Ultimately, progress in the knowledge of nature existed in the fact that one knows enough about natural things to be able to understand their behaviour due to their immanent forces, which is known as their immanence. The less insight into these forces people had, the more they assumed outer causes for all effects, and if they were at loss to explain, they resorted to familiar things. In the same way as men and animals are able to effect something, people thought that in nature there are "creatures" that can effect something too, such as demons, ghosts und men-like beings like gods. "Everything is full of gods" said the Ionic natural philosopher Anaximander (611 to 545 BC). And the devil, which comes along like a bad human being, was responsible for the things that failed. Today, this world view is in no way obsolete in wide circles. Especially the religious people who draw upon old texts still try to enforce it.
"However, we have the natural sciences which provide for enlightenment", many a person might think. In deed, natural sciences have strongly changed the view of the world. However, even within the natural sciences there is, though hidden and embellished, a lot of contradiction between immanence and transcendence of forces. Just because Newton (1643 to 1727) was of the opinion that the force implanted into matter is the property to offer resistance, through which every body by itself remains in its state" (Newton, Principia, Definition III), he was accused of godlessness by his competitor Leibniz (1646 to 1716) in a letter to the English Royal Court, which was a severe accusation, although Newton, as a precaution, had written too that this property of resisting of matter would be "implanted" thus probably might have come from God, which, however, was irrelevant for his conception of physics. Already Descartes (1596 to 1650), too, had called it "the First Law of Nature", that every body "as much as it is up to it" behaves correspondingly, which, finally, cost him his life. It has been and still is dangerous to stand up for the immanence of forces and thus for a democratically created freedom of forces, which can react and act of their own accord. It is just much more comfortable and less dangerous to hold foreign powers responsible for everything. In this way, you can get rid of your own responsibility and you possibly need not to rot in hell, which probably nobody really wants to do, as has been threatened. Thus, in the secular sphere, parts of physics are the last refuge of totalitarian thinking - a fact that nobody has yet brought up and spoken openly about it but which is taken for granted!
When the founders of quantum mechanics showed that the existing observables (measurands) are sufficient for describing a quantum mechanic incidence, Einstein (1879 to 1955) was not willing to accept this. According to his "common sense" the theory would actually have to be incomplete, which is why he put on a search for the hidden parameters, which lasted for years (and which was in vain). Einstein, influenced by his autism, refused causes coming from the matter itself and preferred to search something behind the things, finally - like all determinists - something like God's guiding hand - The current climax of this search for transcendent creators is the search for the Higgs particle, significantly also called "God particle", for which a "World Machine" (Large Hadron Collider) was specially built at CERN near Geneva, costing billions of dollars. This idea awarded with the Nobel Prize is that a (transcendent) field which can otherwise not be experienced, called Higgs field, would keep the particles at their place and thus imparting them their inertia. If there were enough energy, a "spark" called Higgs particle could, however, be thrown off from the hypothetical Higgs field, which could then be measured. Yes, there are sparks in abundance, which are willingly allowing their interpretation, in these detectors as high as a house.
On 14th February 2014, I spontaneously sent the following email to the editors concerning a report published in the in-house magazine of the Max-Plank-Society in issue 4.2013.
"Dear Editors,
I have gladly read your informative report on the particle hunter Sandra Kortner. In the end, Newton crossed my mind. His Definition III of his Principia states: "There is a force implanted in matter having the power to resist, by which every body, so far as it is by itself, remains in a state of rest or of uniform straight lined motion". If you accept the immanence of forces in matter, then Newton's Definition (which has been serving us well up to date) also applies to all particles, which do constitute matter. A Higgs field producing resistance would then be completely redundant and all the efforts including the Nobel Prize could have been saved. I see no reason to split off inertia from matter/from the particles, unless they want to prove their deterministic world view with might and main."
Supplementary comment: Already according to Occam (about 1300-1350) all unnecessary assumptions should be avoided in science. (Occam’s razor)In addition, it is completely wrong to speak of matter as a particle. Matter is a measure of inertia, which we experience if pressure is exerted on a body, thus a measurand set by men and purely intellectual, and standardized. We then draw a conclusion from the resistance of a body against the changes of its state about its quantity of matter. Thus matter, in terms of physics, is a counted measurand. What is wrong with this simple fact and/or what cannot be understood about it??? However, I am afraid that I will have to wait for an answer for a long, long time, because this alibi research is not a matter of physics but of the "proof" for a world view of irresponsibility, which becomes more and more out of its time and obsolete. This is the philosophy of hidden primal fears combined with lack of analytic expertise which cannot subdue these fears. Einstein: "This feeling [of mental dependence] mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place". (from Einstein, Albert: The World As I See It"). And the stupidity to take an intellectual measurand for a material particle is just smiled away.
Fission fungi at work
Physicist do not only split atoms
but also split the inertia from the matter
(Mach's Principle and/or Higgs Field),
although especially the inertia is proof of matter and reality.Translation by Martha Greiner-Jetha (Gröbenzell near Munich, Germany)
© HILLE 2014