cCHAPTER
5
COSMOLOGY:A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
THE SCIENTIFIC EPOCH. PART 2: POST-KANT
CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY5.1.1.
Situated chronologically some midway through our scientific epoch, Kant’s oeuvre constituted an important watershed – a radical parting of the ways. His theory that all human knowledge is confined to the world of appearance (phenomenal), the real world ‘behind’ the phenomena (noumenal) being necessarily beyond that knowledge, had the effect of splitting cosmologists into two camps; those who rejected metaphysics and those who did not. The former, the majority, were greatly influenced in their choice by their lack of constructive ability. Like their masters, their role in matters philosophical was perforce confined to the critical. For them, the arguments of Hume and Kant meant the divorcing of science (empirical cosmology) from metaphysics (rational cosmology), since they believed, and were only too ready to accept, that the latter had now been exploded as a valid cognitive discipline. Science now became essentially the search for regular relations existing among phenomena. If the claims of rational cosmology (metaphysics) to acquire knowledge of the universe are rejected, and empirical cosmology is fully taken over by science, what is there left for philosophy considered as a means of acquiring knowledge of reality? Only so-called second order knowledge – knowledge about knowledge. The first order knowledge being effectively that of science, second order knowledge amounts to little more than a critique of its methods, evidential criteria, the meaning of its terms, and so forth. All of which, however, is of little help, relevance, or interest to the working scientist. In the two centuries or so of critical philosophy’s existence, the course of its activities from Compte’s positivism via Mach’s phenomenalism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle to linguistic philosophy and deconstructionism, has inevitably been one of steady descent to levels of ever more conspicuous triviality. But what we cannot speak about without contempt we should pass over in silence.THE MENTAL ROUTE TO A RATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
5.2.1.
As for the immeasurably more interesting and important second camp: a number of Kant’s immediate successors, especially in Germany, did not accept that he had established that the noumenal world is unknowable, but only that it is unknowable via an investigation confined to the outer, material world, such as that which was being conducted by physics. It might still be knowable via a systematic study of the inner world of the mind. As one of the greatest of these thinkers put it:
“Physics cannot stand on its own feet, but requires a metaphysic to lean upon, whatever airs it may give itself towards the latter. … the greatest advances of physics will make the need of metaphysics ever more felt … the investigator must turn his glance inward … The last fundamental secret man carries within himself, and this is accessible to him in the most immediate manner; therefore it is only here that he can hope to find the key to the riddle of the world and gain a clue to the nature of all things. The special province of metaphysics thus certainly lies in what has been called mental philosophy … the source of the knowledge of metaphysics is not outer experience alone, but also inner. … it combines outer experience with inner, and uses the latter as a key to the former. … Accordingly philosophy is nothing but the correct and universal understanding of experience itself, the true exposition of its meaning and content.” (Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Idea”, Bk.4, Ch.10).
5.2.2.
It must be realised that our sense impressions are phenomena only when considered in relation to those external sources which, via physical stimulation of our sense organs, are thought to give rise to them. As events-in-themselves they are noumena. Moreover it was very possible that the phenomenal world of a living organism was no more than a specially modified region of the noumenal outer world. Clearly, the very fact that the noumenal world gave rise to phenomena argues for some close correspondence between inner and outer worlds – even if this correspondence is remote from the replication assumed by the naïve realist.
5.2.3.
The post-Kantian future of cosmology lay in the increasing enrichment and coherence of this ‘inner’ experiential philosophy as it aspired to assimilate the further advances in empirical knowledge. These were great and many, but fell into only four general categories: from the turn of the eighteenth century onwards, the rapid development of the life sciences, no less momentous in their cosmological implications than Newton’s original synthesis; from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards the systematic investigation of paranormal phenomena; over the same period, the birth and development of experimental psychology in the widest sense; and finally, of course, dating from the turn of the nineteenth century, the increasing shift in physics from Newtonian, towards non-Newtonian conceptions (quantum theory and non-Newtonian mechanics).PROGRESS IN RATIONAL COSMOLOGY
Fichte
5.3.1.
