The Bend: A Speculation on History and Science

Scientific Paper
Title	The Bend: A Speculation on History and Science
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Marvin Eli Kirsh
Keywords	Einstein, Newton, Euclid, Theory of Relativity, Newtons Laws of Motion, Parallel Postulate, ethics in science, civilization, regression in science theory, evolution, birth of life, entanglement, simul
Published	2009
No. of pages	14

Read the full paper here

Abstract

The age of human civilization is given the name "the bend" based on a re-examination of the emergence of science, science theory content, and history.

Overview

This is a philosophical essay rather than a physics paper, and it should be read as such. Marvin E. Kirsh, writing from The California State University Los Angeles, proposes that the entire age of human civilization be named "the bend" — a term he uses simultaneously in three senses: as an innate geometric feature of nature, as a literal physical disturbance of unknown origin acting on the Earth over cosmological time, and as a metaphor for a divergence between the course of civilization and the course of nature. The paper's own Thesis page states the aim more fully than the one-sentence abstract does: that social and scientific conceptualizations of nature, arising out of "perplexity involving mind matter paradox, logic and illogic", turn out to be "self defining but diverging from the course of whole nature as a result of freely applied will".

The method is a reinterpretation of three canonical bodies of work — Euclid's Elements (specifically the Parallel Postulate), Newton, and Einstein's relativity — read not as descriptions of nature but as artefacts of a particular historical and bodily standpoint. Kirsh's recurring charge is that mathematical physics smuggles in what he calls physical attachments: every supposedly universal frame of reference is in fact constructed "from within perspectives that are defined historically", anchored to a "gravity bound, history molded, human witness". Where mainstream physics regards its formalism as approaching a view from nowhere, Kirsh argues no such view has ever been achieved, and that the residue of the attachment shows up as the curvature and bending that the theories then attribute to nature itself.

The argument

Relativity as a mathematical lever

Kirsh characterises relativity as "a mathematical description of simultaneity between events that relate the conceptual parameters of energy, time, mass to velocity in a manner such that parameters are dependant on position of reference". His image for this is a lever: a change at one end, given the property E = mC², produces a change at a distal point according to the lever's property. He describes the relation as extracted, by the methods of calculus, from the area of a triangulation formed by light reflected from a moving body back to an observer, and stresses that the speed of light "is given a fixed value from philosophical considerations that ultimately reflect from the position of witness from which the equation is evolved" — that is, the constancy of c is treated as a choice rooted in standpoint, not a discovery.

The reinterpretation follows. If the lever is read historically rather than kinematically, then simultaneity "refers not to the association of generally designated witness entities, but of all entities to an initial event". Geometrical progressions always refer back to an origin; observation and test therefore trace a reverse path to an origin, "in which the forwards path is beyond witness and is not predictable from either the past or present". On this reading, if c is allowed to be variable and detached from the reference entities, the energy in the relation becomes "a potential energy that is attached to a specific mass and has a long term effect originating from the past". Kirsh notes that of Einstein's consequences, the expansion or contraction of the universe is "relatively untestable" while the bending of light in a gravitational field has been confirmed and secured the theory's acceptance — and it is this confirmed bending that he wants to reassign to a single, local, historical cause rather than to a universal property of space.

Euclid, the Parallel Postulate and the Möbius strip

The second movement turns to Euclid. Kirsh reads the unproven Parallel Postulate as marking "a tangible divide between the presented world and what lay beyond in the realms of the infinite and eternal" — the Greeks, on his account, deliberately kept the geometry of sensory experience distinct from the infinite and eternal, which they assigned to philosophical discussion rather than mathematical enumeration. The postulate's unprovability is thus not a defect but a boundary marker, later forgotten.

To exhibit what lies past that boundary he introduces the Möbius strip, "an inverted looped surface in which the inside is contiguous with the outside", chosen because it escapes the constraints of figures drawn on paper. A longitudinal cut along its centre line yields loops that are parallel in the Euclidean sense, since they derive from the same centre line, yet are "mechanically constrained by necessity of being linked to one another": lines parallel in the plane of the original strip "are necessarily not parallel in observed spaces". Kirsh takes this as an intuitive illumination of the postulate — a case in which parallel lines "can be witnessed to intersect" — but explicitly declines to treat it as a proof, saying it is "more important to conceive the meaning of the parallel postulate in a different light".

From this he draws a quantitative-sounding conclusion: because the twist imposes hindrances absent from plane geometry, the set of realizable volumes, or "kinds", is smaller than the set constructible on paper, so "the world becomes, with this proposal, smaller in number". If the twist is taken to embody a potential energy — an elastic conformation storing the investment of abstracted linear and planar volume — then real space is smaller in volume than abstracted space. His analogy is a broken limb that has outgrown its frame and protrudes with a bend: "a twisting and bending force is required to restore it".

