935.10 Energy Flow and Discontinuity
935.11 Though classic science at the opening of the 18 th century had achieved many remarkably accurate observations and calculations regarding the behaviors of light, individual scientists and their formal societieswith one notable exceptionremained unaware that light (and radiation in general) has a speed. Ole Roemer (1644–1710), both Royal Astronomer and Royal Mathematician of Denmark, was that exception. Roemer’s observations of the reflected light of the revolving moons of the planet Jupiter made him surmise that light has a speed. His calculations from the observed data very closely approximated the figure for that speed as meticulously measured in vacuo two centuries later, in the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887. Though Roemer was well accredited by the scientists and scientific societies of Europe, this hypothesis of his seemed to escape their cosmological considerations. Being overlooked, the concept did not enter into any of the cosmological formulations (either academic or general) of humanity until the 20th century.
935.12 Until the 20th century scientists in general assumed the light of all the stars to be instantaneously and simultaneously extant. Universe was an instantaneous and simultaneous system. The mid-19th-century development of thermodynamics, and in particular its second law, introduced the concept that all systems always lose energy and do so in ever-increasingly disorderly and expansive ways. The academicians spontaneously interpreted the instantaneity and simultaneity of Universe as requiring that the Universe too must be categorized as a system; the academicians assumed that as a system Universe itself must be losing energy in increasingly expansive and disorderly ways. Any expenditure of energy by humans on Earth to whom the stars in the heavens were just so much romantic scenery; no more, no lesswould hasten the end of the Universe. This concept was the foundation of classical conservatismeconomic, political, and philosophical. Those who “spent” energy were abhorred.
935.13 This viewpoint was fortified by the hundred-years-earlier concept of classical science’s giant, Isaac Newton, who in his first law of motion stated that all bodies persist in a state of rest, or in a line of motion, except as affected by other bodies. This law posits a cosmic norm of at rest: change is abnormal. This viewpoint as yet persists in all the graphic-chart coordinates used by society today for plotting performance magnitudes against a time background wherein the baseline of “no change” is the norm. Change is taken spontaneously as being inherently abnormal and is as yet interpreted by many as being cause for fundamental social concern.
935.14 With the accurate measurement, in 1887, of the speed of light in vacuo, science had comprehensively new, experimentally redemonstrable challenges to its cosmogony and cosmology. Inspired by the combined discoveries of the Brownian movement, black body radiation, and the photon of light, Einstein, Planck, and others recognized that energy-as-radiation has a top speedergo, is finitely terminaledbut among them, Einstein seems to have convinced himself that his own cosmological deliberations should assume Boltzmann’s concept to be validergo, always to be included in his own exploratory thoughts. There being no experimental evidence of energy ever being created or lost, universal energy is apparently conserved. Wherefore Boltzmann had hypothesized that energy progressively and broadcastingly exported from various localities in Universe must be progressively imported and reassembled at other localities in Universe.
935.15 Boltzmann’s concept was analogous to that upon which was developed the theory and practice of the 20th-century meteorological weather forecasting, which recognizes that our terrestrial atmosphere’s plurality of high-pressure areas are being progressively exhausted at different rates by a plurality of neighboring low-pressure areas, which accumulate atmospheric molecules and energy until they in turn become new high-pressure areas, which are next to be progressively exhausted by other newly initiated low-pressure areas. The interpatterning of the various importing-exporting centers always changes kaleidoscopically because of varying speeds of moisture formation or precipitation, speeds and directions of travel, and local thermal conditions.
935.16 Though they did not say it that way, the 20th-century leaders of scientific thinking inferred that physical Universe is apparently eternally regenerative.
935.17 Einstein assumed hypothetically that energies given off omnidirectionally with the ever-increasing disorder of entropy by all the stars were being antientropically imported, sorted, and accumulated in various other elsewheres. He showed that when radiant energy interferes with itself, it can, and probably does, tie itself precessionally into local and orderly knots. Einstein must have noted that on Earth children do not disintegrate entropically but multiply their hydrocarbon molecules in an orderly fashion; little saplings grow in an orderly way to become big trees. Einstein assumed Earthian biology to be reverse entropy. (This account does not presume to recapitulate the actual thought processes of Einstein at any given point in the development of his philosophy; rather it attempts to illustrate some of the invitable conclusions that derive from his premises.)
935.18 What made it difficult for scientists, cosmologists, and cosmogonists to comprehend about Boltzmann’s conceptor Einstein’s implicit espousal of itwas the inherent discontinuity of energy events implicit in the photon as a closed-system package of energy. What happened to the energy when it disappeared? For disappear it did. How could it reappear elsewhere in a discontinuous system?