The first of these post-Kantian mental philosophers to attempt a constructive assimilation of the revelations issuing from the life sciences was Schopenhauer. But there were three thinkers prior to Schopenhauer whom we should at least mention. The first of these was Fichte (1762-1814). His central insight was that since, as Kant said, we perceived the external world, not as it exists objectively, but in the ways most favourable to the satisfaction of our biological needs, this very fact tells us something about the striving, appetitive subject, or ego. Fichte came to see the thing-in-itself as Absolute Spirit striving for self-realisation in the form of innumerable derivative spirits or egos, with the outer world existing solely as a means to this self-realisatory end. This placing of the experiential emphasis on will rather than perception was an important step in the development of the true conception of the universe as a process.
Hegel
5.3.2.
Our second thinker, Hegel (1771-1832), also correctly conceived the world as a process issuing from some Absolute; but this conception, viewed as a process occurring among reified abstract categories, was so far from concrete reality as to be, despite a great contribution to the solution of two basic ontological problems, essentially a colossal aberration. Hegel lectured on the Tao at least as early as 1818, Western interest in Oriental philosophy having expanded greatly in the century and a quarter since Leibniz (4.6.3.). For Hegel, the ontological equivalents of T’ai Chi and Wu Chi were not, as they were for Leibniz, God and The Void, but Being and Not-Being. By a process of supposedly logical implication, whose fundamental dynamic, inspired by Kant’s antinomies, was the synthetic resolution of apparent contradictions, Hegel proceeded to deduce from these basics a comprehensive fabric of abstract universals into which he attempted, with small success, to fit the world as experienced. Thus, the matter of the physicists always remained for Hegel an unassimilable residue. Though this orgy of abstractionism – a kind of dynamic Platonism - was fundamentally wrongheaded, it nevertheless contained a second profound structural truth: that is, in addition to that of conceiving the universe as a process of logical implication arising from an ultimate One. This was to understand the central part that relations must play in this creative process. Hegel, like Plato before him, was an aesthete, and therefore vividly conscious of the fact that entities change according to their relational context: that an A in relation to C is not the same as an A in relation to B. We saw earlier (2.2.7.) that differences between complex entities depend ultimately upon differences in arrangement of simple entities, and that this leaves us with the problem of what confers differences upon the simples (3.3.2.). The concept of contextual change points to the answer. Note that this is exemplified even by Not-Being, since what, purely in itself, would have no nature (Nullity), acquires a nature in relation to Being. As Plato put it in “The Sophist”, “Nothing is not Nullity but Otherness.”
Herbart
5.3.3.
The third of these thinkers was Herbart (1776-1841). Whereas the thought of both Fichte and Schopenhauer had will as its central concept, that of Herbart and Hegel, sandwiched between them, had idea. Herbart correctly deduced that as and at the base of human experience there must exist innumerable simple reals – atoms of mind as it were, the mental analogue of the Newtonian material atoms. These would then combine or associate in innumerable ways to form complex experiences (ideas), by laws of the mind, again analogous to, though very different from, the association of material atoms to form complex bodies. This utterly distances Herbart’s associationism from that of Hartley and Mills and their epiphenomenal epigoni who saw (and still do see) the associations as consisting of complex dynamic arrangements of material particles in the nervous systems of living bodies, resulting solely from the operations of physics as conventionally understood. Herbart’s conception was genuinely creative in that he saw compatible ideas as combining in consciousness to form more complex ideas. Incompatible ideas could not exist simultaneously in consciousness, the less interesting idea being forced back into the unconscious, where it became one more constituent of the apperceptive mass. This was composed of all past ideas, which, excluded from consciousness by their incompatibility with its present content, were capable of returning to consciousness and entering by association into the formation of yet more complex ideas, as soon as this content became sufficiently compatible. Finally, it was clear from the experience of memory recall that compatibility and incompatibility were, if not identical to, at least closely dependent upon, similarity and dissimilarity.
Schopenhauer
5.3.4.
