Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 15: Fire as First Matter and Mover: The Problem of the Cosmos

Transcript
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Well, if you leave this paper here in the air for a while, it's going to be cut up. No, you put that paper in the fire and it's going to be cut to pieces. It's a bunch of pile of ashes on the floor. Now, the fire is sharp, right? And the sharpness comes from thickness or thinness. And you know how you put those charcoal there on the fire and the fire gets right inside, right? It's the most penetrating thing, isn't it, the fire? So you might argue that in terms of being subtle and fine and thin, fire might possibly be a better guess than the rest. Which is shown by the fact that it cuts things up. It's the thin that cuts things. But in terms of definite quality, it's inferior not only to air, but even to water. Fire, huh? Yeah. But, if you're playing as the last word now, but maybe he's thinking of the need not only for a matter out of which things are made, but for a, what? A mover. Yeah. And so in that sense, his thinking is more advanced. He's thinking maybe of fire as both the matter out of which things are made and the mover. And Heisenberg, the great physicist, as you'll see when you look at those other passages, he sees a likeness there between fire and the energy of the modern physicist. Because energy is probably able to do things and be like the mover in that sense. But according to Einstein's other equation there, equals mc squared and so on, you can get mass and therefore matter out of what? Energy, right? Energy, right? So energy is both the matter and the mover. In modern science, it seems, huh? And maybe Hercules' fire is like that, huh? It's both the matter and the mover. So he's seeing the need now for a third kind of cause. The mover in addition to the, what? The matter. But notice at the same time, what makes fire a good mover? It's being hot, huh? And you can see that, huh? Hot air rises, huh? So hot is what enables fire to move things. And if I put the water on the stove, the fire makes the water start to move and finally shoot out of the pan and so on, huh? So what makes fire a good mover is being so hot makes it, in a way, a bad matter, huh? Because everything in the world would have to be hot if it's made out of fire. And that gives you a nice hint, doesn't it? What makes it a good mover and makes it a bad, what? Guess, to some extent, is the first matter. There you begin to see maybe the need to separate the, what? Matter and the, what, mover, huh? And when you get the next thinker, in pedicles, the matter and the mover are much more separated than they are in this fire, because they kind of run together. But as you know, you know things in a confused way before you know them distinctly. And the way combining the matter and the mover in the one fire leads you to some difficulty, right? Because what makes it a good mover, it's big hot, makes it a bad one in terms of having a matter that's not limited in its qualities. You see that? And in the next thinker, after that, and it's a grist, the matter and the mover will be even more distinct, entirely distinct. You see? Now you can see why the communists, the Marxists, want to go back to Heraclitus, though. Because once you start to separate the mover from the matter, you're on the way to God. So long as you don't separate the matter and the mover, you know, you forget about God, right? But once you start to separate those things, that's going in the wrong direction for the Marxists, huh? They're going away from the independence of matter, huh? Now, I think you've got to be careful, you know, about Heisenberg's in person, as I'll say they're on again, because the energy of modern physics is a much more abstract notion, mathematical notion. And as we mentioned before, in mathematics, there's no matter, like Schroeder or Painted Out, and there's really no motion in the definitions of mathematics. So some of the physicists, you know, are kind of getting an idea that their knowledge doesn't contain what they're studying. It shadows matter-in-motion, but doesn't contain them. There's no matter-in-motion there. It's a very strange knowledge, huh? It shadows matter-in-motion. It's actually used to be a channel sometimes. And sometimes I compare it a bit to the syllogism because the energy comes into the universal equations of modern physics. And the universal equations of modern physics are something like the, what, premises in a syllogism. That's why they use the word deduction for both, right? You can deduce a conclusion from the premises, you can deduce something from the equation, huh? Now, it's interesting, when Aristotle talks about the premises of the syllogism and how they're, in a way, a cause of the conclusion, he sometimes says that the premises are as the matter of the conclusion, sometimes he says the premises are as the mover or the maker. Well, let me exemplify that here. Just take the formal syllogism for you to show it. Every B is A. Every C is D. What follows necessarily? Every C is A, okay? That's grammatically, but Barbara is the letter A, because it's in the universal affirmative, two universal affirmatives, universal conclusion. So the Enlightenment had Barbara, three A's in it. Now, are the premises as the matter or as the maker of the conclusion? Well, if you consider that the conclusion has C as a subject and A as a predicate, if you consider it's made out of C and A, they are as it were the parts, and therefore like the matter, which is made, you've got those two in the premises, don't you? So that out of which the conclusion is made, C and A, that which is put together to make the conclusion, C and A, are already in the premises, aren't they? So you have something like the matter, right, in the premises, namely C and A. But notice B. B, which in logic is called the middle term, is that really a part of the conclusion? No. But B