A possible Philosophical Orderin

ii) the strength of the force that binds together the particles of an atomic nucleus: ε = 0.007, as the proportion of the mass of a hydrogen nucleus converted into energy at its fusion into helium

iii) Ω = 1/25 or 0.04: the ratio of the actual density (atoms per cubic metre) of the universe to the critical density at which gravity would bring cosmic expansion to a halt

iv) λ as an accelerating force on a cosmic scale competing with gravity: not = 0 (implying a universe in a constant state: holding gravity in check on an inter-galactic scale), but experimentally established as 0.7 (a replacement for the Einstein’s discarded cosmological constant)

v) Q as the ratio between the force of gravity in galaxies the force needed to break up and disperse them as a percentage of their rest mass (mc²): 1/100,000 – a low figure which from the beginning of the universe allowed miniscule ripples from which its structure derived

i) Einstein’s Reference Frames in his Special Relativity Theory in the light of Schelling’s postulation for Each Thing of its Own Space and Time

ii) Schelling’s involvement in the earliest establishment of a relationship between magnetism and electricity as part of a search for a universal source of energy in the cosmos; his familiarity with Faraday’s experiments; his thought as open to “field theory”

Some comments on these factors [in the Einleitung] in a possible philosophical ordering of the material of cosmogony-cosmology

Whilst bringing together significant cosmic numbers, inevitably impressionistically suggesting an overall unity and therefore the nearness to an overall unitary cosmic theory, Sir Martin Rees admits that the picture which he presents of the cosmos in the light of speculation on recent research is not final. Eight years have passed since the publication of his book, and this time has produced new swathes of discoveries, macrocosmic and microcosmic, and the corresponding adjustments to previous theorising.

Probably most people have the residual impression that the nature of space, and particularly of its filling, has not changed much. That it is uniform in all directions, and that the question of crossing the lonely inter-galactic distances does not arise, let alone that these spaces are occupied in any manner.

But the picture is changing with great rapidity as cosmologists audaciously revise the physics of the cosmos, and, from the discernment of factors which could only be held in equilibrium by the presence of other objects and forces, infer the presence of others not yet known. And yet all this not within a closed cosmos, but one in which there is development and expansion. Because it includes the object itself which occupies space and has its dimensions, the word “duration” can posit and allude to that as it views it in whatever process. It would be better to reserve “time” as the ultimately subjective measure which judges on all motions compared in establishing it. The mind comprehends regularity even as its judges on data and evidence. Whilst a convention could be established for a time with randomised units of different length, regularity is expected of it as a utility. As light travels at a standard speed in all directions we can look into space and see the presence of light-objects in stages now through which it had long passed: even to see material which had begun to emit its light when the process had just begun. That light ages as it is delivered to us in individual trajectories. The cosmos only coheres as a durationless unity as its dimensions are united with a particular now of my experience. If I do not confine myself to the particular now of my experience but move in my mind backwards and forwards, recapitulating at least in the imagination indeterminate, or by intention determinate, durations, particularly if I am in the privileged position of being able to observe galaxies by a telescope (or derivatively looking at photographs), my experience is imperfectly of the cosmos in duration – as it really is. Then I will probably be unable to analyse and describe what I am clearly seeing! Particularly as the cosmos changes through duration, a picture of that should be the truest, like a historical geography, except that it needs not a timeless geography, but a geography that is shown as also being modified by duration, if much more modestly than the history. What is normally presented is a lamina across the historical process, because that is what is expected. A series of laminas in a duration sequence is more informative, because the balance and in consequence the balance-seeking of the factors is changing.

There is a problematic in the background which is expressible with deceptive ease as the interrelationship between the totality of things which is being produced spatially – with spatial dimensions – and their unity which is produced at every lamina section which is placeable across the flow of duration. And duration is conceived as a continuum, though tolerant of its any of an infinitude of laminas being drawn across it. Reality is the flawless unity of unity and totality. Yet we are normally happy to represent it as a plane: made across duration and at 90° to it in order to represent its constituents as a particular time, whilst it could be drawn along it at 0° on the same axis, or, if so desired to make particular soundings at another angle. Here we leave aside the mathematical account of the coherence of these dimensions in relativity theory, which uses geometries invented half a century before (especially that of Riemann), so adjusted that their expressions and process expressed non-intuitionally what was a matter of subjective parallax in a subjective reference frame of spatial dimensions reduced to a single ‘now’ and then a series of ‘nows’ what was to be ultimately observable, where Euclidean linearities no longer applied, and outside the system of Sun and planets, in the vast outer space where Newtonian geometry would no longer apply. More cosmological than Newton’s geometry, it was no longer a matter of trajectories of objects under inertia being deflected in an otherwise neutral space within the universality of gravity operating according to laws represented geometrically, but the nature of not only the content of the galaxies and other features but, within the astronomical questions, of what the cosmos could tell us about the sources and processes of its formation and evolution. To which we can add one brute fact that it has a universally applicable measure which cannot be exceeded, which is the speed of light at a constant 186,000 miles [= 300,000 kms.] per second. For outer space it acts as a convenient measure of distance.

The content of space has been a matter of most recent investigation. By intuition alone, Einstein sensed that gravity within the cosmos would implode unless there was an expansive or repulsive force balancing it against its force. He posited a “cosmological constant”. It was for him static and within a cosmos which was at rest.

Neither he nor the scientific worlds were happy about this constant, which was a mathematical expression for what was not unidentified in reality. The original observations at this same period of the American astronomer Hubble, showing that the cosmos was expanding at the galactic level, evident in the red-shifts of their spectra, did not immediately immediate call for a new theory of the cosmos. This came only in 1998 when astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute at Baltimore, USA, using both ground-based telescopes and the Hubble space telescope established from their observations of super-novae that the rate of expansion was accelerating. They looked again at Einstein’s theorising and particularly at his identity of mass and energy, and went on to posit the presence of a force of expansion-repulsion opposed to gravity, for which, finding no corresponding object they named “dark energy”: dark because nothing luminous was involved. They even went on to add a further fact, drawn from observations, that gravity and dark-energy as anti-gravity were not in balance, but the acceleration which began about half of the age of the cosmos (5-6 bn years ago/13.7) when the force of dark energy gradually overhauled the force of gravity. This energy has a physical presence in a quantity which must be considerable. It has been calculated that dark energy makes up about 70% of the cosmos, the rest being dark matter with a greater presence than matter itself: 25% to 5%.[1] So the universe is not a material reality after all as its material content is only 5%.

Whereas dark energy is in conflict with gravity, promoting the extension of the cosmos by increasing acceleration, dark matter – dark because it is not luminous but betrays its presence by otherwise inexplicable gravitational attraction – remains gravitationally attractive of ordinary matter (and presumably the reverse), leaving the ordinary matter in gas, galaxies, stars and planets at one-sixth of all matter. The nature of this matter has intrigued all concerned with cosmology for some time now, and so it is with the greatest interest that we have learnt from the 209^th meeting of the American Astronomical Society at Seattle that with 1,000 hours use of the Hubble telescope a three-dimensional map has been made of dark matter within two square degrees of the sky (which totals 40,000 square degrees). Even so, measurements have been made on half a million distant galaxies, because the light from them passes through a transparent medium. With the technique of gravitational lensing (used in confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity) whereby the gravitational pull of the dark matter deflects the light from, and therefore the apparent shape of, the background galaxies. From this it emerges that dark matter exists in “clumps”, which are bridged together by “threads”. This makes up a web-like and loose network. Galaxy clusters are not repelled by its presence, but rather drawn to it, and are located within these invisible clumps. Speculating on the emergence of structures in the universe, one scientist proposes that cold dark matter formed the first large structures in the universe, which then collapsed under their own gravity (=weight) to form vast “halos”. The gravity of these halos then sucked in ordinary matter, which became a focus for the formation of galaxies. The survey shows that concentrations of dark matter overlap with concentrations of ordinary matter almost always. Yet it is possible that this discrepancy results from errors.[2]

In his book Just Six Numbers, The Deep forces that Shape the Universe, published in 1999 (we use the paperback edition of 2000), the British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, expected that even the nature of dark matter would be made clear by now: “I ‘m optimistic that if I were writing in five year’s time, I would be able to report what the dark matter is”.[3] But it is an achievement to have mapped only a portion of it within eight years. We shall be considering those six numbers in the course of this article. His book was meant for popular diffusion as a serious speculative résumé on the state of the challenging questions about the nature of the cosmos now being considered, which he resumes under the key headings of those six numbers. It is worth while to quote rather fully a passage from the book which expresses the changed view of the cosmos which has already emerged.

“We are used to the post-Copernican idea that we don’t occupy a special central place in the cosmos, but we must now abandon ‘particle chauvinism’ as well. The atoms that comprise our bodies and that make all visible stars and galaxies, are mere trace-constituents of a universe whose large-scale structure is controlled b y some quite different (and invisible) substance. We see, as it were, just the white foam on the wave-crests, not the massive waves themselves. We must envisage our cosmic habitat as a dark place, made mainly of quite unknown material.

Ordinary atoms seem to be a minority constituent of the universe, swamped by quite different kinds of particles surviving from the initial instants of the Big Bang. But it is actually more of a puzzle to understand why there are any atoms – why our universe isn’t solely composed of dark matter.

To every kind of particle there is a corresponding antiparticle. There are protons (made up of three so-called ‘quarks’) and antiprotons (made up of three antiquarks): the ‘anti’ of an electron is a positron. Antiparticles annihilate when they encounter ordinary particles, converting their energy (mc²) into radiation, No antimatter exists in bulk in or on the Earth. Tiny amounts can be made in accelerators, where particles are crashed together with sufficient energy to make extra particle-antiparticle pairs. Antimatter would be the ideal rocket fuel. When it annihilates, its entire rest-mass energy is released compared with the fraction ε = 0.007 for rockets powered by nuclear fusion.[4] Antimatter can only survive if ‘quarantined’ from ordinary matter; otherwise it betrays itself by generating intense gamma rays when it annihilates. We can be sure that our entire galaxy - all its constituent stars and gas – is matter rather than antimatter: its content is constantly being churned up and recycled by stellar births and deaths, and had it started off half matter and half antimatter there would by now be nothing left. But on much larger scales the mixing would be less efficient … . So why is there a seeming bias in favour of one kind of matter?

