Philosophy of Space and Time

And the Inner Constitution of Nature

Michael Whiteman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317851899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Volume XVII of seventeen in a series on Metaphysics. Originally published in 1967, this is a phenomenological study into the philosophy of space and time and the inner constitution of nature and the theory of everything being 'simply located'.

PART I
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

A MINIATURE ‘HISTORY OF IDEAS’ OF SPACE AND TIME

‘The vision of a reality beyond the impressions of the senses …’

M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, London 1958.

From the beginning of history man has been drawn to reflect on the sense of a hidden significance and reason governing the orderly progression of natural phenomena—the seasons, solstice and equinox, youth and old age, the habits of animals, the motion and power of the elements. Even though the course of events might sometimes be influenced by ‘magical’ means, everything remained in the realm of law, partly natural and partly divine. The epoch-making developments in experimental science and mathematics after AD 1600 made possible a thorough systematizing of natural phenomena by their measurements and thus a confident demarcation of the realm of natural law. It is only in this century, however, that Space and Time themselves—the background ‘form of phenomena’¹—have become the subject of a vast and intricate study, stretching far beyond the confines of physics and mathematics as previously understood.

More than 4,000 years ago the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Chinese were making astronomical observations and reducing them to order. While this could be described as the beginnings of ‘science’, no appreciable advance towards the establishment of the modern exact sciences or towards the conceptual precision which they foster could be made till the complex art of measurement had become better understood and made more widely applicable according to reason. Hence the utmost significance and value must be attached to the achievement of the Greek and Alexandrian geometers, notably Thales (600 BC), Pythagoras (540 BC), Hippocrates of Chios (440 BC) and Euclid (300 BC),¹ in abstracting the ideal intuitive properties of space from the actual ones and exhibiting the former as a logical deductive system. After this, for more than 2,000 years, all measurement and study of natural law proceeded on the unquestioned basis of Euclidean geometry, supposed to be not merely ideal but actually constituting the ‘form of phenomena’, like a certain unique ‘container’² with a variety of objects placed here and there inside.

Meanwhile, first religion and then philosophy had been attending to the problem of reality, as distinct from appearances, which plainly vary from person to person with every change of circumstances, cloaking purposes and significances which strike into the depths of our being.

To the seers who composed the poems of the Rig Veda, about 1000 BC, nature was a wondrous panorama, bodying forth a spiritual potency and structure which might be discerned by insight and revelation. For the same ‘ordinances’³ were to be found at work in man’s spirit and manifested in the world around. ‘Above was the (divine) intention [prayati], below was (the principle of creative) subsistence [svadhā]’;⁴ and the course of events was born, as it were, from ‘the watery flood’.⁵ In the Timaeus of Plato (380 BC) mind or spirit [vov̑s] is confronted with ‘necessity’ [ảvάγκη] as an ‘errant cause’, concomitant and corporeal, and cannot therefore completely effect its purpose.⁶ The most developed form of this teaching is found in Plotinos (AD 250) whose view of ‘matter’ as a principle giving externality with indefinite-ness of measure, and of the ‘sense-world’ as ‘a mixture of matter and reason’,⁷ corresponds remarkably with the standpoint of twentieth-century physics.

The ancient world, in general, sought to explain nature in terms of spirit. The treasured lore of the time consisted of a blend of genuine mystical testimony, poetry and myth, theological speculation and rudimentary science, and the wise man was he who was at once seer, prophet, poet and philosopher.¹ In those days there seems to have been considerable communication of knowledge by word of mouth between east and west. Fruits of insight and trends of thought were disseminated, but the originators, and the original esoteric form of the teaching, remain most often unknown.

In this process of dissemination, moreover, true insights became rapidly coloured over by fanciful speculation or altogether transformed by people who did not understand the form in which they were expressed. The doctrine of the four (or five) elements, which in the Upanishads is presented as purely mystical, becomes in Empedocles a semi-mystical or philosophical doctrine and in Aristotle a theory of natural phenomena.² The doctrine of the ‘celestial spheres’, which the celebrated mathematician and astronomer Eudoxos (370 BD) developed under the stimulus of the ‘wisdom of the magis’, was further elaborated and modified by Kalippos and Aristotle (340 BC).³ This remained influential till the time of Galileo and Kepler (AD 1620), alongside the purely mathematical system of epicycles devised by Ptolemy (AD 150) and intended only to ‘save the appearances’ as accurately as possible.

