Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2037

Transcription of a conversation between Heath and Alvin Lowi, Jr. at the latter’s home at 4018 Merrill Street, Torrance, California. Alvin’s wife, Guillermina, and Mrs. Frances Norton Manning, Heath’s hostess in Southern California who arranged and taped this meeting, were also present although mostly in another part of the house.  

January 7, 1962

 

 

ALVIN LOWI, JR.: Now we were talking about . . .

 

SPENCER HEATH:  Imagination. We were talking about absent-mindedness?

 

A:  (Laughing)

 

S:  I was about to say, that my mind travels in so many far places, that that’s the reason it’s absent so much of the time.

 

A:  I have a few misgivings about going into business, because of my absent-mindedness  .. I mean I’m aware of it because of my preference to think about abstractions, and about hypotheses and theories and .. well let’s say to attempt inductions, as apart from deduction about immediate effects of things.

 

S:  Abstractions can crowd out your concretions, eh?

 

A:  Yes sir.

 

S:  Concrete things are the things most people pay attention to. The only interesting thing about things, in my view, is the ideas behind them. As I see it, all things represent ideas. And it’s the idea represented by the thing that is the great center of interest.

 

A:  Well you don’t have things without ideas. At least without ideas the only things that you have are those things which were here before we got here — the

primordial material, you might say. Other than that there are no other things, as I see it, without ideas — without human ideas, to be specific.

 

S:  I dare say the primordial material in us was here before we got here ourselves.

 

A:  Oh, I’m sure that it was. That sticks too; as far as humans are concerned we can only hope to make the best use of what is here, and so far, we don’t have any prospects of running out of this material as I see it.

S:  I think I have a very good prospect at my 86 years of age; I think I have a very good prospect of running out.  /both laughing/

 

A:  Well it seems impossible, but I know biologically that it must be.

/Interruption to check tape recorder/

 

S:  You were suggesting that the primordial thing didn’t have any ideas.

 

A:  But before that I would like to say for posterity that I hope you have many many happy returns of the day, of last Wednesday. Your 86th, I believe it was.

S:  As Clarence Darrow told the judge when he said, “I hope you’re not going

to be in contempt,” Darrow said, “Well Your Honor can always hope.” (both

laughing) So if you’re hoping I’m going to have many happy returns, you

can always hope. You can have some of that hope when you haven’t got

anything else.

 

A:    That’s right. There’s always got to be. I expect even the most miserable specimen has hope. If he doesn’t, he’s only living biologically ..

 

S:     And when he gives up hope, he gives up life.

 

A:     Yes ..

 

S:     He has no hold on life without it.

 

A:     He’s just vegetative, I would say.

 

S:     Yes. If he gives up in any life of his mind, or life of imagination . . Of course some of his vital functions might go on — vegetatively as you say — but human beings, we live by our imagination. And when imagination goes broke, why then we lapse back to the animal level.

 

A:     That goes for a society as well as an individual, I think. As soon as the prevailing trend in society is a departure from imaginative, or at least a toleration of imaginative ideas, I think you may say that society is in a full-fledged regression .. as soon as this becomes noticeable. Which it is to us now. I have not always been quite so aware of it as I am now but I’m still, I would say, in the very, very small minority of people who can see that what people are calling ideas these days are not really; it’s just talk. It’s just noise.

 

S:     For my part, I don’t see that civilization is in any decline. There may be periods, little lumps in the curve, little humped sticks in the curve ________, but this is an expanding universe, expanding both quantitatively and qualitatively.

 

A:     Well technologically speaking, I would say it’s progressive. But socially speaking, I can’t say that we’re having any progress that’s measurable. Locally in spots, maybe, but in any larger amount I wouldn’t say that I could see any social progress.

S:     Walk into a tropical rain forest, and you’ll find a great many trees lying flat on the ground in various stages of decay, and dissolution, with many parasites living on them perhaps. And parasites living on the living trees, and so on. And pulling trees down. Of course when the tree’s down then the parasite has to die, as all parasites have to expire with the host, apparently. So if we walk through a forest like that, no matter how far, and confine our attention to the trees that are lying down and don’t notice the ones that are standing up, except to notice that they are being pulled down, and on their way down, you will never see anything but dissolution and decay. We’d have to be pretty blind in one eye not to notice that trees were growing, wouldn’t we?

A:  Yes, we would.

S:  And that every time a tree came down there were young ones taking their place and so on. And so in our civilization, today. If we only look at the things that are falling down, we won’t think anything is going up.

 

A:  So you look at this as something that is characteristic of the type of equilibrium that we have on this planet; that the type of equilibrium that exists is one which is on the average advancing towards a better stage. And I’m not defining better now. But it’s on the average going that way, that’s the prevailing trend. But there are oscillations in this equilibrium which, if you’re on the regressive side of this oscillation, why it looks pretty bleak, and if you’re on the advancing side of it, it looks pretty good.

 

S:  Equilibrium is a thing I’m not very fond of myself, because equilibrium it seems to me — unless you mean a dynamic equilibrium — equili­brium is a static condition.

 

A:  Well I mean dynamic equilibrium. To me equilibrium is not a static concept.

 

S:  As long as you mean a dynamic equilibrium, then whatever forces are involved are going somewhere. And that we call progress. Let me give you an illustration of that:  you and I are confronted by a stone wall. We want to get over it. And so I try jumping. And jumping doesn’t do much good; I can’t get my feet very far off the ground. So I reach down and pull on my bootstraps, and that doesn’t seem to help very much, and after a good many fumblings around and trying empirically you know, cutting and trying, fumbling and success, finally one of us has a happy idea. Let’s pull on each other’s boot straps. Now, we’re still in equilibrium; it’s just that we’re going somewhere now. Whereas before when we pulled on our own bootstraps we were in static equilibrium Now, as we pull on each other’s bootstraps, we’re still in equilibrium, but it’s a dynamic equilibrium; we’re going somewhere and so may get over the wall. And I think that the cosmos itself is in a dynamic equilibrium, and it can go in any direction, indefinitely, without ever coming to any___________. There’s no reason why it couldn’t keep on going, in respect to any matter.

A:  Well I was careless. I should have said dynamic equilibrium, because what I have in mind is something analogous to a spring mass, a mass hanging on a spring.

 

/Interruption, Mina suggesting they move to another room where it will be less noisy/

 

A:   These couches [couches that Alvin had made] which fold into … You’re interested in mechanisms, but they work very well. I’m rather proud of these. They have a four-bar link. /Sound of moving furniture about/

 

S:   That’s a very neat kind of a toggle. That kind of a toggle might have utility elsewhere than in furniture.

. . . . . . . . .

 

A:  Well I find the term, “Burke’s Principle” . . it belongs to Joseph Galambos, but I find it very useful myself to use, because it . .

S:  A quotation we’ve heard often. Is it thought to have originated with Burke?

      

A:  The quotation? Well it’s described of Burke.

S:  Is it. I didn’t remember about that. I’d heard it often.

A:  So I keep saying that it belongs to Burke.

S:  It might as well.

A:  As far as I know .. I’m not well read on Burke .. he deserves it. I see no reason why he shouldn’t get the credit for it. I tend not to question historians too much until I’ve personally researched the matter a little bit more myself. I’m not taking everything they say on faith, it’s just a matter of deference, you might say.

 

S:  I think a few samples in a person’s writing, representative of different times of his life, are perfectly useful for most purposes. Just the same as if you take a few sample borings from a geological area, you don’t have to turn over all the strata to see what’s there; you can take samples here and there. Like a book; if you take samples from different parts of a book, you get the general tone of the book. Of course if it has a lot of detail that you want to follow up, then you want to read it in detail. But so it is with a man’s writings. Take some generous samples here and there at different times, and you’ve got his number. And that’s all you need for most purposes . . because people are, without knowing it themselves, are consistent.

 

A:     I guess over a long period of time, if they are productive for a long period of time, you may notice some development in their…

 

S:     Emerson says, let consistency be a hobgoblin of little minds. Let it be

gazetted henceforth forever — or something like that. Then he goes on to say, “Do thou so think and act as each moment goes by with complete sincerity, and never fear but what the pattern will be fair.” (laughing)  It will make sense of itself. Whether you try to make it consistent or not. Of course some people are consistently bad. Some of the bad men of history have been consistently so. we find it very seldom that a man will spring all the way from the seraphic to the diabolic. He can’t take that much variation. But he’ll take his position somewhere near the angels or somewhere near the devils, and be pretty consistently at that level. (laughing)  So happily, just as geologists don’t have to turn over all the layers — turn the thing all over upside down to see what’s there — because they can take samples at frequent intervals, so we can take samples of anybody’s writings, or anybody’s thought, or anybody’s conversation, and you get to know a person by more or less unconsciously synthesizing what he says, and he makes up a personality for you. You know him pretty well by a good deal of contact with him. Of course you can’t take a potshot here and there and generalize on small data.

 

A:     People have thoughts, certainly.

S:     Yes.

A:     Well I suppose you could also say that you may find some several individuals who think a great deal alike, and in the perspective of the past, that is looking back many generations, it may be difficult, unless a man has a signed letter or some published work, it may be difficult to decide Just exactly who originated some saying or some document. For example the research that Joseph Lewis did on the Declaration of Independence, attempting to prove that Thomas Paine was the actual author instead of Jefferson, is a good example. Jefferson and Paine probably did think a great deal alike, and you would almost have to go into that kind of research on anything which was not precisely documented and published to be able to say with any certainty who it belonged to. Like, there’s this quotation, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,” or “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” has been ascribed variously to three or four, I think it’s three different individuals. I don’t recall now who they all were . . it’s been ascribed to Jefferson and Franklin maybe, and . . .

 

S:  I’m not sure that’s very authentic though, because as I remember, God or one of His prime representatives said that we should resist not evil. If tyranny is evil, we should not resist it. But overcome evil with good. We have divine command not to resist it. So we can’t very well reconcile that with the idea that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. (laughing)

 

A:  Well, these people who have been attributed to having said this,

weren’t exactly Christians in the classical sense, so this is probably pretty good evidence to support the thesis that Jefferson was a Deist and not a Christian. Because that remark actually does, as you point out, contradict this basic Christian precept, it seems to me.

 

S:  Yes. However I’m afraid it’s kind of a numbers game when we try to determine the exact authorship of things. Like the authorship of the New Testament. Like the authorship of Shakespeare. You know what the Irishman said about it?

 

A:  No

 

S:   “If it wasn’t Shakespeare wrote all those things it was another fellow

by the same name, and it’s just as good.”

A:  (laughing)

S:  So I don’t think it’s terribly important who said a thing or who said it first, or who said it last, or who ever said it at all.

A:  When you get right down to it, this shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not it’s a great piece of work, or whether it’s a miserable piece of work, or whether it’s worth remembering, or constructive, or creative . . .

