Introduction: A new philosophy of nature
This philosophy identifies and explains a common foundation of existence used by nature and humans. It will reveal principles that apply to everything in the universe. It will sharpen our view of what is happening around us.
By applying this philosophy, we will be able to see the universe as a whole structure instead of merely seeing its separate parts. It will change our interpretation of reality, so we can get back to cause and effect and a one-to-one correspondence with nature.
The philosophy shows the meaning of purpose and that is the same for all natural phenomena. It can help us come to a better understanding of ourselves by showing us how to identify ourselves with the rest of the world.
As always, there will be controversy over and resistance to anything new that can bring about change. But if we are to survive, change is necessary and progress can occur only when a more useful and better way of solving problems comes along.
This introduction gives the reader a background on how these ideas began and the purpose and direction of this work. Throughout my life, I have been obsessed with the desire to know the why of things.
This continuing natural curiosity created a paradox, and I suspect the same is true for many people. Why was I such a poor student during my school years, which barely culminated in a university degree? Why did I have such curiosity and also such difficulty in our institutions of learning? I think I have arrived at some answers.
My failure to be excited about our education system came from lacking a base and foundation from which I could relate one thing with another. Everything seemed so isolated. The so-called facts lacked a linking philosophy whereby I could see the wholeness of nature. I was missing how things related to me.
Our minds of necessity have made us proprietary in wanting things to relate to ourselves. This is important to our survival. The problem was, I was required to memorize data that I could not associate with. I rebelled at filling my mind with what I could not connect to and make a part of my existence.
Although it was not this way with everything, I forced a lot of intellectual garbage into my mind to pass examinations, and it was rapidly removed afterwards. It was always painful and required enormous willpower to survive these school years. My mind seemed to function only in an integrative way. Today, physics is also at an impasse because it has not brought the universe into what has been referred to as an unbroken wholeness.
The present stage of knowledge does not link together physicists' isolated theories. They claim to have made these links partially but even in these areas many of their interpretations read like science fiction and have little relationship to logic and cause and effect. Because of this I believe that what you are about to read is the core of a philosophy whose time has come. I have always been a very slow reader and I finally realized why. Sometimes I would spend hours on one paragraph rethinking and re-reading it over and over again.
I attempted to relate my reading to my life experiences and those of others. This takes time, but this very slowness of acquisition produced greater quality thinking for me. I have used this method to identify a cause and effect world for myself. It has brought me into a closer relationship with a nature world around me
After graduating with a doctorate in dental surgery, I took up the process of understanding natural phenomena for myself. The question for me was, how did I relate to this world of which I had become a part? I had no idea where this world would lead me.
Fortunately, I found some effective teachers and finally began to gather the tools necessary for the pursuit of knowledge. I learned where the useful knowledge came from that has given us the resulting leverage to support billions of humans on this planet. It is said that there are more people living on the planet now that have ever existed.
It had never occurred to me that so many people's lives are made possible by the discoveries of just a few people. It was a revelation to learn that a small group of innovators has been responsible for the discoveries that have made our lives possible. Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell are a few examples of the giant thinkers belonging to this category.
I learned this in middle age. I was awed and perplexed by the question of why the source of so much human life had never been explained to me. It seemed incredibly wrong that I might have gone through life and I never realized the debt of all of us owe to so few.
For me it really put things in perspective. It gave me direction where to find real heroes. The purpose of heroes is to give us an example and pattern to emulate and follow. It has been an enormously profound and gratifying experience to come to this awareness.
For those interested in an introduction to history's scientific heroes, I recommend Isaac Asimov's “Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology”.
It presents the lives and achievements of most of our greatest scientists, philosophers and technologists in Asimov's powerful style. In chronological order, he shows the intellectual relations between these fascinating individuals.
It is important for all of us to understand those who are primarily responsible for the advancement of civilization. How did these people go about creating and giving us such incredible value? They must first have intellectual curiosity, the desire to know. From this I learned a few important mental instruments that innovators use in the search for answers.
I learned about the steps of the scientific method, as a guide for recognizing both when you are on the right path or when you are on the wrong path to greater knowledge. Knowing the path not to take is a necessary input for finding the path to take.
The next powerful tool was a simple statement to add to our knowledge of natural phenomena. You show how less information explains more. For me this meant that success in my search for answers about the world would come from finding the simplest base and foundation that everything has in common.
Less to me seemed to require less information to explain more with a goal of reaching a position where the least input defines the principles that govern everything. This is how I interpreted this statement of making less explain more and I have found it to be correct.
With these powerful tools I began my search for the simplest common denominators I could find from which all natural phenomena would spring. What is there about nature that everything is a part of and is involved with? I have found that finding this common ground that leads to a fewer, simpler principles is not easy to do.
