Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1846

Typed note pasted opposite lines 3-10, page 182, of A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1932).

August 14, 1943

Original is missing.

/Eddington’s lines: “And yet a lump of standard size 6.55.10^-27 erg-seconds is continually turning up experimentally. It is all very well to say that we must think of action as atomic and regard this lump as the atom of action. We cannot do it. We have been trying hard for the last ten years. Our present picture of the world (emphasis by Spencer Heath) shows action in a form quite incompatible with this kind of atomic structure …”/

    We must abandon the notion of space as three (or any other) dimensional and adopt mass, motion and duration as our three and only three fundamentals of actual energy — Reality — action, so called,

    The so-called three dimensions are not dimensions because they are not measurements of any kind. They are only three directions out of an infinitude of possible directions proceeding from any point. We could choose them at 60 instead of 90 degrees from each other and by the same processes of repetition resolve space into tetrahedrons instead of cubes. We only find right angles most convenient because linear bodies stand or suspend best at 90 degrees instead of 60 degrees to the earth’s surface. If it had been 60 degrees we would have gone tetrahedral. We might do so now but for the inconvenience — and habits resulting from convenience.

    All dimensions, all measurements, are in units of mass (inertia or gravitation), motion (distance), and duration (time). There are no other fundamental units in which to take them.