2091 lines
158 KiB
HTML
2091 lines
158 KiB
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<title>Contingent laws about local regularities</title>
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<meta name="author" content="Amr Gharbeia">
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>C<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC7" align="right" hspace="5" width="65" height="30" border="0">ontingent
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laws about local regularities. </b></font></font>Though certain kinds
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of events are ruled out as ontologically impossible by the necessary
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principles about local regularities, that leaves open many ways for
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bits of matter to behave. Indeed, it leaves open the possibility that
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no change actually takes place at all. But if bits of matter in space
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do change as time passes, they must change in determinate ways, and
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how they move and interact is what is described by the basic laws of
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physics. Since that is something that can be known only by observing
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<i>what happens </i>in nature, those regularities are not
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ontologically necessary. Assuming that they have ontological causes,
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they depend on the <i>specific kind of matter </i>and <i>specific
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kind of space </i>that constitute the actual world. Thus, although
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spatiomaterialism explains the basic nature of what exists,
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ontological philosophy needs to make additional assumptions about the
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specific essential natures of the matter and space it postulates in
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order to explain the truth of the basic laws of physics. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><span lang="en-US">The
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properties mentioned in basic laws of physics are called “physical
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properties,” and as noted in </span></font></font></font><a href="/F:/Philosophy/Existentialism/The%20Wholeness%20Of%20the%20World/www.twow.net/Lo/LoOthP.htm" target="Lo"><font color="#0000ff"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><span lang="en-US"><u>Properties</u></span></font></font></font></a><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><span lang="en-US">,
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ontological philosophy takes physical properties to characterize the
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extrinsic essential aspects of the nature of matter and space.
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(</span></font></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><span lang="en-US"><i>Intrinsic
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</i></span></font></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><span lang="en-US">essential
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natures, by contrast, are what explain phenomenal properties.) And in
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the same way that physical properties (and spatial relations) are
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explained as aspects of the basic substances constituting the world,
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basic physical laws describing how they change can be explained as
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aspects of those substances as they endure through time.</span></font></font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">If
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the matter postulated by an ontology were simply assumed to have
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whatever essential nature is required to make the basic laws of
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physics true, there would be no genuine ontological explanation of
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why the basic physical laws are true. That is what materialism does
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(hence, its other name, “physicalism”). Indeed, that is the only
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way that physical properties can be introduced by materialism,
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because when space is reduced to spatial relations among bits of
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matter (as materialism does, being implicitly committed to spatial
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relationism), matter is the only possible ontological cause of
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physical properties and regularities about how they change over time.
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But a spatiomaterialist ontology recognizes two basically different
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ontological causes, and so space can work together with matter to
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constitute properties, relations, and how they change over time. When
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it comes to explaining the truth of physics, therefore, what
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ontological philosophy is looking for is a description of a more
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specific essential nature of matter and space such that, when space
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contains all the bits of matter, objects have physical properties and
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spatial relations which change in the ways described by the basic
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laws of physics. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
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may not be surprising that spatiomaterialism can explain the truth of
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the physics that prevailed at about the end of the 19<sup>th</sup>
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Century, because classical physics afforded an intuitive
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understanding of the laws of physics, as descriptions of how material
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substances move and interact in space as time passes and it assumed
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that space and time are absolute. What cast doubt on the possibility
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of a spatiomaterialist explanation were the revolutions that spawned
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contemporary physics. In particular, relativity theory seems to deny
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that space and time are absolute, as spatiomaterialism requires.
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Thus, instead of looking for a spatiomaterialist ontology that would
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make relativity theory (and the other laws of physics) true,
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contemporary physicists see the “holy grail of physics” as merely
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discovering a “Theory of Everything,” that is, a single law from
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which all the other laws can be derived.</font></font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">At present,
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there are four basic laws of physics, each describing one of the four
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basic forces that are now thought to be at work in nature
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(electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and
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gravitation), and the task that physics has set itself is to discover
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a single law that entails (together with suitable initial and
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boundary conditions) all four of those laws. (That seems possible in
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the case of the first three, because they can all be formulated as
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gauge field theories, but attempts to formulate Einstein’s general
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theory of relativity in a compatible way have been forced to assume
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that there are as many ten or eleven dimensions to space ) </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">To take the
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goal to be the discover of a single, basic law is to assume that
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efficient-cause explanations are the most basic explanations that
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physics can give. And since ontology itself is not assumed to be
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explanatory, the only entities that contemporary physics takes to be
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real are those referred to by the basic law of physics, that is,
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scientific realism. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
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philosophy, on the other hand, assumes that ontology itself is
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explanatory. That is what led us to recognize that the world is
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constituted by space as well as matter. Thus, we now expect space and
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matter to work together is some way to explain the truth of the basic
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laws of physics and, thereby, the truth of its efficient-cause
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explanations. Indeed, one of the mortgages we took out in order to
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use spatiomaterialism as our ontological foundation in proving
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necessary truths was the promise to give such an explanation of
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Einstein’s two relativity theories. We promised to show that even
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though we must take space and time to be absolute, it is possible to
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describe more specific essential natures of matter and space that
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would entail the truth of the special and general theories of
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relativity. But in order to lay the foundation for such a theory, we
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must first describe more specific essential natures of matter and
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space that would entail the truth of the laws of classical physics. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
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attempt to discover the specific essential natures of matter and
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space in the actual world is, however, a project resembling empirical
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science, for it would have to discover which essential nature(s) of
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matter and space afford the <i>best </i>ontological explanation of
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the truths of the basic laws of physics in a spatiomaterial world.
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That is a project of empirical ontology, but nothing so definitive is
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claimed for what is sketched here. All that is required here is proof
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that it is <i>possible </i>to give such an ontological explanation of
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the truth of physical laws, for that will show that spatiomaterialism
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is not falsified by what is found empirical in nature by physics and,
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thus, that ontology affords a new approach to philosophy. Thus,
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though this sketch of how more specific essential natures of matter
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and space explain their truth will show that a deeper explanation is
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possible, it may not be the best ontological explanation of physics.
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That job can be left to ontology as branch of empirical, natural
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science that is more basic than physics. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Once it is
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recognized that ontological-cause explanation are prior to
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efficient-cause explanations, finding the best ontological
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explanation will become the “holy grail” of the most basic branch
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of natural science. Unlikely as it may seem now, physicists will
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eventually welcome substantivalism about space, because it opens up
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the possibility of a deeper explanation of the world and what
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physicists really want is the deepest possible explanation that can
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be supported by the empirical method. As we shall see, for example,
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it solves the current puzzle about the relationship between
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gravitation and the other three basic forces of nature. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>C<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC8" align="right" hspace="5" width="59" height="27" border="0">ontingent
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laws: Classical physics. </b></font></font>We begin with the
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spatiomaterialist ontological explanation of the truth of the basic
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laws of classical physics, including Newton’s laws of motion and
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gravitation and Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism. If they can be
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explained ontologically, we can be confident that the rest of
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classical physics can also be explained ontologically, for the basic
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physical laws are like the axioms of a formal system and the rest of
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physics are like theorems that follow from them. That is basically
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the strategy we used for mathematics, ontologically explaining the
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truth of the axioms of set theory from which the rest of mathematics
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follows. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Though
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classical physicists assumed that space is absolute, they did not try
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to give an ontological explanation of the truth of the basic physical
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laws based on space being a substance. They did not recognize the
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validity of ontological explanations, and so they did not think of
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space as a substance that works together with matter to make the
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regularities being described true. Indeed, the action at a distance
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implied by Newton’s law of gravitation must have made any such
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project seem hopeless. Instead, their aim was to formulate physical
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laws mathematically so that they could make quantitatively precise
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predictions of the measurements that would be made in experimental
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situations. That method turned out to be a powerful means of seeing
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into the nature of the world, most spectacularly by revealing the
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nature of micro-processes, though by leaving out the deeper
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ontological explanation, it also made the Einsteinian revolution
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inevitable, as we shall see.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
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simplest way to describe the specific natures of matter and space
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that would explain the truth of classical physics is to start by
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cataloging all the different entities mentioned by the laws of
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physics and showing how the forms of matter required to account for
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them all would, by being contained by space and enduring through
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time, make the regularities described by the basic laws of classical
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physics true. That method will leave some aspects of those
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regularities built into the natures that the kinds of matter and
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space that are assumed to constitute a spatiomaterial world like
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ours. But enough of those regularities will be given a genuine
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explanation to show that an ontological explanation of classical
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physics is possible -- and to lay the foundation for explaining how
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the basic laws of contemporary physics could be true in a
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spatiomaterial world.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>F<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAC8AAAAaCAMAAAAQTvWAAAAAYFBMVEX////38PDv4ODg4ODn0NDMzMzfwMDXsLDMmZnHkJC/gIC3cHCvYGCmUFCeQECZMzOOICCGEBB+AAAQEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABJyHIUAAABEElEQVR4nL2Si27DIAxFu4yZ4IBf2/9/665p1qkvdZWmWti5hINjcA6Hm/bx9fl+e+UQz9greBURe4z6SkeemFke89vY81POlKhFtEHaWy29lhFWqejMXKl6LKXtPCzIg0cQvoPHaOGUIjz5JiEtZg2n/AjCU+I9FKThk76vwa/43s/51JxxtbD1gu+VUdIZv61c5Xg2Jv3l55nCcprSPNymVPH9KlOYx2v6+x887X6Pt7FWZUKHNkKUhSU9tFbFVeCqz3mprot5wc5AtCKWjraj0UJDL/ljhzCY6O1Ujyw5E76q58Rr/dk4+fazeI9HFR35i+h06thyg8/u9jmEBVHzrHDf8JeaXPF/tRfwz9k391NES90NwDQAAAAASUVORK5CYII=" name="OdkC9" align="right" hspace="5" width="47" height="26" border="0">orms
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of matter. </b></font>Though we cannot assume anything about the
|
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nature of matter or space that contradicts spatiomaterialism, there
|
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are many different possible spatiomaterial worlds. It is mainly the
|
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more specific nature of matter that we will be concerned with in
|
||
explaining the truth of classical physics, and in any given
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spatiomaterial world, bits of matter may come in various forms, each
|
||
with different ways of moving, interacting and being related to bits
|
||
of matter in other forms. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Indeed, we
|
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will have to assume that matter takes qualitatively different forms,
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because the basic laws of classical physics mention entities that are
|
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as different from one another as material objects and light. Every
|
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basic entity mentioned by physics as having a location in space and
|
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time must be explained as matter contained by space.</font></font></p>
|
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">A
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promising way to inventory all the basic forms of matter required to
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explain the laws of classical physic ontologically is to take as our
|
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working hypothesis that what is conserved according to the principles
|
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of the conservation of mass and energy is the <i>quantity </i>of the
|
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matter contained by space. Conservation of mass and energy is one of
|
||
the most basic principles of contemporary physics, and this
|
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ontological thesis is a plausible interpretation of it. Indeed, when
|
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the principle was first recognized by physics, it was heralded as
|
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empirical confirmation of the traditional materialist view that
|
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physical processes are made up of substances that endure through
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time. Let us, therefore, take it as our working hypothesis.</font></font></font></p>
|
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
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principle of the conservation of mass and energy holds that in any
|
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closed or isolated region of space, there is a certain quantity of
|
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mass and energy that never changes, regardless what happens there.