is what brings together C and A, and so B is like the middle term, so you're the matchmaker or something, right? See? If I know a man and a woman, I think they make a good couple, and I arrange them to meet and so on without them knowing it, and they get married, well, am I a part of the marriage? No. The marriage is made up of those two that they're doing part, but I'm the, what? The mover, the instigator, you see what I mean? See? So in the syllogism here, you can see that the premises are in some way like the matter of which the conclusion is made, but also in some sense the maker of the conclusion. But you can distinguish them more here than you can in the equations of modern science, because the middle term is more like the maker, the one that brought the two together, and A and C, the major and minor term, are more like the matter. So the universal equations of modern physics are a bit like the premises of the syllogism, they have some likeness to matter and some to the maker. But again, strictly speaking, you don't have matter or motion in logic or in mathematics. So you don't want to overextend the comparison of energy or even the premises of the syllogism to the fire of Heraclitus on it. But there you see how they are really in some way distinct there, the making aspect from the matter aspect. And the equations, are the premises to the conclusion being the application? Well no, Aristotle says, are the premises a clause of the conclusion, and what sense of clause? And sometimes he speaks to them as containing the matter of the conclusion, but sometimes he speaks to them as being the mover or maker. Well, insofar as they have CNA, what the conclusion is made out of them, they seem to be something like the matter, the parts of which it's made. But insofar as they have the middle term, which is bringing these two together and igniting them, then it seems to be like the mover or maker, right? So there's some distinction there between the way in which the premises are like matter and where they're like, more like the mover or maker. If you have a question there, I still don't know about it. Just then, what was the connection with the equations in physics? Well, there's a likeness between the premises of syllogism and the equations. in physics, because just as you can deduce a conclusion from the premises, you can deduce a calculation, right? Something else, huh? So they sometimes call it both deduction, but they're really different things, right? And I would call this reasoning and the other calculating, but there's a similarity between the two. And in fact, the Greek word syllogism comes from the Greek word to calculate. So it's sort of like, you know, if I say, I reckon that's so. But reckoning is originally with numbers, huh? I figured that's so. But you're talking about statements now instead of numbers. You know, put two two together. I mean, put this premise together with that premise, then what do you see? But we use the expression because there's a likeness to it, and it's more obvious to us when calculating it is the way syllogizing it is. So there's a certain likeness there. So sometimes I compare the equations, then, to the premises, the equation which you can calculate somewhere. And what's interesting about the comparison is that you see in the premises of the syllogism something like the matter of the conclusion and something like the maker of the putter together. Of course, in the fire of Heraclitus, you can't redistinguish them at all, can you? You can see those two aspects there, but, and as we said before, what makes fire a good mover, it's being so hot, makes it, in some respects, a bad guess for the matter. And so you start to see kind of the incompatibility of matter and mover being the same thing. And in the next thinkers, I say, in pedocles, you'll start to see a distinction between the two, much more. And then, in Anaxagoras, most of all, a distinction. Okay? Now, beginning and end are common in the circumference of the circle. And this, I think, is interesting if you think back to what Anaximander said. What is the beginning of things is also their what? End. So, in the case of a straight line, if I begin here and go down here, the day and the end are not the same, are they? In the case of a circle, if I begin here, I come back to exactly where I started. And you have a circle there, starting with matter, in the sense that something is made out of matter and then it's broken down again and you end up with what you started with. And we talk about that on Nash Wednesday when we say, dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. You're made out of dust, you know, go back to dust, right? But then later on, when we realize that God is a beginning, not in the sense of matter, but as a father, in the sense of a mover, a maker, and then we find out later on that he's also, what, the end of all things, in the sense not of their destruction, but of their purpose, then we see that reality is in a higher way, circular, right? God is the beginning and the end of things. So, in a way, things go forward from God, but they're, what, tending back towards God at the same time. You can see that in Shakespeare's Exhortation, right? Because he says, on the one hand, the reason is godlike, other hand, he said, sure, he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not the capability and godlike reason to fuss in us and use. So he gave us reason to use, right? But reason is godlike, so when we use it and use it well, we become, what, like God, so we're returning to our, what, maker, huh? There's a circle there, huh? It's marvelous to see that. Now, what is he talking about when he says the way up and down is one and the same? Well, as we'll see later on in Aristotle, you can see it here already, he's thinking of the way the universe appears to us, where you have Mother Earth here, in the beginning, in the middle, rather, and on top of Mother Earth, you've got, at least in