Spencer Heath Archive

Item 465

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Official theology postulates a Creative Reality, an infinite unity of Substance, Power, and Eternity. Physical science also postulates reality in its three aspects or elements as Mass, Motion, and Time, which together consti­tute the unity and the actuality of happenings or events. But, unlike theology, science conceives these three-fold aspects in the finite magnitudes that can be experienced in finite events. And science has established three fundamen­tal units of measurement wherein to ascertain and manipulate rationally, that is, by ratios the finite magnitudes of mass, motion and time that constitute any finite event. These customary units are the gram, the centimeter and the second.

Science has found that mass, motion and time are discontinuous and thus rhythmic in their manifestation, each having a period or frequency in terms of repetitions of the other two.

The gram is the quantity of any substance that weighs the same as that quantity of water which at sea level and at the temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit occupies the volume of one cubic centimeter.

The centimeter is the hundred-millionth part (sup­posedly) of the distance on the earth’s surface from the equator to one of the poles.

The second is that portion of the period of the earth’s rotation which results from dividing it rhythmi­cally (as by a swinging pendulum or other vibration) into 8640 parts (24 x 60 x 60).

Just as the Absolute, Ultimate and Infinite of the theologian is taken — conceived — in its three infinite aspects as Substance, Power and Eternity, and constitutes his absolute metaphysical and contemplative world, so the physicist, as such takes these in their relative and finite aspects as mass, energy and time. These constitute not an absolute and metaphysical world but his limited physical relative rational world — the world of objective experi­ence. And his science is the kind of knowledge called rational because it deals not with absolutes but only with quantities as numbers of their units and with the changing ratios among them that constitute the flow of experience and all events.

But science, in recent years, has made the very, very radical and important discovery that mass, motion and time are not indefinitely divisible but that they occur and recur in very minute discrete and indivisible quantities called quanta. Mass, motion and time come in packets so to speak, always of uniform size. Each constituent of a quantum also is “discontinuous” and thus recurrent and cyclic in all its manifestations (of least magnitudes and therefore at all mag­nitudes which are but aggregations of these). And since there are only these three constituents in a physical event they must exist in ratios or proportions, each, in turn, to another and these two, in turn, in some ratio or proportion to the third.

(Again, as in theology,) The primary element is substance or mass. Motion is secondary, springing always from mass, and for each unit of motion there is always a unit, or a definite number of units of mass. Thus they are propor­tional, and multiplying together any quantity of mass units and any quantity of motion units we have a quantity of the combined units called energy or power. In like manner there is also for each unit of time a definite number of units of energy. They too are proportional, and, where with the prior quantity of mass-motion units more than one unit of time is involved the energy rate is ascertained by dividing such number of time units into the given number of mass-motion or energy units. This gives the energy ratio to time or the rate of energy per unit of time which rate, when multiplied by any period of time with which it is involved ascertains the magnitude of the particular event as a quantity of action — always some whole number of quanta, of the fundamental mag­nitude of action.

Mass, the primary element of action, is, in any stated quantity,

always a ratio to its own unit. For example, a mass of twenty grams is a ratio of twenty-to-one to the unit of mass. This is a homogeneous ratio — a ratio to its own unit. But any stated quantity of mass when taken in relation to any stated quantity of motion becomes thereby a mass ratio to a unit of motion — a mass per unit of motion. This is a heterogeneous ratio, and the quantity of mass-motion units is ascertained by multiplying this ratio by the stated quantity of motion. We now have a stated quantity of energy, a compound of mass and motion, but not a quantity of action (only an abstraction) because time is not as yet involved.

But any quantity of energy when taken in relation to any stated quantity of time …