Parallelism and Relativity
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Parallelism and Relativity |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Marvin Eli Kirsh |
| Keywords | parallelism, relativity, abstraction, monism, simultaneity |
| Published | 2007 |
| Journal | General Science Journal |
| No. of pages | 13 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
A parallel of elementary concepts but non-mathematically obtainable contrasts is described as entailed to all aspects of nature ubiquitously, if conceptual pluralisms/dualisms are logically reduced to monisms. In order for active perceptual/conceptual science pursuit to exist with a valid and coherent meaning, conceptually organizable, but non-parametric sameness/equality of some sort must be attachable to all facets of all perspectives. Examples in lingual form are provided that employ the words "standard" and conceptual comparisons are established with modern life and physical sciences. A suitably corresponding new model, philosophical perspective and sample physics experiment/interpretation is proposed.
Overview
This is a philosophy paper rather than a physics paper. Kirsh writes from the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and his target is not any particular result of relativity theory but the conceptual scheme that makes such results statable at all. His claim is that physics has quietly committed itself to a pluralism — two spaces, two times, an observer's frame and an observed frame, a "special" theory and a "general" one, regions of the universe with mass and regions without — while continuing to speak as though it described a single world. He regards this as an unnoticed contradiction, compressed in one of the paper's more quotable lines: "I can think of the world as two spaces though I am in one space."
The proposed remedy is a monism in which time is the sole constituent of the world, and in which the relation between things is not mathematical equality but what Kirsh calls parallelism — a non-parametric sameness that holds between distinct, indivisible uniques without collapsing them into one another. Relativity, he argues, is built on simultaneity, which is the study of coincidences and therefore a species of the equality relation, and so inherits the incoherence he attributes to it. The paper is written in an unusually dense and idiosyncratic idiom, with extended medical and mythological metaphor doing much of the argumentative work, and several of its passages resist paraphrase; what follows reports only those threads whose sense is reasonably clear from the text itself.
The argument
Monism, pluralism and perspective
Kirsh opens from a broadly sceptical position, invoking Nietzsche for the claim that "a universal perspective does not exist" and Quine for the picture of the scientist trying "to construct, from witness, unified principles from a sea of particulars." If no universal perspective exists but perspective exists at all, then pluralism follows; yet the aim of a unified theory is by definition a monism. He locates the resulting tension in the structure of modern theory itself: spacetime constructions "are divided into topics of special relativity and general relativity," and theories routinely posit "out of this world" components — "places that exist without mass, gravity, or spaces that are not renderable with Euclidean plane geometry" — while still referring "monistically to a whole."
Why mathematics cannot supply parallelism
The most compact argument in the paper concerns the integers. Each integer is unique and indivisible; "one is parallel to one, two is parallel to two," but "the set of integers though is not parallel to itself, it is equal to itself." Mathematical languages, he concludes, "cannot accommodate parallel uniques." Equality identifies; parallelism preserves distinctness while asserting sameness of kind. Since the physical sciences insist on "a universally accepted language of mathematics," they can express only the former, and a "mathematical definition of a world of particulars, in a world of particulars, becomes useless." The complaint is delivered with a striking image: modern physics "might be envisioned as a well nourished theoretical corpse constructed of prosthetics, orthopedic tractions, special contraptions, sprain therapeutics and genetic lesion analysis."
Berkeley and the ubiquity of witness
Kirsh takes George Berkeley as his precedent. Berkeley "logically argued that witness was a mandatory prerequisite for existence," and grounded the continuity of the world in "an ultimate witness in the name of a timeless perceiving god"; he also rejected pure abstraction, holding that "a color, red for instance, cannot be considered as a concept... without referring to specific instances."
Kirsh's move is to keep Berkeley's logic while replacing its theological term. If the all-perceiving God is substituted by "a ubiquity of witness in all aspects of nature and as the means of all transmissions and as the elemental defining character of time," then "an elemental and homogeneous monism to describe nature can be postulated." On this basis "constructions of time can account for materials, mass, energy, the existence of solid objects" as well as for both "corporal/tangible and acorporal/nontangible facets of existence."