Other doctrines due to Aristotle or his predecessors, and resulting from premature attempts at physical or metaphysical analysis, were those of topos (‘place’, located bodily shape) and the ‘void’ or vacuum.⁴ These were of influence as late as the seventeenth century. A more physical theory was that of ‘natural motion’—for instance, the downward fall of unsupported objects. To Aristotle is also chiefly due the general acceptance throughout the scholastic period (AD 1150–1300) of the doctrine of ‘matter’ [ὕλη] as the potentiality or ‘principle of individuation’ of substantial forms. ‘Everything is form, but form itself becomes the matter of a higher form.’⁵

Concurrently with all these speculations, and not, it appears, much influenced by them, the work of experimentalists in astronomical and terrestrial observation continued, measurements being made always in the space of Euclidean geometrical forms—the straight-line, circle, sphere, etc.¹

Also resting on the assumption of an infinite Euclidean ‘container of all’ was the atomic theory broached by Leucippus (450 BC), elaborated by Democritus (420 BC), and taken over by Epicurus (290 BC). Here we find also the germ of a kinetic theory of matter, with a principle of conservation, and the theory of primary and secondary qualities. This ‘new physics’ remained something of a curiosity for 2,000 years, till experimental warrant could be found for its hypotheses.

A partial divorce was thus maintained between philosophy and early science. In this connection the importance of Galileo’s study of the Systems of the World (1630) and Newton’s of Natural Philosophy (1687) was twofold. Firstly, the mythical elements in Aristotelian cosmology and ‘physics’ were thus cleared away, and the rule of scientific method finally established. Secondly, dynamics was shown to determine a preferred set of reference-frames, each frame moving with uniform velocity relative to every other frame of the set. In this new ‘container theory’ the measure of acceleration became absolute, as were also the measures of spatial and temporal separation; but velocity was always relative. The science of Mechanics, which was to dominate man’s scientific view of the world for 200 years, arose on this ground together with that of hypothetical laws relating changes in the measures of time to those of space, as made in a Euclidean reference frame of the class called ‘inertial’, i.e. requiring no ‘correction’ for forces due to absolute acceleration.

After the sixteenth century philosophy moved rapidly along with the development of the natural sciences till a culmination was reached in the nineteenth century. Then, to the majority of scientists and philosophers, it seemed as if everything that happened in the physical world was subject to known laws governing changes in Euclidean space and absolute time. After this it was a small step for many people to pass to what seemed the logical conclusion, that nothing remained unaccounted for. Mind was merely an epiphenomenon or ‘colouring’ of the physical mechanism.

At the very height of its success, however, this ‘materialism’ sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Experiments led conclusively to the special theory of relativity, according to which there is no one spatial ‘form of phenomena’, but an infinity of forms varying from person to person according to their movement. Spatial and temporal separation are no longer absolute. Nevertheless all the various ‘forms’ are equally ‘objective’.

Moreover, one person’s clock may go fast or slow relative to another’s identically constructed; and events which are simultaneous for one person may not be so for another. Yet the new theory does not present itself as a paradox forced upon us by experiment and possibly capable of being reinterpreted when its terms are better understood. On the contrary, it arises from a clarification of our ideas on space and time and the removal of certain hidden assumptions which were unjustified and so led to error.¹

Matter, also, had seemed to break down into minute particles whose precise mass, position, velocity and electric charge could be measured indirectly by means of the theories. Along with the clarification of the concepts of space and time entailed by the special theory of relativity, it was inevitable that the concept of mass should require modification too. But the enormous field of experiment on which quantum theory is based forced altogether more startling conclusions. Energy, hitherto conceived of in terms of mass and velocity or the ability to produce velocity in a mass, is now directly related to frequency of oscillation; and the limiting of energy interchanges as between one system and another to complete 'packets’ or quanta imports into physics an operation which seems inconceivable except as the bare outcome of a piece of mathematical formalism.

In experiments in atomic physics, phenomena regarded as evidence of particles (scintillations, cloud-chamber tracks, etc.) or of waves (bright and dark bands, line spectra, etc.) are continually observed. They are well reconciled in the theory, which also obtains astonishingly accurate and varied experimental confirmation. Nevertheless the reconciliation is achieved at the price of relinquishing the concepts of particle trajectory and particle ensemble, as these would be ordinarily understood. We find that elementary particles can be taken to exist in a certain position only at the instant when the experimental effect appears; and the wave function characterizing any atomic system stands merely for a set of possibilities, one of which will be actualized, in an unpredictable way, under particular experimental circumstances. Thus the ‘mechanism’ of nature, if one may use this term, remains ‘behind the scenes’, and cannot be represented as anything definite in physical space.²

The general theory of relativity, which dispenses with certain mathematical limitations in the special theory and thus arrives at a new way of formulating the gravitational field, began by providing some remarkable astronomical confirmations, considered at the time to be within the limits of experimental accuracy. These confirmations had inevitably to be made by means of an interpretation of the formalism in terms of the Euclidean space and physical time of the laboratory. Once again the 'mechanism’ has receded into the background, and interpretation imposes both metaphysical and practical difficulties. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Principles of Measurement, and Analysis of Space
• Part III: Time and Substructure
• Part IV: Historical Critique: The Rise and Fall of Scientific Dualism
• Conspectus of Principles and Fallacies
• Name Index
• Subject Index