”Action at a distance”
Section 34 (last updated 2.02.2021)
Classical mechanics presents a world that moves in a straightforward, uniform, and cause-effect manner. The classical mechanics of nature are rational laws everything conforms to so that there is order in the world. When we examine the mechanics of the “heavens”, or how planets form systems that orbit around stars, we see that classical mechanics is most evident. But from ordinary experience, even though the orientation of the world is built around classical mechanics, direct experience also presents a more chancy, uneven, “wiggly and wacky” world, e.g., you step on a bug and it gets squished, you see someone walking in a funny manner, you see a jelly fish and it moves like a lava-lamp. All these instances conform to classical mechanics but are taken and than warped and changed in accordance to the situation of a time event. The setting of the event is governed by the laws of classical mechanics, but what happens during this setting, the content of the event, the actual event itself, is much more unpredictable.
Classical mechanics explains rudimentary motion in two ways; first, locomotion is the external effects of gravity having on the relation of two objects, e.g., what goes up must come down, once an object accelerates, it eventually slows down due to friction etc., these instances are based on the second way motion is described which is more fundamental than the first locomotion definition, that motion is also generative, or in this case, how gravity itself formulates the orientation of matter, in other words, how different masses with varying degree of quantitive measures like size, weight, density etc., “sit” in relation to each other, or how they all come together — “fall into place” per say. Gravity from a classical definition limits the concept to a set of rudimentary orientations. For example, what is lightweight comes up and what is heavy goes down, the sky is up and the ground is down, the man is somewhere in the middle maintained intact by an equilibrium of two opposing forces of attraction and repulsion.
A classical mechanical definition of gravity explains how objects move and structured but it does not tell us why this is the case, in other words, it does not tell us the substance of gravity, what gravity is and why an object for example does not just flout off into space off the ground. Classical mechanics can explain all day long that the object has weight and that is why it falls to the ground because it is attracted by the heavier object, and so on and so forth, but this tells us nothing about the reasons why the object has the position that it does on the complex of its actual relations? Note here an important distinction between something being “real” as opposed to being “actual”. What is “real” as Pierce puts it denotes properties, that it is observed in a certain way with certain features. In reality you see the thing as it presently is, however this does not cover the total truth of it. You can see something as it is, but what about as it is not itself, or as something other, or as something it ought to be, which is also something it ought not to be? Actuality involves all these routes of possibilities, but all of them cannot be apprehended all at once by a being limited to any one point of them. How Gravity has as an effect on objects, must be supplemented by how objects in the first place are therefore gravity, or in other words, how gravity itself consists of the totality of objects it is subjecting general laws over. why is an object in the scenario that it is in order for gravity to be a factor in its existence?
Gravity as the way things are
The essence of gravity, or rather gravity as a content of nature, is not just an empty abstract law that objects conform to in order for them to bear a specific kind of relation. Gravity moreover is indistinguishable from the event that takes place in spacetime. The reason why the man does not float into the sky is because he is held into place by a sequence of possible events, or in other words, the man at the particular moment he is in, is one part of a sequence of moments forming the duration of an event that is transpiring over a period within spacetime. He is part of a “script” per say, and in that there are laws that necessarily have to be in a certain way for certain kind of things to happen. The cause and effect of gravity is also an element of time and not just space. There are potential, loosely speaking, “future” events, that maintain a necessary cause for the present to be in a certain way. The future compels the present just like a heavier object attracts a lighter one. Gravity is just indistinguishable from this process.
Apples falls to the ground
Just because two events happen within the same space does not mean they are of the same time. In one sense this means that time deals with minute small distances, so that even two objects within the same perceivable space,I.e., the space they share for the same observer, there is a small and minute spaces that are imperceptible to the observer that a series of things can happen in between which changes the outcome, or which takes a certain unrecognized amount of time for one event to turn into the other. The event where the apple is on the ground attracts the event where the apple is on the tree to fall down.
When the Apple falls from a tree, it falls because it being on the ground is the next logical possible event. The event where the apple is on the ground compels the event where the apple is still on the tree because both do not need to necessarily presuppose each other at different time. it is not necessarily the case that an apple needs to be first on a tree, then after it on the ground, because this is part of a particular duration where the sequence needs to happen in this way. But in an infinitesimal sequence of events where both these events concur in an instantaneity, they are both in a simultaneity, and one attracts the other, or rather causes the other to be in the way that leads to the other. From a linear duration of time, which is how we experience time always heading into one direction, never repeating, ever persisting, we see the cause and effect happen in a linear duration also, e.g., the Apple somehow falls from the branch, and then, and only then, it is on the ground. Moreover we never witness the reverse of the process happen, that the apple falls from the ground up into the branch.
