Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2732

Typed paper by Alvin Lowi, Jr. describing Heath’s “action physics.”

March 24, 2013

 

No original

 

 

 

SPENCER HEATH’S “ACTION” THEORY OF REALITY AND A PROSPECT FOR DEMONSTRATING ITS SUPREMACY IN PHYSICS

 

Alvin Lowi

March 24, 2013

Spencer Heath’s epistemological inclinations led him to adopt the concept of action from physics as the most fundamental quantity for scientific inquiry in any field in general and physics in particular. Action, taken to be the dimensions of “eventual reality,” was his clue to understanding society and he thought it would simplify the understanding of physics if it superseded energy as the fundamental quantity in physical theory.  

Like in physics, action in the sense Heath used it is the product of energy and durational time, which is the dimension of discrete events of human natural history and memorable human experience (a la Gestalt[1]). This concept of action differs from the usage of the Austrian economists (a la von Mises Human Action) but these usages are not in conflict. For the Austrians, human action is the cause of human economic events.  The difference in meaning is interesting. One expresses the quantity of experience in terms of units of action (a la physics) whereas the other refers only to the self-evident motivation of the individual human that produces economic events having magnitudes expressed in units of action.

It was Heath’s view that economic and social events must have the same dimensions as the subject-matter of physics and all other real, observable events. like  After all, reality is reality, etc… And so he developed his social theory accordingly. He designated the whole individual human life as the fundamental social event to be expressed in terms of the energy-times-time dimension, viz. “life-years.” [2]

Heath felt strongly that the epistemological significance of action would finally receive its due and be more widely recognized when its unification and simplification powers had been demonstrated more completely in physics where its usage originated. He thought such a demonstration would precipitate nothing less than a successful reformulation of physical theory in terms of action instead of energy as it now stands. He speculated that such a reformulation would lead to a long over-due unification of physics and a rebirth of its creative advance.

Heath developed an all-encompassing philosophy of spontaneous self-organization in nature from the inorganic through the biological and societal, all built on the premise of “action” as the fundamental observable in physical science.[3] Since he was never with any faculty, he had no students.  His thinking might easily have become lost to history but thanks to the successful efforts of his grandson Spencer Heath MacCallum, Heath’s ideas about human social organization have survived.[4]  A good part of MacCallum’s life’s work has been to preserve and bring his grandfather’s ideas under discussion.[5] But it has haunted this anthropologist having no competence in physics or math that the very foundation of Heath’s philosophy of science still lies uninvestigated. This is especially true of the present subject, about which Heath once remarked to his grandson, that if there was only one thing he would be remembered for a century hence, he hoped it would be for his contribution to the philosophy of science more than for his ideas about social organization.

INTRODUCTION TO HEATH’S IDEA OF ACTION

Spencer Heath’s philosophy of science proceeded from the principle that science deals not so much with abstractions as with events.*  That human experience is “eventual” and discrete as opposed to conceptual and continuous. For scientists in general but Heath in particular, events represent observable experience. As such, they are the particular subject-matter of science.  Heath made it plain that anything less than a whole, discrete event is an abstraction, a plaything of the human mind.  He believed that every person’s mind plays with his or her thoughts and abstractions, perceptions and emotions, but encounters with events introduces evidence of nature’s play.  He suggested that when mind’s play contemplates nature’s play, we humans find suggestions of a universal order. 

Heath attached great significance to the human experience of what he called “congruence,” which he characterized as a oneness with nature. Curiously, this association is reminiscent of the Hebrew concept of atonement (Heath’s expression was “at-one-ment”), which Jews commemorate in the holiday Yom Kippur following the celebration of their new year. This day is set aside for the “Children of Israel” to grapple with nature (or the God of Nature for some) in the manner attributed to Jacob in The Book of Genesis.

Heath’s regard for whole events is congenial with the Gestalt school of psychological studies, which postulate that humans perceive reality in terms of whole events less than which are mere abstractions, figments of the imagination. The rule from Gestalt is that the whole is something other than the sum of the parts.

In speaking of events, Heath embraced the traditional usage of physics in which the overall magnitude of an event is denominated in terms of units of action, defined as “energy” times “time.” Thus a bigger event contains a larger measure of action, a smaller event a lesser value of this property. 

