Everything is in motion… Arthur M. Young and Isaac Newton both knew that, but in different ages and different ways. Let’s take a slight detour into some basic ways of looking at one of our fundamentals – the way things move. Our search for Arthur M. Young’s ‘geometry of meaning’ will be enhanced if we can enrich our vocabulary…
Someone in the age of Newton would have said. “This chair upon which I sit is plainly still.”
We can be cleverer than that, now. We all know that our planet is rotating once per day. We may remember that the Earth orbits around its sun once per year. We can even know that the atoms from which the chair is made are themselves in constant motion, albeit within a quantum envelope which renders them solid only when they are observed. The chair is therefore in constant motion, but most of that motion is irrelevant to the scale of human life. The rotation of the Earth is not likely to upset the stability of the chair, but it would be theoretically possible to create a hyper-sensitive chair that was…
Newton did not know of atoms, though the ancient Greeks discussed their necessity. But he knew that there had to be a limit to how many times you could divide something. At that limit you would find the essence of matter. He was very adept at envisioning the practical consequences of pursuing things to their limit…
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