Spencer Heath Archive

Item 418

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath at 11 Waverly Place, New York City

July 3, 1955

“Would you say that the movements of the individual electron are probably just as surely predictable as the statistical movements of large numbers of electrons, except that we just don’t know yet enough about the forces governing the individual electron?”

/Heath, absorbed in reading a book/ Well, that’s purely suppositional. I just don’t know whether if we understood them well enough they would be predictable or not.

“What do you imagine the probabilities are?”

Well you can say this with assurance that if we understood them well enough to find them predictable, they would be predictable.

/SM amused/ “Yep, I guess that’s right.”

That’s just a matter of words; it’s just like nobody ever had small-pox after a successful vaccination. If you understood me well enough, you could predict everything that I do. But that’s a big if. The same may be true of electrons; we don’t know.

“You’re evading both of them!”

/Heath still trying to read a book/ Umh-humh — all of which means, I don’t know.

“Well I’m asking you to speculate, Popdaddy; I could have told you you didn’t know that.”

 

My speculation is that there is an intrinsically understandable rationale in all things.

“If this speculation holds out, even the movements of the individual electron should be predictable.”

Yes, remembering always this — the behavior of any one thing is always influenced and affected by the behavior of other things.

“Then it should take a cosmic understanding to predict the course of movement of almost any single thing.”

Only a cosmic understanding could be expected either to predict or to understand anything completely.

“Because sooner or later, everything involves everything else. Isn’t that right?”

Umh-humh. Besides “sooner or later,” you can say, “directly or indirectly” — sooner or later, directly or indirectly.”

“Well, that’s an interesting bit of dialogue — but we didn’t get anywhere.”

No. It’s a recognition of the fact that we’re not infinite. We’re not absolute. We are only elements of less than total significance in the cosmos. We’re not God, in other words.

/Giving up trying to read his book/ Nothing can be understood in terms of itself — only in terms of its action, or behavior. Limited as we are, there are only three doors to our consciousness, and these only open in a particular order or succession. The first is mass, or force. It is known only in terms of its action, or behavior, which is motion. The relation of mass to motion is the relation between the given number of mass magnitudes and a single unit of motion. Crawford didn’t see that, and I didn’t see it at first. And then only dimly. We can speak of a pound or ten pounds as being without motion, but we cannot experience it except in terms of its behavior, which is motion. The rationality of mass and motion is the ratio between any mass magnitude and any one unity of motion magnitude. Hence, the

amount of work is mass magnitude times the number of motion magnitudes. Work and motion are related to time in a precisely similar manner.

“That’s the difference between work and motion?”

When you speak of motion, you forget mass. When you speak of work, you are likely to include both force and motion. Force times distance is work, also called power, but that more often means a rate of work. So that’s why the confusion arises.

Either work, which includes motion, or motion considered alone, is related to time. It comes into experience at a rate or ratio, which is the number of work units or of motion units per one unit of time. This is the unit quantity of work, or of motion, the gross quantity of which is the unit quantity multiplied by the number of units of time during which it acts. But time is not related to any fourth element or action, either as mass (or force) is relative to motion, or as motion is relative to time. Time, the third term in the hierarchy of objective action or events as experience, is the absolute element, not taken in terms of anything beyond itself. It is the third or last window through which consciousness perceives the cosmos.

“Also, evolving nature seems to have a predilection for time, doesn’t it, always increasing that element?”

 

Yes. Hence, those kinds of action, or events, which come to have greatest continuity or duration, other things being equal or comparable, are the most real because possessing in highest degree that which is absolute — time.

 

“Then nature is always progressing towards more and more reality?”

 

The Universal is always transcending itself.

 

 

“The Universal? What is the Universal?”

The everything is always transcending itself, achieving greater degrees of reality. In the language of Christian philosophy, the physical concepts, mass, motion and time, which together constitute reality, take the form, in their infinite aspect, of substance, power and eternity, or, in metaphor, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

“When you say, Reality, you^’re using it as a qualitative term, aren’t you, because the Cosmos always remains the same quantitatively?”

Yes. It may or may not remain the same quantitatively — that’s immaterial.