Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2085

Marginal pencilings by Heath in Erwin Schroedinger, What Is Life and Other Scientific Essays, Doubleday 1956. Heath’s cleaning lady at Apt 11C, 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3, brought him this book, which he treasured. Only words are transcribed here; for the markings and underscorings see originals envelope. Two copies of the book were annotated at different readings. Marked pages from both books are accounted for here. Words within [brackets] are the author’s, those between /slants/ are this editor’s.

Original is missing.

 

Flyleaf/  Wave or particle motions; longitudinal and transverse.

171-174  Two motions, two velocities?

 

108/  That /clock-work/ runs down. Entropy, but /except for/ life.

 

131/  [But this kind of competition /”between big firms and concerns all over the world”/ is as uninteresting as it is biologically worthless.]  Not so. It provides the creature comforts and necessities that are prerequisite to creative spontaneity, in which honor and prestige and the experiencing of Beauty are the individual goals.

 

169/  Ultimate units of mass, motion and time, in nature?

 

195/  [But in view of the fundamental role which this enticing principle is still, or again, accorded by the Neo-Machians in present-day quantum mechanics, it seems to me right to recall emphatically his wrong prognosis ..”]  Like exposing the popular fallacy of land communism.

 

200/  [..it is again the mechanical theory of heat that carries the burden of responsibility for the actually lawful behavior.] — The statistical interpretation.

 

222/  [Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does ‘life,’ but not so mind.]  The individual is granular in himself, but not in his relation to others. There it is a unit.

 

227/  [Nothing that happens in nature is in itself good or bad.]  Apart from man.

 

243/  [But the  universality of discreteness, as now recognized, appears to show that the method of enumeration, the method of the integer, is really the royal road, the only road by which we may hope to achieve real insight.]  The only actual rationality.

 

250/

 The objective world is the field and subject-matter of objective experience. It comprises all that can be experienced objectively.

      The objective world manifests itself (to the subjective) in discrete units — primarily sense impressions — called actions, happenings, events, the general and inclusive term for which is action.

      We are so finitely constituted that the least event we can experience objectively is the quantum, the least unit of action, of which whole (and objectively indivisible) units all greater events are composed.

      The quanta are composite of three elements or aspects. These are measurable in units of mass (per unit of motion), motion (per unit of time), and time (in units of time) — mass and motion relative as ratios and time absolute.