There are 10⁷⁸ atoms within our observable universe (mainly hydrogen atoms, each composed of a proton and an electron), but there do not seem to be so many antiatoms. The simplest universe, one might imagine, would have started off with particles and antiparticles mixed up in equal numbers. Our universe luckily wasn’t like that. If it had been, then all protons would have been annihilated with antiprotons during the dense early stages; it would have ended up full of radiation and dark matter but containing no atoms, no stars and no galaxies”.[5]

The result is an asymmetry Here Rees gives the 1967 hypothesis of the Russian physicist, André Sakharov, that during the cooling immediately after the Big Bang favoured particles over antiparticles, and that an imbalance of quarks over antiquarks could have been translated into an excess of protons over antiprotons. So the behaviour of matter and antimatter was not perfectly symmetrical. Just previously (in 1964) two Americans, James Cronin and Val Fitch discovered that the rate of decay of an unstable particle, K°, did not mirror that of its antiparticle. “So all the atoms in the universe could result from a tiny bias in favour of matter over antimatter. We, and the visible universe around us, may exist only because of a difference in the ninth decimal place between the numbers of quarks and antiquarks”.[6]

From this point we can pass quickly to the theme of this article. Sir Martin Rees bas brought out of the data of contemporary physical cosmology six ratios between different factors whose numbers are the six numbers of his title. Five of these relationships are stable and are the ratio between two forces which together produce an effect on the physical evolution of the universe. They reach into the forces which are operative at a microscopic level, and yet which have their consequences in the macrocosm. They are paired and if their pairing had found a different relationship the cosmos would not have evolved as it now is. From the point of finality the cosmos could not have found its present condition which other researchers have asserted to be rare, from which life has developed and human life in particular is its seeming fulfilment.[7] Though he offers no final unifying theory, his conclusion entails that the ratios expressed in these relationships must have developed in our setting, not excluding the possibility of other analogous environments, at their critical stages together and in a relationship with each other. In his frequently used expression, their relationships have been “finely tuned” – and given the cosmic scale, one must comment, that tuning must be the cause not only of wonder but of stupor – that amidst all the possibilities of different adjustments to these relationships, expressed mathematically, these fortunate ones have emerged.

If we detach ourselves from the actual conditions of the cosmos and our relationship to them, and look at it cosmogenetically, the relative weakness of gravity has played a very significant part in its formation, and has left its traces in the present physical constitution of this world, together with the evolution of life in all of its forms. Whilst its attractive force at an atomic scale can be neglected the precise strength of its force at a cosmic scale was immensely formative. That is true even of its weakness then in the precise circumstances and especially the relationship to other factors, of which electrical forces are the most comparable. Atomic structures in themselves have a balance of the centrifugal force of the negatively charged electrons which circle the positively charged attractive nucleus, and at this level any gravitational effects between the particles are totally undetectable, even though they must be present. The electric forces which hold atoms together in themselves have an extension into the holding of individual atoms together. Here the attraction of unlike charges and the repulsion of like charges in different atoms becomes a basis for the forces which hold different atoms stably together. Rees’s consideration bears the ratio between gravitational force and “the electric forces that hold atoms together.“ It is not immediately clear whether he means the attractive forces (between the negatively charged electrons and positively charged nucleus) and disregards the repulsive forces which coexist with them, or the net attractive force, and in both cases he would be making a contrast with gravity as between two attractive forces; or he is making a summation of attractive and repulsive forces, not as the harmonisation but the total of all forces present.[8] He views the hypothetical consequences of differences in the original cosmogenic constitution between these two kinds of force, for had gravity been either weaker or stronger then as measured in relation to the electric force, the constitution of the whole cosmos down to all its microcosmic, even sub-microscopic, elements would have been different. He takes a passing glance at the consequences for living things, but the differences would have been present also in all physical forms. Even though their present appearances and the now detectable forces which formed them, with their unvarying atomic structure and a varying chemical composition, may give the impression of a normative permanence for solids, liquids and gases, all of their sources as a totality were not isolated from the ultimate formative influences even in their changing super-aeonic stages where the strength of gravity was most important and universally decisive,[9] as it was finding and continually readjusting its equilibrium with other forces and whatever physical stuff was universally formative. All this as it eventually moved into a constitution in which terrestrial physical-chemical processes have finally shaped our world into what we naturally take anthropically not only as our own norm, but as a measure for cosmic development.

Rees considered the situations of a weaker gravity and a stronger gravity, measurable in a ratio with those electrical forces. "The weaker the gravity is (providing it isn’t actually zero), the grander and more complex can be its consequences." Rees firstly sets out the consequences of a stronger cosmogenetic gravitational force. Galaxies would form more quickly and interact much more, the life-time of stars would be reduced and they would be closely packed, precluding stable planetary systems (though Rees sees the consequences through to the stunting of the evolutionary potential of all life). No doubt the effect of gravity on the formation of iron as a skin to supernovas would accelarate their liability to explode from a smaller mass, and the highly localised (on our normal view ultimate) concretisations of planetary gas, liquid and solid, as derived through different proportions of the constituents of forces which, at a molecular level, would have produced coherences which would not be identical with those we now know. Rees reviews the whole scale of objects in the cosmos. Self-gravity is negligible at the particle level, even as far as that of asteroids, but evident in planets and our terrestrial moon. At the lower levels there are physical processes from heating which, in the immensely hot gas at the sun’s core, holds it in equilibrium against its self-gravity.[10] Even Jupiter, formed from helium and hydrogen from the outer disk of the newly-formed sun, is in a state of equilibrium between its own gravity and these light weight atoms.[11] A spherical nature to both planets and suns would indicate the strength of gravity which makes round objects that are not rigid enough to maintain an irregular shape.[12] In the core of these suns the self-gravity which keeps them spherical becomes a compressive force which generates the temperatures and pressures which brings about atomic fusion. In these localised situations there are conditions in which the attractive force of gravity is opposed to forces arising amongst physical objects in conditions such as super-heating. So there are spheres in which the invisible force of gravity is finding a harmonisation point with forces present with physical objects and states, especially that of heat. A ratio postulated here would not have a cosmic range, even though it has a strong localised effect within our limited view-point. By choosing a ratio between gravity as universal and invisible and a (perhaps compounded) universal and invisible electrical force, Rees may give a valid constant of electric forces over gravitational force. Cosmogenetically gravity was more formative in the beginnings than an electric force, with both weakening, but gravity by so much more. But if one gives one’s attention to their stable relationship in atomic and inter-atomic structures at any moment during their formation and subsequent existence, whilst gravity may be factually present and constant, it remains undetectably small in itself, whilst their total force can be accounted for by their electric forces. Designating it as N, Rees gives the ratio of electrical to gravitational force as 10³⁶.[13] In cosmogenesis the paradox becomes clear that "an even weaker gravity could allow even more elaborate and longer-lived structures to develop".[14] Yet were it not so high, even by a few less zeros, “only a short lived miniature universe could exist: no creatures could grow larger than insects, and there would be no time for biological evolution”.[15] On a cosmic scale so much of what has happened in stars and planets would have been concentrated and cut relatively short.[16]

ii) the strength of the force that binds together the particles of an atomic nucleus: ε = 0.007, as the quantity of hydrogen converted into energy at its fusion into helium

His brief description of the force ε, with the value 0.007, is as follows; we have already referred to it. It “defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth are made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common, whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If ε were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist”.[17]

His longer account[18] interconnects with his thoughts on N, and begins with the sun as seen in a state of equilibrium between mechanical expansive energy (produced by fusion at the sun's heart, overcoming the electric energy between the fusing protons) and contractive gravity, but within a widely different field. “… the Sun is so massive that gravity holds down the overlying cooler layers, and thereby ‘keeps the lid on’ the high-pressure core. The Sun has adjusted its structure so that nuclear power is generated in the core, and diffuses outward, at just the rate needed to balance the heat lost from the surface – heat that is the basis for life on Earth’. Always with the knowledge that “atoms and their nuclei are the same everywhere”,[19] astrophysicists have worked out what the interior of the Sun is like, and, on the plausible hypothesis that it was the material descendent of stars that died as supernovas before the Solar System was formed, by extrapolation from the present stable balance, have calculated its evolution over “the next few billion years”.[20] The supernova explosion(s) produced the heat energy which was able to produce from simple hydrogen atoms (1 proton as nuclear and 1 electron) the elements known to us in their diversity. “Without [the explosions of supernovae], we would never have existed. Supernovae have created the ‘mix’ of atoms that the earth is made of and that are the building blocks for the intricate chemistry of life.” Their balance of mechanical expansive energy and gravity, in the sense mentioned above, is destroyed in an explosion, blowing off their outer layers, in only a few terrestrial weeks of peak brilliance, fading over only years. Its original central hydrogen is fused into helium, as gravity acts destructively on it, squeezing it hotter until its gravity can overcome the even higher electric repulsion (twice that of hydrogen: its nuclear structure is of two protons and two neutrons), so that the imbalance created can cause fusions in the helium through another surge of gravitational contraction, as it is squeezed even hotter. With the new factor of fusion, more energy is produced than the gravitational contraction producing collisions the heating from which provides the energy for collisions which overcome repellent electrical energy. More energy creates the possibility of even more complex nuclei whose ultimate result will be what we know in the residual periodic tables of atomic weights. The chain reaction is not in small stars like our Sun, but in the centres of heavy stars with their great gravity; their central temperatures can reach a billion degrees. The fusion into six-proton carbon atoms produces a skin with a consequent build up of temperature until it is exploded. Transmutations follow into the heavier nuclei of oxygen, neon, sodium, silicon and so on. The instability is now more between the compatible protons and neutrons of the nucleus and the electrical incompatibility of the similarly charged protons between themselves. Progressing up the periodic table, there is the formation of 26-proton iron nuclei. The iron aggregates until the gravity dominates the reaction until the core implodes, with an energy which blows off the overlaying material: all in the gigantic and short-lived flash which observers designate as a supernova.

The spatial debris diffuses principally oxygen, and then carbon, nitrogen, silicon and iron. Whilst hydrogen and helium are still burning in the outer regions the input of energy from the implosion in a smaller space together with the explosive blast generates the energy from which the relatively small quantities of the higher elements up to uranium at 92.