Some of our greatest discoveries have been commonplace that it is easy to think that they have always been known. Few gain the insight into the great struggle involved in taking the steps along the path of progress. We take for granted some of the most profound discoveries in the world.
I took up this search for answers about nature for my own enjoyment. My motives did not come from any desire to save humankind. I just wanted to know for myself. After a few years of taking many wrong paths to understand nature, in 1978, I read a brief paragraph on Eastern philosophy.
It described the concept of nothing as a very important entity and that physical matter is used to mold and build a non-physical nothing. The borders of something provide an identity for nothing and, conversely, the void, nothing, is shaped by the physical so we can fill it with other structures.
An example is the physical structure of a wooden bowl that shapes and gives form to the nothing inside that then can be filled with things. This was an amazing realization to me. Who was the forgotten Asian thousands of years ago who made this observation?
Whoever he or she was, I offer my gratitude for giving me the key to a meaningful life. Now, I began to relate this entity of nothing to all the physical things around me, and I was off and running, although it seemed like a crawl, after taking 17 years to reach some vital conclusions.
It has been an exciting adventure with one discovery following another. What astonished me was the realization that I could only sense a physical object because of nothing next to it. It is also the physical of an object that gives us the ability to see and define the spatial geometry of nothing.
The contrasting opposite of physical and non-physical entities is what gives us our sensory perceptions. It sounds so simple and yet to me it was profound. It appears that our frame of reference for observation and measurements comes from the interdependent physical something and non-physical nothing.
It seems so obvious, after it has been pointed out, and yet I had to ask, why had I never seen this simple idea written or heard it spoken? Would it not be important to understand that it is these binary opposites, something and nothing, that allow us to define our existence and to frame our ability to know what is going on around us and within us?
If we have not consciously noticed these binary relationships, could this be a reason for our difficulties in interpreting natural phenomena? I attribute the difficulty of noticing this to the fact that the most obvious has somehow become the least obvious. In the following chapters, there will be many examples to illustrate this point.
We have a one-way vision of the physical world and the purpose of this work is to show how the non-physical is a necessary and indispensable partner of the physical. When we focus on the physical, we fail to perceive that it is the existence of the non-physical that allows the perception of the physical in the first place.
It is also nothing that allows something to have a path for motion and a place to exist. In 1983, at age 52, I retired from dentistry to build a sailboat and explore the Caribbean Sea. I have always had a fascination for the ocean and the sailboat seemed an ideal vehicle to that end.
Outside of exploration, this would also give me more time to delve into this new binary concept of the physical and the non-physical. From this approach I had gained a deeper insight into human action and then I decided to see if this would also apply to science and physics.
To integrate a theory, it is important to make the same predictions in areas that seem totally unrelated to each other and then see if they come true. If the predictions come true for unrelated areas, then this would be a significant corroboration of the new theory.
For example, if we can show that human action follows the same rules as the rest of nature, then we have good reason to believe that this new developing idea is correct. Nature should be explained in a way that makes our existence understandable.
In other words, since man is a part of nature, then a test for the rightness of our interpretation of nature should be based upon its success in explaining us. This philosophy shows for the first time that the base and common ground for what we do is the same for all nature.
I first had to gain more knowledge of traditional science and to do this I purchased and studied many books on physics and general science written for educated adults. How did this new idea fit into mainstream science? It eventually became clear to me that somehow the deep meaning behind the non-physical has been missed. This has placed scientists in the difficult position of trying to interpret nature without this underlying recognition.
It has led them to a thought process where cause and effect and a one-to-one correspondence with reality has been lost or at least is held in question. As we shall see, the basic problem is that our mind seems to associate only with the physical, but we also use the non-physical to perceive the physical without realizing it.
After some years, it became obvious I was heading in the right direction. The world was finally making sense. A process of integration was taking place whereby I could begin to see the relationship between widely separated entities.
For instance, as incredible as it may sound, the attraction between the poles of a magnet is related to the same principle of attraction between a man and a woman. Behind all motion, which includes electrons, gravity and people, there is the same underlying foundation. I have approached my work as the detective searching for clues to solve a mystery.
Each time I came upon other corroborative answer this new knowledge gave me the momentum to keep going. These discoveries became an exciting part of my life. But this led to a new problem. How was I to communicate this information to rational human beings? It became clear that I could not do this with casual conversations.
So there I was with a new philosophy that I was unable to communicate. I have learned that I do not want to become a complete loner and I do want to receive value from others. This treatise is my effort to explain my thinking so I can gain further knowledge from the discussions and action that may come from it.
Of course, these ideas must give value to others in order for me to gain value from them. My efforts here are purely selfish, which means that for me to gain value, I must also give value. The word selfish does not have to mean a one-way process.
