What I’ve got to write about here is turning out to be too much for one post, so I think I will break it up into two or three parts. I’m gonna start off with some scienc-y stuff for Part 1, but if this doesn’t interest you, hang with me, (or just skip to the last paragraph and wait for the next post!) I’m going to get to a more common ground of experience soon.
I’ve taught Thermal Physics, usually to 9th graders, quite a number of times over the years, possibly the most of any other topic. It’s a subject I’m fascinated by scientifically, as it has certain anti-materialistic nuggets tucked into the established science that I think most folks who teach science won’t admit. The big one is energy. As one of my Waldorf science mentors has said many times, there is no “heatron” in thermal physics analogous to an “electron” in the study of electricity. So, while the electron gives people who study electricity the comfortable feeling that there is a “thing” responsible for electrical effects (There isn’t. The electron is only a model and therefore simply a thought construct to which we’ve granted a feeling of “thing-ness”), no such false comfortability exists when you study thermal physics, the physics of warming and cooling.
Richard Feynmann himself, in one of his famous lectures to freshman at CalTech, offered a fun and surprisingly honest analogy for working with energy in thermal physics in which he compared it to Dennis the Menace playing with blocks in his room. The honest part comes at the end of the analogy when he says quite clearly, “What is the analogy of this to the conservation of energy? The most remarkable aspect that must be abstracted from this picture is that there are no blocks. . .It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives “28”—always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.”
So, when working with warming and cooling phenomena, you are stuck studying a subject that, if you’re honest, defies “thingification.”
I said warming and cooling because there is a biased and almost thing-ified concept called “heat”. Heat is supposedly the thermal form of energy. The standard kinetic model asks you to imagine increased “amounts of heat” as increased motion of the molecules. Ah, there are the things we can understand. Decreasing amounts of heat is how we understand cooling, and so less and less motion means less and less heat. This all seems straightforward enough, and you quickly arrive at the conclusion that the complete absence of all motion is the absence of all heat energy, the idea of absolute zero. Seems neat and tidy. Except it’s not, at least not in my view. It turns out that as you actually, physically approach “absolute zero” on the Kelvin scale (the scale that is just the Celsius scale with zero placed at this theoretical coldest point), it becomes more and more difficult to “remove energy”. The kinds of substances you are working with experimentally at these temperatures are things like liquid helium. I spent a summer in the basement of a physics building on my college campus dipping metal samples into liquid helium to experiment with their electrical qualities at around 2 degrees above "absolute zero". But helium starts to exhibit all kinds of very weird behaviors (like superfluidity. It literally starts crawling up the walls of its container) below 2 Kelvin, and trying to get closer and closer to this ideal lowest temperature becomes harder and harder. Many metals exhibit something called “superconductivity” at very low temperatures, which means they conduct electric current with no losses. So, getting to lowest theoretical temperatures becomes interconnected with physical and electrical and magnetic behavior, and you may start to lose your sense that what you are trying to reach anymore is a temperature so much as an idea.
“Absolute zero” is, in fact, not a fixed point you can reach, but an infinitesimally small abstraction, an imaginary point that you can only approach closer and closer, but never reach. In mathematics, that’s called an asymptote, or also Xeno's paradox. A scientist called Dalton realized this and proposed an alternative temperature scale that was logarithmic, in which the degree marking changed its unit size, to give warming and cooling basically equal footing on the scale. So, there are an infinite number of degrees to reach absolute zero (that get smaller and smaller the colder you get) just as there is no theoretical hottest temperature. Now we are getting somewhere. But the Dalton scale has not yet caught on like the Kelvin scale did.
I want to be clear here that I’m not writing this to: (1) try to disprove the laws of thermal physics as they are written. That’s not interesting to me at the moment, and likely not possible within the reductionist constraints that are built into the creation of the laws in the first place. Yet I am trying to point out that the way that the laws were conceived have bias built into them. I have done some reading on the history of the development of thermal physics, and the question of the temperature scale used to write the equations was not a trivial one. Many different scales were tried and the consensus was almost entirely in service of achieving abstract universal equations, not faithfulness to the phenomena. I’m also not (2) trying to make the case for perpetual motion machines or free energy devices, which have a thriving corner of the internet all to themselves. Sometimes I’ve been sucked into those corners, and they can be tantalizing and fun. I’ve read about the suppression of Nikola Tesla’s free energy transmission device, and Victor Shauberger’s vortex-based propulsion systems. . . all perhaps worth looking into, but not my purposes here. Here, I’d like to keep the focus on simply this: When the laws of thermal physics were being written, they were developed with two specific purposes in mind. Those were: to perfect the efficiency of the steam engine, and then to abstract those efficiency formulae for “universal laws”. Fast forward to today, and we’ve simply swapped out the internal combustion engine for the steam engine. We have, in fact, not made many significant advances in thermal physics. We’ve got nuclear fission reactors, but they just make more excessive heating. And there’s the constant search for sustainable nuclear fusion, which is always 30 years away. We’ve got the jet engine, and rocket propulsion, but really, the technology and the so-called laws are married hand in hand, and so it’s no wonder that we haven’t solved our energy crisis. We are obsessed with heating, and have ignored cooling.
This bias that our scientific study of warming and cooling has toward heat and against "coolth" (we don't even have a thing-y word for cooling energy) is something I think about all the time. That this is the case really should be no surprise, because we have a technological world that is almost entirely based on creating huge surpluses of heat through combustion, and then harvesting portions of that energy for our purposes. I wrote about this in my post about Tree Technology. What I’m trying to say is, we need to learn to understand and love cooling as much as we do warming, and we might then start to understand etheric technology better.
I’ll stop here for Part 1. In Part 2, I’ll talk much less about the science angle, and more about the human angle.
I appreciate the accessibility of this as someone who has not studied any of this science but found it possible to follow you. I look forward to part 2.