Fine tuning in the size of the original star; fine tuning at every stage in the none-uniform sequence of contractions and explosions, some of whose debris, on a time scale of billions of years, will be synthesised into constituents of living and non-living in our delightful but so tiny environment. “The Earth, and we ourselves, are the ashes from those ancient stars. Our galaxy is an ecosystem, recycling atoms again and again through generations of stars.” Unlike the earth, Jupiter is “like the Sun, mainly hydrogen and helium … and its own gravity was enough to retain these light-weight atoms.”

In the light of Einstein’s formula which relates mass (m) to energy (E) through the speed of light (c): E = mc² , the whole process of the formation of the whole range of elements depends on the cohesive force between the elements of their atomic nucleus, uniting protons and neutrons against the mutual repulsion of their protons. The single protons of original hydrogen at the Sun’s core fuse into helium nuclei of two protons and two neutrons, whose weight is not the weight of the two synthesized hydrogen atoms, but 99.3%, the other 0.7% being converted into heat: i.e. it converts 0.007 of its mass into energy, and this process, underlying the whole process in which the other elements are formed up to iron (with dramatic final consequences of another order), all of which produce transmutations of the helium which, for the process up to the formation of iron, converts into energy only 0.001 of its mass. But speculation looks at the nearest figures to 0,007, and decides that a biosphere would be impossible at 0.006 or 0.008, because that depends on the presence of carbon and oxygen. And whilst the production of carbon could be attributed to an (incidental) fusion of three helium nuclei, come together after having passed through a union of two in a short-lived beryllium, this is followed by the formation of oxygen when (non-incidentally) “carbon captures another helium nucleus”. There would be no carbon-based biosphere – no life for plants and animals – if the value had been other than 0.007.

That indeed is fine tuning, but there is a constant succession of different fine-tunings, with a finality in a biosphere ending with an intelligence which can contain it and reflect on it. It is not surprising that some men come to the conclusion that their intelligence must have a quality which is identical with an all-comprehending cause.

iii) Ω = 1/25 or 0.04: the ratio of the actual density (atoms per cubic metre) of the universe to the critical density at which gravity would bring cosmic expansion to a halt

By a human logic working on the presumption of an overall equilibrium of forces in the whole cosmos expressed in movement, whether the factors are visible (by their own or reflected luminosity) or invisible, entails that “any complex cosmos must incorporate a ‘large number’ N reflecting the weakness of gravity, and “a value of ε that allows nuclear and chemical processes to take place.” But these conditions, though necessary, are not sufficient. But only a universe with a ‘finely tuned’ expansion rate can provide the arena for these processes to unfold. "So Ω must be added to our list of crucial numbers [and] amazingly close to unity in the early universe”.[21] It is "The ratio of the actual density to the critical density” – the latter being the “number of atoms per cubic metre [if they were spread uniformly through our universe] that would be needed for gravity to bring cosmic expansion to a halt’. That the actual number “is now at least 0.3 … implies that Ω was very close indeed to unity in early eras … unless expansion energy and gravitational energy are in exact balance [=1] … the gap between those two energies widens”. Then either kinetic energy would dominate [Ω becoming very small] and dissipate incipient formations, or gravity would bring expansion to a halt [Ω “substantially” more than 1]. The slide to 0.3 implies a process of mutual adjustment to a stability in view of the total aggregation of forces in play. The description of this present state as “optimal” with its teleological implications is avoided by Rees by his concentration of attention on the initiating impetus.[22] Here, the older (pre-1980) position which took into account only the visible universe was that it was 0.04 (or 1/25). But for the universe to be held in a balance between the expansive force and the (gravitational) attractive, and therefore contractive, force this figure should not be more than 1.[23] The figure of 0.04 would have allowed perpetual expansion minimally restrained by gravity. Therefore a physical economy of the cosmos cannot be established from the visible matter, but only by accepting the presence of masses which are invisible and exert a gravitational restraint which keeps the relationship between the actual and the critical density of the cosmos as 1, or near to 1. “We have come to realise in the last twenty years that there’s a lot more in the universe than we actually see, such unseen material consisting mainly of ‘dark stuff’ of unknown nature. The things that shine – galaxies, stars and glowing gas clouds – are a small and typical fraction of what is actually there … . Most of the material in the universe, and the main contributor to Ω, emits no light, nor infrared heat, not radio waves, nor any other kind of radiation, and is consequently hard to detect’.[24] In the short initial definition of Ω he had added the consequences of its being too high or too low: “If this ratio were too high relative to a particular ‘critical’ value, the universe would have collapsed long ago; had it been too low, no galaxies or stars would have been formed. The initial expansion speed seems to have been finely tuned”.[25] And to return to the main exposition: “Galaxies are ten times bigger and heavier than we used to think. The same argument applies, on a larger scale, to entire clusters of galaxies, each millions of light-years across. To hold them together requires the gravitational pull of ten times more material than we can actually see”.[26]The photograph of the small segment of the heavens by the Hubble Space Telescope, picking out the masses of dark matter by ‘gravitational lensing’ of remote objects: not as their light passes through the gravitational field of visible and luminous objects, but through that of invisible masses, whose nature is not yet identified, is therefore a considerable step towards for understanding a cosmic space, not with widely spaced objects in a virtual void, but a space which is filled mainly with invisible objects, postulated as being in a dynamic equilibrium, and where disequilibrium is not a product of miscalculation but a guide to their presence. He gives the example of stars and gas clouds in other galaxies, especially outliers. If they were feeling the gravitational pull of visible objects, they should be escaping. There is an inference that there is a heavy invisible halo around big galaxies – of dark “stuff”, neither illuminating nor illuminated. The disks or spirals must be a “luminous sediment held in the gravitational clutch of vast swarms of invisible objects of quite unknown nature”. And further, on a larger scale, to be held together, clusters of galaxies, which are each millions of light-years across, “require the gravitational pull of about ten times more material [the figure also for individual galaxies] than we can actually see”.[27]

Cosmic dust would block out the view; there are well-grounded doubts about whether there would be sufficient brown dwarf stars to produce this effect, and the conditions for their multiple gravitational lensing in sufficient quantity are not feasible. Cold planets in deep space might escape detection, so could lumps of frozen hydrogen and black holes. Perhaps deuterium – ‘heavy hydrogen’ with a nucleus of a proton and a neutron – which is a stage in the building up from the abundant original hydrogen, with its single proton nucleus, of the abundant helium, with its nucleus of two protons and two neutrons. Were dark matter composed of deuterium, the calculations relative to the Big Bang would predict even less deuterium and somewhat more helium; a transient presence of deuterium would seem more likely.

Attention therefore turns to neutrinos, subatomic particles (leptons) existing in three forms. In the first second after the Big Bang, at a temperature of billions of degrees, and under unimaginable compression the reactions converted photons (quanta of radiation) into neutrinos, bringing them into balance but leaving a vast quantity free, even to pass through the earth, and a fortiori even through us. “There are hundreds of millions of neutrinos for every atom in the universe”.[28] And the position has emerged as Rees had anticipated at several points: that neutrinos are gravitationally significant. The “Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search” announced in March 2006 that it had discovered that neutrinos transform in a process called neutrino oscillation, changing from one type to another (tau, muon, electron), and that to do this they must have mass, and therefore have gravitational relationships.[29]

They could well constitute the dark matter through their utter fineness which makes them virtually invisible, and their gravity which arises from their mass.

iv) λ as the cause of an accelerating force on a cosmic scale competing with gravity: not = 0 (implying a universe in a constant state: holding gravity in check on an inter-galactic scale, but experimentally established as 0.7 (a replacement for the Einstein’s discarded cosmological constant)

That ratio Ω was between an expansive force and a gravitational force, and the next number of Martin Rees, designated by λ, is also between an expansive and a gravitational force, in a different setting though with an inevitable overlap.

It derives from the “cosmological constant” put forward by Einstein as necessary for a cosmic repulsion which exactly balanced gravity in his steady state universe. He had argued that were this repulsive force not present from the beginning of the universe, its gravity would cause an immediate contraction because everything in the universe attracts everything else. When Einstein had formulated his expression of a general relativity, it was not realised that our universe was not the only galaxy. But by the end of the 1920s astronomers realised that our galaxy was one among many, and that distant galaxies were receding. Here the astronomical observations of Edwin Hubble of galaxies hitherto unsuspected, and in movement away from us, revealed by a reddening of their light by the Doppler effect caused by recession at high speeds, changed the picture completely. Einstein reproached himself for introducing this constant, because without it his equations would have produced a universe in overall active movement (either expansion or contraction). However his willingness to speculate in the need of other unknown factors to maintain an overall equilibrium of forces, even passing to a new stage in active development, encouraged researchers to speculate with cosmic equations, noting discrepancies and finding their explanation, and then seeking to identify them by radio or optical telescopes.[30]

The ratio between actual density and critical density which constitutes Ω sees gravitational attraction from known masses (even masses whose discovery was and is provoked by the search for the nature of the overall present, past and future energy/mass economy of the cosmos) restraining the actual density produced under past expansion. It is so ‘finely tuned’ in relationship to a possible total dominance of gravity that there is a physical liberty (‘tolerance’ is too negative an expression) for both ongoing progressive developments and ongoing degenerations (which may even harmonise within epochal distinct stages for further ongoings), or for them to disperse themselves as additions to the total energy.

