When my grandfather, Spencer Heath, died in 1963, now almost fifty years ago, I had the good sense to gather up all of his writings, a good bushel basket full of mostly penciled notes, jottings in tablets and on the back of envelopes. Gradually over a period of months I transcribed them uniformly by typewriter, in no particular order, numbering each as I went. The final tally was just over 2,000 items, now called the Spencer Heath Archive.
Subsequently, at the suggestion of Donald H. Allen, Alvin Lowi studied and annotated several hundred items, pulled more or less randomly since there was no organization to the cartons of typed sheets, looking for ones relating to the philosophy of science. For although Heath had never published on that subject, he valued his discoveries in the philosophy of science more highly, even, than his contributions to voluntaryist social organization. Years later, in 1998, Lowi authored “The Legacy of Spencer Heath,” intended as a forward for a contemplated new edition of Heath’s Citadel, Market and Altar. In the Summary of that essay, he wrote,
“Spencer Heath is remembered here for his work to establish a realistic basis for science. His theory of reality upholding observable events per se as the foundation of natural science suggests a reformulation of physics in terms of action (instead of the more abstract energy) and has far-reaching implications. A rational measure of quality, or value, in human terms is found in the dimensions of action. Heath’s reasoning is followed into the domain of social phenomena where an action concept of population provides a quantitative measure of social performance and a humane rationale for human progress.”
Except for Alvin Lowi’s work, the Archive lay fallow until this year, 2011, when Emalie and I undertook to scan it to make it accessible to the public. It is now about one-fifth scanned, and I am amazed and humbled at how much richer the content is, now that I come to it with greater understanding than in my callow years half-a-century ago. When Item 456 came up this week, Emalie suggested posting it on this site as a taste of what we are finding. (While I thought it a bit technical for a beginning piece, Emi won out.) Because Heath published little, and never had students, his ideas are little known. An accessible Archive may go some ways toward remedying that.
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Spencer Heath Archive Item 456
PHYSICAL REALTY AND HUMAN AIMS
When a physical scientist discourses upon the great modern discoveries in atomic organization and as to mass and motion, space and time he very frequently makes off-hand reference to the real subject matter of physical science as being energy or action, happenings or events. In doing this, he virtually concedes that all his previous discussion has had reference only to various and partial elements or aspects of the actual reality with which he deals. No longer speaking of matter and energy, matter and particles as ultimates, he unconsciously lets them fall into a unified conception as actions, happenings or events. He thus by implication acknowledges that his prior conceptions have been but particular abstractions out of that total reality of which mankind is a part and with which alone, as action or actuality man can interact and thereby have experience.
Physical science is rational. That is to say its method is measurement in terms of definite dimensional units and numerical quantities. It is in the ratios between such quantities that its rationality consists and on which its facility of mathematical description and analysis depends.
Physical science shows how there are three measurable aspects in which exterior objects or events impinge upon the interior consciousness in the following order: First, as mere mass, force or inertia, pressure or impact. Second, as motion or rate of motion through distance, direction or space, and Third, as repetition, rhythm or time, — the intermittency or discontinuity of motion into periods of duration. This is the order in which the three aspects, elements or ingredients of objects or events enter into the human consciousness and, taken together, constitute the three-fold concrete reality of any action or event of whatever magnitude or kind.
By means of standardized units of measurement such as dyne (unit of inertial mass or force), the centimeter (unit of linear motion through distance or space), and lastly, the second (the unit for a period of time or duration, the inverse of frequency of an event), events can be measured, their dimensions ascertained. These three dimensional units are called the “fundamental units of physical science” because other physical units are secondary, derived from or compounded of these.
Notwithstanding that an event does not come into concrete experience otherwise than in the full unity of its three component aspects or elements, it is nevertheless possible to measure any one of them or each of them in turn by the simple expedient of taking no account of the presence or persistence of the other two. Through this device these components may be and often are regarded as independent entities or actions instead of mere abstractions that cannot separately, or otherwise than in their threefold unity, play any part in concrete experience. Nor can any two together be experienced except in composition with the third. For some purposes, it may be convenient to treat force times units of motion separately as energy or work, without regard to time, or motion per unit of time as velocity, without regard to force or mass. But energy as work, or as a rate of work, without specific duration, cannot be experienced; nor can motion or rate of motion, apart from mass or force and time.
