Spencer Heath Archive

Item 265

Pencil notes on a program dated 9/15/60 inserted in Hans Reichenbach, Atom and Cosmos

Spring 1961?

 

 

 

 

In an event,

Given — Three numerical quantities, (1) mass units, (2) motion units, (3) time units — all ultimate units — so related that: Let there be a single unit of each. Then, for one mass unit there is one motion unit /and/ there is one time unit. And the three together comprise one action unit.

 

Now, let there be not one but numbers (n) of each unit so related that: (1) Each single mass unit is tied to a single motion unit, thus constituting a mass-motion or work unit. (2) Each single mass-motion or work unit is tied to a single time unit, thus constituting a single mass-motion-time unit or action unit.

 

Mass units are abstract, lacking motion and time.

 

Mass-motion or work units are abstract, lacking any unit of time.

 

Mass-motion-time units, action units, are concrete, objective, not lacking in any one of the three aspects of action and thus are ground-work of objective experience and /are/ the least units thereof.

All this is premised on there being a rational cosmos, a cosmos characterized by ratios, thus by numbers and thus by units. These units may well be finite in size. They are absolute or least only as least that can combine. (But there are no grounds on which they must be finite in number.)

The fact of the physical world being composed of energy or action is derived from the fact that wherever scientists describe physical processes or events in terms of mass, motion and time quantitatively by means of numbers based on units they discover definite ratios, proportionality, rationality between those numbers, whatever be the system of units employed. This necessarily implies that there is a fundamental rationality based on fundamental least units of mass, motion and time. To hold otherwise is to abandon all possibility of any understanding of the physical world — any science of physics at all. For where there are no fundamental units there can be no numbers and therefore no fundamental rationality. The primary tenet of all science that the universe is intelligible — rational — must be aban­doned, the very concept of cosmos is denied and naught but chaos remains.