Gravity is identical with the way things are at the situation of time, it is simply the way things are in a given plain of time. Gravity is a force of time. It is not a spatial force merely, because any force of space is only a force observable in the present, but time extends beyond the presents and covers all possible moments of a duration. In order for any force in space to attract or repulse any two or more objects it must be in the present moment because space itself must be present in order for the action to happen. In other words, every action was made at some point during the present moment. Space is the present moment of time. But the present is only one domain of time mediated by the past and future, both of which maintain the present. Gravity generally is not only spatial factor but is also extended from future to past. The events of the past and future events must have some gravitational influence on the way things are during a present. For one things, this claim is very simple, the earth in the past moment has the same gravity as the earth in the future. But clearly things move around and things change and the influence of gravity on them also changes, for example if something got heavier, gravity now affects that differently than the way it was before when it was lightweight. Weight is a very interesting factor of gravity because it is the measure of how quantity measures quality. Quality is always quantitive, we say ‘something with importance “carries” weight with it’
The necessity for the next event is the force that maintains matter at the present moment intact.
The ingredients of life is in the essence of time
General happening
Einstein’s special relativity recognizes a general happening going on but what defines this general happening is a set of infinite particular events each with their own measure of time distinct from the whole and distinct from each. In terms of motion, each object moves in relation to some other object and both of them are moving in relation to some third object, everything moves in relation to something else, and this is what is generally happening as a measure of time. However this general trend of antithetical motions bears a homogeneous form and this form is what makes up each thing into an individual and distinct o next different from everything else, in other words, any unique object has a continuous and homogeneous form so as to be the entity that it is, and this unity of the thing being identical with itself, is a feature of each thing that is different from some other thing. So the general continuity is that each thing is harmonious discreetness of a thing with itself and different from something else. The force that maintains these movements in equilibrium is defined by Newton’s general law of gravitation which like the idea of absolute time, it states first, that every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass, everything has a gravitational effect on everything else, if one object moves or is displaced the general gravitation of other objects get effected. Just like there is an absolute time governing the direction of everything there is a general force holding everything together. So by the general theories we have everything held together and moving at the same direction. We can take this law to apply generally to all objects but we can also take it particularly as what maintains the smaller objects making up a single body. Any single body is intact and moves in a definite direction.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation states secondarily, that particles attract every other particles with the force proportional to the product of their masses And inversely proportional to the square of their distance between the centre of each particle.
We can take the first part to mean that the mass of an object, how big and heavy it is, determines the extent of its gravitational affect on other objects. For example an object with a smaller mass is attracted to a bigger mass. But the second part of the sentence, the square of their distance, does not explain how an object with a certain mass that is separate from other objects cause them to move, the mass of an object is discrete to that object so how does it move other objects separated by space without contact? Gravity develops this “magical” element where things move other things at a distance. Einstein calls this the “spooky” action at a distance, which is the concept that an object can be moved, changed, or otherwise affected without being physically touched by another object. That is, it is the nonlocal interaction of objects that are separated in space. This idea later came to be the basis of quantum entanglement, but prior to this, general relativity develops the idea of spacetime, which means that there is a shared matter that acts as a plain connecting objects together, and when the mass of one object alters this plain, the now affected plain affects the other object resting on it. Objects indirectly affect each other by directly affecting spacetime.
The action at a distance problem is a contradiction if we only look to solve the problem by looking at how objects interact spatially then the contradiction always persists.
-Action at a distance- electron
“According to this conception of scientific objects, the rival theories of action at a distance and action by transmission through a medium are both incomplete expressions of the true process of nature. The stream of events which form the continuous series of situations of the electron is entirely self-determined, both as regards having the intrinsic character of being the series of situations of that electron and as regards the time-systems with which its various members are cogredient, and the flux of their positions in their corresponding durations. This is the foundation of the denial of action at a distance; namely the progress of the stream of the situations of a scientific object can be determined by an analysis of the stream itself.” (159)
This is an early quantum discovery where the “analysis of the stream itself” means that it is not a stream state but makes it a particle state, somehow contradicts its physical state
The idea of a charge at a distance is an early empirical discovery of the electron. Whitehead argues “the electron is not merely where its charge is” because the “theories of action at a distance” have to explain what determines the transmission through a medium. In other words, is there an aspect of the electron responsible for the determination of it as “an action at a distance”? Observation of an “action at a distance” goes something like this, when scientist observed the atom, the proton-neutron nucleus appears closer to the observer and further away from that is some sort of flickering electrical charge at a distance, so that scientist hypothesize that this charge goes furthest away from the observer, and it appears like a flickering light wave, and it makes its way around to the observer and it appears as a particle state, so that closest to the observer it is not a wave, further away it is a wave. The observation is part of the physical composition of the phenomenon that moulds the action at a distance part of it.