The word "standard" as a self-subscribing term
A long central section examines the word standard. Kirsh's observation is that the term belongs to its own extension — "'standard' = ['Standard'], contains itself and is self subscribing" — and that this self-reference makes it incoherent as a foundation. He notes that scientific practice compounds this: the speed of light is "empirically reproducible as a natural constant and elected as a 'standard' for length and distance." He treats the resulting linguistic structure as pathological, developing it through a sustained tumour metaphor: excise "standard" from the body of scientific statements and the remaining statements would be "incapable of coherent communications." "It is a premise of this communication that scientifically (e.g. mathematical) coherent standards do not exist, and that their recorded presence and behavior is a behavioral phenomenon that is associated with a pathological state."
Time is offered as the non-pathological substitute, on the ground that it is "non-excisible": "Nothing in the world can be conceived of that is absent of 'time' or can escape definition with respect to it." Crucially, he argues, "the standard set 'time' has no adjective/descriptive potential" — expressions such as time machine, time space and time clock are held to be "incoherent and descriptively redundant in this context." A model that accounts for time therefore "cannot subscribe to itself, as its existence is given as premise."
Time as the sole component of the world
From the monism of time Kirsh sketches reconstructions of the basic physical categories. Solid materials "can be defined with respect to time as simply having emerged with a greater density to cause the perception of solidness." Force and energy become "a consequence of identity/uniqueness": if all things are distinct, then "one unique physical thing must be separable from another by means of a force" — entities "must repel one another to be considered distinct or be the same." Motion follows as "time as the propagation of distance by virtue of a force of self avoidance."
He also argues that location has no externally coherent content. Taking a scientist on a telephone, he contends that neither the apparatus nor the speaker has "a consistent description of position"; all notions of where the other party is are "second sense constructions" that are "themselves independent of direction or geometrical factors" and are "temporal constructions." Hence "notions of location are probably interchangeable with notions of uniqueness."
Simultaneity and relativity
The application to relativity follows directly. "Simultaneity, the study of coincidences, as the foundation for theories of relativity, is based on an abstractual cross examination and projected model assembled from more than that which can be directly known in the first perspective." Because it exceeds what is available in a single perspective, it "mathematically generates untestable values" — among them elapsed time, with the velocity of light held constant at every point of reference. In special relativity, simultaneity "assumes a coherent parametric assignment of relative position/velocity"; in general relativity it "descends in definition to notions altogether absent of location content."
Kirsh's central objection is that "given as a premise in relativity theory is not time, but time and location/distance," and "it is proposed that parameters of time and distance, combined together, are incoherent." Parallelism is contrasted with simultaneity by an analogy: "a set of non parallel lines can potentially either be defined as or measured as parallel, but 'time' as a 'parallely' and independently existing agent at each and any frame of reference, without the means of forming contrasts and differences, can never be found as 'aparallel'." Time so construed is "immune to change that delineates motion."
The proposed model and figures
Figure 1 presents four "containers" of light and sound vectors, hatched regions marking incoherency: 1b and 1c depict perception and theory each taken as non-random, and 1a and 1d "a resultant random synergism for nature." The suggestion is that the dualism of observer time and observed time in a measurement of light speed "might be made logically coherent if constructions of space are considered to be a similar resultant random synergism of light (transverse) and sound (longitudinal)," with the ratio drawn against "the observer's own displacement."
The "displacement" invoked is biological rather than mechanical — "not direct volume or energetic/calorimetric considerations... but factors of surfaces," with the remark that "the length of the DNA of a single human is theorized to be greater than the distance of the earth to the sun." Kirsh then argues that "the current value of 3 × 108 m/s is based on assumptions related to the origin of the light traced, distances and volumes, change with time," and that if all light humans observe is relevant only to human perception, then "actual values for the origin of the light, parameters related to location become inconsequential," to be replaced by a parallel relation between the observer species and the observed source.
Figure 2 is a three-dimensional parametric plot offered as "a potential parallel... shape for space as a function of incremental change," specified as X = 2cosθ + sinθ, Y = 2cosθ, R = (X2 + Y2)1/2, with 0 < θ < ~1017, together with Δ(E/m) = ΔV2/2 + ΔC2, ΔC = cosθ and ΔV = sinθ.
