Spencer Heath Archive

Item 80

Penciling by Heath on 9 numbered pages of notepad paper, this being pages 6 to 9. The first 5 pages are pencil figures, notations and diagrams requiring photocopying.

No date

     Mass, Motion and Time are discontinuous, that is to say, they are not indefinitely divisible. They are rhythmic, which is to say that they repeat themselves in successive units of least and therefore indivisible magnitudes.

     Mass, motion and time are basic entities that may be conceived of each as independent and apart or in any combination of one or more. But in their concrete or objective manifestation they are never apart. They are always united concretely in ACTION.

     Action is a term designating events, occurrences, happenings in general. Action is divisible, manifests itself in particular parts, quantities or particles called actions or events. Thus action is dis-continuous, therefore repetitional and therefore rhythmic, so far as successive events are of or contain the same or similar magnitudes. But action is not indefinitely divisible. There is a funda­mental least magnitude in which mass, motion and time ever unite to constitute an action or event and without which fundamental indivisibility no higher magnitudes of action or events could be definitely divisible or distinguishable one from another.

     That least unit of action or fundamental event of which action in general is composed, being least, is of uniform magnitude. Just as an erg-second is a very small fraction of a horsepower-hour or of a kilowatt-hour, so the fundamental unit of action is an almost infinitesimally small yet perfectly definite fraction or division of an erg-second. It is called by physicists the “quantum of action,” symbolised by “h” and expressed mathematically as h = 6.55 x 10^-27 erg-seconds.