As we said earlier (4.5.3.), science, in the nineteenth century, with its solidly grounded theory of biological evolution, had achieved a triumph of an ontological significance at least equal to that of the Newtonian synthesis itself. The seeming gulf between mind and matter had always constituted one of the major stumbling blocks to a rational synthesis. And now the evidence was flooding in – evidence that subsequent scientific progress was only to make stronger to the point of certainty – that human beings had evolved out of the inanimate world by a process composed of an aeons-long series of small constructive steps. Here, then, was an enormous advance towards a rational synthesis. The first great scientifically centred thinker to put biology, rather than physics, at the centre of his world-view was Schopenhauer (1788-1860). And the great merit of Schopenhauer’s ontology was simply that it was the first to see the universe as an experiential process, with the evolution of life at its centre. As a disciple of Kant, Schopenhauer believed that the noumenal level was forever inaccessible to discursive thought; but this did not mean that we could not experience it directly. After all, as the phenomenal world had evolved out of the noumenal, it must be rooted in it, and so partake of its nature in some fashion. Schopenhauer saw the noumenal as the inner nature of all material bodies, manifesting as attractive and repulsive force in the inanimate world, and in conation, or appetitive striving, in the living. He termed this “will”. He saw the multiplicity of things in space and time as the objectification of will; and our perception of this spatio-temporal world as “idea”. This conception was, by implication, monistic so far as substance went. Its dualism lay in the relation between the ceaselessly striving will and its material objectification in time and space. Although, as we saw above, Schopenhauer saw that a metaphysically coherent physics could emerge only via a profound understanding of the structure of experience itself, he himself made no attempt to adumbrate one. He remained content with pointing out the radical inadequacies of existing physics. Clearly, a satisfactory physics had at least to be capable of bringing this blind, if upwardly striving, will and the material spatio-temporal order to which it also gave rise, into rationally coherent relation.
Bergson
5.3.5.
A further great step towards this rational synthesis was taken by Bergson (1859-1940). We saw earlier that Herbart had postulated an unconscious in which all past experiences resided, and which, given a suitable occasion, were capable of returning to consciousness. The unconscious, as a repository of all past experience, had been brought to prominence by von Hartmann (1842-1906) in his massive work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). In this he attempted a synthesis between thinkers such as Hegel and Herbart who conceived the mental ground as composed fundamentally of ideas, and those like Fichte and Schopenhauer who had thought of it primarily as will. Unfortunately, Hartmann’s synthesis of will and idea invoked the utterly false conception of metaphysical teleology. Bergson, though contemptuously dismissing metaphysical teleology as a kind of mechanism in reverse, wholeheartedly embraced the concept of an unconscious in which all past experience resided. His clinical and neurophysiological researches had convinced him that memories were not stored in the brain as engrams - that no such physical traces existed. Instead, he believed that “ … the past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting.” (Creative Evolution; p.5). And that past, according to all the geological and biological evidence was centrally the whole evolutionary process. Obviously, a universe containing such a basic structural feature ran wholly counter to the universe as depicted by mechanistic physics. But, like Schopenhauer, Bergson could not take the ontological conceptions of physicists seriously, arising as these did from thought confined to a merely phenomenal level. As against this he was not, himself, able to devise a coherent physics which, incorporating the experimental data, required that the past persisted indefinitely. In fact he was highly sceptical as to the possibility of any such achievement. As he saw it, the evolution, over the aeons, of the human mind had been directed basically by the exigences of survival in a perceived world of spatially situated and changing solid bodies. Yet our own mind – past and present - is the one portion of the noumenal world to which we have direct, or intuitive access; and life thus directly experienced and examined gave the lie to any merely phenomenal, mechanistic physics. So Bergson rejected mechanism, with its undifferentiatedly enduring atoms, in favour of a universe modelled basically on our directly intuited knowledge of human and animal life; life evolving via an open-ended, spontaneous, opportunistic process which, though without any predetermined goal, yet struggled upwards into ever greater life.BIOLOGY AND RATIONAL COSMOLOGY
5.4.1.