In physics, the quantity or physical property called action is defined in terms of the operations involved in observing it. The energy content of an event is combined with the time during which this quantity of energy is manifested by forming the mathematical product of the two quantities.  As a consequence, a unit of action is formed, which is expressed in such terms as erg-seconds, where an erg is a small metric unit of energy.*

Action is the least abstract quantity in physics, integrating as it does fundamental but abstract dimensions.  For Heath, the dimensions of action consist of three essential conceptions of reality — mass, motion and time.** In combining those three abstract dimensions into the one quantity action, Heath found evidence of discrete, whole human experience — a Gestalt, so to speak. 

Energy, on the other hand, in terms of which most of modern physics is formulated, is an abstract concept, for it takes no account of the durational aspect of reality.  This oversight obliges physicists and engineers to submit to a separate “reality check.”  Strictly speaking, therefore, energy is not directly observable.  The durational property it neglects is an intrinsic attribute of all experience, which is essentially and fundamentally “event-ual”.  Heath found energy to be defective in this important respect.

A simple illustration of the reality defect in the energy-formulation of physics comes from classical thermodynamics which provides engineers a criterion for attaining the maximum possible conversion of heat energy to work.  Such a feat might be accomplished with a thermodynamically-ideal Carnot-Cycle engine if time was forever.  However, time is always at a premium for engineers and their human clients and this consideration has required, heretofore, separate treatment of the external factors affecting the time-rate  of energy transport; namely, friction, inertia, strength of materials, thermal and fluid flow resistance, heat capacity, etc.  In the end, actual engines, although obedient to Carnot’s principles, must effect vastly different physical processes in order to be practical and useful.

Heath conceived of the possibility of reformulating modern physics in terms of action instead of the more abstract energy, thereby making observable events per se   the foundation of physical science.  Although physics took a turn in this direction in the late nineteenth century, the more familiar energy viewpoint still predominates even though the revolutionary quantum physics is based upon an action-formulated hypothesis.  Energy formulations that derived from the conservation principle preoccupy physicists everywhere but in quantum physics where action is the fundamental quantity. Meanwhile, the principle of least action languishes in obscurity notwithstanding its recognized supremacy as a universality in physical theory.*

Modern physics, to which Heath was devoted, reckons there to be a discrete lower limit to the size of an event that can be observed in nature without being corrupted by the observer. That is to say, an event having a magnitude smaller than Planck’s quantum cannot be experienced by man independent of his manipulations, even with instruments.  Therefore, below this level of experience, knowledge becomes indeterminate and the uncertainties that are inherent in scientific work increase to the point where, regardless of diligence, no confidence can be gained in knowing the abstract details underlying the phenomena. Whatever may lie beyond can only be speculated as belonging in the domain of some ultimate objective reality that is presumed to exist but forever remains outside the scope of scientific treatment and, thus, the sphere of human knowledge.  Consequently, all men are burdened to live with a degree of uncertainty in their lives and to maintain an appropriate level of humility, sobriety and tolerance to ambiguity to go with it.

 

This apparent epistemological limitation on the validity of human knowledge seems to ordain an awareness of ignorance that grows faster than the knowledge acquired.  However, such a limitation would not seem to be so oppressive as to discourage learning.  Consider the quantum of Planck, a vanishingly small event which contains a quantity of action known as “Planck’s Constant” or “Planck’s Quantum of Action.”[6] Planck’s constant has been determined with remarkable precision to be about

            0.00000000000000000000000000663 erg-seconds of action^**

If an erg-second represents an almost unnoticeable chunk of history in human terms, then a quantum-sized event must be infinitesimal — a billionth-of-a-billionth-of-a-billionth of an erg-second.  But this quantity is not a “nothing.”  It is a finite “something.” It is the fundamental unit of all knowable physical experience, the indivisible event comprising all memorable experience.

Heath observed that quantum physics bears a marked resemblance to antique Greek atomistic philosophy.  However, he noticed that the ancient Greeks conceived their ultimate building blocks to be all alike and that they were never able to explain how to observe one.  Quantum physics represented to Heath a powerful refinement and advancement in that tradition by virtue of its reliance on the concept of action. Action enabled him to relate directly to experience, to bring into account the three constituent and quantifiable dimensions of that experience and to visualize infinite qualitative variation in the quanta of experience in terms of the proportions of those dimensions. 

For example, Heath was intrigued to find that three events possessing the same magnitude of action can vary so extremely in the proportions of their attributes of mass, motion and time as to manifest variously the speed of light (least mass), absolute minimum temperature (least motion) or nuclear fission (least time), three events having radically different sentient manifestations.  The term “least” is used here not to denote an absolute quantity but as a figure of speech suggesting an extreme qualitative distinction.

