What it All is and Why
PREFACE
The following was the preface to a prior unpublished manuscript. It remains appropriate here:
"Over the many years that I have been working out these concepts I have made the most excruciatingly minute examination of the implications of all sorts of ideas, all kinds of data and reported results of very many scientific experiments, numerous accredited, discarded, and some few new original theories. Books, then paragraphs, then sentences, then single words, then the shades of meanings of such single words, then the historical development behind those shades of meanings were sifted and peered at close.
I was like a member of a lost tribe, hidden deep in a blind cave from which no one knew the exit. Our scouts (scientists, philosophers, etc.) had long been seeking the exit, had once thought they saw light, but on following the trail toward it found only blackness when they got there. Now, having explored the area most intensively, they have continued digging painfully onward. Sitting back in the pack I found myself slightly interested by the scouting reports and decided one day to see what they were doing. I began after them, in the dimness of the caverns, tracing out their trail, far, far back. Along the back-trail, moving steadily, I spied the light they had long since seen, and started toward it. As I move, I glide swiftly past boulders and rocks, wondering how the scouts could have missed the ever-brightening exit-way. Then the light dims down and dies! I go back. I shrink. Small me glides swiftly toward the light, passing the tremendous pebbles and chunks of dust on the smooth floor. I look closely at that floor, following the trail, around this pebble, over this mounded obstacle of speck, into this giant molecule, around that big atom. Smallest I glide swiftly along the floor, atom by atom of its structure. Running as fast as I can, but seeming to stand still, I bask in the brightening light. I look far up and around, and see the pick marks and canyons the scouts have blasted in their tunnel. I see them, now, in the almost infinite distance a few rods away, working hard at the steadily harder rock face. They work in darkness, but I run after them in the light. The light! It comes from under my feet! I have concentrated down to so fine a focus as to see every undulation in the structure of the floor. Down little cracks, and up the other side I'd scurried. And now, between a few of the floor's atoms I spy the brightness. I look closer. I approach. I grow smaller. I stand, now, between two boulderish atoms. But what is this? How can there still be a floor between the atoms the floor is supposed to be made of? I touch, and the floor is soft and yielding. The light is bright and dazzling. I push my finger and it passes through! I feel clean air, wind upon my finger tip and know. It is the way!"We shall find that the kinetic atomic theory that matter is made of ultimate particles got in the way of correct understanding of the equations that describe and generalize experimental results and of the physical experiments that helped refine those equations. As we study the actions of a real material that has no voids anywhere, as compared against the explanations based on a void space with particles scattered about within it, you will gradually understand many things. As you do you will see why the basic-particle theory is responsible for the present belief that nature is ultimately incomprehensible, thus why mathematical equations have replaced comprehension as the goal of theoretical physics. You will see why some of our deeply embedded programs need to be changed and how incredibly hard it is to do that. Along the way perhaps you may find some samples of the fun and games Science can be.
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