Philosophy

"The decisive steps toward a clear understanding of non-Euclidean geometry were taken by Riemann, Helmholtz, and Poincaré, who recognized the essential unity of geometry and physics. However, the understanding did not come into its own until Einstein showed that such a combination of geometry and physics was really necessary for the derivation of phenomena which had actually been observed."

"People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don't know."

"Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics."

"During the 1970s Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg... came up with a theory in which there have to be three separate particles carrying the weak force... the three weak carriers are recognized as heavy photons and the weak force is seen as a modified form of electromagnetism. The obvious differences between... interactions are ascribed to the fact that the photon has no mass and the weak carriers have a lot. ... The role of the electroweak theory in the effort to streamline fundamental physics is in some respects debatable. More [three] particles are needed and the mathematical structure... is not entirely beyond reproach. But it ties two separate forces into a single theoretical device... In 1983, physicists... found the W and Z particles. The electroweak theory was thereupon deemed correct, and the number of distinct forces in the world was officially reduced to three—electroweak, strong, and gravitational. Electroweak unification has organized another corner of theoretical physics, as did the quark model before it."

"Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics—space, time, matter and force—has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to present day string theory. What started as four independent concepts, with space and time postulated and the possible forms of matter and force arbitrarily chosen, now appear as different aspects of a rich and novel dynamically determined structure."

"We have to realize that a unified theory of the physical world simply does not exist. We have theories that work in restricted regions, we have purely formal attempts to condense them into a single formula, we have lots of unfounded claims (such as the claim that all of chemistry can be reduced to physics), phenomena that do not fit into the accepted framework are suppressed; in physics, which many scientists regard as the one really basic science, we have now at least three different points of view (relativity, dealing with the very large, quantum theory for an intermediate domain and various particle models for the very small) without a promise of conceptual (and not only formal) unification; perceptions are outside of the material universe (the mind-body problem is still unsolved) - from the very beginning the salesman of a universal truth cheated people into admissions instead of clearly arguing for their philosophy. And let us not forget that it was they and not the representatives of the traditions they attacked who introduced argument as the one and only universal arbiter. They praised argument - they constantly violated its principles."

"At first the mathematical disciplines were not sharply defined. As knowledge increased, individual subjects split off from the parent mass and became autonomous. Later, some were overtaken and reabsorbed in vaster generalizations of the mass from which they sprang. Thus trigonometry issued from surveying, astronomy, and geometry only to be absorbed, centuries later, in the analysis which had generalized geometry. This recurrent escape and recapture has inspired some to dream of a final, unified mathematics which shall embrace all. Early in the twentieth century it was believed by some for a time that the desired unification had been achieved in mathematical logic. But mathematics, too irrepressibly creative to be restrained by any formalism, escaped."

"You could not imagine the sum-over-histories picture being true for a part of nature and untrue for another part. You could not imagine it being true for electrons and untrue for gravity. It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing. And this made me profoundly skeptical. I knew how many great scientists had chased this will-o’-the-wisp of a unified theory. The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories. Even Einstein had spent twenty years searching for a unified theory and had found nothing that satisfied him. I admired Dick tremendously, but I did not believe he could beat Einstein at his own game."

"From the present state of theory it looks as if the electromagnetic field, as opposed to the gravitational field, rests upon an entirely new formal motif, as though nature might just as well have endowed the gravitational ether with fields of quite another type, for example, with fields of a scalar potential, instead of fields of the electromagnetic type. Since according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field, our present view of the universe presents two realities which are completely separated from each other conceptually, although connected causally, namely, gravitational ether and electromagnetic field, or — as they might also be called — space and matter. Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation. Then, for the first time, the epoch of theoretical physics founded by Faraday and Maxwell would reach a satisfactory conclusion. The contrast between ether and matter would fade away, and, through the general theory of relativity, the whole of physics would become a complete system of thought, like geometry, kinematics, and the theory of gravitation."

"The basic concepts and laws which are not logically further reducible constitute the indispensable and not rationally deducible part of the theory. ...The conception... of the purely fictitious character of the basic principles of theory was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still far from being the prevailing one. But it continues to gain more and more ground because of the ever-widening logical gap between the basic concepts and laws on the one side and the consequences to be correlated with our experiences on the other—a gap which widens progressively with the developing unification of the logical structure, that is with the reduction in the number of the logically independent conceptual elements required for the basis of the whole system."

"Functions are the bread and butter of modern scientists, statisticians, and economists. Once many repeated... experiments and observations produce the same functional interrelationships, those may acquire the... status of laws of nature—mathematical descriptions... Descartes' ideas... opened the door for a systematic mathematization of everything—the very essence of the notion that God is a mathematician. ...[B]y establishing the equivalence of two perspectives of mathematics (algebraic and geometric) previously considered disjoint, Descartes expanded the horizons of mathematics and paved the way to the modern era of analysis, which allows [us] to comfortably cross from one mathematical discipline to another."

"Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions."