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That quantity could be the total quantity of matter, for that
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hypothesis would explain two aspects of the principle. </font></font></font>
|
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</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">First,
|
||
since matter is a substance, it neither comes into existence nor goes
|
||
out of existence as time passes, and thus, it is conserved. Hence,
|
||
the quantity of mass and energy could be the quantity of matter. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Second, the
|
||
principles of local motion and local action explain why the quantity
|
||
of matter does not change under the conditions described by the
|
||
principle of conservation of mass and energy. If the only way that
|
||
bits of matter can change location is by motion, they cannot change
|
||
their location from inside the closed or isolated region to outside,
|
||
or vice versa, unless they cross the boundary, and that is excluded.
|
||
Nor can bits of matter outside the closed region affect what happens
|
||
to the bits of matter inside, since that would involve action at a
|
||
distance, contrary to the principle of local action (unless something
|
||
moved across the boundary between inside and outside to mediate the
|
||
force, which is excluded). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Let us set
|
||
aside the peculiar effects that bits of matter may have on one
|
||
another that are mediated by space itself, since they are not
|
||
relevant to classical physics. As we shall see, there are always such
|
||
effects crossing the boundaries, but they do not violate this
|
||
conservation principle, because, as it turns out, they carry neither
|
||
energy nor mass. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Thus, it is
|
||
plausible that the quantity to which classical physics is referring
|
||
in the principle of the conservation of mass and energy is the total
|
||
quantity of matter in closed or isolated regions of space. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">There
|
||
is, however, one aspect of contemporary physics that is relevant at
|
||
this point in our argument. Though mass and energy were thought to be
|
||
conserved separately in classical physics, Einstein discovered, as a
|
||
consequence of his special theory of relativity, the famous equation
|
||
connecting them (<i>E=mc</i><sup><i>2</i></sup>). That is further
|
||
evidence that mass and energy are just different forms of the same
|
||
basic material substance, because if they were different forms of
|
||
matter, we would expect them to be commensurable. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Indeed, the
|
||
suggestion that they are basically the same stuff has turned out to
|
||
be true, for there are actual physical processes in which they are
|
||
converted into one another, most spectacularly in the nuclear
|
||
reactions used in nuclear weapons (fission and fusion). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
conservation of mass and energy is now seen as a consequence (or
|
||
presupposition) of the basic laws of contemporary physics. It is a
|
||
way of formulating what is called a “symmetry” about those laws,
|
||
that is, something that is invariant as other things change. But that
|
||
it to treat it formally, as a basic symmetry principle of
|
||
contemporary physics, and here, it will be interpreted ontologically,
|
||
as describing an aspect of the world that is caused by the permanence
|
||
of the matter that coincides with space. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Furthermore,
|
||
the conversion between mass and energy will be assumed here in order
|
||
to explain the various forms of matter ontologically, quite apart
|
||
from explaining any of the phenomena covered by Einstein’s special
|
||
theory of relativity. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
assumption that all the forms of mass and energy described by physics
|
||
are various forms of matter that coincide with space is just a
|
||
working hypothesis. It will serve my purposes, because it is a simple
|
||
and plausible way of laying out an ontological explanation of the
|
||
laws of physics (classical and contemporary) and, as we shall see, it
|
||
does show that there is at least one way that spatiomaterialism can
|
||
explain them all ontologically. Though it may not be the best
|
||
spatiomaterialist explanation of them, it will suffice to provide an
|
||
ontological foundation for explaining the global regularities,
|
||
because it will show that, for all that physics knows empirically,
|
||
spatiomaterialism could be true. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">This
|
||
ontological explanation of the truth of the principle of conservation
|
||
of mass and energy implies that there are as many different forms of
|
||
matter as there are kinds of mass and energy recognized by physics in
|
||
confirming this principle empirically. And in order to explain the
|
||
truth of the laws of classical physics, we must recognize four (or,
|
||
perhaps, six) qualitatively different forms of matter (with varieties
|
||
of each). They are (1) material objects with rest mass, (2) the
|
||
kinetic energy involved in the motion of rest masses, (3) the energy
|
||
due to gravitation, and (4) the energy due to electromagnetism.
|
||
(Since the latter two each involve two basically different forms of
|
||
energy, as potential energy and as actual waves, they might better be
|
||
counted as two forms of matter each, yielding a total of six.) Let us
|
||
consider briefly how each kind of energy can be explained as a form
|
||
of matter and then we will see how these forms of matter would
|
||
explain ontologically the truth of the laws of classical physics.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Matter
|
||
as material objects with (rest) mass.</b></i> Material objects with
|
||
rest mass are the form of matter that is usually intended when people
|
||
think of matter. Ordinary material objects have definite locations in
|
||
space and can be at rest. The quantity of rest mass in any such
|
||
object (at rest) would be the quantity of matter constituting its
|
||
existence. The endurance of matter through time would then explain
|
||
the principle of the conservation of mass in classical physics. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Even
|
||
at the altitude of classical physics, however, material objects have
|
||
further properties. Since different material objects cannot occupy
|
||
the same places at the same times, some sort of interaction keeps
|
||
them from doing so, when their motion would otherwise bring them to
|
||
the same location. Such interactions are explained in physics by
|
||
forces that the objects exert one another. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Thus, we
|
||
will assume that some material objects have electric charges by which
|
||
they can interact with other charged objects. And we will assume that
|
||
every material object exerts a gravitational force by which it
|
||
attracts every other material object. Such forces are, as we shall
|
||
see, aspects of the matter that exists in the form of rest mass, and
|
||
since these aspects involve regularities about change, they are
|
||
dispositional properties. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">However,
|
||
since the forces are spread out in the space surrounding where the
|
||
material object with rest mass is located, we must assume that some
|
||
of the matter constituting its existence is somehow spread out in
|
||
space, for otherwise the matter would not be able to explain the
|
||
forces that the material objects exert. But as we shall see, all the
|
||
matter constituting the material object is counted in its rest mass,
|
||
and the object interacts as if all its (rest) mass were concentrated
|
||
at its center, where the material object itself is said to be
|
||
located. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">We
|
||
will also assume, as classical physics did, that ordinary material
|
||
objects, such a billiard balls and cream puffs, are composed of
|
||
simpler material objects, such as “atoms,” the parts of atoms
|
||
(protons, neutrons and electrons), and the parts of parts of atoms
|
||
(such as quarks), though we will also leave the natures of these
|
||
particles and the forces binding them together unexplained until we
|
||
take up contemporary physics. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">The
|
||
simplest parts of material objects are now known to be particles that
|
||
are quite unlike material objects in various ways, but I will just
|
||
assume that they can also be explained ontologically by
|
||
spatiomaterialism until I show that the truth of quantum mechanics
|
||
can be explained ontologically by spatiomaterialism. (The nature of
|
||
the basic particles of physics is explained ontologically in </span></font></font><a href="/F:/Philosophy/Existentialism/The%20Wholeness%20Of%20the%20World/www.twow.net/Lo/L/LoOtkCaL16.htm" target="Lo"><font color="#0000ff"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><span lang="en-US"><u>Change:
|
||
Cosmology: Basic objects</u></span></font></font></a><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">.)</span></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Kinetic
|
||
matter.</b></i> All the other forms of matter recognized by classical
|
||
physics are classified as energy by physics, and the most surprising
|
||
implication of this ontological explanation of classical physics is
|
||
probably that kinetic energy is a form of matter, for it means that
|
||
the motion of objects with rest mass is itself a form of matter.
|
||
There is no way to avoid this implication, given our working
|
||
hypothesis, because even in classical physics, kinetic energy can be
|
||
converted into other forms of energy (such a light and potential
|
||
energy), and other forms of energy can be converted into kinetic
|
||
energy. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">To
|
||
hold that kinetic energy is a form of matter is to hold that the
|
||
motion of a material object is constituted by a bit of matter that
|
||
exists in addition to the matter counted in the (rest) mass of the
|
||
material object. This bit of matter must somehow be attached to (and,
|
||
therefore, located with) the matter that makes up the rest mass of
|
||
the material object, and as a result, both must coincide with space
|
||
in a way that carries it and the material object across space as time
|
||
passes. Let us call it “kinetic matter.” More will be said about
|
||
the essential nature of matter in this form when we take up quantum
|
||
mechanics, but for now we need only recognize that quantitatively
|
||
different varieties of kinetic matter would propel objects at
|
||
different speeds or in different directions. Kinetic matter would be
|
||
like a motor, except that instead of consuming energy, it is just a
|
||
bit of matter that endures through time as a substance, and thus, as
|
||
long as it continues to exist in that form, the material object
|
||
continues to move. There are, however, interactions by which kinetic
|
||
matter can be transferred to other material objects, supplemented
|
||
with kinetic matter transferred from other material objects to join
|
||
it, and converted into other forms of matter. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">To treat
|
||
kinetic energy as a form of matter is to depart from the received
|
||
understanding of physics. Kinetic energy is usually treated
|
||
abstractly as just another quantity that is mentioned in the laws of
|
||
physics and must be taken into account in order to predict or control
|
||
what happens in particular situations. When we think of kinetic
|
||
energy as a form of matter, however, we expect to find other
|
||
properties that it must have, and that is what leads to a deeper
|
||
ontological explanation. Kinetic matter must be located, as we have
|
||
assumed, with the rest mass that it is moving, and as we shall see in
|
||
explaining quantum mechanics ontologically, kinetic matter has other
|
||
properties that explain the quantitative relationship between kinetic
|
||
energy and momentum.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
other forms of matter into which kinetic matter can be converted are
|
||
those postulated in order to explain gravitation and
|
||
electromagnetism. Gravitation and electromagnetism are forces that
|
||
material objects exert on one another, and in order to explain the
|
||
distinctive kind of energy involved in each, we will assume that the
|
||
forces themselves are a form of matter. That is, the energy (or
|
||
matter) associated with these forces can exist in two different
|
||
forms, potential or actual (that is, as forces being exerted by
|
||
material objects or as waves of forces that exist independently of
|
||
material objects).</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Potential
|
||
energy.</i> Potential energy is the energy that material objects have
|
||
when they exert forces on one another. Such forces must be a form of
|
||
energy, because they can change how the objects involved are moving. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The amount
|
||
of potential energy that exists in any situation depends on the
|
||
distance across which the forces can continue to accelerate the
|
||
objects involved. When the distance is maximum, the potential energy
|
||
is maximum. But physics sets the maximum quantity at zero. Thus, any
|
||
subsequent state in which some potential energy has been converted
|
||
into kinetic energy (or into some other form of energy) is counted as
|
||
<i>negative </i>potential energy. This is sometimes said to be just a
|
||
mathematical convention, but according to this ontological
|
||
explanation of potential energy, it represents the fact that the
|
||
kinetic energy acquired by objects being accelerated is another form
|
||
of the same matter that previously existed in the form of potential
|
||
energy, that is, as forces being exerted by the material objects. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">As
|
||
suggested above, some of the matter making up a material object that
|
||
exerts a force must be conceived as being spread out in the space
|
||
around it as a force field, and that matter is counted as part of its
|
||
rest mass. When potential energy is consumed, objects accelerate,
|
||
changing the positions of the objects that were exerting the forces.
|
||
That alters the force field they jointly impose on space, and the
|
||
result is a reduction in the quantity of matter constituting those
|
||
forces and, thus, the material objects themselves. That is, the
|
||
material objects lose rest mass as their potential energy is consumed
|
||
as kinetic energy, because some of the matter counted in the rest
|
||
mass is converted from constituting a force field to constituting the
|
||
motion of objects with rest mass. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">On this
|
||
ontological theory, therefore, the reason that the potential energy
|
||
that is consumed as kinetic energy is <i>negative</i> (rather than
|
||
just a smaller positive quantity) is that the kinetic energy must be
|
||
subtracted from the rest masses of the material objects that were
|
||
exerting the forces in order to balance the account. The kinetic
|
||
energy is a different form of the same bits of matter that previously
|
||
existed as forces being exerted by the objects. Thus, at the end of
|
||
such a process, when as much kinetic (or other) energy has been
|
||
actualized as possible in the situation, the material objects are in
|
||
a position where their forces cannot accelerate one another and more,
|
||
and the potential energy is some negative quantity. And since the
|
||
total quantity of energy (or matter) involved in the process does not
|
||
change as time passes, the principle of the conservation of mass and
|
||
energy is true. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Though the
|
||
equivalence of mass and energy is entailed by Einstein’s special
|
||
theory of relativity, it is assumed here, as I warned earlier, in
|
||
order to explain ontologically the conversion of energy between
|
||
kinetic and potential forms. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
matter that explains potential energy is, therefore, included as part
|
||
of the matter that explains the (rest) masses of material objects,
|
||
and as we shall assume, it is the matter that constitutes the forces
|
||
exerted by the object. Since those forces are spread out in space
|
||
like a field, this is to take the force field to be a form of matter
|
||
that coincides with all those parts of space. Likewise, the strength
|
||
of the force at any point in space will be taken as a measure of the
|
||
“thickness” of the matter coinciding with space at that point.
