Spencer Heath Archive

Item 416

Taping by Spencer MacCallum of portion of conversation with Heath.

No date

     Newton says that this /cosmic/ mechanism with its mathemati­cal precision does not take into account human capacities and sensibilities. He therefore calls in the God of his fathers by name and offers that naming as the explanation of the human or supra-mechanical side of the cosmos. And he offers this mere name as an explanation, notwith­standing that all through his description of the mechani­cal universe he scorns again and again the employment of hypotheses, insisting that the phenomenon itself must speak to its own explanation, and not be taken in the light of any hypothetical preconceptions. Dr. /Edwin Arthur/ Burtt says that Newton’s authority as a scientist was so great that his successors almost disregarded his religious side. More in detail I remember now, Newton found irregularities in the heavenly movements — from which he regarded it as imperfect and proposed that God intervened from time to time like a plumber to put things right. His successors found that in the light of more accurate calculations and observations, Newton’s supposed irregularities did not exist. So they went through the materialist nineteenth-century science and discarded Newton’s religion in the main and adopted a crass, materialistic view. Those of the pre­sent century have been hard-put to find a substitute for the crude religious explanation which they were obliged to discard.

     Dr. Burtt has made, tentatively, some very interesting suggestions regarding the nature of time and space, upon which a new metaphysics may possibly arise.

     You have probably heard me say that action at a distance has puzzled nearly all scientific thinkers: what is between the earth and a stone that it should fall; what is between the wire and the needle parallel to it but distant from it, that the needle should turn when a current passes through the wire? Can it be time and space without mass, and if so, can this be a realm in which time and space are not limited to material events but exists in the absolute [in the manner] as the mind conceives them? We do not conceive of time and space as having any limitations.