they can nevertheless be of highly variant composition, because the mass element can be at its very least, in which case the velocity element has to be at its highest, or, con­versely, the velocity element can be at its lowest, and the mass element correspondingly at its highest — which would be represented by the closest we can get to an absolute motionless event, what we call the absolute zero. So the zero velocity is the correlate to the velocity of light, which can be predicated upon the fact that the mass element being at its lowest, the particle element being at its minimum, then the motion element has to be at its maximum. And so on, we can find out the limits between which various phenomena occur in a scale of electro-magnetic waves, energy waves, action waves, which runs all the way from zero to infinity, so far as the mind is concerned, but which we bodily occupy only a sort of octave between. By further and further experience and evolution of our bodies, we can extend the faculties of our bodies, like the sight, and the hearing, and touch and all those things, and towards the zero on the one hand, and towards the infinity on the other hand. That is to say, we can experience tinier and tinier events towards the zero, and we can experience larger and larger events towards infinity, always confined between those two extremes.

/“So then if we study an electron, we study it as a certain number of quanta of action ..”/

We are told that an electron doesn’t manifest itself except in packets, or trains — that a light wave, alone, is not sufficient to cause an electron to jump out of a metal surface, impact of a wave alone; it requires a train of waves, or a chain of waves, a packet of waves, which of course makes it necessary that the quantum unit possess less action than any light wave. Otherwise, it wouldn’t require a whole series, or train, of these waves to put out the action that is embodied in the electron.

This presentation that I’m giving is rather very, very unorthodox, and rather, not very concisely given; so I can’t wonder that it would seem a little bit confused to you.

/“Yes, it does to a certain extent. There’s one point I’m not quite clear on the practical aspect I’m trying to get. We do study something that…we don’t state mass, or the time involved, but we study the action involved. But we could study an electron and a light wave, and they both have the same amount of action. We have to have something to differentiate between this.”/

Well, on my general hypothesis, whatever you take to study, be it an electron or a wave, or a cosmic cataclysm, or a body falling, exhibiting a certain amount of work, or action, that they are all capable of analysis in these three aspects, and they are all intermingling one with another under the Newtonian principle that all …

 

/tape ran out here, conversation continues on second tape. Mrs. Manning opens the discussion as follows:/

 

/“Jim, what were the questions that you had in mind that … ?”/

Yes, I’d be glad to hear some of his reaction to what I’m trying to say.

 

/“The philosophy of it sounds interesting, assuming that this Planckian unit is a more basic quantity than length, time or mass, and is the only thing that we actually experience. But I’m still not clear on how we can study action rather than individual units of mass, and length and time, and how this would improve matter in any way.”/

I would suggest that the only approach we can have to the physical world is through events, and that we have to consider any part of that event as mere conception, mere imagination, because our minds can’t entertain things that can’t happen to our bodies. Abstractions, we call them. But our bodies can’t entertain abstractions. So if we wish to find out about our bodily experiences, or those events which our body can perceive, participate in, then I’m ready to grant that all action is also reaction — that events are always colliding, so to speak, and intermingling, and cross-connecting, reforming, reshaping themselves as to their composition. The event that has a large force acting through a short distance, it will mingle more or less with another event that has a small force acting through a long distance. It’s a different composition. And then when the time element is changed, it changes the composition ______________________. Since time is always present, I’d better present it in this way. The two aspects of an event that give it its character are the magnitude of the mass, or force, and the velocity with which it moves. And if the mass or force is very large, and the velocity is small, that’s one composition. If the particle or mass is very small and the velocity is high, that’s another composition within the event. But neither of these changes of proportion, neither of these ratio changes, affects the over-all magnitude of the event. All that ever changes the over-all magnitude is a change in the third element, the durational element — how many units of time it endures or comprises. So I’m thinking that if we want to understand events, we should understand them not quantitatively alone, but in the simpler /subtler?/ quantitative way: What’s the quantity of force or mass in relation to the velocity — in relation to the quantity of motion per unit of time? When we learn the composition of events, then we can recombine them and create events through having gained the rationale.

