Impetus and Energy

August 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Naive Physics cannot handle abstract (non-embodied) concepts (in that sense Naive Physics is an organised system of embodied metaphors). Therefore a concept such as ‘energy’ cannot figure with Naive Physics as it does within rational physics, as a purely mathematical or other abstraction. Instead it is conceived of as a SUBSTANCE; a limited resource which provided motive power and which, in common with physical substances, can be transformed, transferred, accumulated, depleted, much as a fuel is conceived in engineering. The Impetus Theory of energy and motion, which is part of the Naive Physics perplex, (and was a part of mainstream ‘rational’ physics from Aristotle onwards) makes explicit use of this ENERGY=FUEL metaphor. This historical correspondence between naive and rational physics was only broken in the 17th century by Newton in his formulation of the laws of motion. In Newton’s schema, motion is conceived not as an unusual state of matter requiring a fuel or impetus to maintain, but as a natural relative state or property. The only ‘energetic’ principle that is required within the Newton paradigm is during acceleration and deceleration, and this cannot be conceived as the transfer of a limited fuel resource into the body of the moving object.

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Human scale understanding

September 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The fact that, as Dawkins puts it, human beings are ‘medium-sized objects moving at medium speed’, would be banal were it not for the fact that the physical laws which structure reality vary according to scale and velocity. The largely Newtonian physics which applies at human scale are not applicable at a quantum level, and Cartesian spacetime breaks down at speeds approaching that of light. Atoms are not tiny solar systems and one cannot subdivide matter infinitely, as one might cut up a cake, without arriving at wildly different substituents . Modern physics, and science more generally, (unlike naive physics and pre-scientific study), does not restrict itself to investigations only of human scale phenomena, which inevitably requires having to deal with phenomena that do not offer themselves intuitively to our understanding, an understanding which is most determinedly human scale.

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Folk Physics and Agency

October 28th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It is a principle of Folk Physics that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. This principle was widely accepted as true until the time of Galileo, and is still felt as intuitively correct by many people today until they actually carry out relevant experiments. Evidently this principle is incorrect and is easily disproved simply by dropping two object of dissimilar weight and observing what happens, and this finding seems to illustrate the ‘naivite’ of Folk Physics and its inherent weakness. Folk (Naive) Physics seems, with this example, to be prone to substantial factual errors and therefore inferior to other, more rational physics systems such as the Newtonian model (which predicts the result of the falling objects experiment accurately). However, whilst the prediction made by Folk Physics is, in this case, incorrect, this is not due to an error in the physics but rather to a misapplication of the Folk Physics model to a system which lies outside its area of explanation. Folk Physics is, to a large extent, the physics not of inanimate objects, but of intentional agents, and describes the functioning of a world in which matter is animated and motion is purposive. The force of gravity, within Folk Physics, is felt not as the passive attraction of inert masses, but as the active striving of material agents. Like two dogs pulling at their leads with different degrees of force, the two objects of different weights, when attributed with agency and purpose (entelechy), will inevitably move at different speeds when released. Within the limits of its own purview Folk Physics is an accurate description of the world and makes accurate predictions. It is only when it is misapplied (as it commonly is) that its limitations are revealed.

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Ghosts in Space

December 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

When we think consciously about space we often imagine it as Newton may have imagined it; as an effective emptiness; an absolute nothingness that existed distinct from matter and the body and spread uniformly without regard to the events of the world. Space, in this understanding, is the neutral backdrop against which experience and action takes place, it is not implicated in that experience and action. This imagination of space affects our felt relationship to space; we do not, typically, consider ourselves to be part of space, or to have an affect upon space, but simply that space is the void between one body and another. When we move, we imagine ourselves passing through this emptiness like a ghost passing through the walls of an empty house. We are dead to this space.