|
||
And the total potential energy that can be converted to kinetic
|
||
energy (or other forms of energy) depends on the total amount of
|
||
matter in this form that exists along the pathway of the object being
|
||
accelerated (which depends on the length of the path and the
|
||
“thickness” of the matter at each point along the path)</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">To be sure,
|
||
this ontological assumption will seem empirically unwarranted from
|
||
the point of view of inferring to the best efficient-cause
|
||
explanation. What happens in the relevant situations can be predicted
|
||
with laws describing the forces and descriptions of the locations of
|
||
the kinds of objects involved, without any need to refer to matter
|
||
making up the forces involved. In the received formulations of
|
||
physics, force fields are usually explained as spatially variable
|
||
dispositions, that is, in terms of regularities about how material
|
||
objects of certain kinds would be accelerated, if they were located
|
||
there. But ontologically speaking, there must be a substance located
|
||
there to accelerate the body, and though this description of matter
|
||
in the form of potential energy does not tell us much more about it
|
||
than is described by the relevant laws of physics, it does make us
|
||
look for further properties of such force-field matter. Such
|
||
properties will be described in the ontological explanations of
|
||
Einstein's general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">More
|
||
generally, furthermore, remember that we already have empirical
|
||
reasons for believing that space and matter are substances, and what
|
||
is at issue is whether the laws of physics can be descriptions of
|
||
regular changes in the aspects the basic substances we have
|
||
postulated. This is not an attempt to show that physics must
|
||
recognize matter in these forms in order to predict what will happen,
|
||
but only that it can and, thus, that physics provides no reason do
|
||
doubt that spatiomaterialism is true. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Energy
|
||
as waves of forces.</i> If forces are a part of the matter
|
||
constituting the rest mass of a material object that is spread out in
|
||
space around it, then references to that matter by way of rest masses
|
||
and as negative energy are indirect, and they obscure its real
|
||
nature. Moreover, there is other evidence that forces are a form of
|
||
matter, for such forces can also exist independently of material
|
||
objects (that is, when they are not counted as part of their rest
|
||
masses). They exist as light waves, in the case of electromagnetism,
|
||
and as gravitational waves, though the latter were not recognized
|
||
until Einstein’s discovery of the general theory of relativity. In
|
||
both cases, the waves propagate across space on their own, and since
|
||
they act on objects that they encounter in their paths like forces of
|
||
the appropriate kind, those waves are best explained as matter
|
||
existing in much same form that helps constitute the rest masses of
|
||
material objects, except that it now exist independently of material
|
||
objects. But given the difference between its form as part of the
|
||
rest mass of material object and its form as an independently
|
||
existing wave, we should probably postulate two different forms of
|
||
matter for each kind of energy, gravitational and electromagnetic
|
||
(yielding six forms of matter in all). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Gravitational
|
||
matter.</b></i> The nature of the force of gravity was problematic in
|
||
classical physics, because it was supposed to enable material objects
|
||
to act on one another at a distance, and an adequate ontological
|
||
explanation of it cannot be given here until we take up the
|
||
spatiomaterialist interpretation of Einstein’s general theory of
|
||
relativity. According to Newton, gravity is a universal force of
|
||
attraction among material objects whose strength is in proportion to
|
||
the products of their masses and inversely proportional the square of
|
||
the distance separating them. When material objects (and energy) have
|
||
accumulated at a certain location in space, as in planets and stars,
|
||
the gravitational force is strong enough to make an enormous
|
||
difference in what happens in the surrounding space. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">According
|
||
to contemporary physics, the mass that is responsible for gravitation
|
||
is not just the rest masses of the material objects, but also
|
||
includes the mass equivalent of their kinetic energy and
|
||
electromagnetic energy. That is readily explained by this ontological
|
||
theory, if matter in all forms exerts gravitational forces, and it
|
||
will be assumed here. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Without
|
||
giving a deeper explanation of its nature, we can think of the
|
||
gravitational force field as a form of matter that is spread out in
|
||
the space around the center of gravity and has the power where it is
|
||
located to accelerate towards itself other material objects that
|
||
coincide with the same part of space. The strength of the force at
|
||
any location as described by Newton’s law can be thought of as
|
||
varying with the amount (or “thickness”) of matter in this form
|
||
spread out in that part of space. But since the quantity of
|
||
gravitational matter is already counted in the rest mass of the
|
||
matter accumulated at that location, the force field is just an
|
||
aspect of the accumulated matter (or an extrinsic property of the
|
||
matter located there). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Though we
|
||
are assuming that the gravitational force field is a form of matter
|
||
in order to explain how classical physics is true, I promise to give
|
||
a deeper ontological explanation of gravitational matter and how it
|
||
is related to other forms of matter in making up the rest mass of a
|
||
material object when we take up contemporary physics. But for now,
|
||
spatiomaterialism leaves us no option but to recognize the
|
||
gravitational force itself as a form of matter in some sense, for
|
||
otherwise there would be nothing to exert the forces involved. Space
|
||
by itself cannot exert gravitational forces, because they vary with
|
||
location, whereas space is uniform throughout. But as we shall see,
|
||
gravitational matter can be a condition of space that is imposed on
|
||
it by the accumulation of matter at a nearby location.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Gravitational
|
||
potential energy is the matter that can be extracted from material
|
||
objects because they are so located relative to one another in space
|
||
that the gravitational forces that they exert on one another can
|
||
accelerate them toward one another. When gravitation accelerates
|
||
material objects to the some location, they acquire kinetic energy,
|
||
and when they collide, some of it may be turned into other forms of
|
||
energy. Though that means, on this ontological explanation, that the
|
||
material objects involved have less rest mass than they did when they
|
||
were still attracting one another across the distance separating
|
||
them, there is no violation of the principle of the conservation of
|
||
mass and energy, because the missing rest mass is now counted as the
|
||
kinetic (and other forms) of energy of the objects at the center. The
|
||
reason that classical physics does not recognize that the rest masses
|
||
of the material objects at the center of gravitation have become less
|
||
than they were before they accumulated there is that it assumes that
|
||
any potential energy that is less than the maximum possible is a
|
||
negative quantity. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In
|
||
particular, it is possible to hold that the kinetic (and other forms
|
||
of) energy that material objects acquire as they accelerate toward
|
||
one another comes from the gravitational matter that was spread out
|
||
in the space between them, because the motions of the objects so
|
||
alters the force field between them that less gravitational matter is
|
||
required for them to exert a gravitational force on one another. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The total
|
||
matter, both rest mass and forms of energy, accumulated at the center
|
||
of gravitation determines the strength of the gravitational field
|
||
around that center, and the field is stronger than it was when the
|
||
material objects were still separated, even though some gravitational
|
||
matter has been converted to kinetic (and other forms of) energy,
|
||
because the accumulation of bits of matter at the same location makes
|
||
their gravitational fields coincide more completely with the same
|
||
parts of space, so that the gravitational matter at any location in
|
||
the field they jointly impose on space is spread more thickly. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Though
|
||
gravitational matter is just part of matter counted in the rest mass
|
||
of a material object, gravitational matter can also exist
|
||
independently, as gravitational waves. But we can leave that until we
|
||
take up the ontological explanation of Einstein’s general theory of
|
||
relativity. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Electromagnetic
|
||
matter.</b></i> The electric force is another kind of force that we
|
||
will assume that material objects can exert. It has a more
|
||
complicated structure than gravity, because material objects can
|
||
exert two opposite electric forces, positive and negative, and in
|
||
either case, the electric force interacts with another force, the
|
||
magnetic force. How material objects interact by these forces is what
|
||
is described by Maxwell’s laws, and they will be explained in more
|
||
detail later. For now, let me merely suggest how electric forces can
|
||
be explained as a form of matter, by analogy with gravitational
|
||
matter. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Material
|
||
objects that exert an electric force are said to have an electric
|
||
charge, either positive or negative. In order to explain
|
||
ontologically how Maxwell’s laws are true, we will assume that the
|
||
matter making up such a material object coincides with space in a way
|
||
that makes its total rest mass seem to have a determinate location at
|
||
the center even though some of its constituent matter is spread out
|
||
around it like a force field. Since the strength of the forces in
|
||
this field fall off in proportion to the square of the distance from
|
||
the center, their strength at any point can also be explained as the
|
||
“thickness” of the electromagnetic matter spread out in that part
|
||
of space, though it must have a more complex structure to explain the
|
||
direction of the force, because it depends on the sign of the charge
|
||
and its motion. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
electromagnetic matter making up the electric field is already
|
||
counted as part of the rest mass of the material object in balancing
|
||
the mass and energy books. Thus, the electric field is actually an
|
||
aspect of the material object, that is, an extrinsic property of the
|
||
material substance that has the electric charge. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Electromagnetic
|
||
matter in this form is electrical potential energy, because the force
|
||
field can accelerate material objects affected by it, namely, other
|
||
material objects with electric charges. Like gravitational potential
|
||
energy, electromagnetic matter is converted to kinetic (or other
|
||
forms of) energy, and such conversions change the rest masses of the
|
||
objects exerting the electric forces appropriately, because material
|
||
objects are actually either acquiring or losing matter. But once
|
||
again, the changes in rest mass may not be recognized as such,
|
||
because any amount of potential energy less than the maximum possible
|
||
is counted as a negative quantity. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">In
|
||
the case of electromagnetism, the interaction of electric forces with
|
||
magnetic forces makes it necessary to recognize that matter of
|
||
basically the same kind can also exist independently of material
|
||
objects as waves, such as ordinary light. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">When these
|
||
two forces are coupled, as described below, they propagate across
|
||
space as a wave of electric and magnetic forces. Since those forces
|
||
interact with charged objects in much the same way as the electric
|
||
(or magnetic) forces exerted by material objects directly,
|
||
electromagnetic waves are basically another form of electromagnetic
|
||
matter. But since the electric (and magnetic) forces exerted by
|
||
charged material objects directly are so different from
|
||
electromagnetic waves, it is probably best to think of
|
||
electromagnetic matter as existing in two different forms. In one
|
||
form, its quantity is included in the rest masses of the objects (and
|
||
the negative potential energy of the situation), and in the other
|
||
form it is added to the rest of the mass and energy in calculating
|
||
the total quantity that does not change over time in a closed or
|
||
isolated system. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Electromagnetic
|
||
energy is not portrayed as mere <i>waves </i>in contemporary physics.
|
||
There are two reasons, one that we will accept in the end and one
|
||
that we won’t. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The first
|
||
reason is that electromagnetic waves are now known to have a
|
||
particle-like nature, which has given them the name “photons.”