When employing the fundamental units, the numerical magnitude of any mass is taken always as the number of mass, force or inertia units per each unit of motion (ratio of mass to motion). Hence the quantity of mass-motion units taken together, such as dyne-centimeters (called ergs), is expressed by the product of the ascertained number of mass units into the number of motion units ascertained or contemplated as associated with them. These two aspects or elements thus taken together are designated as energy or work. When the motion is in contemplation only, and not actual, the “energy” is said to be “potential” and refers not to any actual energy as action or work but only to a hypothetical capacity of doing work and while “potential” only cannot, of course, be any part of objective experience. In like manner, so many ergs of energy or work, being merely a product of force times a number of motion units without reference to time, does not describe any specific action or event unless the rate of energy is stated as the number of ergs that act through or are associated with a single unit of time.
A great deal has been written and reasoned about “three-dimensional” space, but it is plain that in this only one measuring unit is involved, namely, the linear unit, in whatever number of directions it may be employed.
Now there is a fine and precise correspondence between the three-fold kinetic magnitudes that can be experienced and those three-directional merely static and formal magnitudes that can only be conceived. For the three elements or aspects of any action or event taken together constitute its over-all magnitude just as the three right-linear dimensions of any merely spatial or volumetric magnitude taken similarly together constitute our abstract conceptions of volume or space. And in like manner as these linear abstractions may be variously composed so as to include equal volumes in manifold varieties as to form, so equal magnitudes (volumes, as it were) of kinetic energy or action are manifested objectively to experience in similar great variety according to the numerical ratios of mass (inertial), motion and time which taken together constitute the various otherwise and over-all equal actions or events.
Differences between events arising from differences in their internal composition — in the ratios or proportions subsisting among their constituent elements — may be regarded as purely qualitative differences. These ratios determine the different kinds of events, and these ratios or unit quantities of action or events, as related to a single unit of time, when multiplied by the total time involved give the over-all magnitude or dimension of any particular event or succession of events of a given composition or kind. It is the ratios that determine the kind, the repetitions the quantity, dimension or magnitude. And it is to be noted that the former, the kind, is abstract and subjective and incomplete whereas the latter, the quantity, which includes the ratios of mass to motion and of motion to time, is the conception which alone can represent and come, into objective experience. It is owing to their differences of composition or kind that it is possible for internally differentiated events to enter into vast reciprocal and complex organizational and organic interrelationships among themselves whereby new events as new entities and new modes of operation are evolved and new and complex functions achieved. This capacity of energy as action and events to organize itself in ever higher structures and events may be identified as the principle of transcendence whereby the Universe is an evolving cosmos. And this tendency of future organizations of energy to transcend the past is ineluctable and not to be denied. For among similar organizational forms, whether organic or inorganic, those so organized within themselves that the time component or duration between organization and disorganization shall be greatest will be continuing and extant when those of lesser temporal organization shall have ceased and passed away. It is in this inherent determination towards higher and more enduring organizational forms that the cosmos exhibits its transcendent nature, its ever-advancing and its all-enduring Reality.
Physical scientists are increasingly agreed that all matter, all structures as such, are none of them fundamental entities but, rather, organizations of energy as action or events, having always a three-fold composition of mass or particle, motion or velocity, and duration or period of time, which last is stated usually as the frequency. Under this conception, action or events is seen as being of two varieties: One called radiation, the other called material structures, particles, atoms, molecules or cells and including cellular organisms, all basically the same as radiant waves. They occur in linear succession but their frequency is relatively low, their period of duration exceedingly long as compared with the duration of a radiant wave. These two kinds of organization, those having a high frequency as waves with their mass or particle aspect barely if at all perceptible, and those of low frequency of succession, having palpable mass and inertia, are now regarded as inter-convertible and mutually equivalent without loss. The one may be called free, the other bound energy or action. It springs from the disintegration of bound energy and tends towards indefinite motion and extension in all directions, just as gas molecules tend to occupy all space and the universe as a whole seems indefinitely to expand. Bound energy exhibits higher organization, condensation and concentration and gravitational aggregation towards rotational and polar organization with mutual repulsion and attraction, depending on likeness or unlikeness of rotation and consequent dissimilarity of polarity and poles. Bound energy tends to integrate free energy and free energy tends to liberate bound energy. There are constant transformations, but those organizations, otherwise similar, in which the third element, the durational, is in highest proportion, these by an inherent necessity tend progressively to abide. The principle of transcendence ineluctably prevails.