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The Newtonian Imagination

May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The mechanistic paradigm devised by Newton and Descartes, and refined by Locke, Le Mettier etc. represents the final stage in the development of a truly ‘embodiable’ body of knowledge (sic). By virtue of the paradigm being limited to the the mechanical interactions of medium sized objects moving at medium speed, its area of of explanation corresponds to that which falls within the horizon of direct human experience. The fact that the model was used to explain phenomena which would later be more effectively explained by theories lying beyond the reach of human embodiment: electricity, chemistry, particle physics, astrophysics etc. does not diminish the achievements of scientists working in and advancing an understanding of the mechanistic paradigm. Rather it is more useful to recognise that one of the properties of the mechanistic paradigm is that it not only explains much of the workings of the human-sized world, but also that it describes what (metaphorical, imaginary) cognitive structures we need to create in order to think about elements of the cosmos which lie beyond the horizon of the senses. In other words, our minds are adapted to solve only those problems which apply to medium-sized objects moving at medium speed, and which are directly apprehensible to the senses. All of the problems that we are adaptively enable to detect and deal with fit within the mechanistic Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm. When we address problems or create theories which appear to lie outside of the mechanistic paradigm, we do to through the use of embodiable, Newtonian metaphor.

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Unweavable Rainbow

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

The poet John Keats, referring to the work of Isaac Newton, wrote about the dangers of ‘unweaving the rainbow’ in which, through the developments of optics and the scientific understanding of light, the mysteries of the rainbow were revealed. This rational revelation Keats interpreted as an evacuating of the power and sublime beauty of the rainbow. The rainbow itself does not disappear under the gaze of science of course; a full and complete explanation of the mechanisms by which a rainbow is produced, or of how one is perceived, or even a complete neuron-by-neuron account of the cerebral processes which correlate with one’s consciousness of the rainbow, do not remove the rainbow from the sky.

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From Apples to Planets

June 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The incorporation of theory such that it turns from speculation into common sense is also a process whereby metaphorical fiction becomes metaphorical fact. Given that all abstract concepts are only conceivable through metaphor and the embodied imagination, this transformation from speculation to incorporation does not involve a shift in the ontology of the information, but in its entanglement with the larger structures of previously existing embodied knowledge.

An example of this process may be the changing status of the ‘theory’ of gravitation since it was first described in reasonably modern form by Newton in the 17th Century. Included within the Principia as a convenient way of talking about the observed relationship between large objects, Gravity, as Newton introduced it, was seen primarily as a ‘force’, and indeed this is still the way it is commonly considered today. As a force, gravity takes its meaning from the embodied experiences of pushing and pulling material objects around. Force has a muscular meaningfulness which is fully incorporated, in the most literal sense of the word, into our day to day experience. Our experience of physical force preceded consciousness and that experience is built into the development of consciousness at the most fundamental level. Force, as a physical fact, we completely understand. When we apply the term ‘force’ to gravity, as we routinely do since Newton, we are using the deep understanding of physical force as a metaphor for an abstract concept. Newton himself, however, did not conceive of gravity in this way; for him, gravity was simply the name that he gave to the purely mathematical relationships governing falling or orbiting bodies, from apples to planets. Several of his contemporaries did take his concept literally and assumed that he was positing such a force, a notion which, at the time, was considered absurd and anti-scientific. This putative force could cause ‘action at a distance’, movement without physical contact or detectable radiation, and was therefore not a scientifically credible concept at all. At that time, science strived for physical and material explanation and the supposed ‘force’ of gravity smacked of the occult. The fact that the idea of gravity as a force did not disappear from the language of science, and is still around in the popular imagination today demonstrates that what began as a convenient fiction used to prop up certain mathematical findings transmuted into something approaching a fact. This transformation or actualisation is not due to new understandings about gravity, new ways of detecting it, controlling it, or producing it. Rather, the change that has resulted in the ‘fact’ of a gravitational force is the gradual integration of the fiction into the wider metaphorical structure of scientific and popular knowledge. Specifically, the metaphor that gravity is a force is now incorporated into a large number of other scientific theories including those related to astrophysics, aeronautics, geology etc etc. The overall metaphorical and imaginary structure of science, honed and pruned by the scientific method to ensure coherence and consistency, now contains the fact of the force of gravity.

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Energy in Metaphorland

July 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

The landscape of metaphor through which our thoughts move is a shifting, unstable terrain, with its own laws and properties different to the real world of lived experience. In some ways Metaphorland is simpler; there is no quantum uncertainty or relativity effects, no dark matter or eleven dimensional superstrings, all that is there is Newtonian and embodiable, everything is medium sized and everything moves at medium speed. In other ways Metaphorland is truly alien however. The constancies and solidity of the real world are absent here, and the objects mix and move, roiling and turning like the currents of the ocean.

