Spencer Heath Archive

Item 405

Typescript marked by Alvin Lowi.

September 1956

 

GREEKS:

Atomists — Particles, Masses — mechanical — structural.

Basic Unit: Atom (Motion and form secondary.

Time?

Geometricians — Forms without substance.

Basic Unit: Point — Motion and form secondary.

Point, line, surface, volume. No Substance, mass,

               particle. Volume without content. Space — empty.

NEWTONIAN AGE:

Basic Units: Masses, particles. Motion, velocity —

     secondary. Time? Like the old atomists.

MODERN CENTURY:

Basic Units: Gram, speed of light “C” —

     interchangeable. Mass-Velocity as Separate

     entities.

 

 Mass as basic. Velocity “C” also as basic, yet compound of motion and time — as a ratio Mass — velocity, interchangeable.

 

 Mass — Motion, as work. In ratio to time, Energy —

Work rated to time, Energy. Energy (quantity per time unit)

through a period of time — Action, Energy-in-Action. An

Event — Can be experienced — because all events are related — directly or indirectly. Up to this, all are abstractions — no subject-matter of experience — Mass, particle, Motion, Velocity. Energy — Only action — events, (action) are real. Because only they also include time.

 We are finite. Hence all our experiences are finite. We are indivisible individuals (units) events bounded by a period of time — measure of our reality. So also are our experiences, realities — events — bounded each by its period of time.

 Imagination enables us to picture events analytically — with reference to their three measurable aspects — dimensions. But not to experience them otherwise than as unities.

 Man is an event in a cosmos of events. Cosmic because of the ratios (order)

 Let us look at the Cosmos, not as a Mass, not as motion or velocity, not as work or rate of work — energy. But as an infinitude of finite unitary actions, events, and thus an infinite or absolute event where reality rests in its eternality

 Let us not speculate (look _______) in terms of mass or matter only, in terms of velocity without reference to mass —  Moving, as a verb without subject or object. Energy as a rate of work or action with nothing acting

/All this page above marked by Alvin Lowi as “False starts”/

    Let us realize that our relation to all else is experience and that events, happenings alone constitute the objective side of experiences (consciousness of something) and that experience alone is susceptible of scientific or objective verification.

     Let science, then, analyze events. That it may be unclouded by the turbulence of emotion — feeling — (which is wholly subjective) let it proceed quantitatively; let it be dimensional — let it employ its instruments of measurement, the fundamental units of physical science: gram, centimeter and second. For these and their derivatives alone are wholly objective and without qualitative connotation.

     The inorganic world affords for analysis and examination happenings and events more simple than those in which life processes also are involved. Yet these simpler events are of wider reach, for the more simply organized events are constituent in the more complex. Organization is hierarchal, the more complex always dependent on the less, as atoms are essential to the organization of cells and, in turn, dependent on the organization of nucleons. And all these are themselves but the structural aspects of what is objective to experience, of the concrete events that they give signal of, and which events alone and in them constitute the objective units of actual experience. Not measurable mass alone, but also motion and time are essential to an objective event.

     Science, in its lay language at least (non mathematical) interprets experience primarily in terms of particles or bodies, nuclear to nebular, and in merely static and geometric relationships between their centers as points themselves without quantity as to mass or, in fact, any dimension, yet conceived as having motion and thereby constituting lines, surfaces and volumes having dimensions, albeit without content — all but the linear unit being excluded from the Euclidean mind.

     But despite all its abstract wanderings, science yields its final homage to the actual, /and/ takes for its ultimate text the concrete outcome of experiment, the predicated and predicted event.

     Science ministers only to the mind. She has no worldly gifts of boon or ban. Her fruit is knowledge, the understanding that gives power, the power of creation, in which alone lies ecstasy, beyond all ease or lesser joy. This is her ineluctable lure. The feeling heart dreams and yearns for freedom and beauty, but only the understanding mind /can find these./

/Delete last sentence of preceding paragraph? “inelectable lure” makes a stronger ending./

/Alvin Lowi puts a question mark by the following paragraph, whether it follows from the preceding page./

 Things, first as constituted, then as related in space; then motion as related to time and, lastly, time itself as the periodic intermittency of similar objective events — these, with relatively diminishing emphasis and intensity, have been made the virtually independent focal centers of rational inquiry and investigation.

But Science still employs the Hellenistic conception of particles, bodies and structures, from the nuclear to the nebular and the cosmic, not simply as the mass constituent of objective reality but as ultimate and exclusive, leaving the imponderables, motion and time, to empty mathematical conceptions and constructions or metaphysical speculations, abstract alike from concrete event or objective experience.

