Spencer Heath Archive

Item 215

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at Elkridge MD.

September 17, 1960

     This idea of non-Euclidean geometry is demonstrably self-contradictory. The more I read of it, the more clearly I find it a reversion to Medieval subjectivism. It is admittedly not founded on any experience or any kind of deduction to anything that can be verified in objective experience. I made some marginal notes in Reichenbach’s Atom and Cosmos: The World of Modern Physics and elsewhere that point to specific contradictions and question-beggings. None of these geometries any more than the Euclidean has anything to do with objective experience. They only show what the mind does with premises that are merely conceptual and fantastic. Whatever they demonstrate on their fantastic premises must be equally fantastic as conclusions. Reichenbach says at page 38 /?/ that things in the small, where there is experience, are entirely different outside the realm of experience, giving no grounds for this assumption.

     First, he places non-Euclidean geometry outside of experience. Then he refers to the “world of previous experiences,” thus implying that there are experiences in this new world of admittedly non-experience. It is a very subtle question-begging that would escape most people, as it apparently escapes him.

     The very arguments Voltaire and Diderot used to puncture the theological presuppositions are perfectly applicable to puncture the presuppositions of all the geometries as having any bearing on actual events or objective experience.