|
||
The discovery of their particle-like nature is at the very foundation
|
||
of quantum mechanics, and it will not be disputed here. We shall see
|
||
how spatiomaterialism can explain their particle-like when we take up
|
||
the ontological explanation of quantum mechanics. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The second
|
||
reason for avoiding the notion of electromagnetic waves is that the
|
||
notion of waves requires a substratum or medium in which the waves
|
||
occur, such as the water in which ocean waves occur and the air in
|
||
which sound waves occur. In classical physics, electromagnetic waves
|
||
were thought to occur in the “luminiferous ether,” which was
|
||
assumed to be at rest in absolute space. But when absolute space was
|
||
rejected with the rise of relativity theory, the notion that light
|
||
propagates in such a medium was rejected with it. Spatiomaterialism
|
||
entails, however, that space and time are absolute, and so we do not
|
||
have that reason for denying the reality of the ether. And since our
|
||
reason for accepting absolute space and time is that space is a
|
||
substance (not merely a way of thinking about references to locations
|
||
and times in the equations of physics, as classical physics did), we
|
||
have the option of explaining the ether ontologically, that is, as an
|
||
aspect of space itself. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In other
|
||
words, we will take the motion of electromagnetic waves to exhibit an
|
||
aspect of the nature of space. Much the same is true of any form of
|
||
matter, because the properties of any bit of matter are an aspect of
|
||
something constituted jointly by the bit of matter and the part of
|
||
space with which it coincides. But in the case of electromagnetic
|
||
waves, we will hold that their velocity, that is, the velocity of
|
||
light, manifests a basic aspect of the nature of space (what will be
|
||
called the “inherent motion” of space or the “ether”). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
|
||
may seem that there are other kinds of energy, besides kinetic energy
|
||
and the energy that is due to electromagnetism and gravitation,
|
||
recognized in classical physics, but they all turn out in the end to
|
||
be reducible to these basic forms. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Chemical
|
||
energy, for example, is a form of potential electromagnetic energy
|
||
that depends on how charged particles are configured in atoms and
|
||
molecules. Heat turns out to be the kinetic energy in the random
|
||
motion of the smallest material objects. Kinetic energy can also be
|
||
stored internally in molecules as vibrations of parts of atoms. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">There
|
||
are, of course, other forms of energy associated with the short range
|
||
forces that are involved in the constitution of more basic material
|
||
objects, such as the strong forces exerted by protons and neutrons
|
||
(or the color forces exerted by quarks) and the weak forces that are
|
||
apparently involved in the constitution of quarks and electrons (and
|
||
show up observationally in radioactive decay). But we are leaving
|
||
them aside until we take up contemporary physics, taking the internal
|
||
structure of material objects with rest mass for granted. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
reason we are taking all these kinds of mass and energy to be forms
|
||
of matter is that they can be converted into one another without
|
||
changing the total mass and energy in the region, that is, because
|
||
the total mass and energy is conserved. Electromagnetic waves
|
||
interacting with charged particles can convert them into kinetic
|
||
energy. But this ontological explanation of classical physics takes
|
||
the conversion between potential and kinetic energy to be an instance
|
||
of the convertibility of mass and energy into one another. How these
|
||
forms of mass and energy are converted into one another is described
|
||
by the basic laws of physics. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">To
|
||
hold that these kinds of mass and energy are basically different
|
||
forms of matter which move and interact in the ways described by the
|
||
laws of physics is to hold that matter has a temporally complex
|
||
nature. What is assumed about the essential nature of matter must
|
||
include how each kind moves and interacts, including how they change
|
||
from one form of matter to another. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">However,
|
||
spatiomaterialism opens up the possibility of a deeper ontological
|
||
explanation of how these forms of matter are related to one another,
|
||
which might explain how they can be converted into one another. Since
|
||
ontological philosophy takes space to be a substance, it may be
|
||
possible to describe the essential nature of matter in a way that
|
||
makes it possible to explain ontologically why it takes these
|
||
different forms by <i>how </i>generic matter coincides with space and
|
||
other bits of matter. That is to suppose that the same material
|
||
substance could have the properties defining any special form
|
||
depending on its current relationship to space (and, perhaps, other
|
||
bits of matter at its location).</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">For
|
||
example, if there were a geometrical aspect to generic matter,
|
||
differences in the forms mentioned above (or some of them) might have
|
||
an intelligible ontological explanation as different ways in which
|
||
generic matter engages with the geometrical structure of space. An
|
||
explanation of the nature of some forms of matter along these lines
|
||
will be suggested by a theory about the nature of matter that will be
|
||
offered as an ontological explanation of the truth of quantum
|
||
mechanics, and it will explain the simplest particles recognized by
|
||
physics (in </span></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><span lang="en-US">Basic
|
||
Objects </span></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">under
|
||
</span></font></font><a href="/F:/Philosophy/Existentialism/The%20Wholeness%20Of%20the%20World/www.twow.net/Lo/LoOtkCaLeCos.htm" target="Lo"><font color="#0000ff"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><span lang="en-US"><u>Cosmology</u></span></font></font></a><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">
|
||
under </span></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><span lang="en-US">Change</span></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">.)
|
||
It illustrates a research project that would be promising, if
|
||
ontological philosophy is on the right track. </span></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; background: #cccccc; border-top: 6.75pt double #000000; border-bottom: 6.75pt double #808080; border-left: 6.75pt double #000000; border-right: 6.75pt double #808080; padding: 0.28cm 0.46cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">T<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="HistCmt" align="right" hspace="5" width="149" height="22" border="0">o
|
||
explain the truth of the laws of physics by postulating a kind of
|
||
material substance that can change from one form to another with
|
||
different essential properties is to make the forms of matter similar
|
||
to Aristotle’s basic substances. Aristotle believed that the
|
||
simplest kinds of substances (earth, air, fire and water) could be
|
||
converted into one another, for example, as fire gives its form to
|
||
other substances, such as wood, changing its essential form to fire.
|
||
As the essential properties (or essential form) of the substances
|
||
change, the substratum (or material cause) was supposed to endure
|
||
unchanged. There is, however, a difference. Spatiomaterialism does
|
||
not assume, as Aristotle did, that (essential) forms of matter and
|
||
their substratum are basic principles. Spatiomaterialism is a variety
|
||
of materialism, in Aristotle’s sense, because it denies that
|
||
individual substances necessarily involve his two principles (or
|
||
ontological causes), substratum (material cause) and essential form.
|
||
Bits of matter are independent substances, and their capacity to
|
||
change from one form of matter to another is just part of the
|
||
essential nature of material substance. However, since
|
||
spatiomaterialism does recognize another basic kind of substance,
|
||
besides matter, with which it coincides, it is possible that those
|
||
regularities have a deeper ontological explanation. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Leaving
|
||
aside for now deeper ontological explanations of these forms of
|
||
matter, our project here is to show that classical physics can be
|
||
explained ontologically by spatiomaterialism. That is to explain the
|
||
truth of the laws of classical physics by their correspondence to
|
||
aspects of a spatiomaterialism world, and it will be accomplished
|
||
here by assuming that the bits of matter that coincide with space
|
||
have these basic forms: <i>material objects with rest mass</i>,
|
||
<i>kinetic matter</i>, <i>gravitational matter </i>(as part of the
|
||
matter making up objects with rest mass) and <i>electromagnetic
|
||
matter </i>(both as part of the matter making up material objects
|
||
with electric charges and as electromagnetic waves). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
laws to be explained are Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation as
|
||
well as Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism. That will suffice to
|
||
show how the physical properties mentioned by the basic laws of
|
||
classical physics can be aspects of these forms of matter, and it
|
||
will explain the regularities among them as temporal aspects of a
|
||
world constituted by such substances enduring through time. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Since
|
||
what is at issue is the correspondence between these laws and aspects
|
||
of substances, what is crucial is not the quantitative aspects of
|
||
those laws, which are generally the focus of attention in physics,
|
||
but how those quantities can be explained ontologically by substances
|
||
of the kind postulated by spatiomaterialism. I will describe how
|
||
aspects of these forms of matter would explain the properties
|
||
mentioned by the laws of physics, and I will show that they can
|
||
explain the quantitative relationships among them and how they change
|
||
over time. But I will merely show that the quantities can all have
|
||
the right signs, change in the right directions and have the right
|
||
orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of making any new,
|
||
quantitatively precise predictions of what will happen, because any
|
||
more precise quantitative correspondence can be made to come out
|
||
right simply by making the right assumption about the essential
|
||
nature of matter. It is enough to explain them ontologically.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Not
|
||
every aspect of those physical laws will be given a genuine
|
||
ontological explanation. But enough will be explained to show that it
|
||
is possible for spatiomaterialism to explain the truth of classical
|
||
physics. That will put us in a position to show how spatiomaterialism
|
||
can also explain the truth of contemporary physics, both relativity
|
||
theory and quantum mechanics. We begin by sketching an ontological
|
||
explanation of Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation and then
|
||
take up Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>N<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC10" align="right" hspace="5" width="53" height="24" border="0">ewton’s
|
||
laws of motion. </b></font>Newton’s laws of motion are remarkably
|
||
simple. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">First
|
||
law of motion: “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of
|
||
uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that
|
||
state by forces impressed on it.” </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Second
|
||
law of motion: “The change of motion is proportional to the motive
|
||
force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in
|
||
which that force is impressed.”</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Third
|
||
law of motion: “To every action there is always opposed an equal
|
||
reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are
|
||
always equal, and directed to contrary parts.” </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Law
|
||
of gravitation: material objects always attract one another in
|
||
proportion to the product of their masses and inversely as the square
|
||
of the distance separating them.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Newton’s
|
||
laws describe how material objects move and interact, and since we
|
||
postulate matter in the form of material objects with rest mass, we
|
||
need only see how the regularities described by Newton’s laws of
|
||
motion would be explained on the assumption that kinetic energy and
|
||
potential energy are forms of matter as well. That requires making
|
||
further assumptions about the specific essential natures of these
|
||
forms of matter and about space, but as we shall see, it affords
|
||
genuine, even illuminating, ontological explanations of some aspects
|
||
of classical physics.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">According
|
||
to our working hypothesis, the motion of a material object with rest
|
||
mass is due to the kinetic matter attached to it. The kinetic matter
|
||
must coincide with the same part of space as the material object
|
||
itself, but in a way that that moves the material object across space
|
||
as time passes. Each speed and direction of motion for any given
|
||
material objects would involve a (quantitatively) different variety
|
||
of kinetic matter (which could be explained ontologically by aspects
|
||
of how kinetic matter coincides with space, such as its direction and
|
||
quantity). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Newton’s
|
||
first law of motion. </b></i>Newton’s first law is an immediate
|
||
consequence of this ontological assumption about kinetic matter.
|
||
Since the kinetic matter that makes the material object move is
|
||
itself a substance that endures through time with the same essential
|
||
nature, the object in motion will continue moving at the same speed
|
||
and in the same direction (unless it interacts with another bit of
|
||
matter). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">What does
|
||
not change according to the first law of motion is called “velocity,”
|
||
because it includes two aspects of the object’s motion, its speed
|
||
and its direction. That is why we assume that, for any given material
|
||
object, each different speed and each different direction requires a
|
||
different variety of kinetic matter. The velocity is not the kinetic
|
||
matter, but just a <i>property </i>of the material object with the
|
||
kinetic matter, that is, an aspect of the substances constituting the
|
||
object with rest mass together with its kinetic matter and how both
|
||
are contained by space. (The three dimensional structure of space
|
||
makes it possible to represent any velocity mathematically as a
|
||
certain speed in each of any three mutually perpendicular directions.
|
||
Quantities that depend on direction in this way are called
|
||
“vectors.”) </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Newton’s
|
||
first law must be true, if the motion of objects is due to kinetic
|
||
matter, because all the ways that an object might be thought to
|
||
change its speed or direction on its own are ontologically
|
||
impossible. A change in its motion would require kinetic matter of
|
||
one variety to come into existence and another variety would have to
|
||
go out of existence as time passes, which substances cannot do. Or it
|
||
would require the variety of kinetic matter to change its essential
|
||
nature, which no form of matter can do on its own. Or it would
|
||
require space to contain kinetic matter in a different way at
|
||
different locations, which is not compatible with the uniformity of
|
||
space. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">To
|
||
be sure, in order to explain motion as a form of matter that connects
|
||
material objects to space in a certain way, the objects must have an
|
||
<i>absolute </i>velocity, that is, a certain velocity in absolute
|
||
space. That may seem doubtful in contemporary physics, but it is just
|
||
what spatiomaterialism entails about the nature of space and that is
|
||
what is at issue in this ontological explanation of physics.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; background: #cccccc; border-top: 6.75pt double #000000; border-bottom: 6.75pt double #808080; border-left: 6.75pt double #000000; border-right: 6.75pt double #808080; padding: 0.28cm 0.46cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">N<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="Image1" align="right" hspace="5" width="149" height="22" border="0">otice
|
||
that the assumption that an object’s velocity is due to its kinetic
|
||
matter solves a problem that motion otherwise poses for any ontology
|
||
that that postulates only substances enduring through time. The
|
||
problem was first posed by Zeno as a paradox about motion. He pointed
|
||
out that, at each moment, an object must be at rest (as we assume by
|
||
holding that nothing exists but the present), and he asked, How is
|
||
motion even possible in that case? If motion is simply how location
|
||
changes as time passes, motion does not really exist, because the
|
||
object always has only one location at each moment as it is present.