The action at a distance is the physical fact of a potential event, a possible object. Even in ordinary perception an object at a distance renders the possibility of a thing. The fact of an action at a distance is simply the potentiality of an event, which brings itself an actuality, is derived from an actual source. From a first person point of view the electron appears as a charge at a distance, but more generally the place from where the charge is at a distance and the charge at a distance itself, form variables of the same congruent duration, in geometry a figure that is identical in form.
“On the other hand the ingression of every electron into nature modifies to some extent the character of every event. Thus the character of the stream of events which we are considering bears marks of the existence of every other electron throughout the universe. If we like to think of the electrons as being merely what I call their charges, then the charges act at a distance. But this action consists in the modification of the situation of the other electron under consideration. This conception of a charge acting at a distance is a wholly artificial one. The conception which most fully expresses the character of nature is that of each event as modified by the ingression of each electron into nature. The ether is the expression of this systematic modification of events throughout space and throughout time. The best expression of the character of this modification is for physicists to find out. My theory has nothing to do with that and is ready to accept any outcome of physical research.” (160)
the difference is that the internal structure is the unpacked version whereas the external behaviour is the actual acting one at a time of its possibilities.
“In one respect this is also a tautology. For the physical object is nothing else than the habitual concurrence of a certain set of sense-objects in one situation. Accordingly when we know all about the physical object, we thereby know its component sense-objects. *But a physical object is a condition for the occurrence of sense-objects other than those which are its components. For example […] A mirror which is itself a physical object is an active condition for the situation of a patch of colour behind it, due to the reflection of light in it.” (158)
“These scientific objects are not themselves merely formulae for calculation; because formulae must refer to things in nature, and the scientific objects are the things in nature to which the formulae refer.”
33:00
Electron charge at a distance
(See plasma energy)
The left side is the discrete measure in the wavelength; while the right side is the wavelength as the discrete,I.e., the wavelength consist of little discrete points of energy. The former is abstract illustration of the latter which is the concrete and real way electrons operate within atomic structures.
“A scientific object such as a definite electron is a systematic correlation of the characters of all events throughout all nature. It is an aspect of the systematic character of nature. The electron is not merely where its charge is. The charge is the quantitative character of certain events due to the ingression of the electron into nature. The electron is its whole field of force. Namely the electron is the systematic way in which all events are modified as the expression of its ingression. The situation of an electron in any small duration may be defined as that event which has the quantitative character which is the charge of the electron. We may if we please term the mere charge the electron. But then another name is required for the scientific object which is the full entity which concerns science, and which I have called the electron.” (Objects 159)
“The examples which I have given of the ingression of objects into events remind us that ingression takes a peculiar form in the case of some events; in a sense, it is a more concentrated form. For example, the electron has a certain position in space and a certain shape. Perhaps it is an extremely small sphere in a certain test-tube.The storm is a gale situated in mid-Atlantic with a certain latitude and longitude, and the cook is in the kitchen. I will call this special form of ingression the ‘relation of situation’; also, by a double use of the word ‘situation,’ I will call the event in which an object is situated ‘the situation of the object.’ ”
the identification of a cook is always made in relation to a kitchen, the cook takes up a position in the kitchen and that gives us the situation of the event
(147) “It seems so obvious that any object is in such and such a position, and that it is influencing other events in a totally different sense. Namely, in a sense an object is the character of the event which is its situation, but it only influences the character of other events.”
“For example, Where was your toothache? You went to a dentist and pointed out the tooth to him. He pronounced it perfectly sound, and cured you by stopping another tooth. Which tooth was the situation of the toothache? Again, a man has an arm amputated, and experiences sensations in the hand which he has lost. The situation of the imaginary hand is in fact merely thin air. You look into a mirror and see a fire. The flames that you see are situated behind the mirror. Again at night you watch the sky; if some of the stars had vanished from existence hours ago, you would not be any the wiser. Even the situations of the planets differ from those which science would assign to them.”