The essential condition for the factor known as λ is an increase in acceleration. It has revealed itself as weak and gradual. It imposes itself “over a ‘baseline’ of several billion years, so there is no chance of detecting it unless we can observe objects several billion light years away. One needs “standard candles” of brightness for keeping particular objects under observation. For example, red-shifted objects moving at an earlier stage compared with comparable objects as they appear now. Quasars have too wide a range of apparent brightness and are poorly understood; galaxies are too complicated, too varied and still poorly understood; single stars in galaxies are too faint to be detected as such great distances. The atomic explosions in the midst of supernovae of a certain type (‘1a’) follows physical laws which can metered; their brightness is apparent at great distances; the fading of the most distant and red-shifted ones is slow signifying their recession. In the 1990s two teams monitored and reported on about a dozen supernovae. En passant these findings demonstrated that dark matter was not in sufficient quantity to raise Ω above 0.3 (certainly not to unity), and, surprisingly, that expansion seemed to be speeding up. The research continues with more supernovae. Rees does not say so in so many words, but he implies that λ has always been virtually present, but so insignificant in solar space and within galaxies and could be ignored. Despite the gravitational fields which accompany dark matter and add to the total gravity, the expansive force as “antigravity” finds the conditions in which it can accelerate.[31]

Space is in itself so full, but this force is “so weak that it can only compete with the very dilute gravity of intergalactic space”. [32]

Here are some stages in the meditation he then makes on the appropriateness of finding an emerging acceleration. Gravity could very well be overwhelmed in rarefied intergalactic space, despite the gravitational pull of dark matter. Without the few particles of interstellar space, without radiation passing through it, and cooled to absolute zero, “the emptiness that is left can may still exert some residual force” – i.e. allowing an expansion?[33] And, more exquisitely, arguing indirectly for a non-zero λ: The non-uniform, patchy radiation surviving from the big bang can be calculated, their appearance after gravitational lensing tells against “a straightforward low density universe” With Ω at 0.7 and λ at 0, the seeds of clusters would appear too small. But latent energy in the vacuum contributes to the focussing. λ at 0.7 produces consistency with the results, and coincides with the supernova evidence. “Density is so low for the whole universe that a different force may take over.” So the supposedly weak λ seems to control the universe’s expansion and its ultimate fate. The cosmic environment would not suffer from an even smaller value than its natural value. “Our existence requires that λ should not have been too large.” A higher value λ would have overwhelmed gravity earlier, and if early enough would have prevented the formation of galaxies.[34]

And of the ultimate end of the cosmos as we know it: “if λ isn’t zero, the cosmic repulsion will push galaxies away from each other at an accelerating rate. … A galaxy in a λ-dominated universe would accelerate away from us, moving ever close to the speed of light as it approaches the horizon. … Extragalactic space will become exponentially emptier as the aeons advance”.[35]

The numbers so far given – N, ε, Ω, and λ - all refer to general features of the cosmos; the next figure is more speculative and more concrete together. It is an attempt to account for the appearance of structures: stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Rees points out that it appears to go against an inexorable tendency towards uniformity described by the second law of thermodynamics. The physics of the Big Bang presumes that there was an original uniformity under unimaginable, though calculable, intensities of temperature and compression, and that underlies all the processes indicated by those letters which are tendencies towards complexification, especially through the separation out of different forces. The entropy that intervenes, a limitation of the available energy through its deconcentration and dispersion, would refer to a uniformity arising from a relative levelling in the elements in that dispersion. Rees explains galaxy formation as being against the principle that entropy can never decrease: i.e. the dispersed, levelled out constituents are unable to exert the energy they had in their earlier condition and so re-achieve its structure. That entropy decreases in one location of the universe being outweighed by increases elsewhere certainly preserves the law whilst postulating a very large-scale plasticity yet still within a containing limit – which must be another force (though the final stage of λ was tentatively explained by a decrease of the outer density and consequent weakening of gravity). His classic homely analogue is the ordered motion of the piston of a steam-roller under ordered steam injection contrasted with always wasted heat unavailable to work through its dispersion.^{^[36]}

Stars are part of the structure of the cosmos. They derive from gas clouds; they “condense within irregular clouds of cool dusty gas. The densest regions contract because of their own gravity” – “they are held together by the inward pull of their own gravity” – becoming so suppressed that they light up as stars”. Star formation “is insensitive to the wider cosmos”, and “their formation poses no mystery in principle: once gravity gets a grip on a system, it inexorably contracts”.[37]

“The emergence of the galaxies is less straightforward than the equivalent process for stars. Their origin lies in the early universe; they are shaped by their ‘genetics’ as well as by their environment.” “If the universe had started off completely smooth and uniform, it would have remained so throughout its expansion … hydrogen and helium gas so rarefied that there was [after ten billion years] less than one atom to each cubic metre. It would be cold and dull: no galaxies, therefore no stars, no periodic table, no complexity, certainly no people.” Very slight irregularities in density at the beginning are magnified during expansion, and feeling the consequent extra gravity, those patches decelerate and their expansion lags behind that of an average region. “Gravity amplifies slight ‘ripples’ in an almost featureless fireball. Enhancing the density contrasts until the over dense regions stop expanding and condense into structures held together by gravity.” That can be expressed as a number: a ratio between their rest-mass energy (mc²) and the energy needed to break them up and disperse them. For clusters and superclusters of galaxies (as the largest objects) this, designated as Q, is 1/100,000, or 10^-5. This may be rated so low that Newton’s law can describe the movements of stars in a galaxy and the movements of the other galaxies and dark matter within a cluster. The size of the ‘ripples’ is so small that the cosmos can be treated as “approximately homogeneous”, and at the beginning having nothing significant at any size.[38] Yet if Q were larger or smaller the texture of the cosmos would be very different.

Besides which there is another background factor, before the first forms of the galaxies began to illuminate the cosmos after a dark age which supervened on the first period of expansion. From even before that time, as an “afterglow” from the background of the Big Bang there remains a microwave background radiation, which has slightly overdense regions destined to become galaxies, and slightly underdense regions lying behind voids. The current microwave radiation varies with these densities, and its non-uniformities are of same level as the physical force measured for Q: 1/100,000: the displacement of temperature and force is of the same ratio.[39]

Though dark matter and the atoms of matter in the form of gas are related by gravitational attraction, the atoms being passive to it, that gas condensed from its clouds to form assemblages of stars held within galaxy-sized structures, in which the gas is recycled in the production of the periodical table of elements within the parameters of ε. Some massive accumulation which either collapses into a black hole or draws on the swirling associated material as fuel to produce a super-brilliant quasar.[40] As such systems form, which when heavy enough to be self-gravitating, they produce departures from equilibrium. The cosmos evolves with increasing intricacy, ultimately with the emergence of life, itself subject to accidents – like the production of the periodical table, and the gravitational accumulation of the material recycled out of connection with its source into planets.

The force for an expanding universe, as in conflict with universal gravity, start from the factors represented by Ω, λ and Q, which had been imprinted on the very early universe.[41] If Q were less than 10^-5 (the other numbers being unchanged) the deficiency of energy would only allow smaller and looser aggregations of dark matter, star formation in the slacker galaxies would be inefficient and processed material could not be retained.; gas could not condense into gravitationally efficient structures. Were Q greater than 10^-5, the larger amplitude ripples would become turbulent; greater structures than galaxies would condense early; the energy of surviving gas would be transformed into x-ray and gamma radiation; galaxies would be tightly bound; stars would be packed too close and be too buffeted to retain their planets. Life could not have evolved without the simplicity which its low figure guarantees.[42]

Before passing on to the sixth figure, D = 3, which dilates on the different lay out of dimensions, whether 3 or more, Rees continues to put these numbers into an alignment together. How they fall short of the sharpness of the geometric proofs which Newton thought would allow sharper intelligences to arrive more easily at his own conclusions![43] But the cosmos has proved to be fuller than had ever been assumed, and more of things invisible than visible, and in which gravity was not alone but, as contractive, paired with expansive forces: both active together and in the processes indicated by these numbers, and no doubt others. This expansion moderated by gravity took place after a positing of a reality which was uniform, originally microscopic, whose substance was the uncatalysed, original heated gas: not infinitely hot nor infinitely dense but created with its own limits which were beyond everything subsequent, and not reproducible in any terrestrial setting. Physics can extrapolate from everything subsequent, and it can extrapolate from the product backwards to the origination even to posit events according to a miniaturised time-scale for the manipulation of events after “the first millisecond”: not the ‘Big Bang’ itself but its most intimate effects as the beginning of the process. Helium, for example, began to form after a second’s expansion,

Rees lists five among other possible difficulties might have refuted the concept[44], which has survived. “Many crucial features of our universe could have been imprinted when the cosmic clock was reading 10^-35 seconds, or even less”, with cosmos and microworld overlapping.[45] From the discoveries of Faraday[46] and Maxwell in quite other settings, that electromagnetism unites the features of each, and the failure to find a unification of electromagnetism with gravity whose cause was the presence of factors contained in the number ratios already detailed above. The opposition between the attractive-contractive force of gravity and the expansive force of electro-magnetism has a key place in the pairings of forces which Rees has brought together in numerical ratios. A general theory must unify gravity with the three forces which operate in different ways on the microworld.[47]

The action of gravity seems uniform in nature, bearing on the mutual attraction of masses. The first stage towards unification was the discovery of a relationship between electric and magnetic forces and the “weak” force, such that they would have had the same in the very early universe, and “acquired distinctive identities after the universe had cooled below a critical temperature of about 10¹⁵ degrees (which happened when it was 10^-12 seconds old. To the discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s of new kinds of particles besides the electrons, neutrons and protons, the discernments of sub-particles dating from 1964 allowed their grouping in families. Here the number 3 is significant for the protons are made up of three “point charges” named “quarks” carrying 2/3, 2/3 and -1/3 of the total electronic charge. The quarks behave as if they were free inside a proton, but do not exist in separation. By the late 1970s most of the particles had been explained in terms of nine [3²] types of quark. They are held together by another kind of particle named a “gluon”, though these do not operate at the value of ε = 0.007.[48]

Further progress in establishing a “grand unified theory” is halted by the impossibility of uniting gravity to the electro-magnetic forces already brought together. We are told here that the temperature for the unification – which we presume to be that at which the individual forces became detached – is 10²⁸ which is impossible to produce in terrestrial conditions. That phase ceased ten billion years ago, which still leaves the possibility of finding quasi-fossilized vestiges. That age may have settled the predominance of matter over anti-matter, though more importantly the scale of the cosmos and its expansive nature. The big bang theory extrapolates from a projection of its conditions and its timescale, even at milliseconds where exponential timescales would miss the important detail. It is descriptive and does not have the vocabulary or the conceptions for explaining how laws emerged from such relatively simple states and how they came to be in the act of the appearances. The processes were coincident with the application, with no physical models: positive and measurable by their consequent course and modifications. Their positivism needs appreciation before their measurement, for determination is negation as Spinoza has said.[49]

Rees here returns to the continuity of Ω. The cosmos is expanding after ten billion years with Ω still not too different from a value of one. It has neither collapsed, nor does its kinetic energy overwhelm the effect of gravity by many powers of 10. “This requires Ω to have been tuned amazingly close to the value of unity in the early universe.” Some related consequences to this: the similarity of remote regions in opposite directions, the near identity of the microwave afterglow over the whole sky. These could be solved “if all parts of our present universe had synchronised and coordinated themselves very early on, and then accelerated apart".[50] This conception of an “inflationary universe” occurred, according to its conceiver Alan Guth, when “our entire observable universe was literally of microscopic size” at 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang, when an enormously strong λ overwhelmed gravity. A “runaway inflation” in “overdrive” led to a runaway acceleration so that an embryo universe “could have inflated, homogenised and established the ‘fine-tuned’ balance between gravitational and kinetic energy. A reader will notice that “runaway” is supposedly productive of “fine-tuned” – but that leaves unexplained, except perhaps by chance, the passage from the former to the latter, as obedience to a very powerful force which gradually applied a powerful brake on the whole process which by an evident principle of finality was an image of the source from which it came.

