Spencer Heath Archive

Item 231

Penciling on notepad paper at Elkridge, Maryland

About 1959-60?

 

 

 

 

      

      

     All science is numerically quantitative and quanti­fied experience. For this it employs standardized units whereby it measures its subject-matter in multiples and fractional parts of these units

 

     Natural sciences discovers rationality in the world of

    

     The natural sciences postulate the self and the not-self — the particular and individual subjective ego and the general circumambient environment wherewith the individual interacts and thus has objective experience

 

     The total cosmic reality is a system of happenings or events.

 

     The cosmic reality is neither static nor is it homo­geneous. It is heterogeneous and kinetic, organized and differentiated; not a world of matter or substance alone but also of motion and time; a dynamic system of interacting happenings or events which in the physical sciences is desig­nated technically as action.

 

     Action is the general term for whatever happens. The source and subject-matter of all objective human experience. In its purely physical manifestation it has just three dis­tinguishable and measurable aspects which unitedly and in various proportions constitute all physical happenings or events. These aspects are called (1) Mass (or particle), (2) motion and (3) time. To measure separately these diverse aspects and constituent elements of an event the customary units known as gram, centimeter and second are employed. It is noteworthy that these three aspects of an event are wholly abstract. Any one or any two of them together can be separately measured and abstractly conceived only by disregarding the presence of the other, but they cannot come into any actual experience except in their concrete unity as a physical event.

 

     Mass times motion, force through motion or length, constitutes work, which is a quantity of action, without any regard to its rate or time. It is thus wholly abstract and indefinite either as to the relative magnitudes of the force and motion or the length of time involved. Mass or force times motion per unit of time (velocity) is a rate of action and is commonly called energy or power. It is not action, but the rate or ratio at which action (or work) is performed.

 

     The ratio between mass and motion (or length) determines the kind or quality of an action or event. The product of mass per unit of motion (or length) per unit of time (velocity) is the energy rate or rate of action. Any rate of action multiplied by a time (as duration) of action is a quantity of action — a concrete actuality, such as can be objectively and physically experienced. Physical science, however, has demonstrated that there is a very minute over-all quantity of action less than which, regardless of how its constituents of mass, motion and time are composed, lies beyond the necessary limitations of objective and physical human experience. An event as a quantity of action having this definite over-all magnitude (6.50 x 10^-27 of an erg-second), is called the quantum of action. Such events mark the boundary between what can be physically experienced, either singly or in whole multiples, and that which can be only conceptually and metaphysically experienced. There are many evidences for the actuality of this sub-quantal world of events, among them the circumstance that single light waves do not have any physical impact on an electron except as sufficient numbers of them are accumulated in packets or train.

 

     Physical science accepts the quanta of action as being the ultimate units or “atoms of action” which singly and in myriad multiples as cycles or events constitute the entire objective and physical world.

 

     This being so, it seems fair to presume that all physical events must reflect the nature and quality of the unitary events of which they are composed, and especially of such events as seem to evince limits short of infinity as maximum as in the velocity of light waves or short of absolute zero in the velocity of molecules when deprived of heat

 

     The very wide range of proportions as to mass, motion and time in the erg-second, of which every quantum is a definite fraction, and the highly variant manifestations of action or events as to mass, motion and time, bespeak a similar diversity of composition in the quanta of which the physical world is composed. The quanta must be of complex and variable composition — at least as composite and variant as the erg-seconds from which by a specific division /?/ they are derived. It must be accepted that the same variable rationalities, ratios of composition, as to mass, motion and time of which all erg-seconds are composed will hold good in its uniform fractions, the quanta of which they are composed. That these ratios may obtain it is necessary that numbers be attached to the elements of which the quanta are composed, in the same proportions as in the erg-seconds which they compose (no ratios except between numbers). This makes it necessary that there be fundamental units of mass, motion and time in terms of which they are numerical and thus rationally composed. And these units must represent the least magni­tudes in which the quantum can be composed respectively of mass, motion and time. Just as the quanta themselves must be of a definite minimum magnitude in order to constitute objective physical events.

 

     Consider now an event in which the energy or rate of action, mass times velocity, in each quantum is very high. The energy or rate of action per unit of time

 

 Consider now an objective event composed of myriad quanta each composed of some number, as x, y and z, of fundamental units respectively of mass (per-unit of motion), motion (per each unit of time)

 

     Consider now a flow of action composed of quanta composed of x fundamental units of mass (per each unit of motion), y fundamental units of velocity per each fundamental unit of time, and thus having the energy or rate of action xy² per each fundamental unit of time. Then the total action over a period of z fundamental units of time is xy²/z  — a rate of action times a period of time.

 

     Since the velocity involved in an erg-second or any fractional part of an erg-second such as a quantum of action increases more rapidly than the mass or force diminishes then,

 

     Since in any constant quantity of action the mass element . . .