Spencer Heath Archive

Item 685

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

March 1956

 

White envelope has items 685-687.

 

 

     For the last fifty years, there have been grave indications that physicists, who presumably set out to understand their objective world, have departed from all acceptance of any such world and taken flight into the land of metaphysical abstractions along with Berkeley and those philosophers who have so completely escaped from objective reality. The fallacy in this seems to rest upon a crucial false assumption, an unexamined premise, that the capacities of an objective human being are somehow infinite. The standard modern dictum in which this fallacy is involved is that we cannot ascertain the location and the velocity of a particle at one and the same instant of time. The hidden premise is that we could be able to experience an infinitely small division of time. It assumes that time is, for us, infinitely divisible — that our concrete nature is such that it can experience the infinite.

 

     Physical science is an attempt to understand — to understand something. The verb is transitive. It must be to understand something. And that something must happen. It must be objective and not subjective to that which understands it. This is recognized, unwittingly, it seems, by the use of such words as phenomena, happenings, events, in casual, almost careless expressions. For without such tacit admission of an objective world, of a thing perceived apart from the perceiver, there can be nothing for physical science to get its teeth into, nothing to understand, no concrete actuality from which to derive abstractions or generalize conceptions.

 

     A mathematical abstraction either describes an event or it describes what is not an event — what does not happen. When it runs one to one with a concrete experience, we say that we understand it. A testing of this is called a verification, but there is no way to test an abstraction except by an experiential verification. This means we must either find or construct some kind of model whose operation verifies the abstraction. To construct such a model is an objectification of the thought. The value of an abstraction from experience, once it is verified, is that it gives us the key wherewith to reconstruct experience, to dominate and not merely submit to the events which constitute our objective world. To multiply abstractions, mathematically or otherwise, without constant reference to and verification in objective experience, is perilous. We enter an endless realm of pure fantasy, in which we deny that anything but fantasy exists without any proof of even the fantasy itself.

 

     Physicists will do well when their realm of unverified mathematical abstractions /can be shown to correspond with the objective natural world./[1] Until they do, no prediction is possible, for prediction is not prediction unless it is verified in the realm of objective experience. The abstract must be a generalization of the concrete. Its value is that it has a rationale — that it can be manipulated mathematically in ways that are predetermined for all reasoning minds. A simple abstraction, based on observation and experience, is a form of thought that can be manipulated under uniform laws. This changes its form. We now have a different formulation without a different experience. It now remains to ascertain whether there is any experience that verifies the formulation. This calls for an event, or series of them, that must be embodied in a model or some other concrete form either naturally or artificially supplied.

 

     Where we find the model in our objective natural world, we have increased our understanding of it — our at-one-ment, our psychological accord. When we construct a model in which the abstraction is verified, we have built our own dream into our experience and have, so far, entered into the psychological creation of our objective world. We have become ourselves factors in the psychological causation out of which the objective world proceeds.

 

/Aside to MacCallum:/ That’s a positive note to end on. That’s a good place to stop, don’t you think? I could go on and on.

 

     If, however, we flee from verifications in the realm of experience such as mechanical models give us, we have departed for the sake of pure fantasy. Even if they take the form of beautiful mathematical abstractions not springing out of experience or verified in it, we are wanderers only in the shadowy unreality of un-experience or non-experience.

 

     Let physicists, of all scientists, keep their feet on the ground. Let them make the objective event their fundamental reality. Let them resolve it into its three rational (measurable, quantitative)manifestations that are properly to be called its three dimensions, namely, of mass, of velocity, and of duration or time, in terms of the established physical units for taking these three dimensions and thereby making a quantitative description of a physical event. Let them build on the foundation of those least physical events that have come to be called quanta of action, and avoiding mere abstractions involving either zeros, infinitesimals or infinitudes, all of which, by definition, transcend the realm of all possible finite human experience. These conceptions may be useful to describe directions — as more or less, plus or minus of quantities — but never as events.