Mainstream biology in the twentieth century has been largely unaffected by Bergson’s theories. Its most spectacular advances have been made in unravelling the intricate details of biological processes, and for this, up to a point, classical chemical models proved adequate. But the more philosophically minded biologist has always been aware that something over and above the forces of conventional physics is required to provide a rational explanation of biological processes rather than their mere detailed description. As Errol Harris pointed out (4.5.3.) it is clear from the evidence that some other, systematically ordering, influence must be at work. A significant minority have accepted this, but have been largely content to demonstrate this as an empirical fact to their mechanistic colleagues who stubbornly contend that feedback processes are sufficient to account for systematic organisation. But even the phenomena of regulation, to go no further, are sufficient to refute that thesis. One biologist who has gone further is the Bergsonian, Rupert Sheldrake. He advances much detailed empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that the past is preserved, resonates sympathetically with the physical present, and in so doing exerts a formative influence upon it. All of which is true enough, as far as it goes. But, apart from maintaining that the probabilistic nature of the standard interpretation of quantum phenomena affords a chink whereby he can undisruptively introduce his formative causation into the physical world, Sheldrake, like the two philosophers – Schopenhauer and Bergson – who most influenced his thought, has no physical theory to offer. Still, his hypothesis at least points in the direction from which a rational synthesis must come.PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND RATIONAL COSMOLOGY
5.5.1.
The triumphant expansion of the life sciences throughout the nineteenth century, together with the first tentative attempts at an empirical psychology, acted as an inducement for the application of scientific method to the investigation of paranormal experience. It is obvious that the conception of the universe as essentially a cumulative and constructive experiential process bears powerfully upon such age-old questions as paranormal experience, the existence of the soul, its survival of bodily death, and its subsequent reincarnation. Of all of which, of course, Bergson was well aware. One of the founder members of the Society for Psychical Research, F.W.H. Myers (1843-1901), was of a distinctly philosophical cast of mind, and the evidence for the existence of telepathy, which he rightly found wholly convincing, led him to an ontological theory of a reservoir of unconscious experience in which, to a significant extent, the contributions of individuals merged. As William James (1842-1911), an older philosophical contemporary of Bergson’s, a psychical researcher, and a personal friend of Myers, expressed it,
“ … there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. … Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favour on some such “panpsychic” view of the universe as this.” (James, “The Last Report. The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher.” 1909, p.16).
5.5.2.
During the twentieth century psychical research has produced a vast wealth of evidence in support of this conception of a universe where all past experience persists, and which, under suitable conditions, returns to consciousness - which is as much as to say, become part, once more, of the changing present. One might perhaps single out as preeminent: the Myers cross-correspondences; near-death experience; and children’s memories of past lives.PSYCHOLOGY AND RATIONAL COSMOLOGY
5.6.1.
In order properly to assess the cosmological contribution of more mundane laboratory psychology, we must constantly keep in mind those relations between science and ontology that I outlined earlier (2.3.;2.4.). What these mean, broadly, in this context, is that this contribution consists wholly in its bearing on the theories of the ontologists: not only in point of their truth or falsity, but also in developing them on an altogether more evidentially precise, detailed, and concrete level. Certainly, depth psychology in its numerous manifestations has gone some way to achieving this in the case of the unconscious. And developmental psychology in particular has succeeded in establishing in great detail what Berkeley was the first to adumbrate: namely, that the world-as-perceived is a complex construct whose principal ingredients are our visual, tactile, and kinaesthetic sensations, our interoceptions in the widest sense, our willed motor impulses, and our memories of all these. Also, experiments have vindicated the interference theory of forgetting over the extinction theory; thereby tying up perfectly with neuropsychology’s total failure to discover any evidence of any kind that memories in any form are in any way stored in the brain. In short, when the findings of laboratory psychology are carefully extracted from the simplistic metaphysics in which the greater part of its practitioners (there are, of course, a significant number of honorable exceptions) have seen fit to wrap them, it is seen that they all vindicate the world-view that has been steadily emerging from the work of the great line of ontologists whom we have been considering; viz, that the universe is essentially a cumulative and constructive experiential process.PHYSICS AND RATIONAL COSMOLOGY
The Demise of Classical Physics
5.7.1.
