Examples of Universal Physics

July 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Brown, D. E., Embodiment, Evolution, Naive Physics, Physics, Universals |

The concept of a ‘Universal People’ put forward by Brown is based on the notion that all human beings share a common core of behaviours, perceptions, and concepts. This notion is derived from a large number of cross-cultural and anthropological studies and is widely assumed to result from a common evolutionary history and a shared embodiment, this embodiment also incorporating the organs of sense and cognition. Part of this shared universal cognition concerns commonly held interpretations of the behaviour of matter and energy; what in rational scientific terms would be called ‘physics’. Given this commonality, we should expect to see a set of correspondences across cultures, and possibly across times, between the models that different peoples use for this ‘universal physics’, and indeed this is what we find when we compare:

• The pre-Newtonian paradigm in Western hermetic science
• The paradigm informing Chinese Traditional Medicine
• The paradigm implied by ‘Naive Physics’