The photon of Einstein represents another example of this intriguing quality aspect of events.  Although Einstein preferred to think of a photon of light in terms of continuous electromagnetic waves and fields, a photon can also be depicted as a quantum of action manifesting qualitative variation in terms of its constituent units. A given photon can display the various colors in visible light, attain remarkable penetrating power as “x-rays” and travel long distances through clouds, around the curvature of the Earth and throughout space as “radio waves” depending on its wavelength or period of vibration.

To further illustrate the “qualitative” nature of events, we can easily construct in our imagination pairs of events of equal magnitude, that is, containing equal quantities of action but evoke sharply contrasting human perceptions.  For example, a Thanksgiving roast turkey dinner represents a physical event containing about the same magnitude of action as a lightning bolt. However, contrast the human responses to these disparate events of “equal” magnitude — gratification on the one hand and trauma on the other.

Classical physics developed wherever nature “appears” to be continuous.  Under such conditions, scientists can safely concentrate on processes or mechanical relationships while ignoring discrete events.  Classical physicists concentrating on “continuum physics have been successful — even spectacularly so — when dealing with macrocosmic phenomena, where mechanical models of the universe suffice for most engineering applications and analysis. However, in the realm of radiation, chemistry, thermodynamics and other microscopic studies where phenomena appear as separate or discrete events, as physicists are pressed to deal with discontinuous “micro” physical phenomena. Here, the notion of action has become indispensable and the newer “Quantum” physics takes over.  At this scale of experience, the newer quantum physics, notwithstanding or perhaps because of its concern for indeterminacy, has proven its great explanatory power, succeeding in areas where the classical approach has utterly failed to produce agreement with observation. The mechanistic determinism of renaissance continuum science, although alluring in its simplicity, is now seen to be inadequate for resolving natures’ order regarding more complex phenomena such as society.

The discretely eventual or corpuscular view of the world has challenged and discomforted many thoughtful people throughout the ages. No less a person than Einstein was one.  Spencer Heath was not.  Heath found ample evidence of processes connecting events to explain the flow of history and he had no problem conceding the concept of continuity in nature to an “ultimate reality.”  Thus the idea that “everything is connected to everything else” was entirely plausible to him. 

PROSPECTS OF AN “ACTION” PHYSICS DEMONSTRATION

Spencer Heath’s epistemological inclinations led him to adopt the concept of action from physics as the most fundamental quantity for scientific inquiry in any field of phenomena in general and physics in particular. That “action” from physics provided the dimensions of “eventual reality” was his clue to understanding society, and he thought this discovery would return the favor to physics by enabling a simplification of the subject matter as a result of the more fundamental “action” superseding the more abstract “energy” as the fundamental quantity in physical theory.  Like in physics, action in the sense Heath used it is the product of energy and durational time, which is the dimension of discrete events of human natural history and memorable human experience (a la Gestalt).

This concept of action differs from another usage of the term in social science, namely that of the Austrian school economists such as Ludwig von Mises. But these usages are not in conflict. The difference in meaning is interesting. For the Austrians, human action is the postulated cause of human economic events. For Heath and physicists in general, action is merely the magnitude of an event. One expresses the quantity of experience in terms of units of action (a la physics) whereas the other refers only to the self-evident motivation that produces economic events whose magnitude would be expressed in some sort of action units. 

It was Heath’s view that economic and social events like all real observable events must have the same dimensions as the subject-matter of physics and any other real, observable events. And so he developed his social theory accordingly, e.g. he designated the whole individual human life as the fundamental social event to be expressed in terms of the energy-times-time dimension — “life-years.”[7]

Heath felt strongly that the epistemological importance of action would finally receive its due and be more widely recognized when its unification and simplification powers had been demonstrated more completely in physics where its usage originated. He thought that demonstration would consist of nothing less than a successful reformulation of physical theory in terms of action instead of energy, which is where the exposition of physics now stands. If this result could be demonstrated, it would prove the novelty and merit of Heath’s proposal that “action” is more fundamental to physics than “energy.”

A place to start such a reformulation is the unification of the two most fundamental laws of physics – The Principle of Least Action and the Conservation of Energy Law. The idea is to derive the First Law of Thermodynamics from the Principle of Least Action. This feat is said to be possible for one with sufficient literacy and competence in physical theory. The converse is said to be impossible.  