|
||
This is not just a puzzle about the continuousness of time and space,
|
||
because holding that to move is just to have a location that varies
|
||
continuously with time leaves a problem about why the moving object
|
||
has a different location the next moment, whereas the object at rest
|
||
does not. What makes the object in motion different from the object
|
||
at rest at each moment? To be sure, it is possible to simply assume
|
||
that the essential nature of all material objects includes the
|
||
temporally complex property of changing locations again, if it did so
|
||
the last moment. That is what materialism does in this case (as in
|
||
the case of every other basic law of physics), and it is not very
|
||
satisfying, because there is nothing to distinguish the moving object
|
||
from the one at rest at any moment except where each was the previous
|
||
moment (which is not something that exists at that moment). If,
|
||
however, motion is constituted by a bit of kinetic matter that exists
|
||
in addition to the object with rest mass, then motion is actually a
|
||
substance that endures through time, and thus, what makes the moving
|
||
object at any moment different from an object at rest is something
|
||
that exists at that moment (not just the fact that it has a different
|
||
position the previous moment). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
first law of motion allows for velocity to change when the material
|
||
object interacts with another object, and given the forms of matter
|
||
we are postulating, the only way that a material object can change
|
||
velocity is for kinetic matter to be transferred to it or from it or
|
||
both. Somehow the object must come to have a different variety of
|
||
kinetic matter attached to it. That is basically what interactions do
|
||
to objects with rest mass. In such an interaction, Newton’s laws
|
||
say that the object is subject to a force, and our working hypothesis
|
||
implies that the exertion of a force on the object somehow transfers
|
||
kinetic matter to and/or from it. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Interactions
|
||
are something that we expect, given our assumption that material
|
||
objects are a form of matter that cannot occupy the same place at the
|
||
same time, because if they can move, they can move to the same
|
||
location at the same time and something must keep them from being
|
||
contained by the same part of space. The simplest kind of interaction
|
||
is a collision of material objects that is elastic, that is, in which
|
||
nothing changes but the velocities of the material objects that
|
||
collide. Though collisions of ordinary material objects are mediated
|
||
by electromagnetic interactions, we can, for present purposes,
|
||
abstract from the nature of the forces and consider only what happens
|
||
when material objects collide. We know that they exchange kinetic
|
||
matter. But we do not know how much is transferred or what effect it
|
||
has on their velocities. The regularities about such transfers of
|
||
kinetic matter are what is described by Newton’s second and third
|
||
laws of motion. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Newton’s
|
||
second law of motion.</b></i> Newton’s second law holds that the
|
||
exertion of a force is what changes the velocity of a material
|
||
object. Since forces are exerted by other objects, the force on any
|
||
object has some direction or other, which determines in some way the
|
||
direction in which the object’s speed changes. It also has a
|
||
determinate strength and its action on the object has a certain
|
||
quantity. But how much an object’s speed changes in the direction
|
||
of any given force depends on another factor, its rest mass, or the
|
||
quantity of matter embodied in it. That is, what changes when a
|
||
material object is subject to a force is its momentum, or the <i>product
|
||
</i>of its velocity and its rest mass. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">In
|
||
the case of material objects composed of many parts with the same
|
||
rest mass, our working ontological hypothesis offers an explanation
|
||
of the relevance of rest mass in determining the change of velocity.
|
||
In order for the composite object to move in a certain way, each of
|
||
objects of which it is composed (each “atom,” if you will) must
|
||
move in the same way (assuming that the parts have unchanging spatial
|
||
relations to one another). Since each part must be moved across space
|
||
by its own bit of kinetic matter, a force can change the velocity of
|
||
the whole only by changing the velocity of each part in the same way.
|
||
Thus, the change in velocity caused by a force varies inversely with
|
||
the total rest mass of the material object. It must be spread out
|
||
among all the parts, so to speak. For example, an object with twice
|
||
as much rest mass has half as much change in velocity, if subjected
|
||
to the same force. In other words, what changes is not merely its
|
||
velocity, but its momentum, the product of its velocity and its rest
|
||
mass.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
second law of motion also holds in the case of elementary material
|
||
objects with different rest masses. But without a deeper ontological
|
||
explanation of the nature of kinetic matter and material objects with
|
||
rest mass, that regularity can only be assumed as part of the
|
||
essential natures of those forms of matter.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Velocity
|
||
is not a measure of the amount of kinetic matter, because the change
|
||
caused by the transfer of kinetic matter to or from an object depends
|
||
on its rest mass. But it might seem that momentum is the measure of
|
||
kinetic matter, since it is what changes when kinetic matter is
|
||
transferred. However, momentum, like velocity, is just a property of
|
||
the material object with kinetic matter, and we can begin to see why
|
||
by considering the third law of motion. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Newton’s
|
||
third law of motion</b></i><b>. </b>Newton’s third law describes a
|
||
more inclusive regularity than the second, for it includes the object
|
||
that is the source of the force, describing how it is affected as
|
||
well. This law holds that the action of one object on another is
|
||
opposed by an equal and opposite action of the other object back on
|
||
the first. That is, every action of one object on another is actually
|
||
a symmetrical interaction of the two objects involved. And since what
|
||
the action changes is momentum, this law says that the change in the
|
||
momentum of one object is equal and opposite to the change in
|
||
momentum of the other object. Thus, Newton’s third law of motion
|
||
entails the conservation of momentum. That is, in any interaction,
|
||
the sum of the products of the velocity and mass of all the objects
|
||
involved in the interaction does not change in any direction
|
||
regardless how the objects may interact. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
conservation of momentum may make it seem that momentum must be the
|
||
measure of the total quantity of kinetic matter involved. Suppose,
|
||
for example, that two equally massive objects moving toward one
|
||
another at the same speed were to collide. Given our working
|
||
ontological hypothesis, we might try to understand why the two
|
||
objects rebound from one another by thinking of the interaction as
|
||
each object transferring its kinetic matter to the other, for that
|
||
would also explain why both objects come out with velocities in the
|
||
opposite direction. Each acquires the other object’s kinetic
|
||
matter. And if the objects had different rest masses and different
|
||
velocities, this would even explain how much the velocity of each
|
||
changes. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Momentum
|
||
cannot, however, be the measure of the amount of kinetic matter,
|
||
because it is a quantity that depends on the direction of the motion,
|
||
whereas the quantity of kinetic matter does not. (In other words,
|
||
momentum is a “vector quantity,” whereas kinetic energy, as a
|
||
substance, must be a “scalar quantity,” which does not depend on
|
||
the direction of motion.) To illustrate the problem, suppose that two
|
||
objects colliding with equal and opposite momentums do not rebound
|
||
from one another, but simply come to a stop. The latter is compatible
|
||
with Newton’s third law of motion, because the change in the
|
||
momentum of one is still equal and opposite to the change in momentum
|
||
of the other. Each loses an equal and opposite momentum. Action and
|
||
reaction are symmetrical. But if momentum were the measure of kinetic
|
||
matter, it would mean that their kinetic matter simply goes out of
|
||
existence, for their momentums cancel out. And since that is
|
||
impossible for a substance, momentum cannot be the measure of kinetic
|
||
matter.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">It is no
|
||
great surprise, of course, that momentum is not the measure of the
|
||
quantity of kinetic matter on this ontological explanation, for we
|
||
postulated the existence of kinetic matter in the first place in
|
||
order to account for kinetic energy. But the foregoing example does
|
||
bring out the difference between <i>momentum </i>and <i>kinetic
|
||
energy</i>. It is currently explained only mathematically: in
|
||
Newtonian physics, momentum is the product of an object’s rest mass
|
||
and its velocity (<i>mv</i>), whereas its kinetic energy is one-half
|
||
the product of its rest mass and the <i>square </i>of its velocity
|
||
(<i>1/2 mv</i><sup><i>2</i></sup>). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; background: #cccccc; border-top: 6.75pt double #000000; border-bottom: 6.75pt double #808080; border-left: 6.75pt double #000000; border-right: 6.75pt double #808080; padding: 0.28cm 0.46cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">I<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAJUAAAAWBAMAAAA7qMMKAAAAMFBMVEX////AwMC0tLSoqKiZmZmEhIR4eHhmZmZUVFRISEg7OzszMzMjIyMXFxcLCwsAAAA6ENpBAAAB4ElEQVR4nGNgoCLg/08tQGWzPgpSB9DdLCFFEswSnl8iXLtFuAhFSt0QyhDfTYpZgv6CgtKFYk9QpPwSYaztRBmFYhZYQHghpiLCZoF1wczavXtfofpGkYrJfq8dLSqaBdOrp1Q5CqXPMMysLISYld7pKNzeYWhxZPakrO2CWeW7g7uXCIqUTxXu8dypCNSF6i7Vj3KGTuIbRQ8J+gX2lxbaO2opigcWC14DmyXpKFIYoyjyVOWb0lpH20LtLSI/FOsEMwV1gvyLtBaKb0Tzo8hH6RuG4htlAwXFL8o7Cso7TgUq8Cw/DjYrA4ivCgrWinwUrAaqBYbIF6CuS+4Vif6C4huxmCUY+V18o3ygoMhHsFlbBQVFLwFNAplVAcRfgQpRzfoZDNKL1SxhwSjxjZIbBcUngs2qURQ0PygIcZefo6DhbEHBSlSzVgkKGqKZJVTvLOQzWf1LXEmJ+HOn2SGViv7Fgv6FEi+qik5X3VQ5CUxfYi8rJ2ludZ+k/kV4jqHPJJ9JIt+F6h21r1cF1TtqHhF/Dg97IRdnIFJxEXQRBCIhF0VBF2dBF0dBFUdBEUcXFRdQWhVxEhRUcRJUcRF2MXRxcnEScRECqjBxBJIQjfTPjwNkFjXLQiqaRUUAAEeiCPOXTqbkAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" name="Image2" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="149" height="22" border="0">t
|
||
is a subtle difference, which was not obvious even to classical
|
||
physicists at first. The difference was not recognized by Cartesians,
|
||
and Leibniz was so struck by kinetic energy being different from
|
||
momentum, or mere motion, that he took the existence kinetic energy
|
||
as evidence of a <i>vis viva</i>, a “force of life” in the
|
||
object, which helped inspire his belief that atoms are really
|
||
“monads,” or minds. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
ontological difference between <i>kinetic energy </i>and <i>momentum
|
||
</i>is that the former is the quantity of <i>a form of matter </i>that
|
||
can be attached to objects with rest mass and the latter is a
|
||
quantitative <i>property </i>that material objects have when kinetic
|
||
matter is attached. Momentum is just an aspect of those two kinds of
|
||
material substances as they are contained by space, an aspect that
|
||
depends on the direction of the motion in space. Newton’s second
|
||
and third laws of motion describe the regularity about how that
|
||
property changes when material objects interact, including the
|
||
conservation of momentum. The kinetic energy is, however, part of the
|
||
substance constituting the object in motion, and so it is conserved
|
||
because it is a substance. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">This is
|
||
just the beginning of an ontological explanation of the difference
|
||
between kinetic energy and momentum. Though we can see <i>that </i>they
|
||
are different, it does not explain the quantitative relationship
|
||
between them, that is, why kinetic energy varies with the square of
|
||
velocity, while momentum varies with velocity. That can be explained
|
||
only later, when we take up a deeper ontological explanation, the
|
||
quantum theory of matter. There is a more specific nature of kinetic
|
||
matter that entails momentum being related to kinetic energy as the
|
||
velocity to the square of velocity. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">In
|
||
the foregoing case, where colliding objects with equal and opposite
|
||
momentums simply stop, the collision is not elastic, that is,
|
||
something changes besides the motion of those objects. Instead of
|
||
dropping out of existence, the kinetic energy is converted into
|
||
another form of matter (such as potential energy in new forces being
|
||
exerted among its parts) or transferred to other objects (such as the
|
||
kinetic energy of the parts of the objects, that is, becoming heat). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Newton’s
|
||
law of gravitation</b></i><b>. </b>Newton’s law of gravitation
|
||
holds that material objects exert an attractive force on one another
|
||
that is proportional to the product of their (rest) masses and
|
||
inversely proportional to the distance between them. But since each
|
||
object exerts such a force on the other, an object must have a
|
||
gravitational field around it even when there are no other objects in
|
||
its neighborhood. There is, in other words, a gravitational force at
|
||
every location in the space around the material object. Those forces
|
||
are radially symmetric around the object itself, and their strength
|
||
declines with the square of the distance from the object. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
gravitational field is explained ontologically by postulating matter
|
||
in the form of gravitational matter, which is spread out in space
|
||
around the material object exerting the gravitational force, though
|
||
its quantity is included, along with matter is some other (yet to be
|
||
described) forms, as the rest mass of the material object. This
|
||
affords an obvious ontological explanation of many of the aspects
|
||
described by Newton’s law of gravitation. Gravitational forces are
|
||
directed toward the object, since that is the center of the rest mass
|
||
of the material object that spreads gravitational matter out in
|
||
space. The forces are radically symmetric, because the object is
|
||
located in three dimensional space. And the strength to the force
|
||
falls off with the square of the distance, because that is how fast
|
||
space spreads out sideways as you move away from the source of the
|
||
force. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The force
|
||
of gravity is not given an ontological explanation in classical
|
||
physics. Instead, it is usually described as just a disposition at
|
||
each point in space to exert a precise, mathematically described
|
||
force on any material object (with a certain mass), if it were
|
||
located at that point. Talk of “dispositions” is a way of
|
||
predicating regularities of objects as if regularities were just
|
||
properties of the objects. But that is to leave those regularities
|
||
unexplained. There is no alternative in classical physics, because it
|
||
assumed that gravity involves action at a distance (which is
|
||
implicitly to deny the reality of the space across which it is
|
||
supposed to act). Talk of gravitation as a disposition is a way of
|
||
being skeptical about the reality of such forces as anything beyond
|
||
their effects. This ontological problem was eliminated by Einstein’s
|
||
general theory of relativity, and that discovery is what we are
|
||
anticipating by including gravitational energy as a form of matter in
|
||
this explanation of the truth of classical physics.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Gravitational
|
||
matter helps explain the truth of the principle of the conservation
|
||
of mass and energy, however, only by being counted as a negative
|
||
quantity, that is, as potential energy. The maximum quantity of
|
||
potential energy is zero, because according to our our ontological
|
||
explanation of that accounting practice, potential energy is actually
|
||
part of the matter that is already counted in the rest mass of the
|
||
material object whose forces are a potential source of kinetic
|
||
energy. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">This theory
|
||
calls for a deeper explanation of how the matter appears both as a
|
||
material object, with a definite location and rest mass, and at the
|
||
same time as force field spread out in the space around that center
|
||
of mass. We will consider such a theory later, but for now, we must
|
||
simply recognize that the rest mass includes both forms of matter.
