Physis: neutrinos, elements, the cosmos and Carl Sagan's laws of science

Physis from Greece meaning material existence is the origin of our words: physical, physiology, physician and physics.

Eagle Nebula as seen by Hubble space telescope.

atom "You'd never know it, but six trillion subatomic particles pass through every square inch of your body every second at nearly the speed of light."

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Natural History: Universe "Little Neutral Ones," February 2007, pp. 16-21, p. 16.

We are all awash in a sea of neutrinos

"Most are leftovers from the big bang, but others arrive fresh from their super high-energy origins near black holes, deep inside gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, and within the core of our sun."

"They zip across space, pass through your flesh and bones as if you didn't exist, and continue heedlessly on their way."

The facts:

1. "Along with the photon, the electron, and the less-familiar quark, the neutrino lays claim to being one of the fundamental, indivisible building blocks of nature."

2. the elusive sub atomic particles were experimentally verified in 1956.

3."Today neutrinos remain among the most challenging subatomic particles to catch, even though everybody and everything is steeped in trillions of them....they interact so rarely with other kinds of matter."

p. 18

4. "Turns out, neutrinos come in three flavors, representing three regimes of energy in the universe ....they're called the electron neutrino (low energy), the muon neutrino (middle energy), , and tau neutrino (high energy)."

p. 19

5. "Until recently, physicists were uncertain whether the neutrino had any mass at all"

6. "Once you know a neutrino can transform itself, you know it has a self-timer. You also know it cannot be traveling at the speed of light, which means it must have mass. As of March 2006,...physicists can say with confidence that the mass of the neutrino is no more than 1/2,000,000 the mass of the already tiny electron (about 1/2,000 the mass of the proton.) ."

p. 21

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Natural History: Universe "Little Neutral Ones," February 2007, pp. 16-21.

Physis was the Greek word for the material universe we sense, or detect with instruments. Physics or natural philosophy as Newton's and his contemporaries practiced was developed by physicists so that we may examine and measure material we experience in an attempt to predict its character, origins, capacities and future behavior.

This view of tree rings suggests that the past geological record is still observable in the world we see today. Thus the quest to understand, predict, measure and examine nature involves observation and pre historical details of the geological record. This focus on the material and the temporal is the basis of scientific inquiry today.

In Ionia, a Greek province, these thinkers who examined physical reality were referred to by Plato and Aristotle as: physikoi, the natural philosophers or philosophers of nature. Among them was Thales who conceived of the primordial origin of the cosmic regularity sensed by us was the primary element of water. He believed the universe emerged from a primordial aqueous solution like an embryo in an egg's allantoin, or fluid membrane.

Greek physical thought produced variations on ideas about creation and the origins of all material existence. Among the ideas discussed by the fysikoi was the four elements that combine to form the sensory reality of the material world.

By the time of Aristotle these ideas coalesced into the doctrine of the four elements.

On the floor or Westminster Abbey, in U. K., hidden beneath a carpet, was discovered the original mosaic which from a distance symbolizes the Aristotelian concept: the doctrine of the four elements in graphical formulation.

Using a dialectical approach to hypothesize the underlying conditions for the four elements we experience, Aristotle deduced that opposites combine to produce the elements we see. Thus hot is opposite of cold and wet (moist) is opposite of dry. You combine each two of these conditions, the result, according to the doctrine is the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air.

Related to this doctrine of the four elements was both a mathematical formulation of the Platonic solids and the medical concept of the Doctrine of the Humors: phlegm, two kinds of bile (yellow cause jaundice and black triggered melancholia -- or depression), and sanguine (blood the equivalent of fire) that informed some medical diagnosticians well into the 19th century.

Greek doctrine of the Four Elements
Elements	conditions	hot	cold	wet	dry
fire		*			*
water			*	*
earth			*		*
air		*		*

Chinese elements or five phases

These characteristics and elements were the constituent parts of all material things in creation. They were replaced from the eighteenth century of Lavoisier to the nineteenth century of Mendeleev by the Periodic Table of the Elements, that chemists use today.

A related but very different conception of matter was held by Chinese material philosophers, who understood these elements as phases through which all material passes.

Chinese five elements
element	water	earth	fire	metal	wood

This use of reasonable categories to make sense of the physical conditions of existence is one mainspring of science.

Our motivation to love the world ( an aphilia ) requires that we explain what that physical and metaphysical world means to us. Our affection for nature ( called: biophilia ) has been referred to as an erotics of place.

Physics, physician, and physiology all stem from this same root word. By the time of Heraclitus (BCE 234) this word Physis, was the equivalent of our idea of nature. Nature here referred to the indestructible, elemental, immortal totality of the cosmos -- which Plato said was a living being. In the Greek debate as to the exact meaning of fysis is a revealing paradox in our relationship to our surroundings.

Dialectical organization represented in a schematic table:

Some argued that nature should be referred to the organizational patterns inherent in all things. Others countered based on emphasizing a fluid process of fluctuation. Heraclitus and Democritus argued that nature referred to either the "structure of things or the development of things."

Dialectically opposite concepts
Democritus	Heraclitus
structure of things	development of things
atoms in a void	fire as transformational
structure is foremost	process is dynamic
constancy	change

Science is a dialectic between what is knowable and the degree of uncertainty with which we know.

atom Neutron decay H atom

What then accounts for the order of things? Do we apprehend order, or is order imposed upon us? This importance of physical knowledge in relation to the other ideas we cobble together as we design our worldview relates to our ability to distinguish imagined, from real situations.

Three distinct -- yet related and tightly connected, meanings emerged from the early arguments of the philosophers from the time of Thales to the death of Ptolemy about the sort of order we perceive around us.

Foremost was the idea of growth and the process referred to a genesis or the origins of life.
It also referred to the primordial material, arche, in Greek, out of which the perceivable universe is crafted.
The word referred to the internal principle of organization that makes things function according to a process.

Do the ideas we believe about the world truly correspond well with and reliably represent the world we actually inhabit?

The late Carl Sagan–in an interview with questioners in an audience asking about seeing truth–suggested that "A simple question: How can we recognize the truth? It is, of course, difficult. But there are a few simple rules. The truth ought to be logically consistent. It should not contradict itself; that is there are some logical criteria. It ought to be consistent with what else we know."

"We know a great many things–a tiny fraction to be sure, of the universe, a pitifully tiny fraction. But nevertheless some things we know with quite high reliability."

The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we should be. It involves a kind of courageous self-discipline.

I think those three principles at least will winnow out a fair amount of chaff. It doesn't guarantee that what remains will be true, but at least it will significantly diminish the field of discourse."

In response to a physicists prompt Sagan said: "So do I," referring to the questioner's point: "I don't believe as a physicist that physics deals with the truth. I believe that it deals with successive approximations of the truth."

Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, ed. Ann Druyan, New York: Penguin Press, 2006, pp. 229-230, 239.

Sagan's Three Principles of science are:

logically consistent, in that a truth should not contradict itself.
truth must be consistent with what else we know.
Be ever more skeptical the more we want to believe a truth.

Examples are:

Laws of existence.
Solar System.
Bohr atom.
Wilzeck, Physics Lecture on the Strange and beautiful Universe
This is the task of the physical sciences, to reveal the order, periodicity, form, function, structural dynamics and inherent meaning of actual material existence.
Electromagnetic spectrum.

Go here to see more on science subjects.

Science Index | Population Index | Global Warming Index | Nature Index | Research sites.

schedule | Back to Home page | Atlas | site-map