Heath was imbued with the epistemology of action because, based as it was on the durational time content of experience, he found it to be closer to observable reality. On the other hand, energy is a famously static quantity, so much so a professor of mine (Myron Tribus) wrote a textbook on classical thermodynamics and titled it “Thermostatics.” Gestalt psychology provides some support for this viewpoint.   A lot more can be said for this idea but the fact remains that energy, not action, is the fundamental quantity used in most formulations of physical theory. This is true even in some treatments of mechanics, both in the quantum and the macro domains.[8] Such results could not have been accomplished without elevating the concept of action to the top of the conceptual hierarchy.

Work of this type is very sparce in the scientific literature. But an interesting slant on the subject that is quite complementary to Spencer Heath’s point of view on action comes from the Italian physicist Basilio Catania.[9] Catania proposes the unit of action be named after Maupertuis or Plank.  I certainly get those connections.  But Planck’s constant, which is the value of the quantum of action, would seem to preempt  Maupertuis,  even though he was first to define action. It is obvious from his exposition that Catania has already satisfied himself that the action unit is the most fundamental dimension of physics. And his points are well chosen. Still, there is a long way to go before physics is rehashed in terms of action. A derivation of the first law of thermodynamics from the least action principle would seem to be a good place to start.

 

 

 CURRICULUM VITAE

Spencer Heath

SPENCER HEATH began his engineering career designing telephone equipment in the early days of the Western Electric Company. He completed his formal education at the Corcoran Scientific School, National University, Washington, D.C., eventually receiving LL.B and LL.M degrees. He subsequently became a counselor-at-law and a patent attorney, associating with Simon and Christopher Lake in connection with new developments of submarines and aircraft. He was patent counsel and engineering consultant to Emilie Berliner on aircraft engines and helicopters establishing research, development and manufacturing facilities for aeronautical inventions including the mass production of “Paragon” engine-controlled-pitch propellers during World War I. He developed and demonstrated power-operated controllable and reversible pitch propellers of his own invention and sold his patents and technical facilities to Bendix Aviation Corporation in 1929. After two years employment with Bendix as a research engineer, he retired in 1931 to concentrate on research into the foundations of the natural sciences with the aim of establishing the basis for an authentic natural science of society. From 1931 through 1933, he participated in the establishment of The Henry George School of Social Studies in New York City where he taught his outline of basic community organization and social functioning in terms of reciprocal energy exchange. He wrote and published various papers and essays on this subject, completing his major work Citadel, Market and Altar in 1946. This book was published by his own Science of Society Foundation, Inc. in 1957 prior to which he published Progress and Poverty Reviewed  (a critique of Henry George’s work in The  Freeman, 1953), A Solution to the Suez  (1953) and Politics versus Proprietorship  (1954). He was a member of The Aero Club of America, the Newcomen Society and the Society of Automotive Engineers (serving on the Engineering Standards Committee). He authored various technical articles on propeller theory and other aeronautical engineering subjects that were published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute and other technical journals. His biography was listed in International Who’s Who (American University Publishers, 1946…) and in Who’s Who in the East (A. N. Marquis Publications, 1947…). He made his home at Roadsend Gardens on Lawyer Hill, Elkridge, MD. He maintained an office at 11 Waverly Place, New York City.  

Spencer Heath MacCallum

Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico

sm@look.net

El Paso, TX phone line (915)261-0502) rings in Mexico.

 

 

APPENDIX

AN ELEMENTARY CONCEPT OF “ACTION” FROM A PHYSICS VIEWPOINT

                Action is formally defined in classical physics as the mathematical product of energy and time, or, more particularly, as the combined quantity of energy (E) and time (T) involved in a discrete (complete) event bounded by, or occurring in, a definite and finite time interval ( T).^* Symbolically–when the energy constituent is assumed constant–this concept can be most simply expressed as

                                                                                                           (1)         

The subscript numerals in Equation (1) denote the initial and final states bounding the time interval or durational component of the event. If the energy magnitude (E) is expressed in “absolute” metric units (ergs) and the duration () in seconds, the units of action are erg-seconds.

                From an observational standpoint, energy is an abstraction that can have various forms and equivalences, ancestors and progeny. However, all of them must have logical–if not directly observable–equivalence with the special case called work. Thus, symbolically,

 

                                                                                                                                                            (2)         

Work is classically defined as the energy involved in the movement of an object M through a displacement L against a force F. A simple example of work from mechanics is the lifting of a weight. Neglecting the technicality that displacement L and force F have direction as well as magnitude (known formally as vector quantities) and also that force is most generally variable, the work of a constant force may be expressed most simply as

                                                                                                               (3)

                The units of work are quite naturally the same as the units of

energy in general, e.g. ergs. In consistent metric units, the force and displacement in Equation (3) would be expressed in dynes and centimeters respectively.

