Spencer Heath Archive

Item 397

Typed pages by Heath with penciled amendments. Consider moving the sentence “The word ‘imaginary’ is employed..” from the end of the third paragraph to the end of the first (and changing it slightly to read, “..is here being employed..”) to reduce shock to the reader by explaining more up front the use of what some might take to be a pejorative use of the word. This material together with that of Item 398, written at about the same time, might be edited into a complete essay, bringing together discussion of mass-motion-and-time which seems to be where Heath was headed, from elsewhere. -Editor  

May 8, 1958

 

 

 

     Until the twentieth century physical science was materialistic. It held that the sixty or seventy known atoms and their behavior constituted the ultimate basis of the physical universe and that all organization, living and non-living, was in multiples of these basic although highly diverse indivisible units. As to their behavior, this was thought to occur or take place within certain imaginary geometrical limitations called length, breadth and thickness of an imaginary infinite entity called, paradoxically, “empty” space and within certain imaginary limitations of another imaginary infinite entity, based on the imaginary repetition of lengths, called time. 

Thus all behavior of atoms was said to take place within a “framework” of space and time.

 

To account for the obvious fact of relative motion between material bodies, a further imaginary entity called force was devised. Since material bodies could be molded into forms corresponding to geometric conceptions and their motions could be divided up into intervals of time, these conceptions were thought to be intrinsic to material bodies rather than being the imaginary imposition of forms of thought.

 

However, when it was found that the behavior of material bodies could be marked off in units of force per single unit of motion times any number of motion units this compound was designated, when considered objectively, as “work” and when entertained subjectively as the imagined (but not experienced) “capacity to do work” it was designated as “energy.” Thus it was assumed that work or so-called “energy” was inseparable from material bodies and it was found logically necessary to assume an imaginary “ether” as occupying the otherwise empty space between bodies obviously affecting or working upon one another from a distance or when sep­arated by a length of otherwise empty space. Latterly there became a tendency to abandon the concept of an ether by transferring its material attributes and aspects to the ”empty space” itself. The word “imaginary” is employed only to distinguish that which in itself and alone can be conceived but does not constitute any event and therefore cannot be objectively experienced.

 

     Up until the twentieth century materialistic science confined itself to examining the organization of atoms into molecules constituting diverse material substances and to the behavior of ponderable bodies doing work upon one another (exchanging energy) directly and also when separated by length or distance — action at a distance, so called. This was thought to be inclusive of the entire material universe or at least that whatever else it might contain ultimately could be described and understood in the same manner. The fact of there being great diversity of properties and behavior among the atoms was accepted without any question as to what this diversity might signify and without any inference from this that the atoms themselves individually might be composite of some specific and diverse organizational elements just as molecules ad ponderable bodies were complex organizations of atoms both elemental and diverse.

 

     With the twentieth century came the notion that atoms might be composite of something more fundamental just as atoms were more fundamental than molecules—just as molecules were composite of their more fundamental atoms. There came an end to looking only upward from the atoms towards their organization all the way from molecules to solar and cosmic systems and now in mid-century perhaps the most notable preoccupation of physical science is in the dissection of the atom and examining the dynamic relationships among its interacting constituent parts. In this it has been learned that atoms are complex but very compact organizations of work or energy-in-action corresponding in all essentials with that which is dif­fused in all directions and called radiant energy or action in the form, most obviously, of waves. This fundamental correspondence derives from the fact that in every organiza­tion of energy, at whatever level of complexity from cosmic system down to atom and from atom to wave, the organizational complex is always compounded of three elements or aspects, which are measurable in units of mass, of motion and of time, such as grams, centimeters and seconds in relative succession, the number of mass units being that number of them which is related to each unit of motion, the number of mass-motion units being that number of them which is related to each unit of time

                                 /Breaks off/