--- Charles Brown >
>
>
> On the curved space-time, interesting that in his
> Ph.d thesis , Marx favored
> Epicurus over Democritus , and Epicurus held that
> there was a declination of
> a falling atom from a straight line, that atoms
> "swwerved" , which is a
> curve, in contrast with Democritus who held they
> fall in a straightline.
>
> Democritus speculatively thought of atoms.
>
> Did Epircurus speculatively discover curved
> space-time ?
>
> ( See below)
>
> Charles
andie nachgeborenen
No: for Epicurus the particles swerved, not the space
they fall in. In GTR, the particles do not swerve,
they follow the shortest distince between points,
i.e., a straight line in non-Euclidean space.
Non-E geometries were discovered by Johann C.F. Gauss
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Farkas
Bolyai a little afterwards, and around the same time
by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (the subject of a
famous song by Tom Lehrer ("Plagiarize! Don't shade
your eyes! That's why got made your eyes!")), as well
as G.F.B. Riemann, around mid-century.
The key thing is what happens when you deny Euclid's
parallels postulate (parallel lines never meet), which
had for thousands of years struck mathematicians as
unobvious in theway that Euclid's other postulates are
not. Turns out taht you can construct consitent
geometries when you deny the p-posstulate, thus
blowing everyone's minds and setting the statge for
Einstein to posit that these geometries describe
actual space(time).
--- Charles Brown > wrote:
>
>
>
> On the curved space-time, interesting that in his
> Ph.d thesis , Marx favored
> Epicurus over Democritus , and Epicurus held that
> there was a declination of
> a falling atom from a straight line, that atoms
> "swwerved" , which is a
> curve, in contrast with Democritus who held they
> fall in a straightline.
>
> Democritus speculatively thought of atoms.
>
> Did Epircurus speculatively discover curved
> space-time ?
>
> ( See below)
>
> Charles
>
> ^^^^^^
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen
>
>
>
> Gravity is not a force. That is the fundamental
> negative result of GTR -- the elimination of the
> idea
> of the "force" of gravitation posited by Newton,
> thus
> the elimination of the problem of action at a
> distance
> that so puzzled him.* Gravity is an effect of the
> curvature of spacetime near massy objects. It is an
> consequence of geometry. Neither is it correct to
> say
> that it in virtue of some occult force that
> mass-energy "causes" spacetime to curve. That
> presupposes tata spacetime is somehow naturally
> Euclidean and that something must be posited to
> expalin deviations from flatness. This is an error.
> S-T is locally Euclidean, which may be where the
> error
> comes from. It may be (but probbaly isn't)
> Euclidean
> in on the large scale, but once you give up the idea
> of Newtonian absolute space, fixed, immovable, the
> same everywhere, it is no special mystery why the
> presence of mass-energy would produce variations in
> the shape of spacetime, and why it would produce the
> precise highly preductable vatiations it does. No
> occult powers are called for to account for this
> unless you illegitimately import closet Newtonian
> assumptions. As noted by me and others, a
> unification
> of GTR with qwuantum theory, which hopefully will
> give
> us more ins ights into gravity, still eludes us.
