Spencer Heath Archive

Item 314

Penciled by Heath on notepad paper

Transcribed July 8, 1958

 

 

 

/THE CONTEMPORARY GROWTH OF SCIENCE/

     All science is psychological, a process of mind. For it consists in the correspondence between two kinds of reality — subjective and objective; that which is experienced of and within one’s self and that which, through mediation of the sensory apparatus, is experienced as acting upon the subjective self. It is a correspondence between two kinds of reality as action — as happenings or events, that which is interior and that action which is exterior to the conscious thinking self. And this correspondence between subjective and objective, to be science, to be knowledge, as distinguished from mere sense reaction or feeling, must be rational, and, to be rational in any specific sense, the correspondence must be numerical, must consist of constant ratios between particular numbers as ascertained induc­tively through sensory reactions. Such reactions are called measurements, and the numbers so ascertained are called the dimensions of the particular action that by the process of induc­tion is reacted to.

     Our first observation is of things as objects or bodies having, for the most part, no apparent motion or change with respect to one another or their surroundings. From this we come to regard motion and rhythm (time) as something extraneous to objects or bodies and causing action by and reaction among them. Thus we learn to think of energy or work as something extraneous to bodies, as something that comes and goes, and as an object of investigation independently of them.

 

     But after centuries of speculation on the premise of a fundamentally structural and static and unchanging material universe, physical science is slowly discovering that objective phenomena consist only of happenings or events which taken together are called action and that bodies, structures and particles are only partial and passing aspects of the cycles or events which consti­tute action as the sole subject-matter, the objective side of sensory experience.

 

     Modern science is discovering that all phenomena, all events are cyclic and that every cycle or event has three objec­tively measurable elements or aspects — dynamic, kinetic and periodic — mass, motion and time which, taken concretely together, and only when so taken, constitute events that can be objectively experienced.

     For many centuries what passed for physical science was called natural philosophy. It consisted mainly of speculation about the properties of bodies, substances and structures, from cosmic to microcosmic. At the basis of all structures were the indivisible atoms. Until about the 16th century, this natural philosophy consisted chiefly of deductions from traditional, authoritarian dogma or other premises from outside the realm of objective experience. From this time forward science came to be founded more and more upon observation and experiment with objects and things with a view to constant quantitative relationships. Thus, against an ancient and always dominating background of merely static conceptions and geometrical measurements, emerged new con­ceptions of force, motion and time and of energy (or action) as a new and dynamic entity — foundation of all the rational technologies that have so far transformed and by its political application may yet destroy the modern world.

 

     Under the old merely geometrical conceptions all bodies were regarded as discrete among themselves, however differently com­posed, and substance and structure was composed of ultimate dis­crete units that, however different among themselves, could not be further diminished, changed or decomposed.

 

     But the inductive method of measurement developed new concep­tions. Force came to be conceived as a property of mass whereby bodies were naturally attracted or repelled, the merely static conception of length became motion and time was treated (even when not so conceived) as uniform units of succession or change. New dimensional units were employed, such as the gram for the unit of mass or of force, the centimeter as the unit of motion (the basic spatial unit) and the second as the unit of periodicity or discontinuity of rhythmic happenings or events. In terms of these units events could be described in numerical terms and thus rationally and mathematically understood — in a manner susceptible of objective test and verification.

 

     The old geometric science was not so much false as it was incomplete. It was self-consistent within its premises, but these did not include any concepts of force and motion, of change and time. It was limited to space and shape without content and so firmly established that it could not entertain any conception of its objective emptiness. Instead of enlarging itself to include all three of the measurable aspects or elements which constitute the objective basis of all reality as sensory experience, it generated in modern times a whole brood of similar self-consistent abstractions, quite possibly valid as such but of little if any significance in the threefold realm of concrete physical actuality.

 

     The modern science of physics was thus constrained to dis­cover a new and more complete foundation for the events which it sought to explain. It accepted and eventually verified the old atomic theory as to the existence of such unitary bodies and for a long time acquiesced in the dogma of their structureless and indivisible unity, notwithstanding their extreme diversity in their chemical and physical properties. By the end of the nine­teenth century physical science was thought to be substantially full grown and complete. Then two startling and unforeseen events occurred. It was discovered that the ninety odd elements were not simple and unitary but composite and complex. At almost the same time it was established that kinetic energy — energy-in-action — is discontinuous in units of equal but almost infinitesimal frac­tions of an erg-second called quanta of action.

 

      These two radical discoveries opened to 19th-century physical science a wholly new sub-microscopic field. Chemical science, having to do mainly with the organization of atoms in molecular structures, was but little affected, but physics set about the explanation of a previously unsuspected and unknown microcosmic world. For a full half century on the speculative side it has sought to reconcile ancient static and geometric conceptions of reality with the dynamism of action in the quantal units as inte­grations of mass, motion and time, while on the inductive and ex­perimental side it has examined the complex composition and interior organization of the atoms, largely in terms (by aid of) the quantum generalization, with some very fruitful and exciting results.

 

     Despite all modern advance, the ancient conception of atoms as bodies or masses still largely prevails not only with respect to the atom itself but also of its compositional elements or parts. Each as they are discovered is taken primarily and identi­fied as a particle having mass. A second property is that they possess kinetic energy which, being discontinuous, gives the mass-particle the alternative aspect of a wave. All this leads to the speculation that the ultimate compositional units in the atoms will be found to be quanta of action, the ultimate “atoms of energy” which are said to be the “building blocks of the universe.”

                               

                                /Breaks off or is this complete?/