I don’t see how I’ve answered your question, because I’m afraid I’ve lost the question in the answer. Could you rephrase it?

 

/“Well, you say we have to study the composition of events. But the composition of events are just mass, velocity and time. And what the ordinary physicist normally does is study this mass, velocity and time, anyway. So how would studying the composition of events differ any from just doing what the normal physicist usually does?”/

Normal physics usually refers a great deal to abstractions, apart from experiences. It refers to mass as though it were something that could exist, instead of act. It refers to velocity as though it were something in itself, perhaps something fundamental in itself, instead of being ratio between motion units and a time unit. We move ourselves out of the world of experience when we study, mathematically and otherwise, anything less than the whole event, and then we come to conclusions that are not able to be verified in experience because they were derived from a-prioris that were not complete, /that/ were not events. So if we start with the a-prioris, not a complete event, and we derive ever so much by deduction from that, we can’t translate the new principle we have deduced — the new analysis that we have hypothetically deduced — back into the physical world, because it didn’t start with a complete a priori, as an event. We begin with abstractions less than the whole event, and then however much we manipulate, and calculate, and however much we conceive, whatever conclusion we draw can’t transcend the premises with which we began. And so we can’t verify the supposed new discovery, new natural law; we can’t verify it in the world of events unless it was drawn from the world of events. Any verification we would have would be a sort of a verification that satisfies the mind, but couldn’t satisfy the body because it couldn’t have any effect on the body. The body’s tuned to complete events, the smallest of which we are now taking to be the Planckian unit — the smallest physical event to which the body is tuned. Some have suggested that there could not exist in nature any smaller unit, but that may be just another way of saying that any smaller unit doesn’t register in our constitution — that we’re transparent to any smaller event and opaque only to the quantum or multiples of the quantum. We can perceive them, while we can conceive any magnitude; we can conceive fractions of a quantum and so on, but we can’t verify that conception in an actual event because the body isn’t tuned to anything that small — that perhaps being why it requires a whole train of waves to come up to a single quantum. It would register then in a physical event that our bodies receive.

 

My answers are getting awfully long.

 

/“They’re very complete.”/

 

Do you really think they make any sense?

 

/“Yes, I begin to see your ideas.”/

I think an older physicist … then you must be pretty young, and pretty naive, to hear such unheard-of things before you — if that’s what they are.

/“Well they still seem to be rather philosophical, and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly how you could apply these, or what differences it would make, because our physics is set up on the basis … the way it is set up now, its knowledge is something where we can predict what will happen. And we have found out that we can, to a certain extent, predict this. Now would you say that if we can study the actions, that we’ll be able to increase this amount of prediction? We’ll be able actually to do what we’re trying to do better?”/

 

Well first, I was thinking of understanding what happens, so we can have mental pictures of it, conceptions that are correct — which are verifiable in experience. And insofar as they are correct, they are so verifiable, then that makes them predictions. When we come to what we think is an understanding of an event, and then we find that we can verify it in experience, then, the understanding was the prediction of the experience. And that of course is technology. But if we develop conceptions that are not derived from experience, not derived from whole events that can register on our sensory systems, then the conclusions that we draw are likely to be incorrect, or at least not verifiable, because they are built upon premises that were not themselves physical, actual, eventual.

/“But they can to a certain extent accurately predict what will happen.”/

We do now. Yes.

 

/“So there’s some use in it.”/

 