But, of course, the great obstacle to a universal synthesis has been physics. Our empirical knowledge has shown with an irrefutable wealth of detail that, by the long process we term biological evolution, the human world has holistically emerged from the physical. Yet if the classical conception of the physical world, with its inert unchanging atoms and container space, are essentially true, such emergence would be impossible. Our analysis of the Fatal Trap (4.4) establishes that this classical conception is an ontological absurdity; the physical world as a thing-in-itself must be very different. Clearly, as physics probed ever more searchingly into physical processes, the time was bound to arrive when experimental facts, even by the very unexacting standards of physicists, could not be fitted into the classical model. That time was around the turn of the nineteenth century.
A Rational Cosmology from Measure-Number Equations?
5.7.2.
If one were to think that this inability of the Newtonian conception to cope with the latest experimental results would stimulate physicists to develop a more coherent physical conception, one would be very wide of the mark. Physicists are not ontologists, but rather technologists and mathematicians – the experimenters tending to the technological pole, and the theoreticians to the mathematical. They are not primarily concerned with understanding the physical world, but with manipulating it. Now, the great body of experimental facts is not organised primarily in terms of coherent physical theories but in terms of coherent sets of measure-number equations - as one would expect, since these facts are mainly readings of calibrated instruments: rods and clocks and dials. What these numbers imply as to the physical nature of what is being measured is of secondary interest to the theoretical physicist; what is primary is their accommodation within that coherent fabric of measure-number equations that constitutes the real theoretical substance of the science of physics. So that contrary to the layman’s seemingly unshakable belief that the primary conceptual material of theoretical physics consists of physical theories, the truth is that it consists of measure-number equations. In classical times, by the unexacting ontological standards of scientists, a crudely coherent physical interpretation could also accommodate these readings; so that there was as yet no serious conflict, at this ontological level, between physics as a means for understanding the world and a means for manipulating it. Yet, as I say, by about the turn of the nineteenth century even this was no longer the case. The experimental data could no longer be fitted, even crudely, into a simplistic mechanical world conception. But this in no way impeded their coherent mathematical organisation. Such is the infinite plasticity of mathematics that existing classical equations could easily be developed in all sorts of ways to accommodate the new data. As for finding physical reasons why this mathematics should work, the theoretical physicist, being no ontologist, could, perforce, only turn to the naïve classical conceptions: the mathematics was a development of classical mathematics which could be given some kind of physical meaning; hence the physical meaning of the new mathematics was arrived at by making changes in the classical physical conceptions analogous to the changes in the classical mathematics. As might have been expected, all that this method of physical inference grounded on mathematical analogy could achieve was a kind of mechanism run mad. It attained an all-time nadir with the ‘relativity theories’ of Albert Einstein1, who, with the possible exception of his friend and mentor Hermann Minkowski, was unmatched in his ability to derive bad metaphysics from good mathematics. The more philosophically intelligent physicists could see that such self-contradictory models could be justified, if at all, only on heuristic, not ontological, grounds. As for the relation between theoretical physicists and the lay public – well, Alfred O’Rahilly (Electromagnetics. A Discussion of Fundamentals. Longman’s 1938 [Dover 1965], p. 851) summed that up in a few well- chosen words: “The mathematicians got their chance and the semi-educated developed their natural gullibility” (“and” he might have added “their natural pretentiousness”).
Ontological Physicists
5.7.3.
So, with mechanism, the generality of physicists had shot their ontological bolt and were content to settle for an essentially instrumentalist physics, whose theoretical organisation consisted of a coherent measure-number mathematics (systems of formalisms) loosely attached to merely heuristic quasi-physical conceptions. However, there have been a small number of genuine ontological thinkers among modern physicists. One such was David Bohm, whom we have already touched on (4.4.13.;4.ref.2.). Another on the right track was Guy Burniston Brown, with his theory of radiation as composed of rapidly alternating on/off forces-at-a-distance, the alternation being due to alternating changes in the source. (An idea which perhaps owes something to Boscovich.) Equally to the point was his assertion that “The reason why the ‘velocity of light’ plays such an important part in modern physics is that it is not the velocity of anything.” (Retarded Action-at-a-Distance, Cortney Publications Luton, 1982, p.30). Moreover, beneath the smog of mathematically generated absurdities that smothers post-classical physics, one profound, universally accepted, advance in physical understanding can be plainly discerned; and that is that substance and change are far more profoundly interfused than was envisioned by classical physics. What, now, is seen as physically basic, is not unchanging stuff, but some form of – inevitably periodic - activity. Such a conception is an obvious giant step in the right direction, since, as compared with the motions of minuscule ball bearings through space, it conceives physical processes as much more nearly akin to behaviour.