|
||
And we can use the notion of gravitational potential energy to
|
||
illustrate further the puzzling relationship between momentum and
|
||
kinetic energy. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Gravitational
|
||
forces exist as fields in which forces are exerted continuously over
|
||
time and material objects change momentum continuously as they move
|
||
through them. The way in which material objects interact by
|
||
gravitational forces can be described as a conversion between
|
||
potential and kinetic energy, and since such conversions are also a
|
||
way of explaining the interaction of material objects by electric and
|
||
magnetic forces, I will describe some of its features by considering
|
||
what happens to a ball thrown upwards in a (nearly) constant
|
||
gravitational field, such as near the surface of the earth.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The ball
|
||
has an initial momentum when it leaves the hand that is proportional
|
||
to its upward velocity. But since its momentum is constantly
|
||
decreasing as the result of the constant downward gravitational force
|
||
on it, there is a point at which the ball comes to a stop and starts
|
||
falling again, after which its downward velocity increases until we
|
||
catch it. The ball had kinetic energy when it left our hand, but at
|
||
the top of its trajectory, it has lost all its kinetic energy. And by
|
||
the time we catch it, the ball has regained kinetic energy. Since
|
||
kinetic energy is a form of matter, it never simply goes out of
|
||
existence or comes into existence, but merely changes form. It is
|
||
converted into potential energy, which the ball has because it is
|
||
located in a way that enables the gravitational force to accelerate
|
||
it over some distance, that is, can acquire kinetic energy from those
|
||
forces as the object moves through the gravitational force field. If
|
||
we think of it ontologically, we see the ball losing kinetic matter
|
||
as it rises, but since the distance across which the gravitational
|
||
force can accelerate the ball increases, it gains potential energy
|
||
(which increases the rest masses of both ball and earth). And when it
|
||
falls, it loses potential energy (decreasing rest masses) and
|
||
acquires kinetic energy. Since the ball has lost all its kinetic
|
||
energy at the top of its trajectory, when it is at rest, its
|
||
potential energy at that point must be equal to its kinetic energy at
|
||
the beginning and end of its trip. The potential energy depends on
|
||
two factors, the force exerted by the earth on the ball and the
|
||
ball’s location in that force field. Both are needed to accelerate
|
||
the ball and give it kinetic energy, and since the force is nearly
|
||
the same at every location, the potential energy turns out to be
|
||
proportional to the height to which it rises, that is, to the
|
||
distance it can fall in the (constant) gravitational field. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">This allows
|
||
us to see, once again, the difference between momentum and kinetic
|
||
energy. How much faster would we have to throw the ball upward in
|
||
order for the point at which its stops and starts falling again to be
|
||
twice as high? It is not necessary to double its velocity, as we
|
||
would find if we tried. Instead, the initial velocity needs to be
|
||
increased only by the square root of two (or about 1.4). The reason
|
||
is that the ball consumes kinetic energy in rising to a certain
|
||
height in the gravitational field, not momentum, and since kinetic
|
||
energy varies with the square of the velocity, it is not necessary to
|
||
double the initial velocity to double kinetic energy). (Likewise the
|
||
time it takes will also increase only by a factor of the square root
|
||
of two, since gravity changes its momentum at the same amount each
|
||
unit of time and the amount of momentum to be changed is only
|
||
increased by the square root of two.)</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
conversion between kinetic and potential energy is basic to classical
|
||
physics, though the quantities become more complex when we take into
|
||
account that gravitational forces are not constant, but have a
|
||
strength that varies inversely with the distance from the center of
|
||
gravity. But we need not consider all the complexities of the
|
||
quantitative relations (though these ontological causes must be able
|
||
to explain them in the end), because we are merely trying to see what
|
||
is involved in an ontological explanation of the basic laws of
|
||
classical physics. We have seen how such ontological causes would
|
||
make Newton’s laws of motion true, and spatiomaterialism is not
|
||
trivial, like materialism, considering that it implies the existence
|
||
of kinetic matter (and begins, at least, an explanation of the
|
||
relationship between momentum and kinetic energy). The one form of
|
||
matter that has not been described is electromagnetic waves, and that
|
||
brings us to the explanation of Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>M<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC11" align="right" hspace="5" width="52" height="26" border="0">axwell’s
|
||
laws of electromagnetism. </b></font>The other basic set of laws
|
||
making up classical physics at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> Century
|
||
were Maxwell’s four laws of electromagnetism. They describe the
|
||
electric and magnetic forces and how they interact, and these forces
|
||
can be explained in much the same way as gravitation, that is, as a
|
||
form of matter that coincides with space by being spread out spread
|
||
out in space like a field, and yet contained in the rest mass of
|
||
material objects with electric charges. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Electromagnetism
|
||
is more complex than the gravitational force, because there are two
|
||
forces, electric and magnetic, which interact with one another, and
|
||
there are two opposite electric forces that material objects can
|
||
have, positive and negative. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Maxwell’s
|
||
great triumph was to show how the interaction of the electric and
|
||
magnetic forces can couple them in a way that propagates both across
|
||
space at a fixed velocity, that is as electromagnetic waves
|
||
propagating at the velocity of light. Since electromagnetic waves
|
||
exist independently of all the other forms of mass and energy (and,
|
||
thus, the other three forms of matter, on this ontological account),
|
||
there is less room for doubt about these forces being a form of
|
||
matter. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">It
|
||
is now known that electromagnetic interactions mediate all the
|
||
non-gravitational interactions among molecules, among atoms in
|
||
molecules, and even between electrons and protons in atoms. Even the
|
||
elastic collisions that we took for granted in discussing Newton’s
|
||
laws of motion are mediated on the micro level by interactions
|
||
involving both electric and magnetic forces among objects with
|
||
electric charges. But all these interactions involve events with a
|
||
unit-like nature which was unexplained until the discovery of quantum
|
||
mechanics, and we will take them up later (in </span></font></font><a href="/F:/Philosophy/Existentialism/The%20Wholeness%20Of%20the%20World/www.twow.net/Lo/L/LoOtkCaL15.htm" target="Lo"><font color="#0000ff"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><span lang="en-US"><u>Change:
|
||
Quantum mechanics</u></span></font></font></a><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">.)
|
||
</span></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">At
|
||
this point, I will discuss aspects of the regularities described by
|
||
Maxwell’s laws in an order that adds up to an explanation of
|
||
electromagnetic waves, and then I will discuss how spatiomaterialism
|
||
can explain such waves ontologically. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Electric
|
||
charge.</b></i> One of Maxwell’s laws describes the electric forces
|
||
that can be exerted by material objects. When a material object has
|
||
an electric charge, it exerts a radial force surrounding the center
|
||
of rest mass whose strength declines with the square of the distance.
|
||
This is like the force of gravity, except that the electric force
|
||
acts on other objects because of their electric charges, rather than
|
||
their mass. And unlike the gravitational force, the electric force
|
||
can be either attractive or repulsive, depending on whether the other
|
||
object has an opposite or same electric charge, respectively. The
|
||
electric force can give such objects kinetic energy (or become
|
||
another form of energy, such as an electromagnetic wave), and so it
|
||
is counted as potential energy. But once again, the maximum potential
|
||
energy is zero, making it a negative quantity when some of it has
|
||
been consumed. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Spatiomaterialism
|
||
can explain potential electrical energy ontologically as some of the
|
||
matter that is counted in the rest masses of the material objects
|
||
exerting the electric forces. Thus, when potential energy is
|
||
consumed, the rest masses of the charged objects are less. If we
|
||
think of the potential energy as a form of electromagnetic matter
|
||
that is spread out in space around the objects with the electric
|
||
charges, we can see why the quantity of potential energy varies with
|
||
the matter. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Objects
|
||
with opposite charges attract, and their potential energy is maximum
|
||
when they are far apart from one another, because their electric
|
||
fields more nearly approximate a spheres (of forces declining with
|
||
the square of radius), which requires the maximum quantity of
|
||
electromagnetic matter to constitute them. But when opposite charges
|
||
are next to one another, their electric fields are mostly
|
||
neutralized, and the electric field they jointly set up is deformed
|
||
in a way that requires less electromagnetic matter. In this case,
|
||
their total rest mass is less than if they were independent of one
|
||
another.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Objects
|
||
with like charges repel, and their potential energy is maximum when
|
||
they are close to one another, because instead of neutralizing one
|
||
another, their electric fields oppose one another. Though holding
|
||
them together yields an electric force that is twice as strong as the
|
||
radial force field they jointly set up, additional electromagnetic
|
||
matter is required for the two charged particles to have a force
|
||
repelling them from one another. In this case, their rest masses are
|
||
greater than they would be if the objects were at a distance from one
|
||
another. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In either
|
||
case, in the equations describing these situations, the potential
|
||
energy is represented as zero when it is maximum, and thus, what is
|
||
actually a loss of rest mass, which comes from consuming potential
|
||
energy and converting electromagnetic matter into other forms of
|
||
matter, is counted as negative potential energy. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
electric field is also more complex than gravitation in another way
|
||
because of its interaction with the magnetic force. It affects the
|
||
motion of a charged object in an electric field. For example, in an
|
||
electric field is set up by a material object too massive to move
|
||
much, a charged object that is accelerated by it will increase its
|
||
velocity not only in the direction of the force, but also in a
|
||
direction perpendicular to both the electric force and the direction
|
||
of its own motion in the electric field. That is the work of the
|
||
magnetic force. The magnetic force on the charged object is a
|
||
function of its velocity through the electric field as well as the
|
||
strength of the electric field. This effect of electric forces is not
|
||
mentioned in this first law, but is a consequence of another of
|
||
Maxwell’s laws.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>No
|
||
magnetic charges.</b></i> The second law holds that there is no
|
||
material object with a magnetic charge, even though there are
|
||
magnetic forces. A material object with a magnetic charge would have
|
||
a radial force surrounding its center of rest mass which declines
|
||
with the square of the distance. Instead, as it turns out, magnetic
|
||
forces occur in fields in which they are all directed around a closed
|
||
loop, such as a circle. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">According
|
||
to another law, as mentioned above, the magnetic force can arise
|
||
because of the motion of a material object with an electric charge.