In all that has gone before, no limitations have been ascribed to the capability of the human organism to experience any and all kinds of action or events; we have tacitly assumed that our general capacity for experience is without limitations. We do know that we have no capacity for direct experience of any vibratory motion except within a very narrow zone of frequency within a possibly infinite gamut or range, whether of light or of sound. Yet we naively assume that since we are under no limitations or restrictions as to the magnitudes we can abstractly imagine or conceive there are likewise no quantitative limitations, no maxima and minima to our capacity for experience in the concrete. We assume that in the whole cosmic complex there are no proceedings or events either so great or so small as to transcend our capacity to know of them or in any manner to experience or understand. We know nevertheless that we are not infinite, that we are limited in all our experiential powers, however unlimited our imaginations and abstract conceptions may be. We have no warrant to assume that the cosmos, even our little physical world, is subject to any such limitations as we. Yet we are prone to rely on abstract symbols that by our own definition lie beyond the scope of all objective experience.
Employment of the symbols for zero and infinity rests on assumptions that any concrete quantity of energy or action can be infinitely divided or compounded to the nth or to an infinite degree. About the year 1900, however, Professor Max Planck broke from this assumption so far as to establish that under the principle of discontinuity an erg-second of work or action is not objectively divisible into any smaller amount than that represented by the exceedingly small fraction 6.60 x 10-27, that any smaller fraction of an erg-second does not act or exist in nature, at least not within the range of objective, as contrasted with imaginary or conceptual human experience. This quantum principle as it is called, in its facts and their implications, is having a profound, even a revolutionary effect upon physical theory and understanding, and this despite many theoretical complications growing out of the persistence of traditional and purely formal abstract conceptions.
These individual granules of events, the smallest realizable portions of an erg-second, the limiting units of action at the border line between abstract conception and concrete experience, are called quanta of action, sometimes “atoms of action” — the “building blocks” of our objective universe. All the higher organizations of energy, whether explosive and centrifugal intermittently as waves or organized in centripetally bound long-term atomic structures, may be regarded all as integrations of basic quanta in their various proportions and forms. Thus all integrations of quanta into structures and organizations resemble in all their fundamentals the basic quanta, those “atoms of action” of which they are composed.
The quantum of action is defined as that very small division of an erg-second that results from multiplying it by the decimal fraction 6.60 x 10-27 (see among others Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, Chapter IX). Like its corresponding erg-second of which each quantum is a very small fractional part, each quantum, in its three-fold composition, has a particle, mass or force element, a rate of motion or velocity element, and an element of frequency as its period of duration or time. And the various interior ratios or proportions in which these elements unite into their quantum magnitude give rise doubtless to the various types of wave formation and the virtually endless variety of atomic structures, processes and operations.
Any composition of mass (inertial mass), motion (per second) and time whose product is unity or one is an erg-second. It may be composed of just one unit each or it may be variously proportioned, so only that the product remain the same. Now, just as there is a minimum magnitude to which it is possible to reduce the whole erg-second, so there should be a minimum magnitude for each of its constituent parts — unless we are able to take it that the parts are more divisible than the whole. If, then, the dyne, the centimeter and the second are not more divisible than the erg-second itself, it follows that there is a basic unit for each of them, a least magnitude below which it will not unite in composition with the other two, We do not know precisely what these basic units are or in
/Note: The above copy breaks off at this point, the remainder having been lost or never completed. What follows is from an earlier draft without benefit of amendment or revision./
An erg-second having the unitary one-to-one composition of one dyne (or gram) per each centimeter of motion, one centimeter of motion, per each second of time. It may be indicated thus:
1 dyne x 1 centimeter x 1 second = 1 erg-second
A corresponding quantum of action (h being the customary symbol for the exceedingly small fraction 6.60 x 10-27 of an erg-second) would be, h x 1 dyne x 1 centimeter x 1 second = h erg-seconds.