Thermodynamics, life, and the deficit of abstracted space

Kirsh next argues that the mismatch between abstracted and real space shows up as a familiar paradox: the thermodynamic difficulty of the emergence of life from inert materials. Rendering real space from the squares of plane geometry "requires added impetus in order to account for the world", and the resulting explanatory void has, he says, been filled with "notions centered on skewed statistical arrangements in the form of entanglements as additions to a conceived inert beginning". He allows that introducing variable proximity in this way "seems to be on the right track", but holds that it inherits the same paradoxes. His alternative is inherited, transmitted proximities "within a framework of space that takes no difference to start between the inert and the living" — which requires subtracting from theory the abstracted ideas of conception and death.

The bend itself

The concluding section generalises. Kirsh postulates "that a randomly, if not predictably emerging bend exists in all aspects" — chromosomes with abnormally induced bends and rearranged sequences, space structures suffering bends in their relative positions, and the created laws meant to describe nature. He offers a string of illustrations meant as demonstrations of a "petty acquired nature to the conducts of civilization": eggs and egg-shaped geological and political forms, Socrates declining to flee Greece, the fall that led to the study of free fall, psychiatry's study of a "bending and twisted psyche", and the mechanical arm of the Hubble Space Telescope dislodged by a bending and twisting movement. His closing warning is that because the real and the conceptual "have come to exist together as a man made synergy as a civilization guide", one "might hardly distinguish one from the other considering the vast magnitudes of time and/or distance in relation to the individual". The practical consequence he draws is ethical: the scientific application of force to natural elements, taken from planar mechanical abstraction, creates a first-order rate of change that drives the paths of civilization and natural order apart.

Assessment

The genuinely interesting core of this essay is its epistemological claim: that the reference frames of mathematical physics are not viewpoints from nowhere but are anchored to an embodied, gravitationally situated, historically formed observer, and that some of what physics attributes to space may be a residue of that anchoring. That is a serious thesis with a respectable ancestry — it is recognisably in the line of Mach, Whitehead and the phenomenological critics of scientific abstraction — and Kirsh's associated point about Euclid, that the Greeks kept the infinite and eternal outside mathematics on purpose and that the Parallel Postulate marks that boundary, is a defensible reading of the Elements rather than a crank one. The Möbius illustration is likewise apt for its stated purpose: it does exhibit lines parallel by construction that cannot remain parallel once embedded, which is a legitimate way to make vivid what an unprovable postulate is doing.

The difficulties are severe and mostly structural. The paper is written in a prose that resists paraphrase — sentences routinely carry three or four abstractions with no fixed referents, and key terms ("attachment", "proximity", "kind", "impulse", "volume") are used in shifting senses without definition — so that even a sympathetic reader cannot always determine what claim is being made, let alone test it. Nothing in the paper is derived. The central object, the bend, is asserted at every scale at once — chromosomal, geological, cosmological, psychological, political — without a magnitude, a direction, a timescale, or any criterion that would let one detect its presence or absence. When physical content does surface it is not developed: the suggestion that c be treated as variable and that E = mc² be reread as a potential energy "attached to a specific mass" arrives with no equation, no consequence, and no comparison to any measurement. The description of E = mc² as extracted by calculus from the area of a light-path triangulation does not correspond to any derivation of that relation, either Einstein's 1905 argument from radiative energy loss or the later momentum-energy route.

Against established measurement the essay is largely untouchable, because it makes no quantitative prediction — but that immunity is the problem rather than a defence. Its one contact with observation, light bending, is granted as confirmed and then reassigned to an unspecified local historical cause, with no account of why the deflection should then scale with solar mass and impact parameter as measured, nor of how the same cause would produce the lensing seen around distant galaxy clusters. Similarly, the treatment of cosmic expansion as "relatively untestable" ignores the observational programme that has grown up around it. The illustrative catalogue in the final pages — eggs, Socrates, the Hubble arm — reads as free association rather than evidence, and it undercuts the credibility of the serious epistemological claim the essay opened with. Judged as what it announces itself to be, a speculation, the piece is honest about its status; judged as an argument that physics has misread a local disturbance as a property of space, it does not supply the connective tissue that would let anyone accept or reject it.

See also

• Marvin Eli Kirsh
• Special Relativity
• General Relativity
• Speed of Light
• Gravitational Lensing
• Simultaneity
• Expanding Universe
• Entropy
• Isaac Newton
• Time