Postulating a passage from a “tiny ‘seed’” to the dimensions of ten billion light years necessitates an exponential expansion – the radius of the sphere doubles increasing its volume by a factor of eight, with only a hundred doublings to reach the number of atoms in the observable universe alone at 10⁷⁸ : exponential expansion! – with a “fierce repulsion” which had overwhelmed gravity followed by a “more leisurely expansion”. It was a transition which “converted the huge energy latent in the original ‘vacuum’ into ordinary energy, generating the heat of the fireball and initiating the more familiar expansion process that has led to our present universe.” Here we must interpret. The original condition was either of “colossal densities” for a universe “literally of microscopic size” – a “tiny seed”. Then the “vacuum” would be the absence of features and activities, yet with a potentiality within itself to be realised – but then a reason for its nature and its change would have to be suggested. Or, perhaps the “tiny seed” or even the “exponential expansion” are conceived incorrectly as being surrounded by a vacuum, or “nothing”. We regret that we cannot make the words with their ideas cohere together, but we make one final suggestion. That there was first a creation-expansion followed by an expansion alone, and that this derived from the latent energy in whatever the vacuum was which finally slowed down to the “more leisurely expansion”. In that case one can see why he postulates that exponential expansion was “fierce”, and that any associations of a chaos in the runaway expansion have to be removed, with “exponential” assuring ordering. If we can be sure that this expansion was totally ordered in its expansion, we can imagine that the subsequent slowing down, for which a factor must be found, would a fortiori even more ordered and regular. We can then also believe that the combination of force and order continue during the time and through the dimensions of twelve billion years.[51] But the intrusion of “creation” disturbs a continuity of a something from the past at a nothing conceived as a point, credited with being charged with reality, and into a multiversal state which does not have to be brought to an end. These are scientific scruples which allow the writer to defer sine die a decision for or against a creation ex nihilo, and therefore for or against a separate existent Creator.

But is this theory testable? Cosmologists, we infer, have a certain confidence because the time-span of uncertain physics has been reduced from 1 second after the big bang to 10^-35 seconds. Helium formation in the first few minutes can be tested experimentally. In many matters rather than apply to the cosmos what has been discovered in laboratories, astronomers are discovering a new physics, with the result that mainstream theoretical physicists are becoming interested in cosmological matters. Special cosmological surveys provide information about the inflationary phase, and also things related to a grand unified physics. Besides which the “string” theory, which discovers tubes thinner than an atom but extremely heavy, either as loops or stretching right across the universe, as the possible seeds of cosmic structure, and there are also supposed miniature black holes which are disproportionately massive.[52] Here Rees formally considers whether the universe proceeded from nothing. That the gravitational energy of the universe amount to minus mc², exactly balancing its rest energy of (plus) mc² means that not only the energy cost of inflating the universe could be zero, but also that it could have emerged from an “infinitesimal speck”. But he keeps away from the concept of nothing, preferring to identify it with point (“latent with particles and forces”), or empty space which itself can be warped and distorted – in fact structured. And he quotes the philosopher Wittgenstein as a model of the philosophical propriety of silence, where Thomas Aquinas acknowledged a place for speaking of “non ens” “per modum entis” in many useful contexts.[53]

And yet he concludes the chapter with an indulgent and favourable eye on a “multiverse” of light years with “millions of zeros” – which he finds impossible to grasp, in which our big bang was one episode in an infinite ensemble. He quotes the possibility aired, so comforting in its anti-religious assurances that “the cosmos may have had an infinite past”, with a new episode of inflation being triggered from inside a black hole and “creating [in a non-specific sense!] new domains of space and time disjoint from our own”, each “beginning with its own big bang”.[54] Concepts all as empirically untested as a readership sympathetic to his preconceptions would consider religious conceptions which have certainly been tested in life.

We intend to give later a modest theological and philosophical commentary on these five numbers, which have in common a ratio-quality, which enables them to be considered together from a philosophical point of view. That leaves his consideration of three dimensions “(and more)”, for which he refers to the interest of geometers in different dimensions since classical times. It was not only that three dimensions which interested classical geometers, and the compilation of their interest in “Three” had a much more extensive may be seen in a highly compact article, “Drei”, by R. Mehrlein,[55] more than sufficiently makes that point. It touches on aesthetics, mathematics, and significantly in the “steps taken by abstract thinking”. Here he quotes Aristotle: “we use this number for the holy service of divine worship just as if we had taken the law of the triad from the hands of nature”[56]. Naturally it passes to triads in the godhead.[57] After rehearsing the kinds of polygons which would be available at two, three, four and more than four dimensions, he expresses the convenience/convenientia of this. As a physical consequence of a three-dimensional world, forces like gravity and electricity obey the inverse-square law (whilst four dimensions would imply an inverse cube law). Beyond this the stability of the planets trajectory would be lost, causing a planet either to plunge faster into the sun, or quickly spiral out of the system.[58] But that causal nexus stands out like an unrelated factor: would it not be better to accept that of the features were conceived and created together?

The conception of time as being like an arrow was rejected by Schelling who tied himself to the fact that things which progress through time do not move in an arrow formation, chasing the future in keeping up with it. There has to be a distinction between the perdurance of things, their duration and the application of a regular oscillation or other motion to retain things in a statistically accessible framework. Rees sees time as an arrow hardly cohabiting with cosmic expansion. Rather than accept a permanent equilibrium without limit, the factual departures from equilibrium, with an earlier prevalence of matter over anti-matter, the two would have annihilated each other – a universe without either atoms of stars, or anything between them.[59]

For the restlessness of cosmologists before the simplicity of the universe needs indulging; they would feel more at home in a space which was rolled up or had some kind of cellular structure. Could space outside our telescopic viewing range be wrapped up, and exist with more dimensions? We can expect only indirect intimations at a larger scale – and for a smaller scale there could only be complications, and the need to rethink the relationships between our particles and forces and the provisional charts which we have made.[60]

And here, with a certain reticence, Rees does consider the possibilities of exploring the smaller scale. Firstly in “quantum gravity”. Planck brought together into a mathematical expression the constant of time, of gravitation and the speed of light with the intention of making a centre of reference which was also the shortest measurable portion of each. Gravitation however had such a tiny effect at that level (because of the value of N) that it would have to be disregarded as comparable; but space (through the speed of light) and time could be accepted as subject to quantum effects. At the cosmic level, gravity is dominant and quantum effects at such a scale can be ignored. But in the first instants after the big bang gravity could be important at a single quantum level, as it could be in the inside of black holes. Here a unification of gravity with the other constants is necessary, and that means unification with Einstein’s general relativity which incorporates gravity conceived for a circular or spherical space: his special relativity considered only a flat space with time its complement as its negation.

In this connection Rees raises the question about whether there could be a “graininess” in space and time, with the thought that our experience, even with the most sophisticated instruments, is too “coarse” to get beyond its seeming smooth continuum. As one is often perturbed by the failure to distinguish between “duration,” the quality of perduring which belongs to things themselves,[61] which is measured by a regular rhythm which is the nature of time, so here one must raise the question of what is meant here by the nature of space. Is it supposed to be something identical with or distinguishable from the objects which are in it – even when these are only quantities of gas or thinly scattered atoms in deep space? As it is understood it is identical quite apart from the density of the objects which it contains. If it is distinguishable from them, in its distinguishability it will not be as another reality of the same standing as the objects, nor will it be in itself an abstraction of the mind, though as mind-reality it will share the same nature with other objects. Nor could it be the mathematical abstraction made about it, whether the mathematics is precise, or exists with a deliberate tolerance to bring in tolerable factual variations [62]

Here Rees naturally brings in the varieties of “string” theory. Particles and sub-particles are points; these are linear and one-dimensional. It is difficult for an outside observer to penetrate into this theorising, because there is so much development taking place.[63] Rees refers to those of cosmic length: “flailing around at the speed of light, or else stretching right across the universe”. Some think that they “could be the seeds for cosmic structure.” He accepts that these are “thinner than an atom, but so heavy that each kilometre could weigh as much as the earth”.[64] Of those of subatomic size he says that string loops are the “fundamental entities of our universe … and that the various subnuclear particles are different modes of vibration – different harmonics – of these strings. The strings have the scale of the Planck length; in other words, they are many factors of ten smaller than we can actually probe. Moreover, these strings are vibrating not in our ordinary (3 + 1) dimensional space, but in a space of ten dimensions”.[65] Among the reasons for optimism about further research is that he accepts that should emerge the synthesis of gravity and the quantum principle. Already the theory had begun to offer a deeper understanding of black holes.[66]

The position on string-theory can be brought more up to date from the material on the Cambridge Relativity web-site, in the section on ‘Quantum Gravity”, and the section on “M-theory, the theory formerly known as Strings” (v. n.58). “To take into account the different interactions observed in Nature one has to provide particles with more degrees of freedom than only their position and velocity, such as mass, electric charge, colour (which is the ‘charge’ associated with the strong interaction) or spin.” There the researchers have no hesitation in describing the strings as the “fundamental building-block” uniting and so replacing the independent particles – so much has research progressed in the time since Rees wrote his book. “These strings can be closed, like loops, or open, like a hair. As the string moves through time it traces out a tube or a sheet, according to whether it is closed or open. Furthermore, the string is free to vibrate, and different vibrational modes of the string represent the different particle types, since different modes are seen as different masses or spins.” They are precise on the details: “One mode of vibration, or `note', makes the string appear as an electron, another as a photon. There is even a mode describing the graviton, the particle carrying the force of gravity, which is an important reason why String Theory has received so much attention. The point is that we can make sense of the interaction of two gravitons in String theory in a way we could not in [the] Q[uantum F[Field] T[heory].” The Fermion quarks and leptons which made up matter had been excluded from the earlier string theory which considered only the Bosons which carried forces. Now they have been put together into a “supersymmetry” – creating a sphere for “superstrings”, and therefore into a theory which could explain both the force and the matter of the universe – at the level of cosmic strings. At first a plurality of theories arose – until it was realised that “there is an underlying theory of which all string theories are only different aspects. This was called M-theory.[67] The M might stand for Mother of all theories or Mystery, because the planet we call M-theory is still largely unexplored.” From this unification, not only have the different theories been brought into a deeper unity, but the disorder to be found in the black holes has begun to be explained.