some places, you have water, and then on top of the water, you have air, and the way out at the periphery, you've got the sun and the stars, which are obviously fire. And as we see that on Aristotle, the thought that seems to run through those who said there was one matter is that you get things by condensing this matter or making it more, what, rare. Just like when you go from water to air, like from water, say the steam, and then you have the reverse process where the steam condenses into what, water, right? And the water may be condensed into something even thicker, like ice, which is almost like burning. And if you get it hot enough, it turns into fire. So he says the way up and the way down is the same, except you're going in, what, different directions, huh? Now he seems to be transcending the idea that fire is the only thing, and he's going to be anticipating what Empedocles will say when he brings in all four of these. So the death of earth is water coming to be, and the death of water is air coming to be, and of air, fire, and reverse, as if earth turns into water, like when the ice melts into water. We'd say the solid into the liquid, and the water turns into what? The gas, we'd say air. The death of air, so these are very concrete words taken from life and death. In the next fragment, the same thing, it's death to souls to become water, that is to say, to air, to become water. It's the death of steam, we could say, to be condensed, huh? It's death to water to become earth. Water comes to be from earth, and the soul from water. Very interesting, huh? The way he's kind of almost transcending his thought here. Back to that in the later thinkers. Now, this universe, which is the same for all, no god or man has made, but it always was, and is, and will be an everlasting fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures. Now, the Marxists like to quote that, and they say, A good exposition of the rudiments of Dalitical materialism. Because they think that matter is the beginning of all things, and that matter is, what, eternal, huh? So it was the anticipation of the great thought of Karl Marx, and so on. Now, the next fragment is a real puzzle, and again, there's obviously an apparent contradiction there. The most beautiful universe is a heap piled under the land. Now, we talked before about the connection between unity and order, huh? And kind of a supreme example of this is, if you look at these two words, one of which is a Greek word, a Greek derived word, cosmos, and then the, what? Chaos. No, universe, huh? Now, in modern science, when you study the universe as a whole, they call that, what? Cosmology, huh? But, you know, in books of cosmology, they'll refer to the cosmos, sometimes it's a cosmos, and sometimes as the, what? Universe, huh? Now, the Greek word cosmos has a sense of a beautiful, ordered whole, huh? I've tried to, you know, capture that a little bit in the translation there. And as I explained to the girls in class, that's where you get the word cosmetics. That's the same word in Greek. Beautiful, ordered whole. So cosmos is taken from the idea of beautiful order, while the universe is taken from one. Universe means turned into one. That's interesting, huh? There's a connection between order and unity. Order is based in unity. Now, it's striking that Heraclitus had said, in that phrase we saw on the previous page, it is wise listening not to me, but to reason, to agree that all things are one, huh? Reason naturally makes us look for unity. But reason also naturally makes us look for order. And this is a pretty example of that. But now he's saying, and it's very striking in the Greek, because cosmos is taken from order rather than from one. And now he's saying that the cosmos, this beautiful, ordered whole, is a heap piled up and ran. 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Maybe he himself is a bit puzzled by this. If the universe is a result of a mindless matter, a mindless mover matter, like fire, what would you expect? Mindless creation, mindless... Yeah, I know people saw it, but you know that, you know, it's on the TV all the time, the towers there, the twin towers there in New York, you saw pictures of it. Yeah, boy, it's been on everywhere, I see. What did fire do? Like a beautiful ordered hole? And this mindless fire raging through the building, it left a, what, a heap piled up at random, you see? So everybody up to this point has been talking about a mindless matter or a mindless matter mover. That's the origin of all things. So what should the universe be? A heap that piled in. And that's kind of, it's the very origin of the word, which is a reflection of a common understanding of something beautiful about the universe. I started to work very good the day and just say, you know, that the English word, what is it, the word, the Latin word, mundus, I guess. Yeah, mundus has a sense of more like a cosmos, being a beautiful order of whole. It's funny because I had been thinking of buying a book there by a scientist, student theory scientist, book in a bookstore recently. The name of the book is The Elegant Universe. The Elegant Universe. And anyway, I was looking up at this conversation with Warren Murray, I was looking up the word mundus there in the Greek, no, Latin dictionary, and the first meaning, you know, element. Element. It's funny because I've been, you know, thinking of putting out 30, 40 bucks in this book. But you see, that's a reflection of what the scientist sees in these days of the world. It's a beautiful order of whole. It's a just mind, as Einstein would say. But if you say that the origin, the first cause of all this is some mindless matter, or some mindless matter mover like fire, then the universe should be, I keep, piled up at random. So he's leading us to the problem, isn't he? Now later on, we get to Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras will be the first thinker to introduce the idea that there's a