It is obvious that the fraction h may affect any one of the unitary factors without affecting either of the other two, but no smaller fraction than h can, by the quantum definition, be employed.
By definition, a quantum of action is an exceedingly small fraction of an erg-second, the customary symbol for which is h. This is the basic unit or atom of action or kinetic energy. Under the same principle of discontinuity there is a basic unit for each of its component parts. These three basic units taken together constitute the unit of energy or action, just as the three customary single units of mass, motion and time constitute the customary single unit of energy or action, the erg-second. Now since the ratio of h to the erg-second is the same as h is to one, so the ratio between the indivisible unit of mass and the customary dyne or gram, between the indivisible unit of motion and the customary centimeter, and between the indivisible unit of time and the customary second should be the same. Under this hypothesis a quantum of action in erg-seconds can be represented as
h dynes x 1 centimeter per second x 1 second
or
1 dyne x h centimeters per second
or
1 dyne x 1 centimeter per second x h seconds.
The product in each case is one single unit of action. But there is the extremest difference in the respective qualities or compositions. In case number 1, the least possible element of particle or mass is involved. Case number 2 represents the unit of action in which the lowest rate of motion or velocity is involved. In case number 3 the least possible amount or period of time is involved.
Case number 1 may be taken to represent the basic unit in a wave series or wave propagation in which the particle aspect is at its irreducible minimum, on the border line between imagination and experience. The presence of the particle being equivocal makes each single quantum integration equivocal and thus, like the differentials in the calculus, susceptible of being disregarded in small numbers without impairing the practical or statistical accuracy of any experiment or calculation. The employment of h as the true differential might well diminish or remove the logical difficulty often encountered in the application of the calculus. Furthermore, it is quite possible that the quantum of action h could with profit be substituted for the theoretical point that is said to have position but to be without dimensions, in the whole system of lines, surfaces and solids in the Euclidean geometry.
Case number 2 suggests the kind of quanta that may well be involved in those physical processes and events that take place under conditions of atomic or molecular velocities and temperatures at or most nearly approaching the theoretical zero. Such quanta also may be importantly involved in the reintegration of radiant energy into atomic or sub-atomic structures of lower frequencies of disintegration and less transient organizational forms.
Case number 3 presents example of the kind of quanta that may be of most importance in the disintegration of relatively stable organizations or structures. It is the quantum composition in which the force and velocity elements together are necessarily at their maximum because of the irreducible minimum of time being involved — highest rate of energy acting through the least instant of time. The action is explosive. Such quanta acting statistically in very large numbers seem to account for the extreme violence and velocity of atomic or nuclear explosions and the disintegration of mass into predominantly radiant energy having mass, motion and time in such proportions as in case number 1.
In accordance with the generally accepted principle of discontinuity all energy, all action, all quanta are intermittent. They occur as events in succession. Those that occur in like composition have equal periods of time. Their succession is rhythmic. Whole numbers, being thus fundamental in nature, the Cosmos is not Chaos. It is by reason of the whole numbers of discrete units both in their composition and in the organization of quanta and of the ratios between these whole numbers that we have a rational Cosmos. Never any loose ends, no splitting of hairs.
Rhythm and rationality, whether perceptible or not, universally prevail, not only in the short periods and high frequencies of radiant energies but in bound or integrated energy no less, from the nuclei of atoms to biological cells, from amoeba to man and the organized generations of men. In all there is rhythmic succession and a rationality, order and rationale. All are compounds of quanta in compositions of mass, motion and time. In any type or form of organization those best compounded have the lowest frequencies of integration into higher and disintegration into lower and less enduring forms. Thus the higher types and forms ever more prevail. Organization dominates disorganization because the better ordered the better endures. The future cannot but transcend the present as the present transcends the past.