The reflection of the Cambridge researchers is that perhaps the result of producing the M-theory is to place us at the point of entry into a five-dimensional world!

Finally, in the last chapter Rees reviews the possible overall views as they appear to him. “… in our universe, intricate complexity has unfolded from simple laws”. In as rising scale, he sees coincidence – and therefore no values in addition to the facts and the validated conjectures, providence – and here he seems to find merely boring the postulation of a “beneficent Creator” – not a universally, all comprehending, all-powerful mind of the best theology – compared with the “still conjectural … compellingly attractive” of multiple universes each consequent on separate big bangs. This is an extension of his substitution for ‘nothing’ of a filled zero spaciousness so that our universe has a continuity with something else labelable as ‘existent’, and does not care to investigate the un-providential links by which this multiverse is held together, not fixedly but dynamically. Basically it is a scientific version of the attitude of mind found among materialists that any postulation of an external creative God is a result of fear. It has many manifestations, of which The Golden Bough comes to mind. Historically it agrees with neither the process of conversion and a beneficent revelation, nor with the ancient majority philosophic postulation of a divine by the Greek philosophers. Returning from a brief excursus on fossil conditions left from the first 10^-15 seconds after our big bang which may reveal how our universe was “seeded by microscopic fluctuations,” and how the unified theory may offer a backwards-looking enlightenment on the behaviour of subatomic particles, all helped by computer simulations of how our universe could emerge from “something of microscopic size” (expressed without the most extreme, not reproducible density and heat-intensity which he had elsewhere mentioned – and so leaving two unlike types of ‘microscopic’ in association), he returns with some more special pleading for a multiverse. The forces of Ω, Q and λ, even of N and ε, “what we call the laws of physics”, may then “turn out to be merely ‘bylaws’ applying only within our own universe”. And, so he continues, “some universes might just be too small and simple to permit any internal complexity at all”. That “the issue of a multiverse might seem arcane” – that we have heard the same before, from a discredited past – might be true if the past were reconstructed with similar unsympathy. And finally he admits that there are two choices. A universe consistent with mathematical laws, whose tuning would be “brute fact or providence’, or the hope that “the ultimate theory might permit a multiverse”.[68]

So far we have kept principally to summarising the text of Martin Rees’s book. At the beginning we made some references to the existence and nature of “dark energy”. In the course of writing these pages the Scientific American of February 2007 (pp.24-31) has published an article on dark energy by Dr. Christopher J. Conselice (at present lecturing and researching in the School of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Nottingham, England): “The Universe’s Invisible Hand”. As it is another example – at least for the present! - of “fine tuning” it seems appropriate to give its salient points after the summary of Rees’s book: “If dark energy were weaker, matter would be spread out rather than concentrated in filaments. If dark energy were weaker, matter would be even more concentrated than it is.”

Dark energy – so named because it is neither a source of light nor a reflector of light – is not one polarity of two forces like the first four of the ‘Six Numbers’ described by Rees, yet against gravity it is polarised as an expansive force, accounting for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe attested to from universally accepted evidence. (Yet here he leaves unexplained, except by reference to a 2005 Scientific American article by C.H. Lineweaver and T.M. Davis: “Misconceptions about the Big Bang”, that “galaxies are not moving through space in the conventional sense but are being carried along as the fabric of space stretches”.) If dark energy accounts for 70% of the content of the cosmos it must be virtually all-pervasive. That quality concurs with its density which is always the same wherever it is found: about 10^-26 kilogram per cubic metre, which is “equivalent to a handful of hydrogen atoms”. Evidently negligible on the smaller scale, its effects are evident only on the scale of vast cosmic distances and times, when it will be extremely significant. Evidently it overlays all smaller forces whether concordant or discordant; it must underpin so minimally and weakly all other expansive forces. The forces which we take singly must in reality be locally discordant or concordant. The greater the scale, the greater its emergent concordant embrace. The most evident great scale effect attributable to dark energy is the decline in galaxy merging over the first half of cosmic history. Galaxies are attracted to each other by gravity, but anti-gravity expansion of the cosmos has gained the mastery. For this the vastness of dark energy should be the source – as galaxies move relatively apart. 98% of massive galaxies remain in their original elliptical or spiral form. They are stable and contain mainly old stars: most of the existent stars were born in the first half of cosmic history, whilst only “light-weight” systems continue to produce them. Dark energy’s expansive force seems to account for a linked series of phenomena – as gravity weakened and the strength of dark energy increased relatively, given its universal presence and unaltered density. These are the end of galaxy and cluster formation, and the reduction of intergalactic gas which was the fuel of the older dark holes whose activity has correspondingly declined. Other factors deplete the capacity of star formation: galaxy mergers feed gas into black holes, heating up the system above that at which new stars are formed, or the collision provokes an initial star formation and the consequent excessive light and heat prevents their originating gas from cooling into new stars. “Dark energy perhaps modulated this process by determining the degree of galaxy clustering and the rate of merging.” Lower star formation means fewer supernovas, and the resulting formation of the higher elements from the gas and dust would not have occurred. Indirectly the origination of life which needed the elements of carbon and oxygen would have been curtailed.

Without dark energy, more massive galaxies with old stars would have been persisted, with more tightly bound structures, but spiral galaxies would not have survived the merger process. With stronger dark energy, fewer mergers would have produced less massive galaxies and clusters, spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies would be more common. Fewer stars would have formed, and the baryonic [three-quark] mass would remain more gaseous.

Thus, the balance of dark energy in the cosmos is highly determinative of its contents and their form, and its effects work indirectly even on the details. Yet, reporting on some models, the writer envisages an overbalancing in its favour as “exacting its final revenge” – shredding the Earth and destroying its atoms. Thus, there would be a loss of fine tuning without the powers of adjustment which accompany the effects of the other ratios.

Conventional histories of philosophy make a grouping of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel as “German idealists”. That makes the assumption that the uniquely important which their thought confronted was a confrontation of idealism and realism. When examined in detail the various editions of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre did exploit a position which reduced the non-self to the self (nicht-Ich to Ich), which amounts to the popular conception of idealism – that everything is in the last resort mind-reality, but even that analysis had to admit that the functioning of the practical intellect had to confront a reality which it had not itself created. Kant’s critical philosophy is normally considered, with its alignment of a contrast between noumena and phenomena, to be a work which, by attributing so much to the creative structuring of the mind, must be an idealism, even though its content included a refutation of idealism. Fichte wanted the approval of Kant for his philosophy, who took a long time to make a decision on it. The wait was caused by Kant’s inability to understand it, and finally he gave a judgement finding it defective. The young Schelling whilst still a student sought a contact with Fichte, going even so far as to accept Fichte’s judgement that “transcendental” in Kant referred to self-knowledge as such. But he was seeking to re-establish the real over against the real, deriving both an identity which was absolute. Whilst recognising that Fichte had made a passing service to philosophy in his promotion of idealism, he was conscious that his philosophy had become a spent force. In his early career he constructed systems of related idealism and realism but he constructed more figures of a philosophy of nature, to which the epithet of idealism could not apply. To him beginnings and principles were most important. So he evolved a series of philosophies which considered above all the presence of and development of potencies, cosmic and detailed, and all on the same model. Assertive, ‘positive’ philosophy was more significant than the ‘negative’ philosophy which set out limits. This positive philosophy was associated with the emergence of Christianity as ‘the positive religion’. That in turn could be shown to develop from the same potencies which had produced mythological cosmogonies and theogonies. Schelling’s late philosophy consisted of courses given in Munich and then in Berlin on ‘The Philosophy of Mythology’ and the ‘Philosophy of Revelation’ as interrelated. They were characterised by a structuring of interrelated potencies underlying literally everything, and making up an ‘absolute process’ at depth. And Hegel? At first Schelling’s follower and co-operator he made a name for himself by his lampooning of Schelling’s philosophy in his Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Spirit]. To him ends were more important than beginnings, and he proposed (something extremely difficult to discern) that there was a process by which Geist developed itself out of sense knowledge building up a structured knowledge by which it took over the world of nature, until finally finding a course in which it mastered and united nature, logic and Geist itself as bodies of three sciences, it produced the absolute from out of itself as the triadic quasi-syllogistic process of those three sciences taken together as an interrelated series, in the totality of which, as the emerged Absolute, it enjoyed itself in knowing itself. The philosophy of Geist ended with a quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII. Continually he wove negation into the fabric of this system, making it all- comprehensive and supremely dynamic. His mockery of Schelling went virtually unanswered, unless Schelling’s silence in print was an answer in itself. The impasse between them was extreme. Hegel could only read Schelling’s early philosophy of absolute identity and science. The later thought of Schelling was in fact confined to his lectures, but where he did refer to Hegel in them he showed that he had not read him carefully and had the impression that his system was a simple idealism.