S:   I think during contemporary times, it could be fairly important, because we want to look to the same source for more. We want to encourage and inspire that person. We want to be inspired by him, we want to know who he is, and so on. You want to know your friends or any contemporary friends.

A:   The devil of that is . . .

S:   If you let a hundred years go by, what’s the difference with me whether David and Jonathan were good friends or David and somebody else. (laughing)

A:   That’s a very keen observation, and I have another one I’d like to make. And that is, it’s very difficult to observe your contemporaries and be able to judge whether some of their ideas are really good or not, especially when it comes to the arts or to creative writing, and things like this. And you may never come in contact with them until after their death, and then through their writing, so that it’s usually in the perspective of history, you know as they say, you never know until a man’s dead whether his writings or anything that he created will live. And the people tend to take this for granted and make no attempt to determine in advance of their passing whether these things that  they are doing are worthwhile or not. In fact they tend to poo poo everything that is done, just because they’ll wait: let posterity judge. And some, like the ones we were talking about a while ago, they’re not willing to let posterity judge — they condemn every innovator that comes along. I’m now referring to just those very few people who tolerate new ideas. They still tend to refuse to judge.

 

S:  I suspect somewhat that people who accept new ideas are not always as judicious as they might be. They don’t always discriminate between whether  . . perhaps they don’t always have the capacity to discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas. So that contemporary people are just as likely to preserve for posterity bad ideas, as good ideas. And moreover, I don’t think that just because ideas survive, that they’re necessarily good ones. Because I don’t know . . we have no means of knowing how many good ideas are dead and buried every day. We just don’t know about that. So we shouldn’t assume that the ones that live are good ones, and that all that didn’t live were bad . .

A:   Yes, I guess you could worry yourself sick over how many really good ideas have been lost in history, just because . .  Well, like I don’t know who originated the heliocentric theory of the solar system, but I know that it existed maybe two thousand years before Copernicus.

S:   Well, we do know that Copernicus did figure out the mass, motion and time in it, put the arithmetic to it . . or discovered the arithmetic in it. And before that they had a whole lot of subjective nonsense and astrological notions full of animals and demons and dragons, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac and everything of that sort. But when . . .

 

A:   Yes, but the concept of the sun being the center of the universe I guess, as they put it . . they didn’t know what these other bodies, these little particles out there were.

 

S:   I imagine the sun worshippers were pretty favorable to that idea.

 

A:   I expect so. But they were called heathens or something in those days. In the early . . .

 

S:   Well, some people had to call them Heathen; they didn’t call themselves that probably, or anything opprobrious like that!  (Chuckling)

 

A:   But they weren’t looked on with a great deal of favor and respect.

 

S:   In the eyes of the public the trouble with Copernicus was that he simplified   things. Now the public don’t like things to be simplified; they want to be confused. Along came Galileo, and he made it simpler yet. He got down to the roots of the matter, the generalizations, the simple form of it that applied to the whole field of phenomena. Then along came Newton, and he found the whole thing ________in the whole solar system, the arithmetic was there just as plain as anything in the world. Anybody could understand it after that. Now I thought I was happier with the multiplication table, without knowing anything about it, as a kid. I didn’t think I ever could, anyway. It was too complicated. When I got into it, and got to about the second or third table, why it commenced to clear up to me. -—”Is that all there is to it!”

 

A:   Did you build your own?

 

S:   Yes certainly, and I was rather charmed at that. But people generally are not charmed at simplification. They say that’s oversimplifying. They’d rather have their false gods and their complicated ignorance. What they don’t understand, they rather cherish it. There’s a conservative tendency to cherish our ignorance, you know. Cherish our stupidity.

A:   Yes, it’s a sacred cow of complexity.

S:   Yes. It shouldn’t be looked into. Our physical science today suffers from that same thing.

 

A:   Ever since Newton, they’ve been trying to complicate things again. Well, not across the board, but . . .

S:   During this half century perhaps, during this twentieth century, they certainly have been complicating things. They’ve had some excuse for it . . .                 

A:  Well there are of course a few individuals who didn’t, like Maxwell and _________.

S:  I want to see our whole physical science recast on the basis of taking the least, the simplest a prioris it’s possible to take, and seeing what you can build with them. And then if you can’t build satisfactorily with the ones you start out with . . let’s say you take three, and you find you’ve come to the limit of explaining things in terms of those three, then give serious consideration to seeing if maybe you can find a fourth. Now all physical investigation depends upon discovering ratios — measurements in things. The minute you discover a ratio in any activity or any event, you call that a dimension, a ratio between a unit and the particular number that describes the thing. And so we go on examining dimensions of things. And if we examine a cube we find three different dimensions, but all of the same kind. If we examine an event we find three different dimensions, but of three different kinds. And when we can’t describe events adequately in the three known dimensions that are stated in our high school physics and so on as being the fundamental units of physical science, when we find those three units fail us, then it’s time to consider whether or not we can find another unit and get some kind of fourth dimension. And I think that until we have exhausted the resources of explaining things, understanding things, in terms of the three, we’ll be as badly off if we try to fool with a fourth as we would be trying to understand a cube by importing a fourth direction in the same dimensions.

A:   Unless you’re deliberately experimenting with a fourth or a fifth or a sixth postulate.

S:   Even so, you’d better begin with one . . .

A:   You better be sure that you’ve exhausted yourself on the first three or however many you have . . .

S:   Otherwise you’re violating the principle of simplicity — the simplest explanation. If you bring in four factors unnecessarily when three are sufficient, you’re violating the scientific rule of finding the simplest explanation of things.

A:   Joseph Galambos calls this Occam’s razor. Have you ever heard of this expression?

S:   Yes . . now wait a minute. Occam . . I can’t place it now though I remember I’ve heard the expression. Occam was one of those . . a William of Occam . . familiar names somewhere back in the Middle Ages; I can’t place him even in his time now. What does he say about him?

A:   He calls this part of the scientific method — Occam’s Razor. And it’s stated like this . . I’m stating it in my own words:  If you have two rival hypotheses that both explain a given domain of phenomena, choose the one which has the fewer postulates.

S:   The least a priori’s.

A:   Yes.

S:   The simplest premises.

A:   Yes. Choose the simpler.

S:   And that’s called a razor?

A:   That’s called Occam’s Razor.

S:   Shave off the surplus! (laughing)

A:   Shave off the fuzz.

S:   That’s a very good one. I’ll have to try to remember that, because I’m very much committed to that point of view.

A:   I know you are.

S:   Exceedingly so. More so than anybody I know.

A:   Well it’s a way of life. And to return to a point we were making earlier, it may be a fetish on my part — I don’t think so — but of all the things that bother me about the way things are, it’s this tendency to overcomplicate things, and to condemn those who would simplify, with the argument that, “Things are just not that simple, always.” This is one of the toughest things to bear for me that there is. And of course, it’s a natural phenomenon too; you might say it’s one of those basic social characteristics that might be called natural phenomena, I guess, that people always have tended to over-complicate things . . .

S:   I think clear up to and through Newton, the tendency of understanding our environment was towards simpler conceptions — wider, broader generalizations and fewer elements or parts in them. But since Newton, we’ve been running to multifariousness in our premises. Well . . maybe we’re on the regressive swing of the dynamic stability we were talking about a little while ago since Newton. Insofar as intellectual things are concerned, perhaps not long after Newton the curve was swinging the other way, and maybe one of these days it will swing back the other way.

 

S:   Of course our understanding of things, even our capacity to understand, can conceivably decline. But the rationale of the cosmos itself can’t be supposed to suffer from any such cause as that.

 

A:   No. Of course not. It could care less.

 

S:   (Laughing) It couldn’t care less! Yet we must not assume that we are not parts of the cosmos. We belong to the cosmos.

 

A:   Oh, certainly.

 

S:   We’re children of the cosmos. And what’s in the cosmos as a whole is in us, as the chip contains the elements of the block from which it is hewn. So that we’ll have to come back, in the long run . . the positive, the things that support life, will be more powerful than the things that destroy life. Light is more powerful than darkness — since darkness has no power at all. As you well know.

 

A:   That’s right. But it’s a great source of agitation to people. I mean it becomes a way of life to some people just because it fills most of their psychological capacity with things like fear and hate. These can be all consuming, it seems to me. If a person wishes to live in the darkness, why he may fill up himself, he may fully occupy his capacities with such things, and live in the darkness.

 

S:   He’s working with darkness? (Laughing)

 

A:   But he’s still just subsisting.

S:   I agree with you quite profoundly. Because I see that man is funda­mentally, so far as physical man is concerned and his physical powers, including his power to reason . . are matters that had to grow. And that in the case of the man animal, the growth has far transcended that of the other animal forms. And that man is only man so far as he can be described in language that doesn’t apply to anything else — and when you can apply descriptive words to humans in common with other forms of life then you have not distinguished him; you have identified him with them. And so when we speak of man that all men are mortal, we are talking about animals. Because animals have to be mortal. They can have no dream, they don’t have the imaginative powers apparently, the picturing power, the imagination, to think of yesterday, nor tomorrow. They only live in today.

A:   They can perceive, but they can’t conceive.

 

S:   Exactly. Very well said. And so they are always headed for extinction, because they have no dream towards which to strive. And no powers wherewith to fulfill their dreams.

 

A:   Either extinction or enslavement.

S:   Yes. Precisely.

A:   Which is to a human being the same thing, I would say.

S:   Yes. Now a human being has powers far exceeding that; he’s liberated from that because he can travel into yesterday, and he can travel in tomorrow. He can hold in his mind things that exist nowhere else. That is, patterns of organization that exist nowhere else. And so having a dream, he can put forth effort towards the realization of that dream. So he’s distinguished from the animal. The only thing that can conceive immortality could ever practice it. And I’m convinced that human beings as a race cannot conceive of any dream, can’t aspire towards anything — over many generations — without it expressing what is native to their constitution. So they cannot dream anything that they cannot ultimately achieve.

A:   Well this gets to a real basic point . . .

S:   Because every achievement is an achievement of what is innate, what is potential in us. And we can only dream what is potential. I don’t mean a single individual, but I mean what is characteristic. Because nature is very variable . . . all living things are variable, you know. Variability and differentiation is a characteristic of life — no two leaves on the tree alike, and that sort of thing. So with individuals we can’t depend on similarities. But when you take statistically, take millions of people over thousands of years entertaining the same dream, why that’s the . . the dream itself is the first putting out of the energy towards its accomplishment.