Yes. But we must not insist that, even though we can to some extent predict events, that we have the right understanding about it. Because history tells us the Ptolemaic system was used for navigation, and predicted eclipses and things of that kind. Perhaps not with the same accuracy that we later did, but we may be predicting things now, in some fields of investigation, with what we think is sufficient accuracy, although the rationale may be entirely different — as the rationale of the Ptolemaic system was different from what it was imagined to be at that time. We mustn’t rely too much upon approximate verification. I think we’ll learn more about the processes — processes being events — of the physical world when we treat them analytically. If we take mass, motion and time together, as an event, or if we find it combined that’s a synthesis. It doesn’t tell us anything separately. Mass never acts separately without motion, and motion never acts separately without time, and mass and motion together, which we call work, never acts separately without time. By excluding the necessary third element, we’re dealing in the conceptual world, and not in the verifiable world. So when we lay down principles that disregard any one of the three constituent elements, we’re very likely laying down some principle that can’t be verified, because the verification has to be in the three-dimensional world (and I don’t mean geometrical dimensions) in the three dimensions that constitute the event. If it’s not so verifiable, then it can’t be used as a technological instrument. So if we begin to reason about physical measurements, or reactions of our bodies to physical events, and leave out one of the ingredients, we can’t verify it, no matter how accurately we derive mathematically new hypothetical events. We can’t verify them if they’re built upon only two of the necessary elements. We can’t verify the conclusions in three elements. And unless we do verify them in the three elements, we can’t say that we’ve verified them in human experience, because every item of experience involves an event, and every event has the three aspects which I have spoken of so many times.

Does that integrate at all with your thought? Or does it run off on a tangent?

/“No, it’s coming a lot closer to it. /pause/ In fact I’ve run out of questions.”/

Sometimes it’s well to pause and reflect. These machines don’t seem to take account of that. But if we were more accustomed to them, when we wanted to reflect, we could knock it off, and when we begin speaking, resume it. Now we’re just using up tape, aren’t we.

/Mrs. Manning: “No, it can be used over and over.”/

Does this seem highly revolutionary to you? Well I would suggest that sixty years ago, anyone who presumed to think that an atom could be analyzed into three parts, and could be unequally composed of those parts, would be thought to be talking out of his mind. But nevertheless, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable, would it?

/“No.”/

Today, to think that the Planckian unit, symbolized by h, could within its constant magnitude have a very highly various composition — that it could have ingredients at all . . .  It is thought to be a self-contained unit, isn’t it? Just as atoms were thought to be self-contained units sixty years ago. And yet we know that the atom is not a self-contained, indivisible unit, unanalyzable. We are often calling the Planckian unit the “atom of action,” meaning that it has the same impossibility of being analyzed, or of being found to have any constituents, as we thought of the atom, a good while ago. Absurd and ridiculous it may seem, nevertheless, if we think about it, even the fact that it is a tiny fraction of an erg-second, and we know an erg-second has three elements, so if we think of the Planckian unit as having always the same over-all magnitude, but a reproportioning of the magnitudes, the first two magnitudes, gives us a high variety, so far as it comes into our experience.

/“You mentioned, in the erg-second and the Planckian unit, that you can change the first two components, leaving time the same, and still have the same unit ..”/

The same over-all unit.

 

/“Why wouldn’t it be possible to change all three of them? Why is time any more basic than the other two?”/

 

Well, when we are analyzing different objects, or events, and we start out with different magnitudes, we’d have to make correction for the difference in magnitude, if we are analyzing the event. So we take events of equal magnitude so that we can eliminate the quantitative aspect. We confine ourselves to what we might call necessarily the qualitative aspect, the compositional aspect. It isn’t how big an event is that determines its quality; its composition determines that. And once its composition is determined, then its magnitude depends upon that third factor — how many times it repeats itself.

I can’t see how I’ve answered your question, now.

 

/“Well, partly. But still you could say, that the composition was determined by, say, time and mass, and that the length determined the amount…”/

 

Of course, length isn’t anything that happens to your body.

/“Or the velocity or whatever your term is.”/

… It’s an abstraction. Motion does happen to your body. And the discontinuity of motion is perceived in your body. Such a thing as length is not. Time is experienced in your body in the interruptedness that you feel — the discontinuity. And mass, we perceive mass through its effect upon the masses of our bodies — collision or otherwise. The sense of touch is the mass sense. By applying our gram, centimeter and second to things that happen to the body only, we are keeping ourselves in the realm of physical things. If we admit in there something that the body can’t respond to, to which the body is null, then we have departed out of the world of physical experience, out of the world of verifiable understandings — physically verifiable. It seems to me that if we try to analyze any event, and we admit into our analysis any element (which isn’t there, which the body can’t experience, which is an abstraction,) and which is not found except as an abstraction, then we are vitiating our discovery, or our conclusions. If, for example, a falling body falls from a certain level to another — so many grams move so many centimeters at so many centimeters per second and continue doing it for a certain number of seconds — there is no such thing as length in that. Only motion. And if we bring length into the picture without having found it in the event to start with, then we are drawing conclusions, we are drawing down deductions, containing an alien element that wasn’t in our a priori.