All kinds of events happen and they pass away. But a creative Cosmic Consciousness and will seems to pervade all. When bound energy disintegrates, whether from insufficient order and duration within or by impact of collision from without, the freed energy propagates itself not in disorder but organized in the form of waves in rhythmic cycles that speed outwards with every radial motion while ___(words missing)___ with all tangential motions, resolvable into two right-angular, in addition to that of propagation in all radial ways. Thus each preceding wave has three special dimensions as well as dynamic. It occupies successive increments of spherical volume having uniform radial depth and increasing as the square of the distance with a dynamic intensity inverse to its increase of volume.*
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*Note: This diminution of intensity over the whole spherical surface of a wave may result in the single-wave energy of any small spherical area being of sub-quantum magnitude. This could account for the requirement of a “train” of waves cumulatively to constitute at least a single quantum.
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This phenomenon of active energy disintegrating not into random disorder but into a rational system of wave, spherical in form except as it may interact and merge with other or similar systems and thereby assume more complex and more enduring forms gives evidence of an all-pervading Cosmic Consciousness or Will to organize and create.
Every integration of waves, whether into atom or cell, animal or man, man or the slowly evolving organic society of men, has an internal rhythm. And each has its cycle or term from integration to disintegration followed by reintegration into either similar or more enduring forms. The inorganic resists change. It is self-contained and so far as it is stable can react to external energy only by disintegration or by unifying in less stable compounds. The organic is so constituted that it depends on change. It must receive, transform and discharge external energy or perish back into the inorganic whence it came. Its purposive return of transformed energy to its environment is its functioning whereby alone it continues to live. The organic alone can impress its environment with change without itself disintegrating in the process. This depletes environment as the organization thrives. But in its higher forms, as in the organic and reciprocal, the contractual, relations among men, they come into a new form of life, the social organization, in which alone they can progressively create new and happier environment and thereby living better they can live ever longer lives. For the generations of men united in the practice and the freedom of contract, no less than the cyclic successions in all other integrations of energy into action, may be regarded as a succession of energy waves in which as elsewhere the Cosmic Purpose tends to lower frequencies and thereby more stable and enduring yet no less functioning forms.
Science best serves as it is simplest founded, as it yields most answers from fewest premises. The single simple generalization of Professor Max Planck contains within itself much ground for an objective rationale uniting consistently the three diverse absolutes, so called, the absolute velocity of light, the absolute zero of temperature and the absolute explosion of nuclear disintegration. Between the three extremes of quantum composition there are, of course, practically endless intermediate proportions. It is to be hoped that competent investigators, if they have not already done so, will give concentrated attention to the profound implications that seem to inhere in the Planckian hypothesis, not only as to the limiting extremes of quantum phenomena but also the vast field of intermediate proportions in which it may be found possible to unify under one general principle, perhaps all the variant processes and manifestations, organic as well as inorganic, within the Cosmic Complex.
As men seek reverently more and more to understand the creative nature of the Cosmic Mind, so do they come to share the Cosmic Dream.
Supplementary
In the whole universal energy, with its action and reaction, organization and disorganization, there is a durational factor under which there falls to the changing types and varieties of organization unequal endowments of particle, motion and time. By an intrinsic necessity those variant forms least charged with duration or time, other things being comparable, will recede and pass away, while those most endowed will abide and prevail. The balance is not static but dynamic towards the eternal. The lesser endowed must ever be transformed; the more endowed ever more transcend. All action is reaction, all energy is interfused. The inorganic atoms resist change by insulation against external action. The living cell reaches out for external energy which it transforms to its own use and thereby endures. Cells in the reciprocal relations that constitute higher organizations transform and exchange energy. The highest organisms, by their contractual relationships transform and exchange the elements of environment each for many others and many others for each. Men practicing contract employ the golden rule. By this they are re-born into a new life of power and peace. The iron rule of force thereby, and thereby alone, recedes. In their richer realm of contract and exchange men live finer and thereby longer lives. Thus they become creators. In freedom they inherit the earth and in plenty march forward to achieve more and more the abundant and the eternal life.
Spencer MacCallum will speak at Libertopia
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