A:   If I may add a couple of points here that I think are relevant, I think that people can dream about things that are unattainable, that contradict the natural order, you might say. They can dream and shoot for these things. But if they do, over a few generations, they tend to produce regression. In other words, if they dream of Utopian things and try to put these into practice. If they aspire towards things which are not attainable from this point of view, then the mere pursuit of these goals will tend to reduce their own chances of survival. I think they can probably dream and aspire towards things which are not attainable for a few generations, but after a while certain effects start to set in which indicate that the ends that they are shooting for are not achievable or that they are not desirable when they start thinking of them in terms of the other effects that are taking place. The other point I was going to make is, that you were saying a while ago that man has to use a language or choose words which characterize his constitution. Suppose men deliberately. . .

S:   I don’t remember saying it, but I’ll say it now.

A:   Does that sound acceptable to you?

S:   If I didn’t say it, I’ll say it now. (laughing)

A:   All right, sir. Then suppose men deliberately choose to confuse their language, or to make their language less precise rather than more precise, they choose to confuse the meaning of words and prefer not to stick to a definition, they cultivate bringing in new shadings on the meanings of words and so forth. Then how does a man, under those conditions, characterize this constitution we’re talking about in such a way that he may define his goals?

 

S:   We are all aware that there are those who seek darkness rather than light. There are those who seek death, rather than life. But they are too exceptional to characterize the whole.

 

A:   Yes, they are.

S:   There is no statistical validity in that. And since nature is discrete, and the units in any statistical complex are so small, then any judgment based upon the unit, the particular, is a generalization on insufficient data. We have to generalize on the whole.

 

A:   Well I’m the product of a recent generation, and my observation is that, at least at the present time, there are a large number of people . . in fact I would say that I don’t think the people who promote the confusion of the language are in a majority. The majority goes along with them. Because it makes it possible for them to . . .

 

S:   The blind leaders of the blind?

A:   . . . explain away, or to apologize for their lack of articulateness, or ability to communicate. It gives them a ready excuse — “Words mean different things and so I don’t have to worry too much about it.”

 

S:   And they can be j’iners and shine by some felt or reflected light. As they suppose.

A:    There was a cartoon not too long ago, “The Portrait of a Bureaucrat,”  by Virgil Parch. It was a picture of a bureau — like a chest of drawers, you know, with, a mirror on top? Here was a chest of drawers with legs and arms on it with a mirror, so this was supposed to be the portrait of a bureaucrat. You look into it and it reflects anything you wish to see.

S:   (laughing) It reflects a whole lot of things I’d rather not see when I look at a bureaucrat. (both laughing)  But your image makes me think of the frontispiece, I think it is, in one of Parkinson’s books about Parkinson’s Law, and all? The picture of a bureaucrat?

A:   I don’t recall.

S:   Well, it’s a very highly elaborated stuffed shirt — very obese and very blank, and very smug.  (laughing)

A:   Nobody has ever described bureaucrats in such detail as Parkinson, I don’t think.

S:   No. (laughing)  Probably so. Although we’ve had some pretty good jobs — Hawthorne described the bureaucrats in his Custom House tales, way back in his day. And it’s the same thing. When I was in England in the ‘thirties, I was taken into a big government office. You could almost see the cobwebs hanging on the wall, and you see the people all were past middle life. I asked my guide what kind of office this was, and he said, “This is the Office of Assessment.” I said, “Do they ever assess anything?” “No,” he said; “Back in Lloyd George’s day,” some twenty or thirty years before, “they were established in this office to assess land. The Parliament repealed the law assessing land, but they didn’t repeal the jobs. So they were still holding onto them. (laughter)

A:   This is one of those perfect Parkinsonian organizations that receives an input but delivers no output.

S:   Precisely.

A:   Efficiency reaches absolute zero.

S:   I’m not quite satisfied with your suggestion that Utopias are vain, because a Utopia always has to be the top dream of some form of life at some stage. And if we go back in our own ancestry we find that — and we don’t have to go back very far — that anybody who believed in such a thing as the room we’re sitting in now would be having a Utopian dream.

A:   When I use the term “Utopia,” I mean something very specific. And so perhaps I’d better define it, right here. By “Utopia,” I mean that which is unattainable in this universe because it contradicts the structure of the universe. That’s what I mean by “Utopian.” A man may dream of something which is unattainable but he may not know it — maybe nobody knows it. Maybe it contradicts something natural which we have not yet defined sufficiently to be able to judge. But if it is ever known, that such an idea carries with it a contra­diction of some natural principle, then it can be called Utopian. And the pursuit of it, the pursuit of this objective, would tend to reduce one’s chances of survival.

S:   Yes, a self-contradictory statement, any statement that contains its own contradiction, has to be false. And this wouldn’t be a cosmos if there were events occurring that contradicted other events. A paradox just nullifies itself.

A:   But in an idea, it may not be clear that a contradiction is implied in it. So people pursue a contradictory, or an unattainable, idea for a long time without noticing it.

S:   Not everybody can see the contradiction in it. You know what the farm boy said when he told the Sunday School teacher he knew something God couldn’t do. He said, “What’s that, Johnny?” He said, “God can’t make a three-year-old cat in five minutes.” And not everybody would see the self-contradiction there, perhaps. You can see that?

 

A:   Of course; it’s very basic.

S:   It would be two different things, and He couldn’t make two different things at once. (Both laughing)  And so, any statement that contains its own contradiction is patently false. And false by the way doesn’t mean contrary, it means reduced to zero. It doesn’t mean contrary in the sense of contrary, or oppositional, by going into a completely different direction. False means the self-destruc­tive. And those things that we do in life that are self-destructive are the only false things.

A:   This is almost precisely the definition of false which is being taught in this course.

S:   Good.

A:   The idea of truth and falsity is simply that which you can verify by

observation or you cannot. Of course observation is something which should be defined, but you can extend observation to include such things as deduction .. from physical observation.

S:   Of course all experiment, even laboratory experiment, is only observation. You may prepare the circumstances, prepare the conditions, so a certain event happens, but the most you can do by way of under­standing the event is to observe it. If it’s borne out by observa­tion, why then you can verify it.

A:   The verification involves some other powers of logic which are not contained in the experiment, though. The observer still has to use his mind, otherwise the verification can’t take place.

S:   When you see something happening in nature, and you’re a careful observer and use the quantitative method, you put down numerical data, describing it. And then you take that numerical data into your own imagination, and you find it makes a whole lot of sense. You say, then, this is a natural law. The only reason you know it’s a natural law is because you have the same thing in your consciousness — you have the same arithmetic inside your head that you had in the train of gears, or in this lever out here. And then we come to understand our environment because we have the psyche carrying on the same kind of events intellectually, mentally, rationally, that are going on in the objective world. A one-to-one pattern, like the superposition of triangles, and so on. You have an identity there. And then moreover, our imagination is so various, so potential, that we can take those numerical data (and) by certain laws which we all agree upon, we can manipulate the data mathematically and discover that under some other circumstance, it would be thus and so. So by a process of deduction we can predict what’s going to happen in a situation that we’ve never experienced before.

A:   And the deduction for you, and the deduction for me, to the extent we are successful at it, is the same. We don’t use it dif­ferently — or if we do, one of us is wrong.

S:   And that one will admit it, too, because we can’t have two arithme­tics.

A:   If he’s honest.

S:   Well, of course you have to assume that he’s trying to find out something. Not trying to cheat himself.

 

A:   Yes.

 

S:   So you can’t have a different arithmetic from mine, because it’s innate in us. The arithmetic is innate in a train of gears, isn’t it? Or in a lever, or a chemical reaction.

 

A:   If it’s a train of gears.

 

S:   — A thing which manifests itself to our sensory system as a train of gears, or a chemical reaction. We have the same arithmetic. And that shows that we have a solidarity with our cosmos. We are cosmic ourselves. We have the same characteristics as the whole cosmos, necessarily — and that doesn’t mean that we have them to the same extent, because the whole cosmos is infinite, and we know darn well we are not infinite. But so far as we go, we have the same rationality that’s in our environment. That’s what makes it pos­sible for us to understand it.

 

A:   It just exists in different human beings in different degrees.

S:   And so I heard a man say one time — he shocked some of his associates — saying that everybody thinks exactly alike. They challenged him and he stood his ground on it and he finally said, “Well, thinking is a func­tion of the brain. And digestion is a function of the stomach. Respiration is a function of the lungs,” and so on. He said, “I know some of us digest a whole lot more than others do; some of us breathe a whole lot more than others do. And I suspect that a lot of us think a lot more than than others do, but so far as they think, they’re all thinking the same way — the same as they digested the same way. (laughing)

A:   That’s a very good way to put it, too. And you see, if you attempt to talk to a lot of people without in advance knowing that you have some­thing in common with them, you run into this situation frequently, that people really believe that there are different kinds of logic. That this individual over here, his mind is constructed such that it works differently, and he may add up two and two and get four and that’s okay for him . . this is a trivial example.

S:   It’s what you call relativity.

A:   It’s like Marxian logic.

S:   /One person sees a/ train at one velocity, for somebody else it’s another velocity.

 

A:   But relativity doesn’t mean this! But, anyway, it’s said, and this is one of the idiotic things about Marxian theory, that any Marxian who can’t come to terms with his adversary, can always fall back on the argument that this other guy is using bourgeois logic. (both laughing)  And that’s of course a different world. (both laughing)  That’s a good excuse. That’s a very powerful excuse.

 

S:   While our minds do run on the same rational principles, so long as we engage in that kind of activity at all, the rest of our psyche — at least 90 percent of it — doesn’t have any uniform behavior. Highly diverse. Our whole emotional make-up . . can run into all kinds of contradictions.

A:   But this is not a function of the rational being.

S:   No. It’s the functioning of the being that doesn’t have rational powers. The animal. It’s the functioning of the being that’s headed towards extinction.

A:   I’ve never looked at it this way, but you’ve given me some powerful ideas. There is always the tendency to try to characterize social behavior — that is, macroscopic behavior of human beings — using psychology, which I consider is a microscopic thing. That is, psychology applies to individuals, to given human beings, whereas human action, or economics, applies to macroscopic samples of human beings. Large numbers of them.

 

S:   Taken statistically.

A:   Yes. And there’s always a tendency to describe the macroscopic behavior in terms of the microscopic quantities.

S:   — to generalize on narrow premises.

A:   We already know you get in trouble this way. There are some things you can do this way, like in thermodynamics. Not without statistics, though. You can take the microscopic models from kinetic theory of gases or of molecules, and by using statistics, you can describe macroscopic behavior. But not always; at least there is still a wide gap between this microscopic approach to describing processes in gases and in metals and liquids and things like this and in fluid dynamics, and the macroscopic approach.

S:   Max Planck, for one, insists however that our inability to find the rationale in the very minute, is a characteristic of our powers of understanding, our perception, and not a characteristic of the minute event itself.

A:   I would agree with that. Just because we can’t make the transforma­tion between the microscopic to the macroscopic, doesn’t mean that this isn’t the way it happens. I agree with this.