 

/“Well what I was getting at, you see, time is the factor that determines the amount, while mass and velocity determine its composition. Couldn’t you just as easily say that velocity and time determine composition while mass determines the amount?”/

No, for this reason. The effect that any event has on us physically is not an abstraction. It’s an experience. It’s a fact. And if we have an experience, if our body does react to something, it doesn’t react to length. It does react to force, mass, weight, inertia. And it does react to motion. But if you put length to it, your body it doesn’t react. You’ve got to have the motion. If you take mass and length, your body doesn’t answer to that. But /if you/ take mass and motion, with the time element included, the body does react. I’m trying to eliminate from the premises that which is not there . . . include (I would rather say) including in the premises what is essential to an event that we can experience. If I include in my premises length, for instance, then I’ll have it somehow in my conclusion, and it will be excess material there. It will vitiate the thing, because I can’t find length in a bodily experience — I mean length as length; I don’t mean length taken as motion. But we have to have motion. If we take a yardstick and measure anything, we have to move from one end of it to the other to get the length. We can’t experience length in the abstract. When length comes into experience, it takes the form of motion. I think that’s a fair way to put it, isn’t it? I’ll repeat that. When length comes into experience, it must take and does take the form of motion. It’s excess conceptions that confuse us a great deal. If we have two different events, say the first one is one unit, and the second one is two units. Now the first one is composed of . . .

/“. . .one Planckian unit?”/

Yes. One Planckian unit.

One Planckian unit, and two Planckian units.

“The first one is composed of a certain mass, a certain velocity, and a certain time. The second one is composed of the same time, the same velocity, but twice the mass. Now, wouldn’t we say that the second one has a greater magnitude?”

That would be a greater over-all value, unless you reduce…

Yes, it has a greater magnitude, because of the greater mass.

/“Well the whole event is a product of the three, isn’t it?”/

Yes.

It would be so much action.

/“Now what you said before, was that the magnitude of the event will be determined by the time.”/

Yes.

/“But here the magnitude is determined by the mass; we can increase the magnitude by increasing the mass.”/

When you increase the mass, you must also increase the velocity, because mass doesn’t occur without velocity.

 

“You mean you can’t leave the velocity the same?”

No. Because the velocity that you have in the first place is incident to the mass. Now when you introduce another unit of mass, you introduce another unit of velocity, the same as you did the first time. It was a paradox in the theory that mass disappears with velocity. We have a theory like that. What do they call it? The … somebody’s contraction? Fitzgerald contraction?

/“Well, the length /?/ in one direction becomes smaller, and finally becomes zero at the speed of light. But mass itself increases with velocity.”/

Now when we increase velocity up to the speed of light, we either have to import some additional action, or we have to transform the action that we already have. Now if we transform the action we already have, then the velocity will have to go down as the mass goes up, and the velocity will have to go up as the mass goes down. Of course if we import additional velocity, we are importing . . . from the outside, increasing the size of our unit, our Planckian unit . . . we can’t increase its size without bringing in all three of the elements. Because these are indivisible, these Planckian units are. They are the fundamental units of the universe, they tell us, and it’s been well verified in experience. So if confine ourselves, say, to a single quantum event, just one unit, the more we have of one element, the less we’ll have of the other. So that if we have more particle, we’ll have less velocity, and if we have less particle, we’ll have more velocity. By the time we get to the least particle, we’ll have the most velocity — if there be a least. The thought that mass is lost when you increase velocity, supposes you could increase velocity without increasing mass. A certain quantity of mass has attached to it a certain quantity of motion, and if you take on more mass . . . mass always has motion with it; you can’t get rid of the motion so when you take on more mass, you’re taking on more motion, and when you eliminate mass, you’re eliminating motion. Acting within the single quantum, it reverses the common conception.