greater mind responsible for the cosmos, the order of the universe. And Socrates in the pharaoh talks about how enthusiastic he was, and he saw this in Anaxagoras. And Aristotle expresses his admiration by saying that he seemed like a sober man among drunk men. Is it? But they're all drunk, because what they think about the beginning of all things is something mindless, and therefore what they call the cosmos should really be a pile of at random. See? So maybe he's forcing us then. Opposition is useful. There's something wrong or incomplete about our thinking. There's something hidden to us. Why is it a cosmos? Why is it elegant? Why is it a beautiful, ordered whole? Yet there isn't a, what, mind, huh? Now, when you look at the great fragment of Anaxagoras about the mind, you'll notice the first thing he says about the mind, I'm just going to, I just want to look at the very beginning of it. Look on page 8 there, the bottom, big, large fragment. The first thing he says about the mind is that it's un, what, limited, huh? On page 8, do you have that? Okay? That large fragment, DK-12. But mind is unlimited, huh? Okay, we'll be coming back to that. I just mentioned that because look at the fragment now, the last fragment of Heraclitus, in terms of the mind of it. He says, one could not find in going the ends of the soul, having traveled every road. There's something, what, infinite about the soul. What is it? So deep is the reason it has. So Heraclitus is anticipating in this fragment here, the thought of Anaxagoras, the man who really brings out the mind, that the mind is something infinite, huh? But we'll have to find out. what sense it's infinite. Okay? That's a beautiful way to end up those last two fragments, huh? To say something that's going to anticipate what we're going to understand later on. At this point, I want to stop with these and look at this secondary reading, since I don't have much time to go into it, but with the exception of the last part there, which is on the, what, movers, right? The moderns on the movers starting on page five, right? That part, moderns on the movers, we'll look at that after we've looked at Empedocles and what? Anaxagoras, after we've seen all the Greeks talking about the mover. Okay? But up to this point, we've all been looking for one simple, eternal in some way, unchanging, right? Beginning of all things, and maybe they think of it as being unlimited too in some way. And to some extent, they may have a reason for this, but maybe even more so, they're listening to reason when they do this. So I say, the earliest first philosophers, Thales and Eximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus, especially looked for something one, simple and unchanging, underlying all change, following the natural inclination of reason. We can see in the following text the same natural inclination of reason in the great modern physical scientists. And of course, Shakespeare, he's just reflecting this in a way. Fewness and truth, tis thus. When we go back to Aristotle, we'll see the principle of fewness, which can be stated this way. Fewer causes are better if they are not. And you'll, sometimes you call this the principle of simplicity. But this is, as Einstein will say, the underlying principle of all natural philosophy, from the Greeks all the way to his own work. And for Sir Isaac Newton, this is the basic principle. But sometimes they use the word simplicity. But also, Troia says, I am as true as truth's simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of truth. You're going to see this in the scientists. Now, what I've done here, not to take from every century, but I take from the opening century of modern science, the 17th century, and the three great minds there, Galileo, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton. And then I go to the 20th century and take great scientists there. And you see that same tendency, huh, in the first century and the last century. But he runs the whole, the whole gamut, huh? Now, in Galileo here, he's studying, in the dialogues concerning two sciences, he's studying what is called naturally accelerated motion. So if a stone falls off the cliff, huh, it's going to fall, and as it falls, it's going to naturally go what? Faster and faster, right? Okay. Now, Galileo is trying to understand this mathematically, huh? And notice what he does, huh? He says, in the investigation of naturally accelerated motion, we were led by hand, as it were. Well, see, isn't that the expression? You'll find that in Thomas, too. They call it monodexio, huh? One senior Dion was always talking about monodexio. He gave many courses on monodexio. Okay? We were led by hand, as it were, in following the habit and custom of nature itself, in all her other various processes, to employ only those means which are most common, simple, and easy. Now, you have to be a little bit careful about that last word, easy, because the simple is not always, well, simple in itself is not always easy for us to understand, huh? Okay? For I think no one believes that swimming or flying can be accomplished in a manner simpler or easier than that instinctively employed by fishes or birds. When, therefore, I observe a stone initially at rest, falling from an elevated position and continually acquiring new increments of speeds, why should I not believe that such increases take place in a manner which is exceedingly simple and rather obvious to everybody? If now we examine the matter carefully, we find no addition or increment more simple than that which repeats itself always in the same manner. So what does he finally conclude? You get equal what? Increments of speed and equal what? Units of time, right? Non-equal distances. That's about the simplest way it could increase its speed, right? So he's led to the simplest way it could be. Now, Kepler, the second great name in modern, in the first century, Kepler spent, what, ten years trying to find a simple geometrical