S:   It’s just they can’t reach that far down in the well; it doesn’t prove that there are no depths there — and no rationality.

A:   Exactly. That there’s no bottom. (laughter)  I don’t know who it was that related the remark of the fisherman who threw his net in the water — it was of a certain mesh, and he seined the ocean several times and came up with a fish that long, and he said, “There are no fish in the ocean smaller than this.” Well, to some extent the human being is limited by his senses to observations of certain classes. But with advances in those tools which extend the sensory capabilities, I wouldn’t place a limit on this. I would say this is likely to be ever expanding. We know of a large number of fundamental particles now — well at least mathe­matically, which have been verified by experiment — which are smaller than electrons, let’s say. You can’t hold them in your hand, of course; nobody’s ever seen an electron either. But we watch pictures created by theories which postulate a certain mathematical model for an electron, and they work. So, I see no reason to object to the idea of an electron — or even smaller particles, for the same reason.

S:   We can deduce events from experienced events with a great deal of certainty — events which we cannot experience. The forming of a molecule by atoms, we can’t experience them.

A:   But the induction of the idea that there are such things, and that they act this way, that comes about with much less frequency and much less reliability.

S:   We have the same kind of certainty about scientific deductions that we have about geometrical deductions. Give us certain premises in a Euclid proposition, and by reasoning on those premises we deduce things with a great deal of certainty. Since that’s only in the realm of the imagination anyway, we can’t verify it in physical experience. But physicists have a weakness — a very strong weakness too, I think — to ascribe to the infinite environment limitations which exist only in us. We know that in all respects we are limited — in every possible respect we are limited — so far as our structure is concerned; so far as our sensory system is concerned. We also know that the imagination knows no bounds — knows no quantitative bounds. It has to use the same materials to build the imaginative structures that we use with our bodies and that our bodies are made of. But it can put them to­gether in patterns which are beyond the limitations of what we call space and time. We must take bricks to build something, but we can build an infinite structure with those bricks. But we have to have bricks to start with. The imagination cannot entertain something that has not come into it from the outside. But once in there, then it can blow it up to any degree, or it can minimize it to any degree. But we have a very serious scientific vice, I think, of imputing our own limitations to the objective world.

A:   You started out, earlier, saying you were worried about some particular characteristic of devoted physicists to place bounds on certain concepts, or at least to refuse to consider alternatives . . am I paraphrasing you correctly?

S:   Yes. —will not even take a tentative hypothesis. They say, “All that’s been settled long ago.” (laughing)

A:   It’s like — I don’t whether you’ll like this example — it’ s like a person who maintains a very firm religious belief, but wouldn’t dare consider someone else’s.

S:   Or a scientific dogma, either. Like entropy.

A:   Well, I suppose that a postulate can be — although a person doesn’t worship a postulate as some worship the Deity — you could say . . .

S:   Well, theologians do; they think their articles of faith, and article by article they say that’s divinely set, frozen solid. Dogma.

A:   But if a scientist is really worthy of the name, then his respect for a postulate is confined to the extent to which that postulate leads to useful predictions, or useful deductions. Once the postulate is shown to fail, then while it may be controversial and uncomfortable and all this — and it’s happened before — it doesn’t carry with it the stigma of deep fear or sin or whatever you want to call it. If a scien­tist is forced to repudiate one postulate and look for another, he doesn’t personally feel a great deal of guilt.

S:   Certainly what you say is very true in modern times, since we began to question things. But answers anciently, and not very anciently at that, and even in some spheres of contemporary life, answers are absolute. Authority gives the answer. It must not be examined. And this postulate that you speak about which recent scientists have been so ready to question, and discard on the slightest indication of its invalidity, why, look at a postulate that’s, well, a thousand or two years old, and see how ready they are to discard it. When people who have been cherishing something for centuries, or for thousands of years, and it’s been taken up by authority and been enforced by authority for all that length of time, it’s a very difficult thing to get rid of any such premises as that.

A:   Can you think of an example of such longstanding for which there is any evidence that it may not work — that there may be short­comings in it?

S:   We can find examples in the past, plenty.

A:   Oh yes, in the past. These days there are so few fundamental principles, so far as I’m concerned, in the physical sciences, that — and of those I don’t know of any exceptions to them — that I can’t think of any examples. Like, you take the conservation principle. We’ve found no …well, I guess recently there was a generalization of the conserva­tion principle to include the conservation of mass and energy. That is, if you write the law of conservation to include the reciprocity of energy and mass, it’s still valid. But just to write the conserva­tion of energy is not necessarily complete.

S:   Your equal sign between identifies them. It gives them equal authenticity.

A:  But it’s only because the perturbations to physical theory have now sort of damped out since Einstein proposed this revolutionary concept.

S:   Quantitatively, at least, you have the same thing on both sides of your equation. Qualitatively it may be a different organization. I’ll give you an example. You take a piece of work represented by a force through a distance, put that on one side of your equation. On the other side you put another piece of work, represented by a force through a distance. Now those have to be equal amounts or quantities of work, don’t they? But on one side you may have an enormous force through a short distance, and on the other you may have a minute force through a long distance. And you still have equality — quantitative equality. But not compositional equality. And you’ll find that all things, especially in the realm of art — all the arts, both the practical and the esthetic arts, all the creations there — are merely compositions. How things are composed. The quality of things. The things at which we attach value. The quality of things is a matter of how they are composed; it is not a matter of how large or how small they are.

A:   In that equation of yours, I’m not sure I would care to say that they aren’t qualitatively the same — because work is a defined quantity that means a certain thing. And while certainly the composition of the number that quantitatively identifies the terms on each side — which would repudiate the equality if they weren’t numerically the same — nevertheless, qualitatively, looking at work done as a strain in a piece of solid material, produced by the lifting of a weight, or the movement of a force through a distance on a fulcrum . . .

 

S:   Or a falling body . . .

A:   Yes . . they are quantitatively very similar because they still imply the movement of a force through a distance. One of them may be on a microscopic scale, and one of them may be on a macroscopic scale.

S:   But if you have the same amount of work on both sides, that work can be composed almost infinitely differently.

A:   Oh yes, the composition. Well let’s say the composition in terms of

displacement in force, numerically speaking, may be quite different.

S:   I’m thinking of the nature of the thing itself. A bit of work is done.

A force moves through a certain distance. On both sides of the equation, the

force can be an enormous force through a minute distance, on the one side,

and a minute force through an enormous distance on the other side. Now that

difference is not a quantita­tive difference — speaking now of work. It’s the

same amount of work on both sides. That’s what the signs mean between there.

But take it as a practical matter, and if you’re going to come in con­tact with

a body, a large body moving very slowly, you would probably have considerable

preference for that than a very small body moving very rapidly. (laughing)

I mean like a bullet.

 

A:   Well I think that it would be more of a . . .

S:   You’d only feel a mild pressure from a large body moving slowly, whereas in the other condition you’d have something that would pierce right through your body, perhaps.

A:   Well looking at it from the point of view of human experience and

expressing psychological value judgments for things . . .

S:   That is the world of value.

A:   Oh — this is the way in which you are making the distinction.

S:   And that is the world of value, isn’t it.

A:   Oh yes, very definitely.

S:   There are no values outside the human world.

(INTERRUPTION FOR  SUPPER)

______________________________

 

A:   The conservation energy is one — the first law of thermodynamics is the conservation of energy. And the second law of thermodynamics merely says . . Well, sit down, and I’ll . . .

 

S:   I want to tell you what the other thing was.

 

A:   All right, sir.

S:   _________ one of the two things that I thought I might talk with you about, and the other was the implications of our free enterprise system for its further development.

A:   That’s more like my question, that I wanted to talk to you about. So which shall we approach first?

S:   I don’t like to think of a free enterprise system that has been built, it’s finished, and all we’ve got to do is to keep repeating it. It’s on the march. It’s going places it’s never been.

A:   Oh I’m in complete sympathy with this point of view.

S:   And I’m fascinated with the indications of what its future

possibilities are — beyond what it has already accomplished.

A:   It’s of concern to some of my associates that my personal interest

sometimes, that is, my interest in the ultimate consequences and the

ultimate questions that would occur whenever we had no more worries about

constructing a proper society, but after we had one what would . . .

S:   If you got it on a good working basis.

A:   Yes, after we had constructed the so-called moral society, then, ask

myself questions and try to answer them in that perspective.

S:   After you’ve got the automobile so it would run, then where do you

want to go with it?  (laughing)

A:   Yes. Some of my colleagues get a little impatient because maybe I

don’t devote enough of my energies to the immediate problem at hand of

constructing this moral society in the first place.

 

S:   They’re not as imaginative as you are.

 

A:   Well, I wouldn’t say that; I think that it’s a matter of priorities. I

can’t stop living, but I agree with them that this is more urgent. Nevertheless,

as a matter of personal satisfaction, I would prefer thinking about these

things.

S:   I think that unless we do that . . . If we think of economics in a

pedestrian sort of a way — free-enterprise economics — as a thing that has

been achieved, accomplished, but is working under difficult conditions

owing to the impact of government upon it, and that our dream is that we

could get the government off its back so it wouldn’t be bothered with the

government any more, that is very pedestrian to me. Uninspir­ing.

A:   I think we’ve merely started. I think that, first of all, we haven’t even

established — that is, established in the strict sense — a proper social

science. So how can we say that we know everything we want to know

about social organization and human action — interactions of human

beings and groups of human beings? I don’t think we’ve scratched. You’re

the first person I’ve met who I could truly say had given it a proper view,

who had looked at the characteristics of such a society . . .

S:   As something that has been developing and is going somewhere?  

A:   . . . with a view to explaining how things would work when a society

was constructed as it ought to be. Like von Mises, for example, stops at the

point where he’s des­cribed the main features of a free market system —

and in terms of such devices as gold money which we have known before

and we know that it worked satisfactorily.

S:   The same as barter did.

A:   Yes.  But von Mises never asks himself the question, is there something better? The trouble with that maybe is that some people will construe from such a question that von Mises may not be per­fectly certain about what he’s talking about, if he asks himself that question. To me, it’s   . . I know, for example, that von Mises’ ideas of the market economy are right, as far as they go . .

S:   I agree with that, too.

A:   . . and that a proper social science, after generations, will not repudiate the basic tenets of von Mises’ ideas. But von Mises’ ideas are not complete, and what will happen is the same sort of thing that happened when Einstein verified his relativity with respect to Newton’s mechanics. It did not repeal Newton’s mechanics at all. It did nor change the basic usefulness of Newtonian mechanics. But what it did do, is it placed limits on its validity and showed how it was a special case of a more general mechanics. I think the same thing could be said of what we now call classical economics.

S:   We may say that because we have very much better steam engines nowadays, we don’t want to discredit James Watts.

A:   Well of course not, and who wants to discredit James Watt? He was

first.