"The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material universe, the more he is convinced that all its varied forms arise from the action of a few simple principles. These principles themselves converge, with accelerating force, towards some still more comprehensive law to which all matter seems to be submitted. Simple as that law may possibly be, it must be remembered that it is only one amongst an infinite number of simple laws: that each of these laws has consequences at least as extensive as the existing one, and therefore that the Creator who selected the present law must have foreseen the consequences of all other laws."

"It appears... that the elastic theories of light, if Kelvin's gyrostatic adynamic ether be admitted, have not been wholly routed. Nevertheless the great electromagnetic theory of light propounded by Maxwell (1864, 'Treatise,' 1873) has been singularly apt not only in explaining all the phenomena reached by the older theories and in predicting entirely novel results, but in harmoniously uniting as parts of a unique doctrine, both the electric or photographic light vector of Fresnel and Cauchy and the magnetic vector of Neumann and MacCullagh. Its predictions have, moreover, been astonishingly verified by the work of Hertz (1890), and it is to-day acquiring added power in the convection theories of Lorentz (1895) and others."

"While Descartes' theory of vortices was spectacularly wrong (as Newton ruthlessly pointed out later), it was still interesting, being the first serious attempt to formulate a theory of the universe as a whole based upon the same laws that apply on the Earth's surface. In other words, to Descartes there was no difference between terrestrial and celestial phenomena—the Earth was part of a universe that obeyed uniform physical laws."

"[A]ll men have original equal rights which government did not give and cannot justly take away."

"The positivist thesis does not say that law's merits are unintelligible, unimportant, or peripheral to the philosophy of law. It says that they do not determine whether laws or legal systems exist. Whether a society has a legal system depends on the presence of certain structures of governance, not on the extent to which it satisfies ideals of justice, democracy, or the rule of law. What laws are in force in that system depends on what social standards its officials recognize as authoritative; for example, legislative enactments, judicial decisions, or social customs. The fact that a policy would be just, wise, efficient, or prudent is never sufficient reason for thinking that it is actually the law, and the fact that it is unjust, unwise, inefficient or imprudent is never sufficient reason for doubting it. According to positivism, law is a matter of what has been posited (ordered, decided, practiced, tolerated, etc.); as we might say in a more modern idiom, positivism is the view that law is a social construction. Austin thought the thesis “simple and glaring.” While it is probably the dominant view among analytically inclined philosophers of law, it is also the subject of competing interpretations together with persistent criticisms and misunderstandings."

"The existence of law is one thing; its merit and demerit another. Whether it be or be not is one enquiry; whether it be or be not conformable to an assumed standard, is a different enquiry."

"Legal positivism has become one of the main forces which have destroyed classical liberalism because the latter presupposes a conception of justice which is independent of the expediency for achieving particular results. Legal positivism, like the other forms of constructivist pragmatism of a William James or John Dewey or Vilfredo Pareto, is therefore profoundly antiliberal in the original meaning of the word, though their views have become the foundations of that pseudo-liberalism which in the course of the last generation has arrogated the name."

"It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. … They...consequently are instruments of injustice. The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."

"Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that 'all men are created equal' and 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights', they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this nation was built. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity, any more than they lost their humanity, because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away."

"My opinion concerning God differs widely from that which is ordinarily defended by modern Christians. For I hold that God is of all things the cause immanent, as the phrase is, not transient. I say that all things are in God and move in God, thus agreeing with Paul, and, perhaps, with all the ancient philosophers, though the phraseology may be different ; I will even venture to affirm that I agree with all the ancient Hebrews, in so far as one may judge from their traditions, though these are in many ways corrupted. The supposition of some, that I endeavour to prove in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus the unity of God and Nature (meaning by the latter a certain mass or corporeal matter), is wholly erroneous."

"We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must also be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law?"

"Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does "life", but not so mind."

"What matter itself is we know not, but its properties and powers are essentially opposite, "toto genere," to those of mind. From the Infinite Mind matter in its nature must stand yet more perfectly distinct. It has even been argued that, since the effect cannot possess qualities which are not in the cause, and since the effect, in this instance, is material, the cause must be material also; or if the Infinite One be purely spiritual, then matter can be no creation but must have existed eternally. ...But it is not necessary that the effect should be of the same nature with the cause."

"Will matter then be destroyed or not? The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone."

"To those who ask why God did not so create all men, that they should be governed only by reason, I give no answer but this: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature are so vast, as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence."

"By... confounding the properties of matter with those of space he arrives at the logical conclusion, that if the matter within a vessel could be entirely removed the space within the vessel would no longer exist. In fact he assumes that all space must be always full of matter."

"The matter which we suppose to be the main constituent of the universe is built out of small self-contained building-blocks, the chemical atoms. It cannot be repeated too often that the word "atom" is nowadays detached from any of the old philosophical speculations: we know precisely that the atoms with which we are dealing are in no sense the simplest conceivable components of the universe. On the contrary, a number of phenomena, especially in the area of spectroscopy, lead to the conclusion that atoms are very complicated structures. So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely the idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this idea without any regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only above us in the large but also below us in the small. If we start from our human scale of existence and explore the content of the universe further and further, we finally arrive, both in the large and in the small, at misty distances where first our senses and then even our concepts fail us."