|
||
For example, when electric charges are moving in a certain direction
|
||
through space, they set up a magnetic field in which the magnetic
|
||
forces are aligned in a circle around their direction of motion.
|
||
(Such a circular field is set up even when the moving electric
|
||
charges are neutralized locally by opposite charges, as in a wire in
|
||
which a current is flowing, and the net strength of the electric
|
||
force is not changing at any point in space in the surrounding
|
||
space.) </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Coupling
|
||
of magnetic and electric forces.</b></i> The two remaining aspects of
|
||
the regularities described in Maxwell’s equations explain
|
||
electromagnetic waves. One holds that a change in the magnetic field
|
||
causes a circular electric force around the direction of the magnetic
|
||
forces. The other holds that a change in the electric field causes a
|
||
circular magnetic field around the direction of the electric forces.
|
||
In both cases, the strength of the field being set up varies with how
|
||
fast the first field changes (and thus indirectly on the strength of
|
||
the forces). But the directions are reversed (so that an increasing
|
||
electric force causes a magnetic force, while an increasing magnetic
|
||
force causes a electric force in the opposite direction).
|
||
Furthermore, the change in the strength of each force generates a
|
||
force of the other kind that is related to it spatially in a certain
|
||
direction, so that changes in the two forces are coupled as a wave
|
||
that propagates across space at the velocity of light. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">An
|
||
impression of how electromagnetic waves propagate can be gathered by
|
||
considering how the motion of electric charges generates them.
|
||
Consider, for example, a current of electrically charged objects in a
|
||
wire that is changing direction. The current sets up a magnetic force
|
||
circling the wire, but as the electric charges slow down, the
|
||
magnetic force declines (because the rate of change in location of
|
||
the electric charges becomes lower). The decline in the magnetic
|
||
force field causes an electric force that circles it. But the change
|
||
in that electric force causes, in turn, a magnetic field around its
|
||
direction, which is in the opposite direction of the first magnetic
|
||
field. And the change in the second magnetic field then causes an
|
||
electric field, this time in the opposite direction. And finally its
|
||
change causes a magnetic field that is like the one caused by the
|
||
electric charges in the wire, except that it is located a fixed
|
||
distance away from the wire which depends on the velocity of light.
|
||
Thus, the changes in the two forces are coupled in a way that
|
||
propagates across space at the velocity of light as an
|
||
electromagnetic wave. And a steady succession of such waves is
|
||
generated as long as the current in the wire continues to oscillate.
|
||
That is basically how antennas send electromagnetic waves. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Electromagnetic
|
||
waves are a form of energy counted in the principle of the
|
||
conservation of mass and energy, and though the quantitative details
|
||
are not relevant here, we should consider what our working hypothesis
|
||
implies about the nature of "electromagnetic matter." The
|
||
matter involved in these waves is similar to the matter that makes up
|
||
the electric field of a material object with an electric charge,
|
||
except that in the electromagnetic wave, the electric force is
|
||
changing and the changes couple it with a magnetic force that also
|
||
changes. The forces interact in such a way that they go through
|
||
complete cycles, putting them in a position to do the same thing over
|
||
and over again. But the forces they generate are so related to one
|
||
another in space that the wave moves across space over time at
|
||
certain fixed velocity, that is, the velocity of light. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The matter
|
||
constituting electromagnetic waves may not be as different from the
|
||
electromagnetic matter constituting electric charges as this contrast
|
||
makes them appear. According to current quantum theory, material
|
||
objects with electric charges also have a spin angular momentum.
|
||
Since that is a magnetic force, it suggests that the electric charge
|
||
may actually be an electric force that is changing cyclically by
|
||
somehow spinning around an axis. That possibility will lead us to
|
||
speculate (when discussing quantum mechanics and the basic particles)
|
||
that the opposite electric charges (positive and negative) differ
|
||
from one another by being in opposite phases of their cycles wherever
|
||
they are located in space.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i><b>Inherent
|
||
motion in space.</b></i> Maxwell deduced the velocity of light in a
|
||
vacuum from measurable constants mentioned in his laws, and since
|
||
classical physics assumed that space is absolute, it could hope to
|
||
explain this implication as the result of electric and magnetic
|
||
forces being exerted on an extremely elastic substance that was
|
||
assumed to be at rest in absolute space. They called it the
|
||
“luminiferous ether” (or “ether,” for short). Since the ether
|
||
was supposed to be a kind of matter, it seemed plausible to explain
|
||
the propagation of electric and magnetic forces mechanically, as an
|
||
interaction between charged particles and the ether, on the model of
|
||
waves of forces in ordinary material objects. That project did not
|
||
work out, but that does not mean that <i>space </i>cannot be playing
|
||
a similar role in the motion of electromagnetic waves.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">In
|
||
recognizing that space is a substance, spatiomaterialism departs from
|
||
classical physics as well as from materialism. Though classical
|
||
physics assumed that space is absolute, it did not take space to be a
|
||
substance that could interact with bits of matter in any way other
|
||
than providing all the locations where they are could move or be
|
||
located. In particular, space was not supposed to affect the motion
|
||
of bits of matter, at least, not in the way other bits of matter can.
|
||
But since spatiomaterialism has independent reasons for believing in
|
||
the existence of space as a substance enduring through time (that is,
|
||
in addition to presentism, reasons deriving from the recognition of
|
||
the validity of ontological-cause explanations and inferring to the
|
||
best ontological-cause explanation of the natural world), it has no
|
||
reason to doubt that space can interact with bits of matter in ways
|
||
that are quite comparable to the interactions of bits of matter in
|
||
space. Thus, spatiomaterialism can use space to explain the velocity
|
||
of light without having to postulate the existence of the ether as an
|
||
additional kind of matter that coincides with space. We can take talk
|
||
about the ether to be referring to an aspect of space as a substance.
|
||
That is what we will do by taking space itself to be the medium of
|
||
light transmission. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">To
|
||
be the medium of light transmission, space must have an aspect by
|
||
which it interacts with electric and magnetic forces and carries them
|
||
across space as electromagnetic waves at a certain velocity. In order
|
||
to explain how space does so, I will assume that there is an
|
||
“inherent motion in space.” By “inherent motion,” I mean a
|
||
further relationship among the parts of space, beyond the geometrical
|
||
relations we have already assumed, which involves their endurance
|
||
through time. We have assumed that the parts of space are particular
|
||
substances, that is, so that each point has an existence that is
|
||
distinct from all the others and each point endures, like any
|
||
substance, through time, never coming into existence nor going out of
|
||
existence. But since only the present moment exists, only one moment
|
||
in the history of each part of space exists, and that moment in the
|
||
history of all the parts of space always occurs at the same time.
|
||
That is how these substances exist together as a world, and it is the
|
||
wholeness of space that relates the bits of matter it contains as
|
||
parts of the same world. This temporal aspect of the nature of the
|
||
parts of space is the ontological foundation for a further
|
||
relationship among the parts of space. What I am calling the
|
||
"inherent motion of space" (as our substitute for the
|
||
"luminiferous ether") is a spatio-temporal relationship
|
||
among the parts of space.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Such a
|
||
temporal aspect to space is not only plausible, but also required by
|
||
the role of space in constituting what happens. If the parts of space
|
||
did not have a spatio-temporal relationship to one another, they
|
||
could not affect one another as time passes. Nor could they enable
|
||
bits of matter to affect one another. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
geometrical relations among the parts of space explains which parts
|
||
of space can be affected by any other given part, namely, those
|
||
nearby, then those next to it, and so on. But in order for a change
|
||
occurring at any one part of space to affect another part of space,
|
||
the other part of space must change <i>at a later moment</i>. If the
|
||
effect were immediate, the effect would not be distinct from the
|
||
cause, and they could not act on one another like particular
|
||
substances enduring through time. Space would interact with bits of
|
||
matter as a whole. Thus, let us assume that the rate at which one
|
||
part of space can affect another part of space as time passes is
|
||
finite. That would be a maximum velocity by which one part of space
|
||
can affect other parts of space. I call it the “inherent motion”
|
||
in space in order to make clear that it is a temporal aspect of the
|
||
nature of space as a substance.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">I
|
||
think of the "inherent motion" as a motion sweeping through
|
||
every part of space at the same velocity, both ways in every
|
||
direction possible in three dimensional space, at every moment. This
|
||
is how space is an ontological cause, along with the nature of
|
||
electromagnetic matter, of the velocity of light. That is, we can
|
||
explain the motion of electromagnetic waves as bits of matter (or
|
||
so-called “photons’) being carried along by the inherent motion.
|
||
But there is an inherent motion, even when there are no photons.
|
||
Indeed, it would be happening, even if there were no matter in the
|
||
world. In other words, the inherent motion is an aspect of space as a
|
||
substance. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
postulation of an inherent motion may seem ontologically excessive,
|
||
since all we need to assume is that the parts of space are so related
|
||
temporally, as well as geometrically, that there is a maximum rate at
|
||
which it is possible for what happens to matter at one part of space
|
||
to affect what happens to matter at another parts of space. Thus, it
|
||
may be urged that the inherent motion is not real, but merely the
|
||
velocity of <i>possible </i>effects across space. It is merely a
|
||
spatio-temporal geometry about space, that is, a geometry describing
|
||
how the present moment of any one part of space is related to the
|
||
past or future moments of other parts of space because of the maximum
|
||
velocity with which events can affect one another. Such an account,
|
||
it could be argued, would be a better ontological explanation in the
|
||
end. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Though a
|
||
spatio-temporal geometry to space may be a sufficient ontological
|
||
explanation, I will continue to speak of it as the "inherent
|
||
motion in space." I can take this liberty, because I am not
|
||
claiming that the more specific natures of matter and space that I am
|
||
introducing in order to explain the truth of physics are <i>the best
|
||
</i>possible spatiomaterialist ontological explanation of the basic
|
||
laws of physics, only that they are <i>a </i>possible
|
||
spatiomaterialist ontological explanation. That is all that is
|
||
required for ontological philosophy to make the case for using
|
||
spatiomaterialism as the foundation for its argument about necessary
|
||
truths. And I allow myself the liberty of postulating an actual
|
||
inherent motion in space, because that invokes an image (in rational
|
||
imagination) that makes it easy to think about an aspect of the
|
||
essential nature of space that will be central in the following
|
||
explanation of the laws of contemporary physics. I find it preferable
|
||
to “spatio-temporal geometry,” because talk of motion brings out
|
||
vividly the temporal aspect of what might otherwise be seen as a
|
||
static structure (such as spacetime in Einsteinian relativity). And
|
||
it emphasizes that it is always happening everywhere in space,
|
||
connecting the parts of space ontologically in a further way than
|
||
merely having geometrical relations, a way that is central to the
|
||
existence of causal connections among events in the world.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">As it turns
|
||
out, nothing turns on the difference between saying that space has a
|
||
an inherent motion and saying that space has a spatio-temporal
|
||
geometry, as long as we recognize that we are talking about an aspect
|
||
of a substance that endures through time and has the opposite nature
|
||
from matter. The motion of electromagnetic waves (or photons) is only
|
||
one manifestation of this aspect of the essential nature of space.