S:   We don’t want to discredit von Mises . . .

A:   No.

S:   . . . even though we see that there’s a great deal to be accomplished yet.

 

A:  Yes. Von Mises, from my own contact with him, is very difficult to talk to (with) about such questions. If you ask a question about money, his first reaction is a suspicion of your being what he calls, a “monetary quack” — or a “monetary crank,” I forget which term he used. But he is more or less unwilling to discuss concepts in terms other than those which he is accustomed to using.

S:   He’s quite dogmatic. He’s got it laid down — in the proper words, proper thoughts, properly expressed!  (laughing)

A:   In a limited way. Not nearly so much as Ayn Rand though, I’ve found.

 

S:   No.

A:   Von Mises is easy to talk to in some respects, compared to Ayn Rand.

S:   I tried to talk to her a little bit — oh, back about in the, somewhere

in the early thirties, I guess it was.

 

A:   Really? Have you known her since then?

S:   Well I didn’t know her but very briefly then — casually — and I’ve never seen her but once or twice since. Rather recently. I never had any . . .

A:   Was she that way then?

S:   Well I couldn’t say so definitely, I didn’t know her well enough. But I would infer that. She wasn’t a person who would discuss the merits of anything. She had her mind made up.

A:   Well in some respects I have my mind made up too, and so do you. But this doesn’t mean that I can’t entertain a radically different view of things ..

 

S:   That’s it.

A:   . . . simply because, I’m confident that I understand what I’m talking about, and I have no fear that somebody else is going to confuse me. At least, I have enough confidence in myself to think that I’ll be able to judge a new idea. If I ever lose this, I think I’ll . . .

 

S:   If there’s anything in this new idea, well then you might gain!  (laughing)

A:   Oh of course! I want to expose myself to all kinds of ideas.

S:   And if it isn’t a sound idea, I’m well enough established not to be

knocked down by it.  (laughing)

 

A:   I had an interesting experience last Friday. I’m sort of an eccentric at the place where I work currently — at least I’m a non-conformist in the eyes of my colleagues there — and when somebody who they think is a crank, or another eccentric, comes in with some kind of a new idea, they don’t wish to seriously consider it, so they refer him to me. So I entertain all these. Some of them are crack-pots and some of them have good ideas, and I don’t like to take the chance that they won’t have a good idea, and I’ll be denied the benefit of hearing it.

S:   You may miss something!

A:   So, I don’t know if the man I talked to last Friday was a quack or not. Frankly, he didn’t present any evidence that I could appre­ciate; that is, he didn’t have what you might call an adequate amount of scientific information — I’ll put it that way — but I expect to follow up on it. He has a solid-state device that is just a lump of a kind of a plastic. There are two electrodes con­nected to the thing, and it generates power.

S:   Send current from one electrode to the other?

A:   The potential is established between the two electrodes, and this

potential can be used to produce a flow of current in an external circuit.

S:   /Words not clear/

A:   Well, this is what I think. I think that he has possibly a new type of electro-chemical device, like a storage battery.

S:   It’s semi-solid?

A:   It is solid. It’s an acrylic plastic or some sort.

S:   These storage batteries, these flashlights, have semi-solids in them,

don’t they?

A:   Yes. But they’re wet, most of them. This is a solid. This isn’t

unexpected, because GE has developed an ion-exchange membrane which

has all of the properties of — it’s a solid, it’s a plastic — and it has all

of the properties of an electrolyte. GE is merely using this as an electrolyte

for a fuel cell, where you put hydrogen and oxygen on each side of the membrane

constructed of this material, and you put a porous conductor on each side,

to form the electrodes, and then the hydrogen and oxygen react at one of the

electrodes and produce current. This is a classical electro-chemical fuel

cell.

S:   Not very efficient.

A:   They’re very efficient.

S:   Are they?

A:   Yes sir.

S:   They’ll come into use then.

A:   They are coming into use now. This would take some time, but you’re

going to see fairly soon, a company like Southern California Edison, having a brand new, entirely different competitor in the domestic power business. Southern California Gas Company will be their com­petitor. And the way in which the government has constrained the utilities business, it would have to be Southern California Gas Company. But there are imminent possibilities of handling a very effi­cient fuel cell, using natural gas and air, installed in your house like a water-heater — and with a net savings in capital to the supplier and in expense to the consumer.

S:   Well does it pull in power from the outside, in the house?

A:   No sir, just gas.

S:   It brings in gas from the outside.

A:   It just brings in gas, and generates power. It’s silent.

S:   More power than what the gas itself would give by combustion?

A:   Under some conditions, more efficient than a central power station

could burn the gas and use a heat engine as kind of a generator.

S:   Of course that is pretty indirect, inefficient.

A:   You see, a fuel cell doesn’t have a Second Law of Thermodynamics as a

limitation on its efficiency, as a heat engine does. The moment you go

through the intermediate step of converting a source of energy to heat, and

then to mechanical energy, you’re confronted with the Second-Law

limitation. And that brings me to the point I was going to mention. The two

postulates of thermodynamics are, the first, that you can’t get something for

nothing, and the second, you can’t even do that well. Now the first states

that you can’t . . you have to have an energy source, to generate power from

an engine. That’s the law of conservation of energy. Energy comes in, it’s

converted, and goes out in a different form. What comes in has got to go out.

Now the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that you can’t have an engine —

a heat engine — which can operate continuously on a single heat source. In

other words, it’s got to reject part of the heat that it got from its source,

to a sink. It can’t convert all of the energy that it gets from the source

to useful work. It’s got to reject part of it back to nature.

S:   It can only dip part out of the stream.

A:   That’s right. It can dip a lot out of the stream, but it has to put some back. And that that it puts back is unavailable for any useful work — at that datum. That’s the “Second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamicists usually talk about perpetual motion machines of the first kind, and perpetual motion machines of the second kind, as having to do with these two laws. A perpetual motion machine of the first kind is an engine which does work without taking energy from any source.

S:   Isn’t perpetual motion a misnomer?

A:   Yes, that’s a misnomer. A perpetual motion machine of the second kind is one which takes energy from a single source and does work. Now there are thermodynamicists who have argued that there are all kinds of other principles, other postulates. Of course, thermodynamics is no exception. It’s one of the older of the mechanical sciences, and I imagine that hundreds of other postulates have been proposed. But no more than these two that I just gave you, in my opinion, are really needed. There is another one which was proposed just a couple of years ago, and that was the one which was the subject of my paper, called a state principle — in which . . .

S:   Are these others derivative from the other two?  Or derived?

A:   It’s not an easy derivation, and I ran into difficulty myself trying to decide whether you had to make a new postulate . .well, I’ll see if I can’t explain it. A Professor Kline /Klein?/ at Stanford claims that you’re not entitled to write the equation of state, of a gas, that is, a mathematical equation, in terms of its intrinsic properties like temperature, pressure and volume, or energy, entropy and volume. The mere assumption that the gas has a state and it is described in terms of three properties is a postulate itself. This is Kline’s postulate. Kline postulates that to assume that the state of a gas can be described in terms of these three properties, constitutes a postulate. Now this is kind of quibbling, because first of all we have definitions of properties, and the definitions themselves are probably sufficient. The definitions of the physical quantities in terms of measurables is probably sufficient — sufficient to account for the so-called equation of state.

S:   The postulates?

A:   Without a postulate. Oh, you mean the definitions, are they postu­lates?

S:   You don’t need to have the postulates between the definitions and the

equation?

A:   I don’t. I don’t. I’m satisfied that you don’t need another postulate.

S:   The simpler the better.

A:   Yes.  Because, definitions are not postulates. We have lots of definitions in thermodynamics. Pressure is a defined quantity. So is temperature. Temperature is much more abstract than pressure, though. Temperature is one of the most abstract quantities in any physical science.

S:   Isn’t a definition related to an induction?

A:   It is induction. It is inductive. It sure is. But I wouldn’t call it a postulate. I don’t think it conveys enough information.

S:   Isn’t your induction a definition, as an induction?  ___________  proceed from some foundation, some starting point?

A:   I don’t even think you can have an induction before definition. Definitions are more primitive, than even a postulate.

S:   ____________ , you’re right. It fits into Plato’s maxim, “He shall

be as a god to me who can rightly define, and divide.”

A:   Well, I’m glad to be in agreement with Plato, for a change!

S:   For a change, probably! (laughing)  Not economically or politically. _____________________

A:   No.  But I think that definitions, and of course the way that this course that we’re teaching is constructed, this is the way that it’s done. Definitions are more primitive — that is, they come before you can proceed with the development of any postulatory . . .

S:   Your algebra starts that way.

A:   Yes.  Well, doesn’t also geometry?

S:   I think I’m thinking of geometry, really.

A:   Well, the theory of numbers is little more than definitions and some simple ___________, isn’t that correct?

S:   I imagine so. I’m not authority, though. (laughing)  But I’m fascinated with the part that numbers, magnitudes based on discontinuities, are the important things we can manipulate rationally. If your magnitude is not based on a discon­tinuity, let us say on a unit, then it has no rational content, because it cannot be compared in terms of numbers, with another magnitude.

A:   Well I’m aware of your idea on time as being also discontinuous, that

is, there is no continuity in time either. Well let’s say, time is not a

continuum. And if that’s so, if time is not a continuum either, then I can’t

think of anything that is, in nature.

S:   Time is manifested in motion — and motion is not a continuum. It

remains for us now to consider whether mass is a continuum or not.

 

A: Mass isn’t.

 

S:   I think not.

 

A:   Mass is made of particles. I mean, any substance can be broken downinto

particles in smaller and smaller units.

S:   In these three elements of action, these three elements of any quantity

of work, (we) have units.

A:   Yes, they have fundamental units.

S:   Discontinuity means units.

A:   Yes, but the continuity, let’s say the continuum physics, while it may not be microscopically correct, it is physically useful.

S:   The same as statistical conclusions are useful.

A:   Yes.  I guess you’d use statistics to obtain continuity where there isn’t any.

S:   Yes, artificial continuity. I’m very happy to hear you say that, because I was wondering how much confirmation I could find from people who are better versed than I on this matter of continuity.

A:    I haven’t thought very much about whether there’s continuity in time, but I know that in a sense, one of your ideas on this is satisfying to me, and that is, time, as far as human sensibilities are concerned, is made up of discrete intervals, and there’s no continuity as far as humans measure time. So this has made me suspicious that there may not be any real continuity except statistically, for time also.

S:   It manifests itself to our sensory system as a discontinuity.

A:   Yes.  That doesn’t mean that it isn’t continuous, but it makes me

suspicious.

S:   That means for practical purposes, as for physical purposes — even if it may

not be so for metaphysical purposes. ‘For physical purposes at least, and for physical and practical and objective purposes, time is discontinuous.

A:   Yes.

S:   That clock has to tick.