Whitehead’s Contribution
5.7.4.
The ontologist who most clearly grasped the significance of this discovery was Whitehead (1861–1947). He offered a closely reasoned rejection of the Fatal Trap, which he referred to as, “the baseless doctrine of undifferentiated endurance” (Process and Reality, II, II, V, 1929). He rightly saw the physical world as a system of ultimate events none of which persisted through time or were extended in space. And in another work (“Nature and Life” p.p. 48 & 59, 1933), he asks, “How do we add content to the notion of bare activity?”, and answers this with “self-enjoyment.” Whitehead sees this activity as the creation of unified patterns of self-enjoyment, and the universe as essentially a process of becoming of ever greater unities (the latter, incidentally, a conclusion also reached by Nietzsche in his last sane years). But he was not able to define the nature of, and the relations between, these unified patterns of activity more precisely. While, in this vital respect of being able to demonstrate the general nature of the long-sought rational link between the processive and the substantial dimensions of existence, Whitehead’s ontology is clearly an advance on Bergson’s, in all other respects it is a retrogression. The whole argument is conducted on a level much less concretely biological, is sketchy and evasive on the all-important question of memory, and anticipates Teilhard in viewing appetitive striving (“the lure of desire”) as being teleologically directed towards union with “the eternal object”, God - in all of which the theological, the teleological, and the abstractionist errors are preeminent.
Looking to the East
5.7.5.
Since Whitehead, process philosophers such as Hartshorne and Jacobson, as well as the small minority of theoretical physicists with some ontological ability (as against the majority, who have followed Albert Einstein in the wholly chimerical attempt to derive ontology from measure-number algebra) have agreed with him that change is not merely accidental to substance, but an essential part of its nature – that underlying the physical world is some kind of activity. In the search for the nature of this activity, many physicists have looked to the Orient for enlightenment. As we noted earlier (3.10.1.) the only Indian system of thought to incorporate the Fatal Trap is the relatively minor Cãrvãka. The more orthodox Indian physical conception is of a process where change is defined by the addition of instant events. This is certainly an essential element in a true substance theory, but what is also required is a rational account both of the natures of these instant events, and what it is about their natures that associates the events sequentially. And, to date, so far as I am aware, no one has come up with this account. A major stumbling block seems to be that, while explicitly rejecting the notion of unchanging particles, physicists are still stuck in the mind-set of thinking of change in terms of motion - Bohm’s holomovement, for example.TOWARDS A RATIONAL SYNTHESIS
5.8.1.
We said earlier (3.1.1.) that if a rationally coherent theory of the universe is attainable, this can only be via a synthesis of rational and empirical cosmology – metaphysics and science, in short. Having first - in Chapter 2 - surveyed the general nature of these, and indicated the form which such a synthesis must take, and then, in this chapter and the two preceding, outlined the two-and–a-half-millennial history of its fitful progress, we are now in a position to adumbrate the lines along which cosmology must advance.
5.8.2.
By now, at the beginning of our Common Era’s third millennum, empirical cosmology has succeeded in establishing that the human world (noosphere) has evolved out of the living world (biosphere), which has, in turn, evolved out of the inanimate world (hylosphere). It follows that an essential precondition of a coherent world-view is a coherent account of this inanimate world. And this, our contemporary physics has radically failed to supply. It exists in a state of endemic confusion, centred on the Fatal Trap, respecting the nature of, and relations between, phenomena and noumena; and, with instrumentalist concerns paramount, instead of making any serious attempt to resolve this devastating muddle, it has accepted it as an unavoidable consequence of human limitations, and settled for merely mathematical coherence in the form of a vast, hierarchically organised fabric of measure-number equations. But despite this crudely pragmatic tendency, some new, genuinely ontological, insights have emerged. It is now realised that we live not in a world of intrinsically unchanging stuff, but of events: that change, far from being accidental to substance, informs it essentially. Further, that all the evidence points to this change as being basically periodic. Such change, as we have seen, cannot be motion, but rather something more ontologically fundamental out of which motion arises. It is from the knowledge of precisely how substance and change are interconnected that a coherent physics comprising new conceptions of matter, radiation, space and time must arise. This is equivalent to working out the precise nature of a process exhibiting certain kinds of relationship between events which we would call spatial and temporal: space and time, as Leibniz claimed, being no more than mere abstractions drawn from such relationships. Radiation will then be seen as a force acting at a distance. This is a less radical conception than may appear on first acquaintance: firstly, because radiation obviously exerts force, since it changes the motions of receptor particles; secondly, with space as a mere abstraction, action–at-a-distance can no longer be deemed ‘ghostly and absurd’. On the contrary, it is now waves or particles of radiation moving through a non-existent space that are absurd.
