Spencer Heath Archive

Item 263

Pencil notes inserted in Hans Reichenbach, Atom & Cosmos

February 1961

Reichenbach p. 27

     The quantum discovery establishes — proves — objectively that there are fundamental units of mass, motion and time. It thus proves a universal discontinuity and thereby a universal three-fold dimensionality and thereby the universal Galilean and Newtonian numerical rationality — the ratios wherein dimensions, as quantitative realities in the objec­tive world, are related. These necessary and ineluctable relationships are the foundation on which rests, objectively, the principle of cause and effect. Each unitary — integrated — event arising and proceeding from the integration of a complex of its prior constituent events all in the ratios of their respective numerical dimensions.

     Science is knowledge — understanding. Physical science is understanding of nature. Not of man but of the environ­ment of man — of the regular and thus understandable cosmos of happenings or events from which and yet within which he and he alone of all creatures, has uniquely emerged. His uniqueness lies in his capacity for understanding — of coming increasingly into conscious conceptual accord with the rationale of the cosmos whence he springs. He is like all other creatures except that he is endowed with the gift of imagination wherewith he can conceive as well as perceive and thus picture and reflect on things past, and through understanding of these he can foresee happenings and events yet to come. And, what is far more, he can uniquely image as ideals things and happenings that never were. Thus by science, by understanding, and by exercise of the kind of knowledge that is power, man becomes less and less the creature and more and more the creator, in his own image, /his own imagining,/ of the world in which he lives.

     The cosmos is action, and it is cyclic — a vast flow of energy in endless succession as events. Among these cosmic events are the successive cycles of the lives of men and the successive generations of men.

     As the cosmos is rational and evolves, so, in their degree, are all the happenings or events of which it is composed, including the cyclic and successive lives of men. Man thus being of like nature with all the events of which his cosmos is composed, man by his power of imagination can examine the particular happenings or events of which the whole is composed.

      And whatever be the physical event examined, it presents itself through his physical senses to the mind of man in the three measurable and thereby rational aspects of which it is composed. Physical science measures these by means of the objectively determined convenient and conventional dimensional units. That aspect which is measured in grams is called variously mass, inertia, weight and force. That aspect which is measured by centimeters is called motion. And that which is measured by seconds is called frequency or time.

     These three-dimensional units, then, are the basic working tools of physical science for understanding quantitatively by numbers as its dimensions and thereby rationally the events which constitute its physical and phenomenal world. Be it noted that though the subject-matter of the science is objective and physical, the under­standing of it is subjective and conceptual and thereby meta-physical.