But Schelling’s philosophies did touch the cosmological question at three points, which we shall take up.

i) That especially in his course of lectures given at Würzburg in 1804-5 there is, for quite different reasons a conception which posits real points or at least spatially located objects which have the three spatial dimensions together with the dimension of time which Einstein says had not yet been produced – all about a hundred years before Einstein’s special theory of relativity which used such “reference frames”.

ii) The evidence of the discovery by the Danish researcher Örsted, which was passed on to Michael Faraday, and eventually to Maxwell (who formulated extremely important mathematical expressions for this: "Maxwell's Equations"), demonstrated from experiments the presence of fields in which electrical and magnetic force were not only compatible, but to be basically of the same nature. From the grouping around Örsted came the assertion that an inspiration to develop the interest in these fields derived from Schelling’s hen kai pan philosophy, which posits a radical identity of all forces in the absolute. Schelling approved very much of Michael Faraday, and he gave a public lecture in Munich in 1821 on “Faraday’s Latest Discoveries” – long after it was supposed that his interest in a philosophy of nature had come to an end.^{^[69]}

iii) There is Schelling’s positing of a grouping of potencies making a process from -A to

+A producing a harmonisation of the two forces as another potency. Such a concept, expressed as -A+A±A, is needed to give a better ordering to Rees’s “fine tuning” of contradictory forces in the cosmogony after the big bang. This was the creative potency out of which developments came. Otherwise there are present pairings of forces linked only speculatively. ±A is a real potency even though it may not have the simple identity of each of the paired forces, and that potency must in each case be credited with the force of cosmic development in a range of overlapping activities of previous pairings.

i) Einstein’s Reference Frames in his Special Relativity Theory in the light of Schelling’s postulation for Each Thing of its Own Space and Time

That Einstein’s reference frames have a precedent from a century before his special relativity theory in Schelling’s philosophy of time and space in a course of lectures entitled: System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere [A System of integrated Philosophy and in particular of a philosophy of Nature] , given at Würzburg in 1804-5. The texts of Einstein are readily available, but it needs an explanation of the texts of Schelling, and the research which was made on them.

The definitive text of this work is in the edition, edited by his son: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke in two parts, sometimes cited as such, sometimes cited continuously as vols. I-XIV (Stuttgart 1856-1861). There are derivative lithographic versions both complete and re-arranged, and incomplete. They all carry the original volume numbers with the pagination in the pageheads. I have not used the newer CD version. The original volume reference for the complete text is SWI,6 131-576.

Thanks to the Würzburg Professor and Publisher, Johannes Königshausen I was able to see and have a microfilm copy made of a text as taken down by Johannes Roeser of the complete course as given by Schelling – Gesammte Philosophie – preserved in Würzburg University MS M ch q.306. With this text, which differs from the printed text, I was able to make the best typescript copy I could (which needs working over with an expert on German calligraphy I freely admit), and I was also able to draw up a table of correspondences between the printed text and the MS in order to facilitate some initial work. The whole work is separated into numbered paragraphs (as §). Here I use SW§ to indicate the places in the printed text and MS§ to indicate those in the MS.

In reading SW§112, which pursues the thought that everything has not only its own space but its own particular time (given more development in MS§109z), I realised immediately that Schelling expressed in his own way and with a different philosophical background what Einstein had described as a reference frame including space and time. Here Schelling’s thought passed on (in SW§§114-116) to put together a structure of past and future in time and space, with the present comparable to depth in space. The realism of Schelling’s thought is evident from his speaking more of “duration” [Dauer] than of time, which is ambivalent in English, but should be reserved for the regular movement to which the irregular movement of objects can be related and placed in “time”.

For Schelling it was appropriate that these considerations remained part of the philosophy of nature, and inappropriate to reduce the data to mechanics and mathematics (SW§89 z2 = MS§209 Allg.Refl.; SW113z =MS§136). But as is well known Einstein used and further developed mathematical procedures which were invented in the period before him and after Schelling, some of which could deal realistically with imprecisions in the data. Whilst using mathematics as the method of proving, just as Newton had done before him (with the presumption that the rationality presumed in his mathematics was in identity with essential reality), he used it with such connaturality that he could anticipate the ultimate correspondence of reality with his projection. But even in his original mathematical speculations we find that he gave the highest importance to “Ereignisse”: events, occurrences. Empirical verification was not outside his horizon.

But I pursued my research more from Schelling’s point of view, with little mathematical support – except sometimes by chance encounters. Finally I felt that I must embody the material as it stood in order to survey it and use it further. This I did in a piece of just under 100 single-spaced typewritten pages, entitled Time and Space in Schelling’s Würzburg Course – from whose divisions it can be seen to have a pretension to bring the thought of Schelling and Einstein into a relationship. Disappointed in getting further mathematical help and criticism after a brave attempt by a good German lady school teacher of mathematics, I put it all into a file-box, and forgot all about it until a few weeks ago. But for this first point I merely repeat two sections of the text as I wrote it, but translating the German of both Schelling and Einstein, which it had seemed to me to be more important to record in the original language.

The text belongs to Schelling’s early philosophy of absolute identity: of the identity in the absolute of real and ideal. His expansion of the consequences of this intuition are particularly elegant. In effect there are three ways to pursue a metaphysic. One is to relate everything to being; another is to relate everything to self-knowing, in which the self as knowing corresponds perfectly to the self as known, and this becomes a firm anchor for other related reflections. The third was the development of a totality-thinking, in which there is a totality which is an all, which is the same time one: “one and all”, hen kai pan of an ancient tradition rediscovered. This was the way of Schelling and Hegel in different senses. With Hegel the all was the unification and completeness of knowing as effected by a philosopher, and the absolute realised itself as the end product of his speculations. Schelling’s early figures (in his Darstellung and his Fernere Darstellungen, which were both incomplete on the ideal side) seemed to go dangerously near a kind of pantheism, following Lessing more than Spinoza.[70] But in this Würzburg course, God is treated as the absolute: he is the Affirmer, and creation is the Affirmed. By the hen kai pan element, there was an assemblage of all the individual things, with which the absolute one was in direct identity making them all one thing. The individuals were all real or ideal things, not, as with Einstein, all the possible points at which a reference frame could be constructed.

If time is an abstraction from duration, and duration is a privileged affirmation from within each thing, deriving from the absolute substance, it is relatively easy to understand why Schelling says that each thing has its own time within itself. It will be the distendibility of its essential identity with the absolute substance which is eternal. Things therefore have eternity within themselves, and yet they have this distendibility into past, present and future in their appearance-reality. They are not dependent for this condition of life from a time which is abstractly conceived, and it cannot be meaningfully imposed on their living reality. “In so far as the [eternal, absolute] substance is in the thing, so also is eternity in the thing, i.e. past, present and future are one in it: it is firstly when we look at the thing separated or abstracted from, there is also a difference between past and present, i.e. not eternal” (SW§112). The MS version gives some images which show how time can be in things, as expressed in their inner processes: “This belongs to life with the basic changes in the organism, also to sicknesses, [showing that] terrestrial bodies [Weltkörper] have time in themselves in the fullest sense; this will sufficiently explain the way in which a thing has time in itself” (MS§109z). This possession of time in the preparation for the duration of each individual thing is a dilation away from the eternity of the infinite absolute substance which is in identity with each thing. Here there is no complete parallelism between Schelling’s conception and relativity theory, which is contained not within a conception of infinity or eternity (as in Schelling’s philosophy of absolute identity, as also in other theodicies of theism), but within the limitation of the highest speed which is that of light. But there is a limited likeness in that the past, present and future of each thing, which lies within it, will extend themselves into all of its external relationships of space and time, as from the unifying point of a reference frame. The inseparable conjoint theses of Schelling that each thing has both its own space and its own time, and that there is no space or time outside things except in the outward continuation of their own activity, does in fact break up the Newtonian conception of absolute space, and is indifferent to a modification of time and space magnitudes: not so much in abstractly conceived inertia systems, as in things themselves.[71]

From all of this it is perfectly clear that Schelling’s philosophy stands in contradiction to the generalisations made by Einstein about pre-relativity physics: “space and time were … separated essentialities. … Points in space were spoken of as absolute realities, in the same way as points in time. It was not perceived that the true elements in which to describe space-time realities was the event [Ereignis] which were described as spatiotemporal through four numbers x₁, x₂, x₃, t”.[72] Einstein could have found acceptable Schelling’s location of (relative) time and space in the reality itself, not in the abstractly considered, separated points of space and time, for he says: “neither the point in space in which something takes place, nor the point in time in which something takes place, has physical reality, but only the event itself.” Also, the identity of everything with the absolute eternal substance, which furnished Schelling with a facility (and more) by which to view the union of space and time at all stages of their union, up to absolute identity, might have had a limited appeal to Einstein in their common dissatisfaction with the extrinsicism of Newton’s mechanics. For Einstein events were related to each other within factual space, not within an absolute space, though mathematical, empirically verifiable, spatial relationships are initiated linearly (and curvilinearity) within a reference frame which is established for every object, from every point in space-time. And according to the first part of Einstein’s next sentence: “Between two events there is no absolute spatial relationship (independent from the relationship in space [Beszugsraum], and no relationship in time”. As we shall see,[73] for Schelling time and space belong to each other, and space is not empty, and whatever fills it (about “empty space” Schelling is imprecise) will have its own time. Schelling’s absolute space, in identity with absolute time, is the origin and therefore the intermediary between the space and time of things; it is not independent of space, because it is identical with it (i.e. the objects in space) according to the principle of A=A. Einstein’s conception of absolute” is equivalent to “ultimate”, not the state of identify from which everything came, and yet which remains always the same, in which all relativity is seen to have been a distension and in which it is timelessly recapitulated in identity with its true reality. Einstein’s postulation of an absolute [ultimate) relationship in space-time, because their union is more real than their separation, would be, if on different grounds, in the same perspective as Schelling’s thought, though without the presence of both within absolute time and space within an absolutely infinite substance of God as all: “rather a temporal-spatial relationship which is absolute (independent of a choice of relationship in space)”. Einstein went on to speak of the difficulty of picturing a four-dimensional reality: “a visual activation of the relations of this four-dimensional continuum is much less successful than that of a three-dimensional Euclidian continuum”. Einstein saw the three dimensions of space as indivisible, and the time dimension as differently defined: “The inseparability of the four-dimensional continuum of the events in no way entails the equal value of the spatial coordinates with the time coordinates. We have rather to keep before out eyes that the time coordinate is defined completely differently from the spatial coordinates”.[74]

This similarity between Schelling’s conception of the nature of time and space within his philosophy of the identity of the real and the ideal within the absolute, such that (by hen kai pan) the absolute remained one whilst existing in identity with every real and ideal object, and the reference frames postulated by Einstein from any point in the cosmos, is not exactly an ordering for Rees’s exposition, but it is relevant to Einstein’ contribution to cosmology and cosmogony, which is very considerable. We cannot expect an exact rapprochement between Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and contemporary cosmology and cosmogony. Here the pace of research has so accelerated due to carrying out of vast programmes of research involving the devotion of enormous funds for the construction of complex, sometimes gigantic, pieces of machinery-apparatus only affordable by the richest nations, like the USA, though even the USA works with international organizations which manage the joint plans of groups of nations. There is a general understanding that so great is this funding that it needs to activate interest to ensure the support of as large a part of the population as possible, and especially of the relatively young. That means that the diffusion of information and photographs is so swift that each week produces news of significant extensions of the frontiers of natural science.