5.8.3.
Out of a physical world from which all the evils consequent upon the Fatal Trap have been expunged, it becomes altogether natural that life mind and spirit should, in due course, emerge. It seems to be insufficiently appreciated that conventional physics with its essentially ephemeral configurations of particles cannot even begin to account for experience, since the advent of each configuration necessarily demands the simultaneous extinction of its predecessor. But the most cursory reflection is sufficient to convince us that all our experiences are extended in time – that they necessarily incorporate duration, just as Bergson contended.2 And a physical process which negates the very possibility of unchanging particles moving through ‘space’ does not require that events must be obliterated in order to make way for their immediate successors. On the contrary, the persistence of predecessors is an essential attribute of such a process. The physical present is thus no more than the ever-changing skin of a persisting past that forms, as it were, the ever-growing body of the universe – the ‘within’ of things. From such an underlying ontology as this, accounting rationally for the emergence of the biological world, and, out of this, in due course, the human, becomes a perfectly feasible enterprise. Of course, it necessarily entails that there must be some mode or modes of association between present and past experience; but there is no reason at all why the only kind of association acknowledged by materialistic orthodoxy – the spatio-temporal – should be the only one that exists. Indeed, the ever-present experience of association of memories by similarity and contiguity suggests to any mind not wholly given over to naive mechanistic conceptions that there is at least one other. This same persisting and associated past also provides a rational ground for the unconscious mind of depth psychology, for so-called paranormal experience, and for such age-old fundamentals of mysticism and religion as survival of death and reincarnation. The rest of this book is an attempt to take cosmological theory forward by integrating science and metaphysics along these general lines.
NOTES & REFERENCES
1. It was known for some years prior to the publication of Einstein’s special relativity theory that the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment could be accounted for quantitatively by the fact that the Maxwell-Lorentz equations providing the mathematical foundation of electromagnetism were Lorentz invariant. What this means is that for any two ‘observers’ of the same event, with the (x',t') observer moving relatively to the (x,t) observer in the x-direction with a constant velocity v: x' = (x-vt)/√(1-v2/c2) and t' = (t-vx/c2)/√(1-v2/c2), where x is the distance, and t the time of the event measured in the inertial frame (coordinate system) taken as stationary, and x' and t' the distance and time as measured in the other (taken as moving).[If the (x',t') inertial frame is taken as the stationary system, then, in the above equations, x and x' and t and t' must be interchanged and v changed to -v]. It should be noted that this transformation of symbols (first known, in slightly different, but essentially the same form, as a Voigt transformation) holds true irrespective of any particular physical meaning (including none at all) accorded the symbols. The only reason for making these symbols measures of distance, time, and velocity is because of the relevance of this transformation for the validity of the Maxwell-Lorentz electromagnetic equations.Now, half a dozen lines of elementary algebra are all that is required to establish that the expression x2–c2t2 is also Lorentz invariant; that is, that if the above equalities for x' and t' are substituted in the expression x'2 - c2t'2, the expression x2–c2t2 is obtained. And, once again, this invariance is a mere analytical fact, any physical interpretation put upon it being gratuitous so far as these purely numerical relationships are concerned. Nevertheless, Einstein saw fit to give it a very radical physical interpretation which, if true, had three highly desirable consequences: it accounted for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment; it vindicated the Maxwell-Lorentz electromagnetic equations; and it reconciled mathematically the two great fundamental theories of physics: Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electromagnetics, the first of which admitted only relative velocities, but the second, absolute velocites, with the aether providing an absolute standard of rest. Notice that I have italicised ‘equations’ because Einstein’s interpretation contradicted the Maxwell-Lorentz theory, since it denied the existence of that very aether, belief in the physical reality of which gave rise to the equations in the first place, and without which, as Maxwell himself asserted, they are physically meaningless. Einstein postulated that nature contained no discoverable absolute standard of rest, and hence that all inertial frames can, with equal right, claim to be at rest; that every light signal travels at a uniform speed (c) relative to its source; that each inertial frame has its own unique values for the distance (x) and time (t) measurements of any particular event; and that these values for two different inertial frames, moving at a constant velocity (v) relative to one another, are related by the Lorentz transformation.