figure to fit the observations of the paths of the planets, huh? And eventually he found he could do it with the so-called ellipse, huh? And of course, he always has an equation governing that thing. But notice, he's spending ten years convinced that he'll find something very, what, simple at the end. And he says, nature loves simplicity and, what, unity, huh? Now, later on, I have a quote from the 20th century from that central thinker, Max Born, we referred to before. And he'll say, the genuine physicist believes obstinately in the unity and simplicity of nature, despite any appearance of the planet. But notice, that's obviously the natural inclination of the mind, right? Because, despite any appearance of the contrary, that'd be a reason to think it isn't that way, right? See? But your reason is still, what, implying to think that there is unity and simplicity. Now, Sir Isaac Newton united the work of Gaudi and Kepler, huh? Sometimes they speak of terrestrial mechanics and celestial mechanics, and he united all of them. But he's still using the word philosophy, of course, for what, the whole of natural science, as I mentioned, the use of the word natural philosophy. Now, this is his major work, and, of course, it's such an important work in the history of science that the great physicists of the 20th century called the physics of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century classical physics, doesn't mean the Greeks, but classical physics, or they call it Newtonian physics, huh? This is the great model for this, huh? And if you look at the four rules, they're all, in a sense, referring to this, but it's most clear in the first rule. We are to admit normal, we are to admit no more cause of natural things, and such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve, for nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes. So they say it's called simplicity, but it could be better called fewness there, huh? It's saying fewer are better if they are sufficient, huh? Nature doesn't use more than is necessary. And we'll see Aristotle using that principle many times, huh? Okay, now to show that that still continues in the 20th century, I go to Max Planck, who's known as the father of modern physics, the father of the physics of the 20th century. Now Max Planck is a man who in December of 1900 proposed a quantum hypothesis, and that's regarded as the beginning of the physics of the 20th century. Now Planck was studying what they call, what, black body radiation, and using the older theories he was running into absurd consequences, like infinite energies and other things that shouldn't be, that don't make any sense at all, right? In order to untie these absurdities, he saw the need to say that, to put it the simplest way possible, that energy cannot be given or received in just any amount, but only the smallest amount of energy you can give or receive. You can either give or receive that amount or some multiple of it, but nothing less than that. And he knew something was, this is something different than Newtonian physics, but Heisenberg in his lecture there on the history of quantum theory, he says, Planck went for a walk in the park with his son, he says, I think I discovered something as great as Newton, you know? Oh, right. But five years later, Einstein got the Nobel Prize for using the quantum to explain the photoelectric effect so that light involves the quantum. And then 1913, Niels Bohr applied it to the atom to explain the stability of the atom and the emissions. So nothing in the physical world by 1913 was found without the, what, the quantum, right? So he's the father of quantum physics, he's called, he gives him that title. But notice what he says here. As long as physical science exists, the highest goal to which it aspires is the solution to the problem of embracing all natural phenomena observed and still to observe in one single principle, which will allow all past and especially future appearances to be calculated. And then later on, you can see the different page numbers today. This is a collection of Max Planck. papers that I have. The chief purpose of each science is and always will be. That's very definite, right? The unifying of all its great theories into one which will embrace all the problems of the science, and he affords his solution to all of them. A couple of passages then where he's saying that the goal is always this, what? Unity, huh? And then I love this next thing he says here. The more general a natural law is, the more it covers, the simpler is its form. That's really a marvelous thing, huh? And I sometimes, to begin, then I go back to Euclid, huh? My favorite theorem, you know, number five is my number? Number five equals two, huh? Remember that theorem, number five equals two? Well, Euclid states it doesn't arouse the most wonders, eh? Imitate Zeno there, where Aristotle, when he's your common the arguments of Zeno there in the physics. And some of them are really, you know, essentially the same argument, but the way it's stated, it arouses more wonder. And Bernardo Stavros says, he said it with a quodam tragodia, with a certain tragedy. And Thomas, in his commentary, says a sort of magnification of words to arouse wonder, right? And so, you know, the Achilles, the fastest runner of all, could not catch the rabbit, or the turtle, right? You know, the theorem, in the second book where Euclid says, if you cut a line into equal and unequal segments, right? The square contained by the equal segments, if you made a square out of them, right, using those as the sides, will be equal to the rectangle contained by the unequal segments, they have those two, right, just filled in that way, plus the, what, square on the lines and the points of the section. Okay? Give me that theorem, and you get that far? Now, I want to move your wonder, see. What this is pointing out is that among rectangles, the square will always have more area than any oblong with