Some entities here have particular status, and the nature of these objects, and of their particularly shape-shifting abilities, is significant. One such entity is that which we refer to as ‘energy’. Energy as it exists in Metaphorland has no corrolate in the real world, where it refers simply to a set of relations. In the real world you can’t touch, taste, smell, or hear energy, but here where metaphors live it has a very real existence and that existence is completely available to the metaphorical sense. In fact energy in Metaphorland has two forms of existence, and the exchange between these forms is a key currency here. These two forms can be understood as ENERGY IS FORCE and ENERGY IS SUBSTANCE. When it is a substance it flows from one place to another, sometimes moving sluggishly and almost congealing to a solid, at other times turning volatile like superfluid Helium. As a substance we can hold it in our hands and contain it in vessels and pipes. We can swap it for other entities and use it to move our machines and printing presses. When energy is a force we feel it against the surface of our skin and altering our balance, urging us in one direction or another. It pushes us around and pushes around the other objects of the metaphorical world.

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The Physics of Cognition

August 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Our ability to experience the physical world is constructed and constrained by a number of laws, roughly corresponding to Newtonian/Cartesian physics. (Only roughly because ‘folk physics’ also plays a part). These physical laws are significant because the represent the organisation and codification of embodied experience. Put another way, these laws represent the physical world as explored and indexed by the instrumentation of the human body and sensorimotor system. (We are reminded here that any data-gathering process or instrument can only ever gather information which interacts with the instrument used in the gathering; approaching the world with a thermometer produces a different understanding of the world than if one approaches it with a geiger counter, or a calorimeter, or a light meter.)

We may, of course, devise experimental techniques and notation systems which allow us to think about phenomena which are outside the zone of human embodiment, but when we do this we inevitably resort to metaphor, effectively thinking about the unembodiable as if it were within our area of understanding. So, for example, we understand electricity by thinking of it as if it were a flow of liquid through the wires, a current. Our experience of the world is organised through an informal physics, the key feature of which is its capacity for embodiment, its availability for expression in the language of sensorimotor activity.

When we consider our ability to conceptualise, to think about our experiences or to imaginatively explore now ideas and situations, we are reliant upon the same sensorimotor language and, largely, the same physics. As noted above, our ability to formulate ideas which appear to be beyond the scope of the sensorimotor depends upon the implementation of conceptual metaphor, however, even though the vocabulary of this sensorimotor language of conceptual metaphor is the same as that applied to embodied physical experience, the grammar is different. We might say that, although the materials of thought are the same as the materials of action, the physics applied to these materials has significant differences as well as similarities.

An evident example that will be familiar to all is the physical property of object permanence. In the physical world one of the most fundamental principles is that an object, a tree say, will continue to exist unless some large force acts upon it. It will not simply vanish without a trace. Moreover, the tree will continue to exist in some form even if it is acted upon by a force. A forest fire will undoubtedly change its nature but this change will be consistent with certain well-known and predictable laws, and much of the tree will be conserved throughout this transformation. In the conceptual realm however, this principle of conservation does not apply, or at least not in anything like the same way. To stay with the example of the tree, we utilise this concept as part of our sensorimotor vocabulary as a metaphor whenever we want to talk about certain abstract concepts. So we say ‘family tree’ when we want to give conceptual form and structure to the abstract concept of ‘family’. We effectively borrow the physical structure of a tree to organise our thoughts about relations which, while they clearly exist, have no tangible qualities. Relationships between family members, being abstract, would be simply ‘unthinkable’ without the metaphor of a tree to provide a structure to our thoughts.

The key difference between this conceptual tree and the ‘real’ tree in the corner of the field that we pass each day when walking our dog is that, while the tree in the field is unlikely to change into anything else, a tree in the mind may well transform radically, or disappear completely. For instance, when thinking and talking about our family we may shift from talking about our ancestors to talking about our genes. If we did this it is quite likely that, in making this apparently simple turn in the conversation, we would move from referring to our family tree to talking about the ‘gene pool’ from which we emerged. What this reveals is that, behind this seemingly trivial moment in the play of our thoughts and language, one massive organising metaphor has suddenly and unremarkably changed shape. The tree that was standing in our minds, with the members of our family perched on its branches has suddenly become a body of water; a lake perhaps, or an ocean, teeming with genetic life.

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