"Whilst Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that stood fast of the earth—the belief in "substance," in "matter," in the earth-residuum, and particle-atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. One must, however, go still further, and also declare war... against the "atomistic requirements" which still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical requirements": one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the soul-atomism. Let it be pemitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon : this belief ought to be expelled from science!"

"Descartes... fell back on his original confusion of matter with space—space being, according to him, the only form of substance, and all existing things but affections of space. This error... forms one of the ultimate foundations of the system of Spinoza."

"Epicurus held an opinion almost the opposite of all others. He supposed that the beginnings of the universals were atoms and a void; that the void was as it were the place of the things that will be; but that the atoms were matter, from which all things are."

"The fundamental principle of the atheism of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere. There is only one substance, says he, in the world; and that substance is perfectly simple and indivisible, and exists every where, without any local presence. Whatever we discover externally by sensation; whatever we feel internally by reflection; all these are nothing but modifications of that one, simple, and necessarily existent being, and are not possest of any separate or distinct existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere."

"The upward progress of terrestrial life towards individuality has found apparently insurmountable obstacles, gross material difficulties before it, but once more through consciousness it finds wings, and, laughing at matter, flies over lightly where it could not climb."

"He said that the beginning of the universe was mind and matter, mind being the creator and matter that which came into being."

"Leibniz reversed the traditional conception of mind and matter by applying attributes of matter (in terms of sensory experience) to mind. Mind is what it experiences. Every mind or soul becomes an independent attribute of the universe, divinely ordered or arranged. Leibniz’s focus truly was mind."

"Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead. But its place has been taken by other philosophies which represent a virtually equivalent outlook. The tendency today is not to reduce everything to manifestations of matter—since matter now has only a minor place in the physical world—but to reduce it to manifestations of the operation of natural law... laws of the type prevailing in geometry, mechanics, and physics which are found to have this common characteristic—that they are ultimately reducible to mathematical equations. ...[T]hey are laws which, unlike human law, are never broken. It is the belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism."

"To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space."

"The entire cosmos is made out of one and the same world-stuff, operated by the same energy as we ourselves. "Mind" and "matter" appears as two aspects of our unitary mind-bodies. There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion; they are both organs of evolving humanity."

"Popular thought, supported by desires common to all human beings, readily accepts the view that mind is essentially different from matter, that its laws are in every respect different from the laws of material nature, and that the brain, being a part of the material nature, is simply the special tool used by the mind in its intercourse with nature."

"Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature. Then there arises a disturbance in its whole body."

"What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature — outside of our arbitrariness— to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images... The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical... I am all for it to call this "organizing and regulating" "archetypes." It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes."

"The modern scientific concept of Matter first emerged between the 17th and 18th centuries, and therefore has no continuity or homogeneity with Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius."

"Of course, we must avoid postulating a new element for each new phenomenon. But an equally serious mistake is to admit into the theory only those elements which can now be observed. For the purpose of a theory is not only to correlate the results of observations that we already know how to make, but also to suggest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results. In fact, the better a theory is able to suggest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results correctly, the more confidence we have that this theory is likely to be good representation of the actual properties of matter and not simply an empirical system especially chosen in such a way as to correlate a group of already known facts."

"Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it."

"His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lay in his affirmation of the identity of the mind and matter and in his assurance that the entire universe can be regarded as readily from the point of view of its consciousness... as it can be viewed as inert matter."

"Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images’. And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing,—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’. This conception of matter is simply that of common sense."

"It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter. —"

"In later years, Pauli seems to have decided that Bohr himself was not a complete supporter of the Copenhagen interpretation. ...He felt that the real Copenhagen interpretation did insist that the mind was something that you could not avoid referring to in formulating quantum mechanics. Pauli thought, as far as I can judge, that the division between system and apparatus was ultimately between mind and matter."

"I recently listened to a talk by a famous biologist. He spoke about... scientific materialism and religious transcendentalism. He said, "...they are incompatible and mutually exclusive." This seems to be a widely accepted view... I do not share it. I do not know what the word "materialism" means. ...I judge matter to be an imprecise and ...old-fashioned concept ...[M]atter is the way particles behave when a large number of them are lumped together. When we examine matter in the finest detail in experiments of particle physics, we see it behaving as an active agent... Its actions are... unpredictable. It makes what appear to be arbitrary choices between alternative possibilities. Between matter... and mind... there seems to be only a difference of degree... We stand... midway between the unpredictability of matter and the unpredictability of God. This view... may not be true, but it is... logically consistent and compatible with... experiments of modern physics. Therefore... scientific materialism and religious transcendentalism are neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive. We have learned that matter... does not limit God's freedom to make it do what he pleases."