Hegel says;
“Matters are resolved into Forms of one and the same Matter, and this process continues to the point where everything is just a form of one and the same abstract, indifferent Matter, just like the Thing-in-Itself of Kantian philosophy, beyond and outside experience, just a blank substratum of existence. Matter is a philosophical abstraction representing everything that is outside of and independent of thought, just like the Thing-in-itself; it can explain nothing because it is a nothing.” (126)
An electron is the structural totality of the following components: first, potential events are the objects not discerned all at once at any given moment and as a whole consists of an indeterminacy independent from a single possibility that turned into a real moment called the present. Second, the present is simply a single point from which the infinite set of the indeterminate potentials form the possibility of being real instances. The given present moment is a real instance because it is the actuality of one potential event from which every other potential event can also be real. How do you go through ten doors? You start by going into each one individually eventually going through all ten.
(Add here whitehead rectangle mars example) (add to astronomical unit)
The formation of the orbital system we see prevalent across all fields of dimensions is a universal form of the phenomena where in an actual present event takes on a centre position circled by the sum set of potential events, each of which when made the actual instance of the present take on the centre position and circled by the others. This means that when an event is actual and when it is a potential really depends on its formation and when it is the centre point for the conception. To be the centre point does not mean take up a position in a perceptual faculty or somehow be the centre of a particular plane because we know that from an infinite spherical plane, any point is potentially the centre when conceived as the point from which the circumference is conceived. To be the centre point is identical with the point occupied by the conception by being it.
The orbiting system is the way an event is projected furthest away from its real occurrence so to constitutes the duration towards its actualization, and when it comes closest in proximity to its actual occurrence, there is a parallel between its potentiality and actuality, this parallel is its real occurrence. This process is understood by the mechanics of the law of mind, the idea is propelled furthest away from its object by the duration of the two together
meditated by an object already encompassing a mind-matter unity,
idea is the impenetrable and incorporeal element, is propelled furthest away from the conditions other than those of its component, its physical object, so that its physical object is a duration moving towards (Add to event particle)
This charge at a distance is simply an effect wherein the conditions of the idea, the physical object, and the idea of those conditions, its form, met together to formulate the event, and lastly, the element of mind is the recognition of this actualization.
We have the image of an electron from our empirical analysis that it is an infinitely minute size but the fact about the electron being infinitesimally small is simply to suggest that it’s model is prevalent across all dimensions.
The electron is the super symmetry of possible events orbiting a single actual occurrence taking on the conditions of physical object.
(Add to particle events)
When you look out, your conception extends outside of you to disclose what is being perceived. How can you see outside of you? There is an extension between you and the object, so that you are actually perceiving your perception perceiving the object, this is called apperception because the object being perceived is outside your mind, yet your perceptive ability extends from the mind to disclose that. Your perceiving the thing as perceived, that latter is your mind making sense of what is received by your sense, and your ego or consciousness is aware of your mind doing that, but it is not aware that it is also an object perceived by the mind as your mind perceives the object for your ego. And so at the present moment you look out and see an object, but at a different moment in time, say that present as a potential future, it is the mind perceiving your ego perceiving an object. And so when you look out at the present your seeing that as the past of what the mind perceive.
(see consciousnesses is collage of everything )
Whitehead “What I mean by “event”-
Man run over between your tea and dinner
When you ask ‘what time is it?’ “You are really stating the relation of the assigned event to the general structure” of all other events.
