Slowly do I move forward in my efforts to develop words and grammatical structures and concepts adequate to describing the social and moral setting of man as he learns to shape himself, his societies, his technologies, to better reflect and take advantage of the richness and complexity of God’s Creation. This richness and complexity can even be described — to an extent — as being itself a result of the human mind’s development as men explore more deeply and more widely into Creation, sometimes managing to respond in ways that seem to be appropriate in practical or moral terms, terms not to be ultimately separated and not to be fully separated even in the short-term by those who wish to be wise, that is, to act and think in ways anticipating a greater and more accurate knowledge than we currently have.
The knowledge we have of Creation, and the wisdom we need to exercise even as we no more than aspire to the true and complete knowledge of which that wisdom is but a pale reflection, can be seen as having developed in our past and to be developing now as man explores and otherwise responds to that Creation, a manifestation of thoughts our Maker wishes us to share with Him. As I’ve said before, “God is smart,” When it comes to the thoughts of God which resulted in spacetime and stuff, God knows more than freshman mathematics and freshman physics. He knows at least as much as the physics faculty at Harvard and so we should expect it to be hard work to understand what God did as Creator.
And so I turn, for a short while, to more prosaic matters of the sorts understood by those professors at Harvard and many other physicists around the world.
The so-called fictitious forces in physics are the result of forces which don’t exist in all frames, coordinate systems, to the perception of all observers. (I’m being loose and colloquial in my language.)
In The Nature of Science: An A-Z Guide to the Laws & Principles Governing our Universe, the physicist James Trefil provides some technical background for this discussion and does so in clear and understandable prose:
An observer watching from the outside [as the car you’re riding in takes a sharp turn, would say] you were simply continuing to move in a straight line, as any object would if not acted upon by an external force, and the car curved away from you. To this observer, in other words, it’s not that you are being pushed against the door — it is that the door is being pushed against you.
There is nothing inherently contradictory between these two views. They lead to exactly the same description of events and exactly the same equations describing those events.
…
Because not all observers see a force acting, physicists often refer to the centrifugal force as a fictitious force or pseudoforce, but I find these terms somewhat misleading. There is, after all, nothing fictitious about the force you can feel pushing you against the side of the car. The reality of the situation, though, is that you are still trying to move in a straight line and the car is turning away from that straight line and so pushing against you. [page 67]
Centrifugal force can be fictitious in that various descriptions can be given of you being thrown against that car door but it’s not imaginary, as Professor Trefil tells us. A broken arm or wrenched shoulder is real by any of the various descriptions.
Arguably, the force most often labeled ‘fictitious’ is the Coriolis force. Professor Trefil has this to say:
It is the Coriolis force that produces the swirling cloud patterns we associate with satellite pictures of storms. Air starts to flow in a straight line from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure, but the Coriolis force deflects it and causes it to move in a spiral path. (Alternately, we could say that the Earth rotates underneath it so that it appears to move in a spiral to someone on the planet’s surface.)
Again, we can label this force ‘fictitious’, but anyone who’s experienced the damage done by the swirling winds of a hurricane, or even seen it on television, will wonder at the use of this term.
Just to nail down the reality and importance of fictitious forces, gravity is also a fictitious force in general relativity and — so far as I know — all other mainstream theories of gravity. It is ‘fictitious’ because gravity, in Einsteinian theories, is a result of bending of spacetime, which is itself what is being described by frames of reference. You aren’t pulled by the earth but rather do you slide down where the earth has bent spacetime by its relatively large mass. This is why you feel weightless on certain carnival rides or on an elevator which starts its descent rapidly. In that frame of the ride or elevator, you are weightless, you are moving freely in the earth’s gravitational field. To “move freely” in this sense is to be standing still in the common-sense understanding.
In the same way, if you were standing on a train flatbed as it curved sharply, you’d be moving freely and feel no forces for a few seconds as you went flying off in a straight-line. You wouldn’t feel any force until you slammed into a tree or scraped along the ground. Very suddenly, you would have entered a different frame of reference in which you will feel a great deal of force as you collide with something or the other.
I’ll move to my main topic by quoting myself from a weblog entry I wrote nearly three years ago: Differential Geometry and Moral Narratives.
The American physicist John Wheeler once summarized general relativity by telling us that matter tells space how to shape itself and space then tells matter how to move. Maybe we can play around with this metaphor:
“Human beings tell moral space how to shape itself and moral space then tells human beings how to move through life — how to act.”
Following Hannah Arendt and others, I’ve spoken of the modern middle-class which went about its various works, engineering and administration and chemical manufacturing, oblivious to — or perhaps struggling to suppress — any perceptions that they were helping to commit large scale crimes against a variety of innocent human beings: the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, the Ukrainian peasants in the same general period, the North Koreans and the Vietnamese and the Iraqis in the period of American self-destruction. We Americans, perhaps the junior-league imperialistic countries of Europe as well, are likely to suffer soon, at least within a generation, from the same emotional humiliations and physical hardships which a harsh reality inflicted upon the Nazi-era Germans and Soviet-era Russians when their imperial carnival rides ended.
I’ve noted before that Adam Smith retreated from his cheerleading for British-style capitalism long enough to ponder the frightening possibility that the sort of commercial society described in The Wealth of Nations might well produce citizens quite genial but lacking moral integrity not because they’re willfully immoral but because they have no innards to speak of, just a pleasant smile and gentle habits.