the same, what, perimeter. And the difference will always be equal to a square. The square on the difference between the longer or shorter side and the side of the square. I'm not going to try to prove it right now, but let me just exemplify it, huh? This is some examples. As you depart from the square, let's say you have a square which is five by five, but then the perimeter is, what, twenty, right? Okay? Now, as you start to elongate to keep the same perimeter, let's say you make it a four by six, or your perimeter is still, what, twenty. And now as you go further away, let's say three and seven, now your perimeter is still twenty, isn't it? And then, let's say two by eight, the perimeter is still twenty, huh? Okay? But now if you look at the area, it keeps on getting less and less and less. So the area here is five by five, or twenty-five. Here the area is four by six, or what? Twenty-four. Here the area is three by seven, or twenty-one. Here the area is sixteen, right? That's kind of an amazing thing, right? With the same fence, so to speak, right? You're getting less on this area. As you depart from the square, which is the simplest of all. So for the same perimeter, the square contains more area. And always difference, he says, by the difference between the longer or shorter sides of the oblong, the square of that. So the difference between 5 and 4, or 5 and 6 is what, 1, 1 squared is 1, that's the difference. 3 or 7, both differ from 5 by 2, and 2 squared is 4, that's exactly the difference. It's always different by square. 2 and 8, the difference between 2 and 5, or 8 and 5 is 3, 3 squared is 9, you see? Okay. That's kind of an amazing thing, huh? And they say in ancient times, the geometrists would sell land, the crooked geometrists, by perimeter, right? And they know what you're getting more land, you see? And then they thought, well, we've got the same amount of fence, it must be the same amount of land, right? Now, you could be showing this as always so, universally though, in the net theory. But now, you realize that, you realize it's also possible to have 2 by 10. Here the perimeter is what? Yeah. To have more perimeter, but the area is what? Less. 20. Less. 20, and here the area is 25. So it's possible to have less perimeter and more area. That sounds crazy, doesn't it? See? But the simplest of all rectangles, the square, has more area for the same perimeter, and because of that difference, it can even sometimes have more area for less perimeter, and it sounds crazy. I say, you know, if you want a fence in there, a thing for the little cots to play in, right? And you've got so much fence, you buy down in Spags or someplace, and, well, if you put a square, they have more room to play in, they can make a rectangle. So you say, you know, smarts there, right? And they talk about the dummies in ancient times, they're trying to estimate the size and how long it took to see all around it. A lot of indentations, it could take longer, right? Even though it doesn't have the great area. But now, this is very interesting, because you see the likeness between that and what the great Max Planck is saying. The more general an actual law is, the simpler it is its form. This is simpler, the square, than the outlaw, because all the sides are equal, but it contains more, what? Area. And sometimes I use that to manifest my analogy there. Shakespeare's words there, that brevity is the soul of wit, that the wise man says more with fewer words. That's analogous to what? Herbic Moreira with less perimeter. It'd be a beautiful thing, huh? So you show this, and then you show that thing about the wise man says more with fewer words, whereas the Bible says the fool multiplies his words, and so on. And then you go to what Max Planck says here, huh? But then, I sometimes jump to God, huh? And I say, do you know what we show about God first? We show he's the first cause of all things, right? So his causality extends to all things in some way. What's the next thing we show about him? He's the simplest thing there is. See how it's similar to that? The more general a natural law is, the simpler is his form, huh? The more universal a cause is, and God is the most universal cause there is, the simpler it is. God is the simplest thing there is. You see? But all that's anticipated by this simple geometrical thing, where the square is the simplest of rectangles, but it contains the most area. It can even contain more area for less. I love that statement of Planck, you know, beautiful. Then you had the one I referred to before, right, where Max Born is saying the exact thing that Kepler said in the 17th century. But I think the way he states it here, you can see it's the natural inclination of reason. The genuine physicist, that's the real article, you gotta know. He was one of them, huh? And he was associated with all the genuine guys, like Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg and so on. In fact, I learned from Max Born that Heisenberg had hay fever, right? I had to go to the ocean to get away from hay fever. I've always told him to tell us. Yeah. So he knows the genuine physicist. He's one of them. He knows them. But he believes obstinately in the simplicity and unity of nature, despite the appearance of the contrary. He's one of them. He's one of them. He's one of them. He's one of them. He's one of them. Now, Max Born, the context there where he happens to say that, he's talking about what we call the periodic table of elements, and how in the 19th century was it they had how many elements? At least 92, I guess, originally, and then a few more, huh? Around 100, almost. See, there can't be 100 first matters. That's just too many, right? And then they noticed that some of the atoms seemed to be multiples of hydrogen atom, almost numerical multiples, you know? There's more unity than 100. That can't be. So even though they didn't have evidence that there's any kind of unity, they didn't know we'd get