To attain a real and lasting value for ourselves may only be possible by providing value for others. I will expand on this later. I will now introduce a hypothesis, generalization and several corollaries that spring from this generalization. The comprehensive meaning behind them will be difficult to grasp now.
However, I will acquaint you with them here so you can refer back to them as you read the main text. They are straightforward and uncomplicated. The main difficulty in perceiving their importance is in their newness. To enhance your understanding you will find it useful to refer to them again and again.
I promise you a new approach on how to relate to the world. An approach that for me has rendered the world a more meaningful and beautiful place in which to live.
Hypothesis: Generalization
The universe is composed of and structured by the interdependent opposites of the physical one and the non-physical zero, where the physical organizes and uses the non-physical to reach absorption through emission.
This hypothesis provides the foundation for everything in this work. The corollaries follow from and are part of the generalization. The meaning of absorption and emission will follow.
Corollary number 1
Both the physical and the non-physical are mutually dependent upon each other for defining their existence.
For many it may seem to be counter-intuitive for nothing to have an existence. The extreme opposite nature of the non-physical nothing to the physical something is precisely what makes nothing stand out with such clarity and gives it an identity. It may be easier to think of nothing as the existence of non-existence.
Corollary number 2
The physical and non-physical represent the frame of reference for all observations and measurements.
Corollary number 3
The universe is a physical filling, absorption and emptying, emission of holes, non-physical, realized through the development and use of the non-physical by the physical.
Corollary number 4
For a structure to have existence, viability and function, it must continue to oscillate between absorption (fill) and emission (empty). The effective application of corollary number 4 will foster the temporal extension of human life.
Corollary number 5
The universe is binary. Zero and one.
Corollary number 6
The binary nature of the physical and non-physical produces two forces in nature, the force of attraction (zero to one and one to zero) and the force of repulsion (zero to zero and one on one).
Corollary number 7
The physical and non-physical cannot be created or destroyed. Their shape and form will change, but the amount of each will always be conserved. Corollary number seven extends the mass/energy conservation laws of physics by including the non-physical, which is a necessary partner to the physical of mass/energy.
With its inclusion we can reach a better understanding of energy and how it relates to mass.
Corollary number 8
The foundation and source of all opposites are the physical one and non-physical zero with the resultant forces of attraction (zero to one and one to zero) and repulsion (zero and zero and one on one).
The above corollary means that all the opposites used in our language flow directly from the binary physical and non-physical relationships. Using this, I will show how some of our most important antonyms can be redefined to give them more meaning and therefore more useful information about human interaction. This will lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.
Corollary number 9
Opposites define each other and cannot stand alone. To know one is to know the other.
These corollaries will be referred to frequently with explanations and examples. By associating the concept of nothing alongside that of something, we can begin to make more sense out of our relationship with nature.
I have confidence in the truth of this concept because of the way it ties together and integrates natural phenomena. It provides for the first time an explanation of how biology relates to the rest of the cosmos.
We relate to nature in the same way everything relates to nature. I will show a principle that is fundamental to a unified understanding of the cosmos. I recognize the primitive nature of the first attempt.
There is always a better way. There are no final bests. Best is only for the present. With success and time this work will appear archaic. Here is an analogy that I learned from one of my teachers. The Wright brothers' first plane was primitive compared to today's models, but it did fly.
And there always has to be a beginning for everything.
In a similar way, this work will someday look primitive, but I believe this new philosophy does get off the ground and that it will someday lead to the equivalent of a computer-designed Boeing 777.
It is important to read this treatise in sequence.
I am aware of the difficulty of communicating ideas when they are out of sequence. I also caution the reader not to throw away everything in this text or stop reading because of a perceived failure of some prediction of this philosophy. I will stand by the basic principle as being correct and necessary for our next leap forward in understanding nature.
I predict that this basic principle points in the direction that will lead to solving our major problems which are always a result of past solutions. As will be discussed, our problems and solutions must proceed in an ongoing sequence with one following the other, if we are to survive.
This ensures a developing and dynamic civilization. It is easy to see that a problem is necessary to get to a solution, but it is not so easy to see that a solution is necessary to get to another problem, which then leads to another solution and so on.
This is a built-in oscillation that is the essence behind the evolution of life on this planet. When life forms cannot solve these necessary, continuing and important problems, they make way for those that can by becoming extinct.
If we are to continue to exist, we must add to our knowledge through new problems, challenges that spur new solutions.
Nature decrees that our continued existence means continued improvement. We are doomed to social retrogression if we try to continue our existence by only using past solutions. This principle will also show the simple nature of what better means.
So much for the introduction. Let us now proceed to the main part of this treatise.
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