            Force is classically defined by Newton’s Second Law, which can be

written for a non-varying mass as

                                                                                                                     (4)      

where m is the mass of an object M and a is its acceleration in consistent metric units. Where the force is in dynes, the mass would be expressed in grams and the acceleration in centimeters-per-second-per-second.            A particular force is exerted on a body M of mass m when the acceleration is the local acceleration of gravity g.  This is the weight of the body

 

                                                                                                                   (5)

In absolute metric units, the weight F_g like any other force, may be expressed in dynes. However, it is not uncommon, although it is obsolete, to see weight expressed in grams. This is the basis of the gravitational system of units. A gram (weight) is related to a gram (mass) by the local acceleration of gravity as shown in Equation (5).

                Acceleration (a) is the physical concept denoting the time-rate-of-change of velocity (v), which, in turn, is the time-rate-of-change of position–or displacement. As indicated previously, displacement is most precisely understood as a vector, and therefore it follows that velocity and acceleration are likewise vectors. However, neglecting the directional dimension for the present and looking only at magnitudes, the velocity reduces to the abstraction known in physics simply as the speed. To repeat, the speed is the magnitude only of the velocity of a body, which normally describes not only the time-rate-of-change of its linear position (displacement) but also the time-rate-of-change of its direction (rotation), either of which can be referred to as motion. Symbolically, the velocity (speed) is expressed simply as

 

                                                                                                                     (6)

and the acceleration as

                                                                                         (7)

Consistent metric units for velocity would be in centimeters per second, and for acceleration in centimeters per second per second.

            Another widely used concept of classical physics is momentum, which came into precise usage largely because of Newton’s original use of it as the dependent variable in his original differential equation expressing his Second Law of Motion. This differential equation can be written in the algebraic (difference) form as

 

                                                                                                               (8)

where the product of the mass and velocity of a body (mv) in Equation (8) is defined as the momentum and is normally a vector concept also. Following the rules of differential calculus and assuming the mass is constant in Equation (8),

                                                                                                                (9)

Notice that Equation (9) reduces to Equation (4) when the acceleration a in Equation (7) is substituted for it.  An object M of mass m having the momentum mv is said to have kinetic energy, or energy in motion, as defined by the relation

                                                                                                                             (10)

which derives from the work done on the body of constant mass m undergoing a uniform acceleration from rest to a velocity v.  In terms of momentum,

 

                                                                                                            (11)

Now from Equation (1), various expressions of action can be obtained by substituting for the various abstract quantities (m, V, F, etc.). For example, from Equation (10)

                                                                                               (12)

and from Equation (11)

                                                                                               (13)

and from Equation (3)

                                                                                            (14)

and from Equations (3) and (4)

                                                                                        (15)

and from Equations (3) and (5)

                                                                                          (16)

or

                                                                                      (17)

            Now Equations (14) and (16) say action is the product of force, displacement, and time; or weight, displacement, and time.  An extensive vocabulary of equivalent three-component products of action follows from the above derivation. Several are listed in the following table (the “X” denotes multiplication):

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLASSICAL PHYSICS:

Momentum    X	Motion	X      Time
Momentum    X	Motion	X      Duration
Mass             X	(Velocity)2	X      Duration
Weight          X	Displacement	X      Duration
Weight          X	Movement	X      Duration
Weight          X	Motion	X      Time
Force            X	Motion	X      Time
Gramm          X	(Cm/Sec2)	X      Second
Gramf            X	Centimeter	X      Second
Dyne             X	Centimeter	X      Second

COMMON LANGUAGE

Substance     X	Motion	X      Duration

SPENCER HEATH

Mass             X	Motion	X       Time
Gram            X	Centimeter	X       Second

                From the preceding table it becomes readily apparent how Spencer Heath justified his usage of a simplified, threefold constituency for action in terms of the units grams-centimeters-seconds. It is clear that from the viewpoint of classical physics, Heath might have been more precise had he preferred to speak of his abstract substantive component of action in terms of “weight” in grams (force), rather than mass in grams (mass). However, the distinction between weight and mass as concerns the substantive constituent of action is not germane to Heath’s argument. Consequently, no qualitative error in his inquiries can be attributed to this usage.

 

 

 

 

NOTES AND REFERENCES