about electron, proton, neutron, let's say. Or you might reduce 100 to three things, right? But 100 is just too much, right? Their mind was convinced there had to be more unity than that. What's amazing, you see people like Kepler, they're spending 10 years at least, at least 10 years, trying to find a simple, you know, they're really drawn by this. So how do they know there is? They don't know, but their mind is inclined, there must be some simplicity. Heisenberg and some of his books, you know, I don't know if I've got the quote in here or not, but, you know, one of the physics auditoriums in Germany, you know, the simple is the seal of truth, you know, it's in models up there in Martin, you know. Now, Einstein, the evolution of physics there, which is the nearest thing to kind of a history of the science of Einstein, in the whole history of science, and notice where it begins, from Greek philosophy, right, to modern physics, there have been constant attempts to reduce the apparent complexity of natural phenomena, the apparent, right, to some fundamental ideas and relations. This, he says, is the underlying principle of all natural philosophy. It's the principle of simplicity or fewness that we've been talking about. Now, the next reading from Einstein there, one of these little collections, there's essays in science, essays in physics, but they're just kind of names that the editor gives, they're a collection of papers and talks of Einstein. And this talk, if I recall, is one he gave at Columbia University. So he had both professors and students in the audience. And he explains that simple doesn't mean necessarily easy. Okay? As I say, you have to be a little careful about Galileo there. We are seeking for the simplest possible system of thought, which we will bind together the observed facts. By the simplest system, we do not mean the one which a student, and that's because it's down there in the audience, will have the least trouble assimilating, but the one which contains the fewest possible mutually independent postulates or axioms. The principle of fewness, huh? Fewness in truth, as the great Shakespeare said, huh? In that first quote, huh? But notice, you can say that a fortiori about God, huh? God is the simplest thing there is. That doesn't mean he's easy to understand. He's the most difficult to understand, right? But he's the simplest thing there is. Simplicity doesn't mean easy. So you've got to be careful about that, huh? Now, on the method of theoretical physics, the lecture that Einstein gave there in England there, it was at Oxford, but anyway, this is regarded as the most important statement of his method, huh? But these fundamental concepts and postulates, which cannot be further reduced logically, form the essential part of a theory, which reason cannot touch. It is the grand object of all theory to make these, what, irreducible elements as simple and as few in number as possible, without having to renounce the adequate representation of any empirical content, whatever. That's a very nice and good statement of it, huh? As few as possible, right? Simple. But you see that same tendency, right? That's why the physicists who worked with Niels Bohr, you know, some of them in their essays on Bohr, said that he had an attitude towards nature like that of the early Greeks, huh? That's what they admire, huh? In the early Greeks, that tendency for unity and simplicity. It's like having a computer program that's what I used to do before I came here. Yeah. You start out a lot of times, you do a piece of code and it does what you want it to do, then you go back and you keep honing it down, and then you appreciate it. You see other people's code, it's real small and concise, and it does the exact same thing. Yeah, yeah. To some extent, you know, the computers get smaller and better. Oh, yeah. You see? I have in a home kind of a big old computer there that I use a lot. Then I have this little one that I bought from my daughter when she was in Rome. and so on, and that's got twice as much power, you know, it's a big one, you know, but it's a tenth of the size, you know. Okay. So James Jeans, the British astrophysicist, when two hypotheses are possible, right, they both fit the facts, we provisionally choose the aperture of minds and judge to be the simpler, on the supposition that this is more likely to lead in the direction of truth, right? That's interesting, huh? What you realize is that how they're being led by that, huh? And so they don't, they don't see among the two hypotheses that one fits the facts better than the other, but they will naturally take the one that's simpler, if there's more than one that fits the facts. Now Schrodinger, I mentioned him before here, Nature and the Greeks, huh? One of his books, huh? In that book Nature and the Greeks, he says, science is the Greek way of looking at things, and no one has ever had science who has not come in contact with the Greeks. That's quite a compliment to the Greeks. Einstein's marvelous theory of gravitation, based on sound experimental evidence, and clinched by new observational facts, which he had predicted, could only be discovered by Jesus with a strong feeling for the simplicity and beauty of ideas. This you see in geometry at first, right? You look at the Pythagorean theorem, that's very simple, right? The square on the side opposite of the right angle was always exactly equal to the square. The simplicity and beauty of those things, and you're struck by that all the time in these theorems that Euclid gives. For the fact that I was getting before out of how not only is the simplest one larger, or have more area, but the difference is always simple, too. It's a square on the difference in the other sides in the side of the square. The attempts to generalize this great successful conception so as to embrace electromagnetism and the interaction of nuclear particles are informed by the hope of guessing, to a large measure of