In the lay language of science, apart from its own symbolic, there is reference often to phenomena, to the event that takes place in a particular situation. The reference, however, is in most cases seemingly casual and only vaguely applicable to the matter in hand. Yet if the specific matter in hand is in and of itself any matter of objective experience, what can it be other than a happening or event, simple or complex?

What can be objective as actual unless it act, unless it be action, unless it eventuate as event?

Perhaps the real subject-matter of science, not yet fully recognized as such, is action as events — that to which alone there can be re-action as experience, sensory and emotional reaction as feeling, mental and rational reacting as understanding.

Science, especially physical science, specializes; it is of the mind. It disavows no allegiance to the esthetic, the inspirational, the spiritual. But its disciplines are rational as distinguished from emotional. It proceeds quantitatively, its ecstasies spring from the beauty of the rational order it perceives, the numerical ratios in which it finds the fundamentals of its objective reality. And it is through employment of its quantitative dimensional units that physical science discovers the rationale, the numerical ratios in which the elements that constitute its subject-matter as events are compared.

The actual subject matter of physical research is events. These, taken inclusively and called phenomena of, technically, action or energy-in-action, a rate of work or energy, multiplied by time — a quantity of action.

All action involves reaction. Events have both antecedents and consequents, causes and effects, so called. The least quantity of action, smallest event, that will induce a reaction, that is sufficient to induce a change or event in our objective world, is called a quantum of action.[1]

All action, all events are composite. They are composed of three elements or aspects that are measurable by objective standards, each by reference to its appropriate unit among what are called the three “fundamentals of physical science.” The three measurable elements or aspects of an action or event are: (1) mass, force or inertia (per each unit of motion). (2) motion, per unit of time and (3) period of duration (inverse of frequency). The accepted units are the gram, the centimeter and the second, the dimensional units of mass, motion and time, which, taken separately, are abstractions without objective reality, but which taken together, in whatever numerical proportions — however simple or complex the composition, however small or vast, and however various the numerical proportions — constitute the three-fold concrete actuality, the reality of an objective action or event, the fundamental and the necessary subject-matter of all rational analysis and investigation.

The order and the characteristics of the Trinity that in union constitute the quantum unit are worthy of note. First, each is an abstraction, non-objective. No less than the three together can constitute a concrete, objective action or event. Moreover, each predicates the succeeding. Mass is predicated on motion. It involves motion as motion involves time. Motion is inherent in mass much as time is inherent in motion. And discontinuity is the common characteristic whereby they are susceptible of measurement, each in terms of its specific dimensional unit.

Any given number of mass units is actually a ratio. For it is the number of mass units that is rhythmically and successively related to each succeeding unit of motion and accordingly repeated for each. Likewise, any given number of motion units is related to and repeated with each successive unit of time. Combining these two ratios results in a third ratio: the ratio of work, energy or action (the terms are more or less loosely interchanged) to a hypothetical unit of time. And this ratio of energy to time is not any actual quantity, but only a hypothetical one, the quantity of energy or action that is related successively to each unit of time. This ratio of energy to time, therefore, must be multiplied by the actual elapsed time involved in the particular event under examination or predicated in the contemplation of a future event.

It is now apparent that the first two ratios — mass to motion and motion to time — together determine not at all the quantity of an action or event but only its specific quality, character or kind. These internal ratios are qualitative only. The over-all dimension or magnitude of the action or event is dependent upon its durational period, determined solely by the number of time units that it involves. When the third ratio, that of energy to time, is multiplied by the actual durational units as measured or counted or similarly experienced, then we have ascertained, in terms of action units, the numerical magnitude, the over-all dimension of the event as the subject-matter of experience and of rational examination. In this we have ascertained the rationale of an objective event by bringing it into conscious congruence with the rationality implicit in us. Objectivity is mated to subjec­tivity, fact, and fancy brought into accord, giving birth to understanding, the rational knowledge that carries endless power in its hands.

All environmental change, all the processes of scientific technology, may be looked upon as transformations of energy in ways desired, the reproportioning of mass, motion and time in the processes and events in which all objective experience lies.

Time is coming to be recognized expressly as an essential compositional element in events that plays two parts. It affords a unit of reference. First, it quantifies mere motion into velocities and undifferentiated work into rates of energy. Finally, it affords the durational element whereby energy comes into concrete reality as action or event, and, thereby, the subject matter and ground work of objective experience.