Spencer Heath Archive

Item 401

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath in New York City.

June 23, 1958

All science is at bottom quantitative. Until you can translate your sense impressions into numbers, you can’t have any mathematics about that thing. Science has extensively proved (found so much of it, I mean to say) that nature is essentially rational, which is to say, numerical, which is to say, based on some kind of units. Science has long employed conventional units arbitrarily chosen. The quantum principle establishes that so far as energy or action is concerned, there is in nature an ultimate unit of magnitude called the quantum of action. It is because there is such a unit that energy or action can be measured and its transformations mathematically described.

Departing from this for a moment, our twentieth century physics has been engaged chiefly with efforts to reconcile the paradox between the Euclidean concepts, which neglect motion and time, with the quantum concept which includes mass, motion and time as the ingredients which constitute a unit of energy or action as an event, an event consisting of the least quantity of energy in action in the field of objective nature to which the human sense apparatus can directly or indirectly — by instruments — respond.

When you come to the sociological science, you have the biological units, the units of society which are indivisible — the individual — and you have energy exchanges between these units which are also measured in terms of units. This energy exchange of our free enterprise system has complete correspondence, as I see it, with deBroglie’s energy exchange principle at the subatomic level. And this exchange principle of deBroglie’s is the same exchange principle that all scientists recog­nize in all the sciences, physical, biological /and/ social. (Better say economic there, because it will be more quickly recognized.)