I can’t expect you to see all around these suggestions of mine. I’m only offering this for something for you to think about, at your leisure — that our confusions and disagreements in physics today, and there seems to be a lot of it, to me it seems to spring from the fact that we include in our premises static, geometrical conceptions, to which the body doesn’t respond at all. So we can’t verify conclusions that are drawn by a system of thought that takes for its premises things that are themselves not bodily experiences but abstract conceptions. So if we take abstract conceptions of space, or of /motion or line?/ as we do, especially when we are taking about Relativity, our conclusions will bear the same elements, will have the same character, as the premise that we start with.

/“Well up to now, the only ____________that we have known of getting enough knowledge to be able to predict the future to a certain extent, is through these abstractions.”/

Yes. And the only way that we can understand any event is in terms of abstractions, because the three ingredients of the event are themselves abstractions. And the thought, the understanding of the event, is not an event — not a bodily or physical event; it’s an abstraction from such an event.

/“Now we get back to this other point, I’m not quite satisfied . . .”/

Yes, let’s do.

/“You seem to be saying that to increase the mass of something, we have to decrease the velocity.”/

Unless we are going to increase the over-all.

 

/“Unless we increase the over-all. But it still seems to me like we could change the time.”/

Let us suppose that we could treat the elements of a quantum event in larger figures, and we’d say it’s ten units of mass per each unit of motion, and ten units of motion per each unit of time, and that it continues for ten units of time. Then we would get a quantity of action called one thousand, wouldn’t we?

/“Yes.”/

Now then, if we would take for the first two, instead of 10 and 10, we’d take 1 and 100 — 1 unit of mass per each 100 units of length — and then we would likewise take 100 units of length per each unit of time. Now this is only ratios; nothing is happening here. There is no quantity there. It’s just in what proportion these things are related. Then when we bring in the element of time, which is repetition, that gives us the over-all period of the whole event, does it not?

/“Yes.”/

Now just cut that down until that 1 represents the absolute unit, and we could have a quantum event of the same composition.

/“I still don’t understand this time; it would seem that . . .”/

 

It means how many times. Duration means how many times. Frequency means how many events occur within a unit of time, doesn’t it. Duration, is how many units of time are comprised, or are covered, or elapse, during the event — durational time. Frequency is a large number representing how often something happens in a single unit of time. Duration means how many units of time elapse during this event, or this portion of an event, So when we take motion, and say how many of these motion units occur in a time unit, we call it velocity. And when we take the time involved in one of these units, and it repeats itself, then we have durational time — stretch-out time. Frequency means how much of this other thing is compressed into a unit of time, and duration means over how many units of time has this thing passed, or extended itself. You are thinking of why, perhaps, why time should be the thing that gives the quantity. It’s accumulation: it accumulates events.

Well why it should be the unique one of the three.

Well when it has reference to any one of the other two elements, or rather if it has reference to the motion, frequency represents how many of those motions take place within the unit of time. The other is how many units of time elapse while this motion takes place, or while this event takes place.

/“That is, if you have one quantum unit, you’re saying if you decrease the mass, you must increase the velocity.

Right?”/

Yes.

/“Well it still seems you could decrease the mass, leave the velocity the same, and increase the time.”/

 

Well that sounds reasonable, too.

 

/“So then velocity and mass aren’t … well in that case, then they’re all three equal …”/

 

Yes, I think possibly you’re right about that. That means that your quantum unit is subject to a greater variety of composition than I first suggested.

