[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West Bit 4: Time & Destiny against Space &

[jprussell]

We've gotten past the really big thoughts from Decline of the West, but there's still some interesting stuff to go through. This time, we talk about Time, Destiny, Space, and Motion.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

The concepts of "time" vs "destiny" is very interesting. I often find myself walking through the past and trying to explain it. I'll start looking for a "destiny" switch!

Newton did not see gravity as inherent in matter, or space as empty. He wrote:

That gravity should be innate inherent & {essential} to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum wthout the mediation of any thing else by & through wch they may convey their action or force {may} be conveyed/ from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleived no man who has in philosophical matters any competent {illeg} faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent {acting} <7v> consta{ntl}y according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers.

As it is, Lorentz' relativity showed that Newton's laws were not valid at speeds near the speed of light. So Newton's laws are indeed "models", and not "objective facts".

[jprussell]

Thank you for the quote! One thing I didn't go into in the post, but was on my mind, is that Spengler seems to back-project a modernist atheism/agnosticism onto Newton that was, of course, totally false. I don't think Newton's interest in alchemy was widely-known back then, but these days, the quote you provide makes me think he must have had something like spirit/quintessence in mind as the likely agent.

Also, yes, thank you - I should have made more clear that modern professional scientists thoroughly known that Newtonian physics are only a model, and scientifically literate folks know that at least intellectually. When Spengler was writing, though, Special Relativity was still pretty new, and General Relativity was published between Volume 1 and 2, so those ideas were on the very bleeding edge of physics, so for him to recognize that at the time was pretty remarkable. Also, I think a perhaps more important point is that most folks who "know" that Newtonian physics is "only a model" know this intellectually, but still intuit how the world around them works in basically Newtonian ways, and it takes concerted mental effort to do otherwise.

[thinking_turtle]

Another answer to people who think the world is deterministic (that you can predict the future if you had infinite computing power) is radioactive decay. No-one can tell when a single atom of Uranium will decay. If you can't predict the future of a single atom, how can you predict the world?

Looking forward to the next part!