Assessment
The paper's underlying question is a real and respectable one, and it belongs to a genuine tradition. Berkeley's argument that existence is witness-dependent, and the worry that physics smuggles in an unoccupiable "view from nowhere," have exercised philosophers of science continuously; Kirsh's reference list (Quine, Russell, Putnam, Velmans, Lam) shows he knows that literature. The specific observation that equality and parallelism are different relations, and that mathematics offers only the first, is a sharp one: the integers example is the clearest passage in the paper and does establish that a formalism which identifies is not thereby a formalism that relates distinct uniques. His complaint about "standard" is likewise not empty. Since 1983 the metre has been defined from the speed of light, which is fixed by convention at exactly 299,792,458 m/s and is therefore no longer measurable; a constant elected as the standard for the very quantity it is expressed in is self-subscribing in exactly the way Kirsh describes. That a philosopher writing in 2007 put his finger on this without invoking the SI redefinition is to his credit, and it is the strongest thing in the paper.
Against that, the paper is very hard to hold to account, because most of it is not stated in a form that can be true or false. The three load-bearing terms — parallelism, standard and the monism of time — are never defined, only exhibited through examples and metaphors, and the metaphors carry the inference. The extended figure of scientific vocabulary as a tumour, with "standard" as the carcinogen and excision as the cure, and the parallel drawn between experimental interrogation of nature and "a torturous interrogation by a spy of a victim whom does not possess on his person the desired information," persuade by connotation rather than by argument; no step is offered that would let a reader who rejects the metaphor still follow the reasoning. Sentences frequently do not resolve grammatically, and in several places it is not possible to determine what is being asserted. Whatever the merit of the underlying intuition, a claim that cannot be restated without its metaphor cannot be examined.
Where the paper does touch physics, it goes wrong on checkable matters. The assertion that "the current value of 3 × 108 m/s is based on assumptions related to the origin of the light traced, distances and volumes" is simply not how the constant is obtained. It has been determined since the mid-twentieth century by purely local laboratory means — cavity resonance, and later the simultaneous measurement of the frequency and wavelength of a stabilised laser — over benchtop distances, with no reference whatever to the origin of astronomical light; the Rømer method using Jupiter's moons, which is the only historical determination that fits Kirsh's description, was superseded three centuries ago. The parallel claim that relativity's premise is "time and location/distance" and that the combination is "incoherent" is asserted, never argued, and is not reconciled with the fact that the combination yields quantitatively confirmed predictions — the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, the muon lifetime dilation in atmospheric cosmic-ray showers, and the frame-dependent contraction built into every working particle accelerator. A philosophical objection to a theory's conceptual foundations must at some point say what becomes of those confirmations, and this one does not.
The promised "sample physics experiment" of the abstract does not appear. Figure 2 is a parametric curve, not an experiment: it carries no units, no derivation, and no stated connection to any measurable quantity. Its parameters are internally puzzling — the range 0 < θ < ~1017 is unexplained, and the relation Δ(E/m) = ΔV2/2 + ΔC2 sets an energy per unit mass equal to a sum of squares of the dimensionless quantities cosθ and sinθ, so it cannot be read dimensionally as written. Whether the notation is a compression the author intended differently cannot be determined from the text. The supporting biological remark is also imprecise: a single human genome is about two metres of DNA, far short of the Earth–Sun distance; the comparison holds only if one sums the DNA of every cell in a body, which the paper does not say. Smaller slips reinforce the impression of a manuscript that did not receive close editing — Berkeley is placed "of the 1600's" though his Principles appeared in 1710; reference 23 contains two separate entries, Slipher 1912 and de Sitter 1934, neither of which is cited anywhere in the body.
The fairest summary is that Parallelism and Relativity is a philosophical protest rather than a theory. Its animating worry — that the formal apparatus of physics may encode a conceptual dualism that no one has been asked to justify, and that the self-referential character of measurement standards is part of the problem — deserves the hearing it seeks. But the paper does not develop that worry into a position that can be assessed, and on the few occasions when it makes a claim about physical practice, the claim is inaccurate.