It might be said that, with this system of postulates, Einstein was attempting to have the best of both worlds. Consider two bodies moving at a constant relative velocity (v), and such that at the moment when, without colliding, they are all-but-coincident, they each emit a light signal. If light is a ballistic phenomenon – the signal consisting of ‘light particles’ in a void, emitted in all directions – then common sense would claim that each source remains at the centre of its light front, but that, because the two sources are moving steadily apart, the two fronts are not coincident. But if light consists of a wave motion through a fixed universal medium (the aether), the two light fronts move out as one, but with neither of the sources, themselves moving through the aether, at their common centre. As can be seen from the above postulates, Einstein was going against common sense by claiming that (as for aetheric transmission) there existed a single light front, of which (as for ballistic transmission) both relatively moving sources remained at the centre. And his explanation of this apparent physical contradiction was that, in the two inertial frames centred on the two sources, the times and distances of both systems – the stationary (unprimed) and the moving (primed) – are measured differently, according to the Lorentz transformation.
The great appeal of this conception of Einstein’s, known as the special theory of relativity, lay in its vindication of the Maxwell-Lorentz equations (though not, as we have seen, their physical raison d’être), its accounting for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and its mathematical unification of Newtonian mechanics with Maxwellian electromagnetics. But, as many genuine physical thinkers have incontrovertibly established, this theory cannot be true since it necessarily entails a physical impossibility: namely, that each of two precisely similar clocks works steadily slower than the other simultaneously. So much for the attempt to derive metaphysical truth from O-level algebra.STRONGLY RECOMMENDED READING
BOOKS:
(i) Herbert Dingle. Science at the Crossroads. 1972. Martin Brian & O’Keefe. (The definitive disproof of special relativity by one of its leading authorities. A must for anyone seriously wishing to understand the true nature of 'relativity' - and, indeed, of modern physics in general).
(ii) Alfred O’Rahilly. Electromagnetics. A Discussion of Fundamentals. Longmans, 1938. Dover Edition, 1965. ( A monumental critique of modern theoretical physics – arguably the finest ever written).
ARTICLES:
(i) Louis Essen. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, Proc. Roy. Inst. 45, 1972. (An unanswerable refutation of ‘special relativity’ by the world’s foremost expert on the practicalities of timekeeping).
(ii) Guy Burniston Brown. What is Wrong with Relativity? Bull. Inst. Phys. & Phys. Soc. 18, 71, (1967). (A condemnatory assessment of special and general relativity by a physicist possessing both detailed historical knowledge and a profound and lucid understanding of the nature of measure-number equations).
2. ”A structural whole revealing itself seriatim must somehow preserve the earlier stages as it progresses and amalgamate them with those subsequently appearing; otherwise no structure or order comes to light. Single instantaneous events present no order – even if they are not simple but have internal complexity. If each as it passes were utterly obliterated, no order could ever emerge. In some manner, therefore, for an order to be constituted, the earlier events must be retained sublated in the succeeding events. A tune cannot be heard as such if the earlier notes are lost as they occur; a sentence cannot be understood unless the first words are retained in mind until the end – and the end is not the last note or the final word, it is the tune, or the sentence, apprehended as a whole”. (Errol E. Harris. The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science, p.464. George Allen and Unwin, 1965).