A:   Now, epistemologically, is it useful to talk about time in a metaphysical sense,

at the same time you talk about time in a physical sense?

S:   Well if you’re talking about metaphysical phenomena — metaphenomena or

 __________, or psychic phenomena of any kind, then you can talk about continuum or whatever you like. But we know that the environ­ment with which our physical part, our soma, is related, is discontinuous. If it were not, we’d have no way to mark time or to appreciate time or, to experience time. We can only experience time by reason of its discontinuity.

A:   Yes, because at any instant, I don’t observe any motion in the hands of my watch. It’s only when it moves from one number to the next that I perceive the movement of time.

S:   Except these clocks which I notice . . those large clocks, the hand moves every second. They stand still between. Have you noticed that?  (laughing)

A:   No, but I think if you really wanted to get right down to it, so do these hands. They don’t really move continuously. I think if you put a very sensitive dial indicator on, say, the hour hand of this watch, you’d find that it moved in a jerky way itself.

S:   But let’s notice some of the corollaries, if I may call them such — if we are going to assume, at least, that time is discontinuous and that motion, which marks time, is also discontinuous, and that mass, which undergoes motion and from which motion proceeds, is discontinuous, then we are assuming the three fundamental, absolute units in the objective world.

A:   Would you repeat that?

S:  We are assuming then that ___________________ mass, motion and time, are discontinuous — and come in discrete quantities.

A:   Yes, they all three do.

S:   Then, we must either say that there are absolute units in those three fields, or else that there is a field of no discontinuity. The moment you abandon the basic unit, you have assumed that there is a field — of mass, let us say, that is discontinuous.

A:   Is the implication that, if there is a discontinuity, there is a more fundamental unit?

S:   Yes, that there is a fundamental unit. Not more fundamenta1 — like something being more unique!  (laughing)

A:   Oh. That there may be something fundamental which relates all three of these.

S:   No, I think these three are related to each other. We know in fact they are, as a matter of practice. But looking at the nature of the three aspects of an event, the mass aspect, motion aspect and the time aspect, and assuming that below a certain magnitude, we’ll say, take any one, take the mass, below a certain unit of mass, that there is no more divisibility, no more discontinuity. Then we have two kinds of a cosmos. Below a certain point it’s continuous, and above a certain point, it’s discontinuous.

A:   Well let’s see. It’s easier to talk about mass than it is the others, as far

as I’m concerned. Below a certain point, you have to stop talking about mass and

start talking about energy.

S:   Well then you’ve mixed in your motion and time, if you make energy out of it.

A certain amount of work (per) unit of time . . .

A:   Okay then let’s forget it; this more or less proves the interrela­tionship of

mass, motion and time.

S:   Oh yes, I’m taking that for granted. I’m just considering mass alone for

the moment.

A:   Okay. Well you get to the point just before you have to start talking about units of energy rather than mass, and that is at the atomic level.

 

S:   Whatever it may be.

 

A:   Well, the nuclear level, where you have particles of mass approxi­mately equal

to the mass of a proton.

S:   ________________  bring in any conception that we didn’t absolutely have to have.  (laughing)

A:   Well, you get to the point where there are small particles of mass — having masses.

S:   But what I want to point out is that there has to be an absolute minimum unit of mass, or else there’s a quantity at which there is no discontinuity.

A:   There’s still discontinuity here, as far as I’m concerned.

S:   Yes. Well now if you have discontinuity, you’ve got to have units. And to have smaller units than a certain unit, you would have to have a unit less than which will not integrate with motion and time. The three have got to come together to make an event, to make an item of work, or action. You’ve got to have both force, and motion, to get work, or action — to get anything that can be experienced. And shall we say that there is no unit of mass so small that it would not combine with a unit of motion?

A:   (Long pause, dubiously) No . .

S:   Then that’s the least unit.

A:   That unit of mass which . . .

S:   . . . less than which will not combine with motion.

A:   A unit of mass so small, that at any velocity, its energy is zero. Is that right?

S:   It wouldn’t assume any velocity. It wouldn’t take on any velocity.

A:   Oh! But I don’t know — you can talk about velocity, as an abstraction.

S:   Well of course every ratio is an abstraction, and velocity isn’t anything but a ratio. It has no energy; it’s a relationship between two numbers.

A:   Now, it’s more physically meaningful to me to talk about energy — say kinetic energy — as being the product of mass times the velocity squared . . .

S:   Well let me raise a question here. I’m rather shy of using the term energy because it seems to me we use it in two senses. we talk about buying and selling energy, you know, and we also talk about energy as a rate of work.

A:   No — energy isn’t the rate of work, that’s power.

S:   Well, then, let’s call it power then. We can also call it power. But power sounds to me like potential — something that’s capable of doing something. Something like potential energy of an _______________.

A:   No, until the energy is actually producing some effect, it still is just energy. As soon as it begins to do work at a certain rate, then it becomes power, strictly speaking. I mean, this is using the definitions of . . .

S:   We’re drawing a distinction between a rate of energy and a quantity of energy.

A:   Yes, we’re making that distinction.

S:   Now let’s see what the figures are. If we take — shall we use the English measure? Take a pound.

A:  All right.

S:   And it moves through one unit of motion, called a foot.

A:   If we’re taking a pound of mass and we’re going to use English units, we have to be careful as to whether we’re talking about pounds of mass or pounds of force.

S:   Well we use the same unit in our measuring, don’t we?

 

A:   No, it isn’t the same unit. That’s what’s wrong with using the British

system.

S:   Force is measured in pounds, is it not, and mass is measured in pounds,

is it not?

A:   Yes, but they’re different units.

S:   You mean a difference in gravity and ____________ ?

A:   One pound-force is equal to one pound of mass accelerated at a rate of 52.2

feet per second. Now the ratio which defines that force which produces one foot per

second per second acceleration on one pound of mass, is another unit called poundal.

It’s a different unit. A one-pound mass accelerated at one foot per second squared

. . .

S:   Much as a dyne is different from an erg, isn’t it?

A:   Yes.  Well . . no.

S:   A dyne is different from a gram.

A:   No, a dyne and an erg are different concepts.

S:   A dyne and a gram, I’m thinking of.

A:   Yes.  The British have corrupted the metric system also. There’s a metric

gravitational system and the absolute system. Now you don’t get into trouble using

absolute system with metrics, because you can talk about forces in terms of dynes,

and masses in terms of grams, and there’s never any confusion, because you don’t

use the name to apply to different concepts. But in the British system, you can have

a pound of mass and a pound of force, and they’re different — the same name, but

different concepts. And this is a grievous thing to a lot of engineers. I used to

have trouble with it myself until I thought about it and ____________

S:   In the CGS system you don’t have that confusion, do you?

A:   No.  None at all.

S:   Well sticking to the CGS system — I call it GCS myself, for what I think is good reason, but don’t need to go into that now. It doesn’t matter, does it.

A:   No, it doesn’t.

S:   I feel that the gram is the primary experience, that we have to feel something

like weight or force or pressure or inertia, before we can consider motion, and that

we have to consider motion before we can consider time. I think there is a natural

order in which they come into our consciousness, or our sense organs.

A:   If you’re going to try to apply these concepts to human experience, isn’t what

we actually experience, motion?

S:   Well, motion of something.

A:   Motion of something. Something discrete.

S:   Of something that moves. (laughing)

A:   Yes.  If everything else is moving at the same rate we are, we don’t

experience motion even.

S:   That something seems to be a prerequisite. A prerequisite to motion is something

to move, isn’t it.

A:   Yes.  And I guess more specifically, relative motion.

S:   Yes, as all motion is.

A:   Yes . . That’s right. But things have to be moving in relation to us before we sense an event.

S:   Yes, or between some parts of us. We can feel our heart moving and feel our

respiration, we can feel our thumb moving towards or away from our fingers. And yet

we always have to have something to move before we get motion.

A:   But the different senses experience events differently, it seems to me.

S:   Because they’re different senses.

A:   Yes, the experience we get from our eyes, is motion, discrete motion

— something moving relative to us from one corner to the next.

S:   Yes.

A:   The experience we get from our feel . . our. . .

S:   Sense of touch, though . . .

A:   . . our sense of touch, is pressure, or impact.

S:   But you feel the original sense on your body — you feel a motion from here to

here, from your knee to your elbow, or your knee to your thigh, or one side of your

face to another.

A:   Maybe this is revealing: If a pressure is brought to bear on a spot of the body

for a long period of time, you get to the point where you don’t sense it anymore.

You accommodate to it. There is a point before that, though, that you still sense

it; so you can say that you sense pressure, or force, so long as you don’t accommodate

to it. Therefore, maybe what you actually sense is not the force, but a sort of an

impact, the more . . Let’s see. We get into that time response business that we were

talking about once before, you know — a human being has a “band width,” so to speak.

You know this particular concept?

S:   No.

 

A:   Of a “band width?”

 

S:   No.

 

A:   A human being has a certain frequency response. He responds to a certain spectrum of frequencies between . . .

 

S:   /Not audible/

 

A:   At a low enough frequency he doesn’t respond to it at all. Like, most people don’t respond to frequencies common in the economic realm which are, like, a generation or so. They don’t respond to these frequencies.

 

S:  Or the gastronomic frequencies.

 

S:   Any low frequencies, they don’t . . .

/INTERRUPTION TO CHANGE TAPE/

______________________________

 

S:   Let’s go back a little bit, . .

 

A:   All right.

 

S:   . . . and try not to introduce anything except what we have to introduce. I think what I introduce!  (laughing)

 

A:   All right.

 

S:   I’m trying to take that which is least complex at each step. And the first thing I want to introduce is that there is such a thing as — whatever it is that we measure by a gram, and some call it inertia, some call it force, some call it mass. But whatever it is, in dealing quantitatively, if we use the same measurement — that is, the same _____________ or units, whatever it is, and the idea is that there is a basic unit, I mean in the sense that it’s indivisible and that it is unanalyzable of course . . and that it has to be that big in order to generate motion.

 

A:   It has to be that big, to generate motion.

S:   Yes. If it were smaller than that, it wouldn’t manifest motion, it wouldn’t generate motion. No motion would come out of it. I just want to take that tentatively for the time being. Don’t let’s question whether it’s demonstrable.

A:   I want to be sure I understand what you mean by motion, that’s all. You mean by motion that it can take on a velocity?

S:   Well we come to that. We find that motion always generates time. Or  rather, time always proceeds out of motion. Just as mass generates motion.

A:   Oh, okay. Below a certain point, a mass no longer is a mass which can be identified with a change of position.  . .No — that starts to get into an argument.

S:   Of course it’s motion if it’s in the mass of some magnitude that might have motion like a spinning top, without any change in its over-all position but change over the position of all its parts with respect to its environment.

A:   You don’t get very far in this before you find yourself immersed in other fundamental quantities.

