Galileo may have upset the church with his sun centred solar system but he, like many early philosophers, believed God was the provider of everything. He still however sought to explain the why of behaviours. Today we are much less concerned with the why of everything and more concerned with what we have come to know through observation and measurement. We have discarded the Bohr model, now see moving electrons as in clouds or orbitals and have a list of particles in the standard model but have no idea as to the purpose of everything?
In 1644, a French philosopher, Rene Descartes, best known for his “I think therefore I am”, argued a product of mass and speed he called “quantity of motion” was conserved. His Cartesian followers later replaced speed with velocity as direction was clearly significant. This mv product later came to be known as momentum.
In 1676, a German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz argued that his “motive force”, a product of mass and velocity squared (mv2), later called “vis viva” or living force, was the true conserved quantity. Its apparent loss in inelastic collisions he argued was it contributing to minute unseen parts in the whole. The conflict of this view with Cartesian views, became known as the “vis viva” controversy. It lasted near 50 years.
Newton (1642 -1726) viewed forces as impressed. They were the cause of action. He saw matter and light as hard, indivisible, corpuscular balls and saw “gross bodies and light convertible into one another”.
Newton’s status meant his ideas were much accepted. His gravity attraction with its “force at a distance” had its critics but subsequent work by Coulomb, Faraday, Ampere and Maxwell had similar forces at a distance and so the concept of force fields came to be accepted.
Émilie du Châtelet (1706 –1749) a French noblewoman and philosopher corresponded with and invited many philosophers to her chateau where she had a huge library and much scientific apparatus. She supported “vis viva”, repeated experiments where balls were dropped into soft clay and translated Newton’s Principia into French.
Emilie’s view of force and matter were not those of Newton. She viewed forces as either active or passive. Her forces were resident in matter which she saw as highly divisible, internally active and striving for change, yet also constrained in activity.
Early 1800’s and “vis viva” now known as energy was calculated using 1/2 mv2. Then it became kinetic energy as there was clearly energy in steam and as the boring of canons produced heat energy. Engineers were now increasingly calculating forces, work done, kinetic energy, thermal energy and potential energy and using energy conservation.
The concepts of momentum, of energy, of work done, of externally impressed forces, of charge and of force fields delivering distant actions were well established and proving useful long before:-
1. The 1897 discovery of the first atomic particle, the electron.
2. Planck’s black body experiments had linked radiated energy to frequency.
3. Einstein had linked energy radiated to mass loss in his E = mc2.
4. Charge had became a property of electrons and protons.
5. Einstein told us no external force exists in a downward fall.
6. Photon – matter interactions were discovered.
7. Nuclear decays had been observed.
Established concepts did not work at the atomic level
The more we knew of the atomic world the more it became clear that the laws and concepts of our macro world could not be applied there. So we put the established macro ideas on the shelf, called them classical physics and turned to a new and different quantum physics.
Why were these two branches of physics incompatible when macro behaviours clearly result from behaviours at the micro or particle level? Had our classical ideas of force, momentum, work done and energy been right? Which of the ideas were compatible with the new quantum concepts and when might we combine them and when should we avoid doing so?
If Emilie du Chatelet’s view of proactive forces resident in matter had been adopted and Newton’s impressed force causing remote actions been discarded, science would have taken a very different path. Non-living structure actions would no longer be the result of external forces. They would, like living structure actions, arise out of internal desires. We would now view all particulate matter as proactively desiring, selecting and processing energy. We would have a changed picture that would include:-
- Gravity motions as particle desires for space energies.
- Contact motions as particle structures fleeing from unwanted energies.
- Electrons, protons and neutrons as having purpose. Electrons seeking locations where they can best serve environmental energy to protons and hence neutrons but not to excess.
- The desire of electrons to serve protons and protons wanting to be served by electrons, but not to excess, would explain the charge force but also why electrons don’t crash into the protons in nuclei.
- All movements and vibrations of particles become the self determined, proactive actions of particles within structures and of structures to control and stabilise their energy desires.
- The strong force would simply be the desire of neutrons to secure their energy desires from protons but as for the electron – proton exchanges, not to excess. Their vibrating motions we would now see as proactive actions.
- Radioactive decays we would now see as self determined actions and for the purpose of providing better energy processing’s.
- States of matter, chemical, nuclear changes and expansions all become decisions that particles make in order to better satisfy and secure their energy desires from whatever be their changed environment.
- No motion related kinetic energy or potential energy. Conserved energy would comprise that present in either matter or in the bosons radiating through space.
- Energy as something that is real, living and proactive. We wouldn’t have to persuade students its just a property, a number we calculate.
- Human evolution would be the result of particle desires. Those particle desires would explain why we exist.
- Light speed would be the speed at which matter energy wants to process radiations. Energy shifts would be carried out as part of those processes.
- There would be no forces at a distance. All motions and changes would be locally decided by particles.
- We would have an explanation for why we have to take all possibilities into account when establishing a quantum probability. It would be that particles take all possibilities into account when deciding what actions they are to take.
This concept of a living proactive energy should not affect the mathematics which has been proven to work. What it does do is change our view of why universal actions and changes occur. It makes everything simpler to understand, teach and review.