|
||
There will be several others as we proceed, and it will be a somewhat
|
||
more complex aspect of space by the time we are through, variations
|
||
in its velocity at different locations in space. It is easier to
|
||
think about these ontological effects of space by thinking of space
|
||
as having an inherent motion prior to the motion of photons, because
|
||
the picture is spatial imagination is more concrete. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The the
|
||
inherent motion in space is the medium of light transmission, and
|
||
though it may also be called the "ether," as it was in
|
||
Newtonian physics, it is ontologically important to keep in mind that
|
||
it is an aspect of space. The ether was supposed to be an ethereal
|
||
matter that is at rest everywhere in space, and no such thing is
|
||
needed in a spatiomaterial world, because when space is a substance,
|
||
it can interact with bits of matter in much the same way as other
|
||
bits of matter. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">It should
|
||
be noted, however, that just as it made sense to speak of being at
|
||
rest in the ether, it will make sense to speak of being at rest
|
||
relative to the medium of light transmission. In either case, it is
|
||
the reference frame in which the one-way velocity of light is exactly
|
||
the same both ways in every direction in three dimensional space. It
|
||
was assumed in Newtonian physics that being at rest in the ether
|
||
would be at rest in absolute space, because they assumed that the
|
||
ether was at rest in absolute space. Though we also assume that there
|
||
is a reference frame that is at rest relative to the light medium, we
|
||
will not assume that it is at rest in absolute space, because in
|
||
order to explain ontologically the truth of the general theory of
|
||
relativity, we will have to assume that the light medium itself can
|
||
have a velocity in space. That will be to hold that that inherent
|
||
motion in space can have a different velocity at different locations.
|
||
But if you prefer, such talk can always be translated into talk about
|
||
the spatio-temporal geometry of space as a substance enduring though
|
||
time. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
basic laws of classical physics can, in sum, be explained
|
||
ontologically by postulating various forms in which matter can
|
||
coincide with space as a substance. Those forms of matter are
|
||
<i>material objects with rest mass</i>, <i>kinetic matter</i>,
|
||
<i>gravitational matter</i>, and <i>electromagnetic matter </i>(including
|
||
both matter as electric and magnetic forces and as electromagnetic
|
||
waves). And they explain the truth of the laws of classical physics
|
||
in the sense that a world made of such substances enduring through
|
||
time has aspects (properties, relations and regularities about
|
||
change) that correspond to those laws. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">That is,
|
||
the laws of classical physics are true because they correspond to an
|
||
aspect of the world that has been constructed from our assumptions
|
||
about the basic nature of substances, about space and matter as the
|
||
two opposite kind of basic substances that make up the world, and
|
||
about the specific forms of matter that coincide with space. There
|
||
is, therefore, one way, at least, that a spatiomaterialist ontology
|
||
can make its basic laws true, which shows that spatiomaterialism is
|
||
possible, as far as classical physics is concerned. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Thus,
|
||
we have laid the foundation we will need in order to explain the
|
||
truth of the basic laws of contemporary physics ontologically. The
|
||
first step in that project has already been made by postulating an
|
||
inherent motion in substantival space to explain the velocity of
|
||
light ontologically. In assuming that light has a medium through
|
||
which it is transmitted, it may seem that we are resurrecting the
|
||
"luminiferous ether" of Newtonian physics. But if so, it is
|
||
no longer a strange form of ethereal matter at rest in space, but an
|
||
aspect of space itself. Space itself is the medium of light
|
||
transmission.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>C<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC12" align="right" hspace="5" width="82" height="27" border="0">ontingent
|
||
laws: Contemporary physics. </b></font></font>In the early 20th
|
||
Century, revolutions in physics have made it seem impossible for
|
||
spatiomaterialism to explain the basic laws of physics ontologically.
|
||
There were two revolutions, Einstein’s two relativity theories and
|
||
quantum mechanics. The first led to the belief in spacetime, and the
|
||
second made it seem that processes at the micro-level are
|
||
indeterministic. These new theories were irresistible in physics,
|
||
because they were justified by the empirical method in the same way
|
||
as Newtonian physics had been. They were inferences to the best
|
||
efficient-cause explanations, where the best depends heavily on
|
||
making surprising, quantitatively precise predictions that turn out
|
||
to be true when measurements are made. And both revolutions have been
|
||
extremely fruitful, leading to surprising predictions in new fields. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Two
|
||
theories are involved in the Einsteinian revolution: the special
|
||
theory of relativity, which covers phenomena that occur in material
|
||
objects with velocities approaching that of light, and the general
|
||
theory, which is a more accurate account of gravitational phenomena.
|
||
Together with quantum mechanics, the special theory led to quantum
|
||
field theory, a more accurate account of electromagnetism, which
|
||
included the discovery of spin and positively charged electrons. As a
|
||
gauge field theory, quantum electrodynamics became the model for
|
||
theories about the two short range forces, the so-called weak and
|
||
strong (or color) forces, which are responsible for the composition
|
||
of particles in ordinary material objects, and that has exposed more
|
||
basic particles of nature, such as quarks and neutrinos. Together
|
||
with the observation that the universe seems to be expanding
|
||
(Hubble's law), the general theory is now used to support the big
|
||
bang theory about the origin and expansion of the universe. In sum,
|
||
our understanding of every kind of physical phenomenon has been
|
||
radically enriched by these two revolutions in physics. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">There
|
||
is one way, however, in which these two revolutions do not fit well
|
||
together. It is often characterized as the main theoretical problem
|
||
of contemporary physics. Einstein’s general theory of relativity
|
||
explains gravitation, one of the four basic forces, but it is
|
||
mathematically quite different from the theories describing the other
|
||
three forces (electromagnetism, the color force and the weak force).
|
||
The latter three are formulated as gauge field theories, making it
|
||
possible to fit them together mathematically, but no one has found a
|
||
simple way of connecting them with Einstein’s general theory of
|
||
relativity. Attempts to connect them have led some physicists to
|
||
believe that there are ten or more dimensions to space! </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Notice that
|
||
this theoretical problem in contemporary physics is basically a
|
||
mathematical problem. It derives from the so called "holy grail"
|
||
of physics, which is to discover a single law from which all the laws
|
||
of physics, describing all the basic forces, can be derived. But the
|
||
incompatibility between quantum theory and the theory of gravitation
|
||
is very likely intractable as a mathematical problem. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Physics is
|
||
crying out for a new approach. That is what ontological philosophy
|
||
supplies. The solution to the main problem of contemporary physics is
|
||
an extra benefit of its spatiomaterialist interpretation of
|
||
contemporary physics. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Each
|
||
of the basic revolutions of contemporary physics poses, however, a
|
||
challenge to spatiomaterialism all by itself. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Einstein’s
|
||
two relativity theories pose a challenge to ontological philosophy,
|
||
as we have already seen, because they seem to describe a world in
|
||
which space and time are not absolute. Realism about Einsteinian
|
||
relativity entails the belief in spacetime, which puts time
|
||
ontologically on a par with space: each moment in time is supposed to
|
||
exist alongside every other moment in time, just as each point in
|
||
space exists alongside every other point in space, as equal parts of
|
||
an eternal four-dimensional world. But the belief in spacetime is
|
||
incompatible with spatiomaterialism, because spatiomaterialism holds
|
||
that only the present moment exists and takes space to be one of two
|
||
opposite kinds of substances that endure through time. Thus, unless
|
||
there is a way that Einstein’s special and general theories of
|
||
relativity can be true in a world where space and time are absolute,
|
||
ontological philosophy cannot use spatiomaterialism as the foundation
|
||
for its arguments about what is necessary. Showing how the belief in
|
||
spacetime could be replaced in a spatiomaterial world was one of the
|
||
mortgages we took out in order to make this argument, and now the
|
||
time has come to pay it off. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Quantum
|
||
theory however, may also seem incompatible with spatiomaterialism. In
|
||
addition to its apparent denial of determinism, it seems to deny that
|
||
physical processes are constituted by material substances that
|
||
coincide with space. Quantum mechanics is often interpreted, at
|
||
least, as denying that the smallest entities have definite locations
|
||
and as implying that they behave in ways that are incompatible with
|
||
the principle of local motion and local action. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Quantum
|
||
mechanics is less challenging than Einsteinian relativity, because
|
||
the received interpretation of it (the so-called “Copenhagen
|
||
interpretation, due mainly to Bohr) is more like skepticism about
|
||
ever knowing the real nature of the smallest bits of matter than a
|
||
generally accepted ontological belief about what exists on the
|
||
micro-level that is incompatible with spatiomaterialism. The belief
|
||
in spacetime is incompatible with the belief in absolute space and
|
||
time. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
|
||
is possible, however, for spatiomaterialism to explain the truth of
|
||
both theories. What is more, by explaining their truth ontologically,
|
||
it solves the problem about how gravitation is related to the other
|
||
three forces of nature. This ontological solution to the basic
|
||
theoretical problem of contemporary physics will also provide the
|
||
foundation for more speculative suggestions about cosmology, both the
|
||
basic particles recognized by high energy physics and about the
|
||
origin of the large scale structure of the universe.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Relativity
|
||
theories. </i>The two theories involved in Einsteinian revolution
|
||
will be discussed in sequence. The notion of spacetime was introduced
|
||
with the special theory of relativity as a way of explaining
|
||
measurements made from objects with very high relative velocities,
|
||
and Einstein used it as the basis for his explanation of gravitation.
|
||
In a parallel way, the ontological explanation of spacetime in the
|
||
special theory of relativity will be the foundation for the
|
||
ontological explanation of the role of spacetime in the general
|
||
theory of relativity. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In the case
|
||
of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it may not be
|
||
surprising that it is possible for spatiomaterialism to explain its
|
||
truth, for even Einsteinians admit that the empirical implications of
|
||
Einstein’s theory could be explained on the assumption that space
|
||
is absolute. It is just a matter of assuming that one of all possible
|
||
inertial reference frames is at absolute rest and explaining the
|
||
appearance that it is not different from the others on the assumption
|
||
that absolute space causes certain distortions in material objects
|
||
that move through it. Such a theory is possible, and it was begun, at
|
||
least, by Newtonian physicists before Einstein first published his
|
||
special theory of relativity. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
ontological explanation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity
|
||
may be more surprising, because contemporary physicists apparently do
|
||
not even suspect that it is possible to understand the gravitational
|
||
phenomena discovered by Einstein on the assumption that space and
|
||
time are absolute. The universal acceptance of the special theory of
|
||
relativity and its notion of spacetime as a description of the nature
|
||
of space and time has kept physicists from even considering a very
|
||
simple, intuitively satisfying, ontological explanation of
|
||
gravitation.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
spatiomaterialist special and general theories of relativity that
|
||
result are not ontologically necessary truths, according to
|
||
ontological philosophy, because they do not follow from
|
||
spatiomaterialism, but rather depend on what has been discovered
|
||
empirically about what happens in the world. All that needs to be
|
||
shown is that it is possible for Einstein’s two theories to be true
|
||
in a spatiomaterial world. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Once the
|
||
laws of physics are explained ontologically, the additional
|
||
assumptions that must be made about the nature of matter and space in
|
||
order to explain them will be incorporated into the foundation of
|
||
ontological philosophy as a way of explaining ontologically other
|
||
aspects of the world, such as the global regularities. That is how we
|
||
incorporate the laws of physics into spatiomaterialism. But since
|
||
those further explanations will depend on the more specific natures
|
||
of matter and space assumed here in order to explain the truth of
|
||
classical and contemporary physics, their ontological necessity will
|
||
be only conditional. They hold only of all possible spatiomaterial
|
||
worlds like ours, that is, in which the laws of physics are true. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">As it
|
||
happens, however, the spatiomaterialist ontological explanation of
|
||
the truth of classical physics together with its explanation of
|
||
quantum mechanics seem to entail the ontological assumptions that
|
||
have to be made in order to explain the truth of the special theory
|
||
of relativity. If so, the regularities described by Einstein's
|
||
special theory of relativity have a deeper ontological explanation,
|
||
even if they are not unconditionally ontologically necessary. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
|
||
should be mentioned, however, that the explanation of the global
|
||
regularities to be given under <font face="Arial, sans-serif">Change
|
||
</font>does not depend on this ontological explanation of the truth
|
||
of contemporary physics. Given that space is a substance, they depend
|
||
only on matter obeying the regularities described by the laws of
|
||
contemporary (and classical) physics. Though we shall make further
|
||
assumption about the nature of space and matter in order to explain
|
||
ontologically the truth of quantum mechanics, the basic objects of
|
||
physics, and the origin of the universe, they are required only to
|
||
show the possibility of spatiomaterialism. They are not relevant in
|
||
explaining the global regularities. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<br><br>
|
||
</p>
|
||
</body>
|
||
</html> |