the way in which nature really works, of getting the clue from the principle of simplicity and beauty. So sometimes they call it the principle of fewness, or sometimes the principle of simplicity, but the idea of beauty, there's a beauty to those things. In fact, he says, traces of this attitude pervade the work in modern theoretical physics. Now, in the reading here from Heisenberg, his collection there, Philosophic Problems of Nuclear Science. Okay, now a nice reference to Pythagoras. The school of Pythagoras found that the condition for two strings to sound in harmony was that their links must be in a simple ratio, like that ratio we saw at 3-1. This means that a totality of sound appears to the human ear to be in harmony only as certain mathematical relations are realized. The listener may not be conscious of this. This discovery represents one of the strongest impulses of human science. In the last resort, he says, the whole mathematical natural science is based on such a conviction. Modern science has retained confidence in a simple mathematical basis for all regular relations of nature, even of those which we cannot as yet grasp. You know who Heisenberg is, right? Heisenberg is the man who invented quantum mechanics. He did all kinds of things. He was the first man to say the nucleus had protons or neutrons in it. When they discovered experimentally the neutron in 1932, Heisenberg guessed that the nucleus was actually composed of protons and neutrons, huh? But he's the man who formulated the greatest change in the physics since Newton, the principle of indeterminism that we'll talk about later on. But notice what Heisenberg goes on to say here. Mathematical simplicity ranks as the highest heuristic principle in exploring the natural laws that any field opened up as a result of new experiments. And what does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? What does heuristic mean? It comes from the Greek word heurane, actually the Greek word would be like, heurane, but you have a, so the H in English, heurane, it means to find, yeah. So it's the principle of finding or discovery, right? The highest heuristic principle in exploring the natural laws in the field open up as a result of experiments. In such a case, the interrelations seem to be understood only when the determining laws have been formulated in a simple mathematical way. Now, Weizsacher is the scientist who was originally, I think, a pupil of Heisenberg, but he's the man who perfected the theory of the origin of the solar system, but he's the man who explained why the sun can go on so long burning without burning out. We do not have any more than Kepler did in empirical rational explanation for the fact that, it's a fact, we'll say, that precisely those laws of nature which maintain themselves in experience are again and again distinguished from all their conceivable ones by a peculiarly high degree of mathematical simplicity. The often cited principle of economy of thought explains at the most why we look for simple laws but not why we find them. Now, conservation has something to do with what we saw in Axiomander, but we think all these guys had this in mind. Whatever they thought was the first matter, they thought of that first matter as eternal and always remaining throughout change, although maybe under different forms. I have just two quotes here, one from Heisenberg and one from the American physicist Milton Rothman. Heisenberg is saying, any coherent set of axioms and concepts in physics will necessarily contain the concepts of energy, momentum, and angular momentum, and the law that these quantities must in certain conditions be conserved. I think the three laws of motion of Newton that some people were taught, they're reduced to the conservation of momentum, those laws. You study them. Rothman says the same thing. Most basic of all the laws of nature from the point of view of modern science to the conservation laws. It's somewhat similar, right, to seeing the first matter as something, right, unchanging, huh? And later on when they come to the first mover, the first mover is changing too, huh? Rothman begins his consideration of the basic laws with those same ones that Heisenberg singled out. And then I have finally a longer passage from Weizsack, which is unfolding, you know, how a scientist will stand in his head to keep the conservation, huh? And he takes the striking example there of energy, huh? But I guess that's a simple explanation that I say. A scientist will say, you don't, you see, don't know science, you see a heart going down the hill here, right, see? And you think it's losing height, right? And gaining speed it goes down, right? So some height is being lost and some speed is being gained down. But you dummies don't realize that what's happening is that potential energy is being transformed into what? Kinetic energy. Kinetic energy, right? Okay? Now, as it hits the bottom, you've lost all this height, but the kinetic energy is at a maximum, huh? Now it starts up again, see? Okay? Now it's losing kinetic energy, huh? But it's gaining back in potential energy what it lost in what? Kinetic energy, huh? So eventually it gets up here to the top here, and so you didn't lose any energy at all, did you, right? All the potential energy, you still have that, you see? But you had studies in the form of potential energy, sometimes in the form of kinetic energy, huh? Okay? Now, you dummies, you know, that have no far-reaching mind, see, you might say, ah, but it doesn't get up to quite the height that it started from, huh? You see? So, I've lost, you know, all the kinetic energy, but I haven't gained back all the potential energy that I had to begin with, huh? But you dummy, you feel the tracks here, and you'll notice that they feel, what, warm, huh? Ah, that's another form of energy, that's heat energy, huh? And eventually, they make a, what, mathematical equivalent between heat, energy, and mechanical energy.