Spencer Heath Archive

Item 689

Taping BY Spencer MacCallum during conversation with Heath.

May 28, 1956

     There is a mathematical picture that seems to describe the organization of an atom. It takes the form of an equation. It is a subjective diagram of the objective atom. This equation can be manipulated — turned inside out, all its signs changed. It has been suggested that the atom may be capable of a similar transformation. This may be doubted, for there are no negative numbers in nature. Since we cannot postulate a zero as an entity without contradiction in terms, a fortiori anything less than zero is “out of this world,” to say the least.

     It happens that our objective world is a world of happenings, or events, each of which has three and only three elements or aspects: mass, motion and time. All geometries, all mathematics that do not take into account all three of these is pure abstraction, represent­ing only partial aspects of objective experience and usually based on some paradoxical premise. Euclidean geometry, for example, postulates a point (not a particle) having position but no dimension. It then proceeds to integrate them into a line that does have dimension. Of course, neither a point or a line can ever be experienced. There is nothing like energy or action there, no event happening. However, by mathematically imagining transverse movement of the non-objective line, a surface is imagined — a second abstraction. We do have experiences which seem to parallel the line and the surface. But these experiences are events composed of mass, motion and time. The line and the surface are aspects only, and not happenings or events. The point may represent a particle or force, the line a force in motion, which is a rate of action. When we imagine trans­verse motion of a plane, we have the abstract analogue of a quantity of action, which has all the elements of an objec­tive event. Mathematically, we can imagine a fourth operation, but this fourth power is an abstraction that is not the analogue of an event — unless it be an event has four elements or aspects.

     Physical science does not afford any measuring unit in the realm of experience beyond the three fundamental units of mass, motion and time. It seems therefore that whereas a cube employing only linear dimensions (being devoid of force or time) may represent an objective event in all its three dimensions, it cannot be an objective event without the importation of both mass (or force) and time. So whatever the fourth power represents, it must be something outside the realm of objective physical experience, a play-thing of the mind, perhaps, but having nothing whatever to do with the objective events which constitute the subject matter of physical science.