>
> * Action at a distance creeps back in quantum theory
>
> -- in a context totally removed from gravitation --
> via Bell's Theorem, but quantum is so fundamentally
> bizarre and incomprehensible that there isn't much
> we
> can do about that
>
> ^^^^^^
>
> Karl Marx
> The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean
> Philosophy of Nature
> Part II: On the Difference between Democritean and
> Epicurean Physics In
> Detail
>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch04.htm
> ________________________________
>
>
> Chapter One: The Declination of the Atom from the
> Straight Line
>
> ________________________________
>
>
>
>
> Epicurus assumes a threefold motion of the atoms in
> the void.(1)
>
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch04.htm#1>
> One
> motion is the fall in a straight line, the second
> originates in the
> deviation of the atom from the straight line, and
> the third is established
> through the repulsion of the many atoms. Both
> Democritus and Epicurus accept
> the first and the third motion. The declination of
> the atom from the
> straight line differentiates the one from the
> other.(2)
>
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch04.htm#2>
>
>
> This motion of declination has often been made the
> subject of a joke. Cicero
> more than any other is inexhaustible when he touches
> on this theme. Thus we
> read in him, among other things:
>
> "Epicurus maintains that the atoms are thrust
> downwards in a straight line
> by their weight; this motion is said to he the
> natural motion of bodies. But
> then it occurred to him that if all atoms were
> thrust downwards, no atom
> could ever meet another one. Epicurus therefore
> resorted to a lie. He said
> that the atom makes a very tiny swerve, which is, of
> course, entirely
> impossible. From this arose complexities,
> combinations and adhesions of the
> atoms with one another, and out of this came the
> world, all parts of it and
> its contents. Besides all this being a puerile
> invention, he does not even
> achieve what he desires."(3)
>
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch04.htm#3>
>
>
> We find another version in the first book of
> Cicero's treatise On the Nature
> of the Gods:
>
> "Since Epicurus saw that, if the atoms travelled
> downwards by their own
> weight, nothing would be within our control, for
> their motion would be
> determined and necessary, he invented a means for
> escaping this necessity, a
> means which had escaped the notice of Democritus. He
> says that the atom,
> although thrust downwards by its weight and gravity,
> makes a very slight
> swerve. To assert this is more disgraceful than to
> he incapable of defending
> what he wants."(4)
>
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch04.htm#4>
>
>
Evolutionary theory/GravitationCharles Brown
* Previous message: [lbo-talk] Putting the 'X' Back In Xmas
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CB: Thanks, Les.
My other thought was did Epicurus speculatively derive quantum mechanics ?
Since the swerve might explain why location and speed of electrons can't be
simultaneously measured in that measurer is looking for the location at the
end of a straightline and it is actually curved away from the location where
it is looked for.
Reply to Justin: I don't think Epicurus gave an explanation for the curve.
At any rate, both Democrius' version of the atom and Epircurus' swerving
atom are not precisely like the modern scientific descriptions, just
interestingly overlapping pictures or concepts for obvious reasons
^^^^^^
Les Schaffer
Charles Brown wrote:
>
>On the curved space-time, interesting that in his Ph.d thesis , Marx
favored
>Epicurus over Democritus , and Epicurus held that there was a declination
of
>a falling atom from a straight line, that atoms "swwerved" , which is a
>curve, in contrast with Democritus who held they fall in a straightline.
>
>
charles:
do a google on "Zitterbewegung", doesnt relate to relativity theory, but
you'll find the description interesting.
les schaffer
Visual Quantum Mechanics
<http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/imawww/vqm/pages/samples/206_01b.html>
Solution of the free Dirac equation (Zitterbewegung) ... The time evolution
exhibits the phenomenon called "Zitterbewegung": The expectation value of
the ...
www.kfunigraz.ac.at/imawww/ vqm/pages/samples/206_01b.html - 6k - Cached
<http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:U_O5yLOUfA0J:www.kfunigraz.ac.at/imaww
w/vqm/pages/samples/206_01b.html+Zitterbewegung&hl=en> - Similar pages
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=related:www.kfunigraz.ac.at/imawww
/vqm/pages/samples/206_01b.html>
Zitterbewegung
<http://delta.cs.cinvestav.mx/~mcintosh/comun/symm/node11.html>
Evolutionary theory/Gravitation
Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Fri Dec 30 17:24:00 PST 2005
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----
If one wishes to claim to be heir to Democritus & Epicurus, talking
about their specific theories (atoms & swerve etc) is precisely the
_wrong_ way to go about it. Their specific theories have no relation
whatever to modern notions of space, time, or matter. What one should claim
allegiance to is only the _spirit_ of their investigations and claims: their
materialist perspective. And swerving atoms are quite another matter. And
even more important was/is their perspective (passed on to us by Lucretius)
on death: The dead don't know they're dead, and death is a tragedy for the
living, not the dead.
Carrol
^^^^
CB: I agree with this , except for the fact that their method seems to be
speculative and not empirical , which seems at first blush not to be
materialist ( there is idealist empiricism, but is there speculative
materialism ?) I assume there must be something materialist to their
approach , though, as Marx's thesis is on them because of something
materialist in their method. What is materialist about the way they arrived
at these theories of the atom or the swerve ?
Yes, "when you're dead, you're done" is a hard one.
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