S:   Well let’s submit to that if it’s necessary.

A:   All right.

S:   But don’t let’s do it unnecessarily.

A:   I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t necessary right off the bat.

S:   Well, if it is, that necessity should make itself manifest. As a necessity, and not as something we import voluntarily.

A:   Because if you want to define the limits on mass, and you’re unable to do this without introducing one of the other fundamental concepts, this suggests that …

S:   We’re just using the imagination now, and the imagination can

disregard other things that go with mass.

A:   Well you’re talking about motion, and I asked, what is it.

S:   Well, having assumed whatever it is that we commonly think of as mass, we immediately consider it as having motion. And the fact is, when we speak of a pound mass, we always mean, for practical purposes, that that pound’s going to be repeated every time you have a unit of motion. As soon as you have mass and motion combined, then you repeat the mass every time you repeat the motion unit. That’s why you multiply the number of pounds by the number of feet, or the number of grams by the number of centimeters. Here is a quantity of motion. A quantity of motion is the number of centimeters. We’re multiplying the quantity of mass by the quantity of motion.

A:   Okay . . so the term motion here is used in the sense of a displacement.

S:   Yes.

A:   It doesn’t invoke the other basic unit, namely time.

S:   Well that appears in its proper sequence. First we will say we have motion in the sense of displacement, and the thing that moves we call, say, ten centimeters /grams?/. Well that means it’s ten centimeters /grams?/every time you have a unit of motion. So if you have ten units of motion, you multiply the ten by the ten to get the total mass-motion content, which is work. Isn’t that right? That’s the same as force times distance. Mathematically the same thing.

A:   Well, not necessarily. If you moved ten units of mass ten centimeters on a frictionless plane, and took an infinite amount of time to do this, there wouldn’t be any work involved, because there would be no force. But not necessarily.

S:   Right. we’ve introduced an infinity, which of course doesn’t come

within the range or the purview of our experiences.

A:   No . . so the implication . . okay. Physically, you can’t have this without some kind of a force, so there would be work involved here. But is it synonymous, if you find that a mass . . .

S:   I’m asking you to just give consideration to these ques­tions, and not inquire into their validity for the moment.  (laughing)

A:   All right, okay. So we have a concept of mass, which is . . .

S:   And when we say so many units of mass, we mean that as it enters into our experience, it has to take on the form of motion, and that these numbered units of mass must be so many units for each unit of motion. So that makes a mass or force times a distance. Which we call work.

A:   All right, so you’re asking me to consider a concept wherein wherever a mass of so many units, in terms of gram, is found to be displaced from one position to another — now so many units of displacement in centimeters …

S:   And you repeat that mass every time you have a new unit of displacement .

A:   Yes . . and we call the combination work.

S:   Yes.  Now we further find that as we approach (in our imagination) an objective event which we can experience . . . We can’t experience this, because we can’t experience work as such without time. Time has to come into it, and of course we haven’t integrated the three together to make something that we can experience. we can’t experience it without time. So this amount of work has to be done during so many units of time. And so if there are so many units of time, we multiply this amount of work by so many units, to get the quantity of work done in the quantity of time.

 

A:   And you call this . .

S:   We call that the total of the work. We try and measure how much work there is. The mass times the units of motion gives the quantity of work, but we don’t know now long that took. If we say it took one second, and then it continued to operate through several more seconds, we must multiply it by the number of seconds of duration that this event occupies.

A:   The longer it takes, the more you got?

S:   Yes.

A:   That’s curious.

S:   Because your unit of motion is tied to a unit of time. And so if you have two units of time, you have twice as much work.

A:   This is exactly opposite from the way . . .

S:   Now you give me an opposite conception and see it work.  (laughing)

A:   I’m just making a comparison; you don’t want me to do that yet. Okay. So we have a concept of total work, which is the quantitative work that we previously defined . . .

S:   We can say that mass times motion is work. Gram times centimeter is work. And that if that amount occupies one unit of time, that that is a rate of work. If it occupies two units of time . . I mean that if it continues through two, I don’t mean that if you split it up.

A:   Oh!  Okay . .

S:   It continues. Durational time, I’m talking about.

S:   Okay now, okay.

S:   Not time in the sense of its division, dividing it up.

A:   During each period, each one of these units of time, it does the same quantitative amount of work, then integrating over this period gives you the total amount of work.

S:   And then if you have two units of time, there will be twice as much work. Two units of duration. I sometimes use the expression, time as frequency, and time as duration — durational time.

A:   Perfectly satisfactory.

S:   Well, don’t commit yourself too much. We’re just looking at it anyhow, we’re not trying to evaluate it. Giving it what Emerson called, “intelligent consideration.” We’re not either denying it or accepting it. (laughing)

A:   I think what I mean by that is that I am following.

S:   So we now find that if we have a quantity of work being done, and we want to analyze it into its constituents, do a quantitative analysis of it, we’ll call it . . let’s say ten grams through ten centimeters per second, during ten seconds. So many grains per centimeter, and so many centimeters per unit, during ten seconds. Then we have a thousand units of work in the whole combination. Because we have ten grams of force, or mass, for each unit of motion, and we have ten units of motion, then we have a hundred gram-centimeter units  

which are work units, aren’t they, gram-centimeter units? Work units?

A:   All right, okay. And each one of these units of work . . .

S:   And this is per each unit of time. So then if we have ten units of time, we’ll have an over-all quantity of work represented by one thousand work units.

A:   All right.

S:   Now we’re going to keep that one thousand, because we’re talking about a certain quantity of work — just as I talked about a certain quantity of life-years in my book. We’re not going to change that quantity, although we may change the elements which compose it.

A:   The proportions of the elements . .

S:   As we change one, we must make a corresponding reciprocal change in the other, in order that we shouldn’t change our over-all quantity of work, which is a thousand.

So then let us make it, instead of ten units of mass, let’s make it one unit of mass, and one hundred units of motion, per unit of time. And this, by ten units of time, will make a thousand units of work, the same as before, won’t it?

A:   Umhm.

S:   Except that the composition between our first two elements, instead of being

10 to 10, is 1 to 100 — and any other proportions we want to make up that comes

to a hundred. Factor one hundred as much as you like. Now whatever be the composition

of work done per unit of time, whatever the composition be, just so it amounts to

a hundred units of work per unit of work /time?/ then if the units of time are ten,

we’ll still have a thousand units of in the whole event which we’ve been analyzing.

Now we took a thousand units to begin with, and we’ve analyzed it into two ways

— one into ten times ten times ten, and the other into one by one hundred by ten.

And we can go on making any number of different analyses of it, showing that a given

quantity of work represented by one hundred units of work can have a tremendous

variety of composition without having any change of dimension. Yet its interior

dimensions are being changed all the time — what we call its compositional

dimensions.

 

A:   You might call this the quality of the work.

S:   I was about to say . . the quality of the work. Because we experience it

differently.

A:   I’ll say.

S:   And that’s why it’s quality.

A:   We do in physics too.

S:   Yes. Well, quality always means that some evaluation _______________. We evaluate it differently according to how it’s composed. So that identifies composition with quality. You took the words out of my mouth.

A:   I’m sorry.

S:   Oh no, I wanted you to get it, and you got it ahead of time. (laughing)  When

I say “get it,” I don’t mean accept it — Just to look at it.

A:   I think I see what you’re getting at now. You’re getting at several basic

. . well they’re not so basic, but they are still fundamental considerations in

thermodynamics. And they are not approached from this point of view, so that they

are . . .

S:  I’m not sophisticated enough to know all of the technical aspects of the

thing.

A:  But there are concepts of availability, like you could take a certain fixed

Quantity of energy — however you’re calling it work — and of this quantity, how

much work can you get out of it in a heat engine. Well that depends on what level

of energy this energy is in. Now the level of temperature that this energy is existing

at, may be called the quality of it. Now this is my term. I haven’t seen this anywhere

else.

 

S:   I think it may match out all right, but I’m a little bit confused about

it. Because I’m trying to exclude all of those further considerations that

this doesn’t lead us into.

 

A:   Okay, don’t let me distract you. Let me try and follow yours.

S:   If we have them, I want to grow up to them. I don’t want to have to come

down and oppose them _________ my basic pattern.

 

A:   All right, I’ll try not to interrupt you.

 

S:   (laughing)  I want to note some of the consequences, having it clearly fixed in our mind now that a hundred /thousand?/ units of work, made up of a composition of mass and motion multiplied by the durational time, the number of time units through which it extends, to give the magnitude of the whole event. Having that clear in mind, then it is susceptible to us factoring it — a change of ratio between the first two — which affects its quality but does not affect its quantity. I think that is fundamental . . could be thought of as fundamental . . in our whole objective world, perhaps giving us a little light on what we mean by a quantitative or a qualitative change. Then remembering that we have decided that we are dealing with a fundamental unit of mass, less than which would not enter into a quantity of work, less than which would not take on motion — which is requisite that there be motion — having done that, this can’t possibly be any smaller. And that means, then, that the hundred . . one times a hundred, is it not . . that the hundred units of motion is the largest possible hundred units of motion per unit of time. Since the unit of mass can’t get any smaller, then the hundred units of motion must be the highest amount of motion that you could have per unit of time.

A:   Why?  You can’t have fractional mass?

 

S:   We’ve said it’s indivisible, that it’s to be taken as an absolute unit of

mass. An indivisible unit of mass.

 

A:   Okay, whatever these units are..

 

S:   They’re the natural minimum units.

 

A:   One of these is . . 

 

S:   Measured in a gram for convenience.

 

A:   Okay, supposing the gram is the elemental . .

 

S:   All right, or we can just as well say some fraction of a gram could

be the elemental quantity. And this means that there are basic units in

nature.

 

A:   Okay.

S:   So on the basis of that, in that particular composition, the number of motion

units per unit of time would be as high as it could ever get. But if you could cut

down on your mass unit, smaller, you’d get more motion units per unit of time,

wouldn’t you.

 

A:   Uh huh.

S:   Well on that simple hypothesis, and I think it seems oversimplified to you,

probably . .

 

A:   No . .

 

S:   At any rate, on that simple hypothesis, the velocity of light is a derived

consequence, a corollary of the analysis of the quantity of work. In like manner,

let us cut down the durational time units to one. And then we have, whatever the

product is of the first two, which may be one times a hundred or a hundred times

one, or ten times ten, if that remains a hundred, but when we cut down the time unit

from ten to one, that has to become a thousand. And now the quantity of work done

per unit of time is a thousand.

 

A:   And you’re going to leave that fixed.

S:   Well how could it be any greater?

A:   The total amount of work done in ten units of time was a thousand.

S:   Yes.

A:   And that’s going to remain fixed.

S:   But now that we have reduced the number of units of time from ten to one,

we must increase the number of units of work from one hundred to one thousand.