Let me take a look at this situation from a slightly different angle to see if we can learn something or at least start developing a new way of speaking about such matters, a new way that might help us to understand how and why we get into our modern moral messes — such nice men and women sending their armed forces to kill children overseas directly and by way of destroying sanitation systems and hospitals and so forth. Maybe we could even find some possible ways out of these modern moral messes. It’s unlikely we can avoid our imminent disaster because we’re too cowardly, most of us, to have been riding loosely on the equivalent of a railroad flatbed, but being inside won’t protect us because our train isn’t just going around a sharp curve; it’s being thrown off the rails and heading for a nearby field littered with boulders.
Let’s switch from physical spacetime to a different sort of space, the space of social relationships. In these short pieces, I sometimes feel a need to be repetitive and I’ll remind the reader again that I consider created being to lie on a spectrum of abstract being to concrete being, of the most abstract truths which are those God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation through the likes of mathematical truths to those more particular mathematical truths we can see in quantum mechanics and particle physics and on to the thing-like being of this world. I speculate that social spaces belong to a more abstract group of spaces which includes spacetime — let’s call it spaces of relationships for now, including relationships of an entity to its context.
It’s not just that our paths through life start curving beneath our feet as Dante the pilgrim recorded at the start of The Inferno. Those paths and the ground around them are twisting as we enter a phase of human history where some complex possibilities of Creation are now appearing, often without our conscious participation in their emergence. The very space in which our trunks and heads move are being twisted in ways often different from the twisting of the ground beneath our feet. And, yet, we’re bringing on these changes ourselves by exploring Creation and responding to it, rightly or wrongly.
I’m still think matters through and will probably outline an entire book on this subject of expanding our language and concepts for describing and analyzing our moral natures and moral lives, but I’m working on general concepts now and trying to set up my explorations of this topic. Let me go wandering about a little, as is my habit.
Assume something like an orthogonal coordinate system, a retreat from the goal of setting up coordinate-free systems as is done in general relativity and also in certain complex but non-relativistic and non-quantum branches of science and engineering. Let’s assume that the y-axis is some sort of a measure of the acts of a human being which result from individualistic desires, urges, etc. The x-axis is the measure of the acts which result from communal ties, duties, etc. (Be careful about literalizing these natural ways of talking as if desires belong to us as individuals and duties to us as community members — I’ll say no more about this for now.)
Imagine a circle which defines regions of individual-community mixes which are proper for a man who is the member of a certain community, say a village of pre-Celtic natives in southern England a few thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ. There is no easy way, so far as I know, to say that the possibilities in that region are “more individualistic” or “more communal” than what I experience in the region of Ludlow, MA, USA in 2011. The ways in which they were individualistic and the ways in which they were communal were different from the ways I experience. The ways of those longfar agoway human beings combined to form a total human situation, so to speak, which was undoubtedly much different — again — from what I experience in my various communities. One obvious difference is that modern men are probably members of a variety and number of smaller communities within larger communities to an extent which would bewilder a man of 5,000 years ago.
I’m about to place a big burden on your visual imagination even though mine isn’t really so strong — it’s one of my weaker cognitive talents.
So, take on the burden as you imagine this graph of individual vs. community moving into a new direction perpendicular to the axes, individual and communal. That region defining an appropriate mixture of individualistic and communal characteristics for southern England moves through the centuries as if it were reflections in a fun-house. Worse. Unlike most assumed spaces for discussions of the physical universe, this space isn’t likely to be well-behaved. Drawing analogies to the analyses of physical space to be found in books about general relativity, post-Newtonian gravity theory in general, there are likely to rips and tears and other distortions in the shape of that region so that singularities, and maybe other serious problems, will arise. I suspect the definition of causal regions will be far more complex where I consider causal regions for now in terms of timelike regions and spacelike regions and null-lines of special relativity. In any case, there will be great stresses which twist and turn any entity in these moral-social spaces.
I’d like to stay with that image of that region of “appropriate mixtures of individualistic and communal characteristics” as it moves forward in time, twisting and turning, tearing and — in some localities — disappearing into black-holes of a sort. In addition, new regions will appear on that graph. To the extent this analogy works, vague and poorly-defined as it is, our lives are paths through those graphs. And some, including those of us alive in 2011, suffer and enjoy rapid change, that is, great deformations to that region within short periods of time. As we move forward, we might find ourselves moving from a ‘mainstream’ spot deep in the heart of that region of individualistic-communal characteristics to a marginal spot or even one outside what is considered appropriate in a world which suddenly seems so brave and so new.
As we move into strange regions, we’ll feel forces upon our innermost selves even if we’re moving in the straight lines we might have learned from morally well-ordered parents, teachers, clergymen, Boy Scout leaders, and others. Our moral-social space is twisting about as we try to move through it. And it’s twisting about in a way undescribable in any but very abstract terms which I believe to be above the level of abstraction of the mathematics used by modern theoretical physicists to describe the various shapes, contorted and otherwise, of possible spacetimes. From that level of abstraction, there are various lines of descent toward concreteness, one line leading to the relationships of spacetime and matter-energy, another line leading to the relationships of human communities.
One point I’d like to emphasize is that abstract being is for real. Abstractions aren’t just descriptions of concrete created being. They are what concrete created being is shaped from and they continue to inhere in that concrete created being. Those moral-social spaces aren’t just a bookish description. They are a reality inherent in our nature and realized by our development as a race, by the development in particular of the human mind and all that comes from the mind: technology and culture and whatever other categories of human civilized life you might like to use.