/“Yes.”/

And then . . . then still, the principle remains the same, that it is subject to a great deal of composition and re-composition as events mingle with one another, but that given a certain event of a certain composition, that they are only increased by multiplication, as by how many times that event occurs, whether it be a quantum event or a greater event. Now perhaps your mind is only going so far as to establish the compositional character, due to a different proportion of the first two elements, and given a certain proportion of those two elements, then the number of times that this occurs . . . well we can’t this happens, perhaps…yes, in the very fact of velocity is a unit of time. So this is an event involving one unit of time, because velocity means how many motions per one unit of time. Now there is one unit of time there, and then when you multiply it by the total number of units of time, this is the number of units of time attached to so many units of motion, or velocity. Then when you have given your one element of time to constitute the proportion, then you have to have additional elements of time to give you any continuity. The fact that the motion units occur a thousand times, let us say, in a second, means that each of those units contains a unit of time. It’s only when you want to consider more than one unit of time that we use the time factor, at all. The erg-second is one dyne times one centimeter per second times one second. But if you had it . . . some other units of motion occur in one second, and then you bring in two units of time, you will have two quanta.

/Tape ran out here. Continue to Item 1698A appended here:/

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1698A

Extracts from recording during conclusion of a visit with Jim Backman, 21-year-old Pomona College student, at home of Mrs. Frances Norton Manning, Santa Ana, California. First part of recording was very difficult to hear and may contain mistakes in transcription. Slightly amended.

March 11, 1962

Any statement which does not contradict itself is a true statement. If you think it is false, you will only prove that by showing the inherent contradiction. An event has to be falsified — a hypothetical event — before its fallacy can be exposed, and exposing the fallacy in the thing, of course, is the only way to controvert it. But having done that, we haven’t accomplished anything . . . /tape interruption/ We only make headway by what is verifiable. We say this scientific theorem, or hypothesis, falls down because it failed at verification. So you have not established anything; the only way you establish anything is to verify it. It simply speaks for itself; it has been verified. Then it becomes useful, it becomes part of technology. But if you prove to me that my theory is wrong, that is not what gives me the technology. You give me the technology by proving what is right. It does not necessarily follow that proving that I am wrong in some respect establishes anything as being right or correct.

 

I think there is a whole lot of self-contradiction in physics. For example, they have three basic dimensional units. And a dimension has to be some multiple of those units, doesn’t it? Now, if we had four fundamental units, we would have four different kinds of dimensions, wouldn’t we? But who says what the fourth unit is? The college physics tell you that there are only three fundamental dimensions of events, of course. So when anybody would discover a third aspect of an event, different from a given three as they differ from each other — I don’t mean derived from the present ones — when they find a fourth totally different measurable aspect of an event, or a unit, when the fourth unit is discovered, then we can have fourth dimensions, of course. But until we do find a fourth unit, I don’t know how we are going to find any multiple of it to be a dimension. Did you ever think about that?

 

I think physics is always verifiable, to be sound, and I think wherever it engages in manipulating zeros, it cancels all experience out of the picture. You can give zeros attributes, /characteristics,/ and so on. So I like to tell people that I had a cat once that had ten tails, and they challenge me to prove it. And I say, well, no cat has nine tails — you agree with me don’t you? Well I had a cat, and my cat had one more tail than no cat. My cat must have had ten tails, then.

You know what’s the matter there? What’s the cause of the confusion? The confusion comes from treating a zero as though it could be something — treating no cat as though it could have a tail — any tails. No cat does not have any tails at all That is an example, a rather crude one, perhaps, of trying to treat a zero as though it were something .

You see this glass of water is half empty. Clearly it is, isn’t it? You have drunk half of it out. And since it is half empty, it has to be half full, doesn’t it? Because it is half empty, it is half full. Now when it gets wholly empty, it will be wholly full. Making it half empty makes it half full; making it wholly empty will make it wholly full.

We are using the word, empty. It is a zero. Then we cut the zero in half, and get ourselves all mixed up. A thing can be more or less full, but it cannot be more or less empty. It is either empty or it is not empty. If it is empty, it is not full at all — half full or any other full.

See, I am just using an abstraction as though it could have concrete qualities. Zero is all right as an abstraction. You can manipulate it, like the square root of minus one. You can manipulate it, but you cannot experience it. You manipulate it in your mind.