 

A:   But if you have a minimum mass, it can’t be done.

S:   Well either way, let the mass be what it will, and the motion be what it

will, if it’s a hundred — ten by ten, or one by a hundred, or a hundred by one

 — let it be what it will, then if you reduce your durational time unit, the

number of repetitions of your time unit, from ten to one, then in order to preserve

your thousand, not to change your over-all magnitude, you must now have a thousand

units of work in one unit of time. And unless you can make a unit of time less

than one, that’s the highest possible rate of work — the highest quantity of

work per unit of time which is rated to time. And so . . .

 

A:   Where one unit of time is the smallest increment of time you can have.

S:   Yes.  You couldn’t split the unit. Just as we can’t split the quantum units, they say. Now that gives us, then, something resembling an atomic explosion, because you couldn’t have any greater quantity of work done in a unit of time, than that, without increasing your total quantity. We’ve had two transformations within a given quantity of work, which was a thousand — made up of so many units of mass times so many units of motion per unit of time, and so many units of time. We’ve switched them around. The first switch made it appear that the motion units per unit of time couldn’t be any greater than that, unless we diminished the mass. And we’ve got the mass already at its minimum. The other is, suppose we diminish the duration time. Then we’ll have to have ten times as much work done per unit of time in order to have it done in one unit of time, instead of ten.

A:   But once you reach the maximum velocity, the maximum motion per unit of

time, the only way you can increase the energy under these conditions is to

increase the mass. You’ve got the minimum time increment, you’ve got the

maximum motion increment, so then the only way you can increase the energy is

to increase the mass.

S:   The first two terms represent mass times motion, doesn’t it, and that is fixed at a hundred. Although it may be in different factored . . .

A:   Okay.

S:   That’s fixed at a hundred. And that means that your time units must be ten, if you’re going to preserve the original quantity of work that we started out to examine. And we’re not going to change our quantity when we’re in the midst of an analysis, are we.

 

A:   No.

 

S:   So we’re going to keep that thousand firm out there. Well that calls for . .  . . so wherever your mass times motion is a hundred, you’ve got to have ten out there, in that third term. But now if you reduce that third term to one, then you’ve got to have a thousand in the first two terms.

A:   Right — which brings no constraint over the composition.

 

S:   Now since you can’t reduce it any further, by definition — it’s the minimal unit of time — therefore you can’t increase the quantity of work done per unit of time. You have the highest possible rate of energy, or rate of action — or rate of work, I’d better call it to avoid confusion of terms. So there gives us something to indi­cate how, with a given quantity of work represented by a thousand, we can have no more than a certain amount of velocity, and no less than a certain rate of work.

 

A:   Uhhuh.

S:   And that seems to correspond with what we call velocity of light on the

one hand, and with what we call the highest possible energy of explosion or

disintegration . . And notice when that energy takes place, that last one, your

mass element is at its minimum, and if it’s one, one can be considered as

having no effect on the multiplication. We can consider it as non-existent, for

mathe­matical purposes. Because the factor of one doesn’t change the

product. So then we account for mass turning into energy, or into work, as I

prefer to call it.

 

A:   Mass-energy__________________________

S:   Because when mass gets at its minimum, it can only be as a factor of one, and one doesn’t multiply anything. And that may be another way of looking at the famous idea of converting mass into energy.

A:   The equivalence of matter and energy.

S:   Equivalence. Yes. And so there’s a third possibility, too. There’s a

possibility that the amount of motion can be reduced to a single unit. I haven’t

mentioned that before. That means that there would have to be ten times as

much mass, doesn’t it, other things being alike, and so if your motion is at a

single unit, then your mass is at its highest ratio, of mass per unit of motion,

and your motion is at its lowest possible level. Which would be something

corresponding to what we call absolute zero. Though it’s not absolute,

because it’s still a quantity. (laughing) But it’s a quantity which is only one

unit and therefore it doesn’t multiply anything. So we have those three

physical phenomena rather as corollaries to the basic conception of a

thousand units of work made up of ten units of mass per each unit of motion,

and ten units of mass-motion per each unit of time, through ten units of

durational time. And taking that as the basic event, or event, or hypothesis,

that hypothesis contains within itself these three different aspects of action.

A:   You have shown, how you can derive the concept of a maximum velocity, 

a maximum rate of energy release, as in annihilation of an atom, and the

minimum motion, equivalent to absolute zero.

 

S:   Minimum motion per unit of time.

 

A:   Per unit of time, which is equivalent to absolute zero — and as a matter of fact, has a physical analogy. This is the point at which molecular motion, as they call it, ceases. It really doesn’t. But there is a minimum amount of molecular activity at a point called absolute zero, and on the thermodynamic scale of temperature . . .

S:   But I would say it most likely shouldn’t be thought of as absolute,

because it contains one unit of motion. And absolute zero means no motion at

all.

A:   Well it is a misnomer, because at that point there is no possibility of doing any thermal work, but there is still matter, there are still other forms of energy there.

S:   There’s still a unit of motion there.

A:   There’s still a unit of motion.

S:   And that is probably why we can only approach the absolute asymptotically. We can get where there really is a minimum there. And besides, the concept of a zero is something that our senses refuse to recognize. Our imagination entertains it.

A:   Just like . . it’s probably no more difficult to conceive of infinity than

it is of zero.

S:   Just the same.

A:   It’s the same thing.

S:   We can conceive of both of them with perfect ease. But our senses

refuse to recognize either one.

 

A:   Ah, yes.  Perceive, I should say.

S:   So our sensory experience, which then we call our physical, or objective

experience, runs on some octave, as it were — on some scale between zero

and infinity, both of which are incapable of being experienced objectively.

 

A:   I should have said “perceive,” not “conceive.” We can conceive of it.

S:   Yes, oh yes.  And our sensory system is so constructed that that octave has appreciably expanded in past time. It probably can expand much more.

A:   But it can only approach these things.

S:   It can never reach either of these; only the mind can reach the absolute.

We can’t make it towards zero or towards infinity. And that gives us our place

in nature, man’s place in nature. But I wanted to present that little formula,

that little hypothesis of a thousand units of work being capable of manifesting

itself in several different varieties within certain limits. And I gave you the

three different possible limits, corresponding with the three different kinds of

experiences that we have had.

A:   Excuse me. (To Evie) Are you going to bed now?

EV:  Yes, sir.

A:   Well say goodnight, to Mrs. Manning, to Mr. Heath. (Sound of a kiss)

S:   (Affectionate laughing)

A:   She’s the affectionate one. The other one is shy.

S:   One of mine was like that, the middle one. Good night, young lady, good night. (Hugging and affection)  She’s a very sweet young lady.

A:   Can I have one too?  (Loud kiss)  Good night.

EV:  Good night.

A:   (To Rosamina) You too? Good night, Rosie. (Loud kiss)

S:   She’s going to give me one too, no doubt. (To Rosie) Give me one too? (Hugging)  Ummm, that’s a good girl!

A:   She’s going to be my musical artist. And I think Evie’s going to be my graphical artist.

S:   Oh . . Wonderful!

A:   She’s very talented.

S:   It will be so nice they can complement each other.

A:   Yes.

S:   They won’t be rivals.

A:   Oh, they’re rivals already!

S:   (Laughing)  In those respects — if one is gifted in sight and the other in sound, then they’ll be complements rather than rivals.

A:   They get along very harmoniously, actually. They have common . . it’s easy to observe the natural phenomenon of property interacting between kids.

 

S:   Yes.

A:   Whatever they have, it’s theirs, and it’s very valuable to them, and they don’t like to share things. They don’t come by this act of sharing naturally.

 

S:   But that’s not a social phenomenon, as you know, because they don’t relate themselves to one another. They exclude themselves from one another by this process.

 

A:   They’re too young to..

S:   As soon as they use this property as capital, use it in the service of others, then they’re integrating their lives with other lives. The social concept of property is that which may be used in the service of others. The animal concept of property is that which may be withdrawn from the advantage of others. Quite the reverse idea. And we are very slowly coming to understanding that, in society, capital is not something you use yourself or enjoy yourself. Capital is something which you make other people enjoy.

A:   Yes sir.

 

S:   ________ the reverse.  That’s a little example of the things I’ve

thought to bring out whenever I have the opportunity, inherent in our capitalist system, the free enterprise system.

 

A:   Do you want to give exposition to these concepts again?

S:   Yes . . (laughing)

 

A:   Because this is one of the reasons I wanted this on tape; I wanted to listen to this again. I hope it comes out good. Because…

/Some discussion with Mrs. Manning

whether the tape is recording properly/

S:   I’m inclined to think we got past that point which was brought up by the children being here and having property among themselves . . .

A:   Well now does this bring us to the next point?

S:   No, that was a digression. It was taking us away from it.

A:   That was a digression. We want to continue with the development of the fundamental units.

S:   I laid down a hypothesis that there were three fundamental units, and just tentatively and not trying to support it at once, although I have in mind that it can be supported. And seeing that we don’t need any conception but the conception of the three basic units, of different kinds, which are necessary to be unified or integrated to bring about an event which we can experience through our senses.

 

A:   Measurable quantities.

S:   Yes.  Of course they’re imaginative, and they’re only objective when they come into this integration which we call a given quantity of work.

A:   Yes. That’s the part that’s difficult.

S:   Yes. The rest of it is metaphysical.

 

A:   Or I should say, it’s difficult to avoid that part.

S:   Yes, the premise of the three units is a metaphysical premise. Because unless they’re combined . . any one or two of them, without the third, is outside the range of the physical sensorium. (laughing) It only comes into the range of physical experience, of sensory experience when the three are there in some proportion. And if they come there in different proportions, they have a different effect upon our sensory system and therefore we evaluate them differ­ently. So the quality of the event depends not upon its magnitude, but upon its composition. Now this is a basic point of view which, if it is valid and can be supported, gives us a much more fundamental understanding.

A:   Well, the interesting thing about this development is the introduction
of this concept of quality, which you don’t get by considering these
things in the conventional way of physics, where they’re usually
interrelated from the beginning. You don’t talk about work except
in terms of mass, motion and time from the beginning. Energy, or
rather power, as you’re using energy per unit time, is all three at
once. You get to energy very quickly, and they’re already integrated
by the time you start talking about . . .

S:   When you pay your bill to the power company, you pay for this product.

of mass, motion and time. In the beginning.

A:   Durational time.

S:   Yes.

S:   Not how many times within a unit of time, how many repetitions . . but how many units of time are involved in the event.

/Interruption — David and baby Alvin/

S:   Oh how do you do, young man! 

David:  We’ve been very pleased to meet you. We’re glad you came over.

S:   Well, you’re just like me. I’m pleased too.

 

David:  Thanks.

S:   We’re all pleased. I hope you have a nice sleep, and happy dreams.