Spencer Heath Archive

Item 703

Taping by Spencer MacCallum on the occasion of his asking Heath to dictate a review of the book, A Debate on the Theory of Relativity, Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1927, Introduction by William Lowe Bryan.

No date

 

 

    

     This book is a debate on relativity between regular physical scientists. Those opposed to it make no forthright attack. They only seek to point out weak points and insufficiencies. Both sides on the argument are pretty much of a piece, one side being all out for the relativity theory, the other side only pointing out doubts and alleging deficiencies. One looks in vain for some newer and simpler generalization that will give forthright answers to the questions that relativity only answers with weird mathematical theories, recondite and more or less subjective and metaphysical. Those who are attacking it, seem to employ just about the same kind of weapons.

     Much is said about the quantum theory as a possible alternative. But this too seems to be shrouded in mathematical and metaphysical profundities.

     There seems to be no disagreement that the quantum of action is a specific though almost infinitesimal fraction of an erg-second. If this is true, it must have the same nature as the erg-second itself in all respects except magnitude or scale. This means that it is an integration of mass, motion and time, or force, velocity and period. These three, taken together, in the first instance constitute the erg-second; in the second instance they constitute the unit of action, h. In both cases, the unit is composed of a rate of energy multiplied by its duration or time — reciprocal of its frequency. Just as the erg-second is composed of one unit of mass (inertial mass, dyne) times one unit of motion as velocity, times one unit of time, or any other proportion of these elements whose product is unity, or one, so the quantum of action must be composite of mass, motion and time, whose product is the well-known quantity, h.

     From this simple view of the quantum of action as the least objective event that can enter into human experience — human capacity for experience not being absolute or infinite — it is only necessary to assume corresponding minima for the elements that enter into the composition of the constant quantity of action, h.

     Under this assumption, when mass is at its least magnitude that can enter into the quantum, velocity must be at its maximum: velocity of light. When mass or particle is at its maximum, velocity must be minimum: absolute zero temperature. When period or duration is at its minimum (highest frequency), then mass times velocity — energy rate — must be at its maximum, such as nuclear explosion. The best argument against relativity is some such simple alternative to account for the three extreme manifestations in physical events.

 

     Perhaps the most striking feature of the debate is Professor /William Duncan/ MacMillan’s reference to every physical unit from electron to galaxy being something that, as an event, comes into being, runs its course and disintegrates, and that it does this in a quite orderly and even predictable manner. This is a conception long held by the present reviewer, not heretofore encountered in print. Furthermore, he employs this reviewer’s favorite refutation of the narrow entropy conception by comparison with water, instead of energy or temperature, always running downhill. It is not until we become conscious of the necessary positive concomitant that we break away from the severe limitations of the narrow and negative view.

     Yet the present writer cannot hold with Professor MacMillan that “therefore in the long-run there is neither up nor down.” He overlooks that the units or events in nature are variously proportioned as to mass, motion and duration, or time, and that those types of events, units or organizations containing the greater proportion of duration — least frequency of integration and disintegration — must always and endlessly prevail above those possessing less reality in the durational sense. With this recognition, we may recognize a never-ending qualitative progression in the nature and reality of cosmic organization and events, and the whole cosmos as constituting an infinite event, the ultimate and absolute reality.

(We can see on what weak sands the whole relativity-structure rests — entropy.)