“I will use the term ‘event’ because it is the shortest. In order to specify an observed event, the place, the time, and character of the event are necessary. In specifying the place and the time you are really stating the relation of the assigned event to the general structure of other observed events. For example, the man was run over between your tea and your dinner and adjacently to a passing barge in the river and the traffic in the Strand. The point which I want to make is this: Nature is known to us in our experience as a complex of passing events. In this complex we discern definite mutual relations between component events, which we may call their relative positions, and these positions we express partly in terms of space and partly in terms of time. Also in addition to its mere relative position to other events, each particular event has its own peculiar character. In other words, nature is a structure of events and each event has its position in this structure and its own peculiar character or quality.” (166)
(see banana-protein)
Cleopatra needle
“Let us now examine the other two statements in the light of this general principle as to the meaning of nature. Take the second statement, ‘Cleopatra’s Needle is on the Charing Cross Embankment.’ At first sight we should hardly call this an event. It seems to lack the element of time or transitoriness. But does it? If an angel had made the remark some hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth was not in existence, twenty millions of years ago there was no Thames, eighty years ago there was no Thames Embankment, and when I was a small boy Cleopatra’s Needle was not there. And now that it is there, we none of us expect it to be eternal. The static timeless element in the relation of Cleopatra’s Needle to the Embankment is a pure illusion generated by the fact that for purposes of daily intercourse its emphasis is needless. What it comes to is this: Amidst the structure of events which form the medium within which the daily life of Londoners is passed we know how to identify a certain stream of events which maintain permanence of character, namely the character of being the situations of Cleopatra’s Needle. Day by day and hour by hour we can find a certain chunk in the transitory life of nature and of that chunk we say, ‘There is Cleopatra’s Needle.’ If we define the Needle in a sufficiently abstract manner we can say that it never changes. But a physicist who looks on that part of the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it gets dirtier and is occasionally washed. Thus the question of change in the Needle is a mere matter of definition. The more abstract your definition, the more permanent the Needle. But whether your Needle change or be permanent, all you mean by stating that it is situated on the Charing Cross Embankment, is that amid the structure of events you know of a certain continuous limited stream of events, such that any chunk of that stream, during any hour, or any day, or any second, has the character of being the situation of Cleopatra’s Needle.” (166-167)
The concept we hold to be eternal is just a category we emplace in that general place where the needle is constantly changing.
“The analysis of these adventures makes us aware of another character of events, namely their characters as fields of activity which determine the subsequent events to which they will pass on the objects situated in them. We express these fields of activity in terms of gravitational, electromagnetic, or chemical forces and attractions. But the exact expression of the nature of these fields of activity forces us intellectually to acknowledge a less obvious type of objects as situated in events. I mean molecules and electrons. These objects are not recognised in isolation. We cannot well miss Cleopatra’s Needle, if we are in its neighbourhood; but no one has seen a single molecule or a single electron, yet the characters of events are only explicable to us by expressing them in terms of these scientific objects. Undoubtedly molecules and electrons are abstractions. But then so is Cleopatra’s Needle. The concrete facts are the events themselves—I have already explained to you that to be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only one factor of a more concrete element of nature. *So an electron is abstract because you cannot wipe out the whole structure of events and yet retain the electron in existence. In the same way the grin on the cat is abstract; and the molecule is really in the event in the same sense as the grin is really on the cat’s face.” (170-171)
(Add to the magnitude of hand and skin cells, pixel giraffe)
“Where does Cleopatra’s Needle begin and where does it end? Is the soot part of it? Is it a different object when it sheds a molecule or when its surface enters into chemical combination with the acid of a London fog? The definiteness and permanence of the Needle is nothing to the possible permanent definiteness of a molecule as conceived by science, and the permanent definiteness of a molecule in its turn yields to that of an electron. Thus science in its most ultimate formulation of law seeks objects with the most permanent definite simplicity of character and expresses its final laws in terms of them.” (171-172)
“As you are walking along the Embankment you suddenly look up and say, ‘Hullo, there’s the Needle.’ In other words, you recognise it. You cannot recognise an event; because when it is gone, it is gone. You may observe another event of analogous character, but the actual chunk of the life of nature is inseparable from its unique occurrence.” (169)
(This is related to the law of irreversibility, the past event once gone is an ideal for the future even to recreate in an approximate manner as close as possible in the exact same way)
An event cannot be recognized but the character of an event can be recognized.
“But a character of an event can be recognised. We all know that if we go to the Embankment near Charing Cross we shall observe an event having the character which we recognise as Cleopatra’s Needle. Things which we thus recognise I call objects. An object is situated in those events or in that stream of events of which it expresses the character. There are many sorts of objects. For example, the colour green is an object according to the above definition. It is the purpose of science to trace the laws which govern the appearance of objects in the various events in which they are found to be situated. For this purpose we can mainly concentrate on two types of objects, which I will call material physical objects and scientific objects. A material physical object is an ordinary bit of matter, Cleopatra’s Needle for example. This is a much more complicated type of object than a mere colour, such as the colour of the Needle. I call these simple objects, such as colours or sounds, sense-objects. An artist will train himself to attend more particularly to sense-objects where the ordinary person attends normally to material objects. Thus if you were walking with an artist, when you said ‘There’s Cleopatra’s Needle,’ perhaps he simultaneously exclaimed ‘There’s a nice bit of colour.’ Yet you were both expressing your recognition of different component characters of the same event. But in science we have found out that when we know all about the adventures amid events of material physical objects and of scientific objects we have most of the relevant information which will enable us to predict the conditions under which we shall perceive sense-objects in specific situations.” (170)