Nevertheless it is interesting that in the extension of the study of electricity, whose scientific investigation began with Galvani’s discovery of an electrical presence producing a contraction when he brought his scalpel in contact with the sciatic nerves of a frog (in 1780), and Volta’s conviction that the tissue itself was not the source of the charge, owes something to the inspiration of Schelling’s Naturphilosopie, with its conviction that in the absolute all the sources of energy or potency had a single source. He experimented to produce a condenser which separated out positive and negative charges of static electricity (already known in lightning, and beginning to be known as produced by friction), and then went on (in 1819) to make a pile of small round plates placed in the order copper – zinc – cardboard soaked in salt solution. When placed together, the resulting continuous current could be passed from the top to the bottom of the pile through a wire. It was an electricity of a much more manageable and useful kind. It was a forerunner of an electric battery, whose full utilization would depend on technical developments which were initially slow.

This electricity was polarised into positive and negative, just as magnetism derived from two opposed poles in a magnet. It was inevitably that there should be some speculation about whether they were two forms of the same force.

In this sphere the influence of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, with its conviction that the absolute was the source of all forms of energy, was already causing the Danish scientist, Hans Christian Örsted, to speculate (in 1812 and 1813) not only on a relationship between galvanic electricity and a magnet, but on a unity of the chemical, thermal, electrical and magnetic forces of nature (said to echo earlier expressions^{^[75]}). Only in 1820 did he make two discoveries, one by accident, the other by deliberation, that there was a relationship between electricity and magnetism. As he was setting up his materials for a demonstration, he noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when the electric current from the battery he was using was switched on. This deflection convinced him that magnetic fields radiate from all sides of a live wire just as light and heat do, and that it confirmed a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. Three months later he began more intensive investigations. His findings were that an electric current produces a magnetic field as it flows through a wire. Such were the insignificant origins of electrophysics, with the postulation of “fields” on the model of the more evident fields of light and heat, both evident and tangible. It would not be surprising that gravity as a universal force should be brought together with them.

But this was what Schelling had already been doing in his Naturphilosophie, and it is interesting to see how he does this bringing in the other factors, variously associated already with “fields” of energy or force, even from such insignificant beginnings. That was a consequence of the fact that the absolute was infinite in power, realising itself through interrelated potencies, which were characterisable as “able to be”: “Seynkönnende”.

By positing an all, made coherent and one, by being identified in its infinitisable unity with every individual which composed it, Schelling in fact posited a basis for all later totality-thinking for reality: totality in that all individuals were included, totality also in the sense that totality was a factor which played its role in the interior structure and dynamics of the whole. Though all of the works of Naturphilosophie had their different figures, a particular place ought to be given to the densest, which is also the smallest: Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, Oder über den Begriff der spekulativen Physik und die innere Organisation eines Systems dieser Wissenschaft [Introduction to his [SWI,3 pp.269-326: changes “his” to “the”] Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, or about the Concept of Speculative Physics and the inner Organisation of a System of this Science], dated 1799].[76] We give here the passage from a summary, which has never been published: “To the ever repeated process of the emergence of duality and its ending in synthesis, which he had explained from internal principles (though the division itself was absolute, and repeatedly embodied) Schelling adds the intimate action together of light and gravity. Internal gravity as regulator of the opposition of forces is dissolved in the chemical process through the action of light, and especially of the sun. Burnable chemical elements are electrically positive; unburnable elements are negative: for ‘bodies are thickened (hemmed-in) electricity’, and light accompanies positive factors (while negative factors are invisible). Magnetic variation is understandable in this contrariety as related to light; and light is the beginning and end of the chemical process, in which the contrariety is dissolved.[77] In a note[78] he adds that there is a need to bring the magnetic, electrical and chemical processes, and even the organic, into a union. They are related in a chain which begins from magnetic to volcanic phenomena. So far the "central experiment" has not been made to verify the "central phenomenon": the single phenomenon appear in all these functions of matter. Were such a discovery made, it would do for the whole of nature what Galvanism has done for organic nature (i.e. demonstrate the active universal presence of electricity)”.^{^[79]}

It may be mentioned here that at the very end the final ‘General Scholium’ of his Principia, Newton raises the possibility of gravity deriving from “a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them,” which he seemed to identify with their being “electrical” [i.e. electrified].[80] Recent research among his papers produced a draft rewriting of the conclusion in this sense, which seems to have been suppressed.[81]

It is interesting that in nn.39 and 37) of the Einleitung (SWI,3 p.320-1 – written 1799) there is a reference to his Munich lecture in 1832 on Faraday’s latest discovery: evidently an addition of his son-editor. This lecture: Ueber Faraday’s neueste Entdeckung is reproduced in SWI,9 pp.439-452, and gives with his interpretation the whole history from Galvani, Volta and Örsted onwards. The passage sits uneasily among other passages in the Einleitung which give a dominant priority to electricity, which would represent Schelling’s thinking in 1799. For example: “for what are bodies themselves except thickened (hemmed in) electricity?”[82]

In it he was not so willing to pass from the galvanic experiment in the animal world to the voltaic world with the metals. The process seen by Galvanni properly passed from the world of electricity into the presence of organic nature, and passed into a chemical process, whilst on the voltaic pile water was seen to decompose into its chemical elements at each of its ends. Davy followed these indications to establish an electro-chemical system. Gehlen had gone further to detect in the pile the appearance not only of hydrogen and oxygen but of acids, alkalis, ores [Erden], metals: the pile separates out all kinds of chemical polarities, with the understanding that they are linked. The chemical contrarieties show themselves to have the same contrariety in polarity as electricity and magnetism; more independent in the electric, more linked to a determined substance in the magnetic. So magnetism, electricity and the chemical are three forms of the same process, not separated but contained one in the other. The electro-magnetic research had begun with Örsted’s discovery of the effect of an electric current on a magnet. Schelling had learnt through an Austrian article reporting two Italian physicists that Faraday achieved the production of electrical effects from a magnet, that there was “the existence of electrical current in a magnet”.[83] So is the work of Galvani and Örsted “completely closed and brought to a fulfilment”.[84] But he uses the occasion in a footnote to praise a German who had contended against empiricism despite heavy opposition;[85] this must refer to “unser Gehlen”[86]: i.e. Adolf Ferdinand Gehlen (1775-1815).[87]

The results of these experiments were in themselves small and the experimenters and philosophers like Schelling knew that they were significant but could not project what the developments from them might be. But with Schelling there is an incongruity in that with his hen kai pan conception lying behind all of his Naturphilosophie he was providing an arena of totality-thinking to take in all the details and give them a place. The universality of light and of gravity were features already present but not investigated in the cosmos as it was then known; magnetism, electricity and chemical reality seemed to be small in scale. It would need Faraday’s postulation that the energy of the magnetic system was in the field, not in the magnet, depending on a continuously radiating wave, whose medium was space itself - a discovery also of 1832 of greater importance than the analogous bipolarity of magnetism, electricity and chemical reaction - which was significant for the future, at first modestly shown by the patterns of magnetized iron filings on paper around a magnet. Clerk Maxwell extrapolated the data mathematically, not only showing that the intrinsic energy surrounding magnetic force and electrical force were the same, but that light also behaves with the same characteristic as an electric wave which is radiating: “The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.”

He sought the same characteristic in gravity, which like all these was subject to the inverse square law of the distance, but could not establish it.^{^[88]} There was thus already an arena for the play of cosmic forces, to some extent anticipated by the geometric planetary space of Newton, governed by gravity, but much from the hesitant expansion of the miniature local fields of magnetism and electricity through the universal extendibility of light from its functioning according to the laws of electric-magnetism, and its companion gravity.

Here it is interesting that from his intuitive sense of nature, within the forms which attributed to it, Schelling had expressed the idea in two works on Naturphilosophie of 1797 of an assimilation of light to the nature of electricity: in Die Weltseele (The World-Soul), “there is something which proves the identity of the positive matter of light, heat and electricity … . I have not researched this correspondence, but it presented itself to me” (SWI,2 pp.p.450, cf. pp.435-51); and in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur [Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature], “exact observations have taught from a consideration of the path followed by electricity that it follows the same laws as those of light” (SWI,2 p.137). With these thoughts one can associate a reflection from 1799 in his Erster Entwerf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie [First Outline of a system of Naturphilosophie]: “light is the symbol of all continuity. In its quantity it is the most constant that exists … it is a completely dynamic phenomenon” (SWI,3 p.131 n.2).

From this it can be said that that there had been in the general arena of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and even in some details – which admittedly he arrived at by philosophical reflection within the forms of his own figures, significant affinities with the conception of cosmic space being considered as a totality, with the presence of energies and forces derived from a single source, even though his realism in this context was to be taken over by mathematicisation. For him the correct way in which to view nature was in its relationship to the All. Its mathematicisation derived from a plausible mechanical view of nature which ignored its inner factors, which would include its ensouling. To regard nature as composed of measurable mass was to see it as no more than the recipient of inertia (System der gesammten Philosophie under der Naturphilosophie insbesondere [System of the whole of Philosophie, and of Naturphilosophie in particular] SWI,6 §88z). The number which is attached to things belongs to the same kind of non-reality as mass. It arises through the imagination repeating to itself the universal concept on encountering other instances of the same thing which are not identical with it. He claims that the same is true of the numbering in time (not duration): it consists in a relationship to something else, such as a clock (ib. SWI,6 §116z).[89]

The interpretation of Martin Rees of the dualities of forces which had presided over the formation of the cosmos was that they were no more than dualities “finely tuned”. In that he betrayed the preoccupation of his research: to identify and study these forces in isolation. That is perfectly acceptable as a programme of research. But it is a fact that these paired forces of contraries. The one balancing the other, have produced their terrestrially beneficent results by their union together. They have come into harmony in their results: their union has been creative. That union needs expressing them as a single creative principle, even though it works within the conjoint parameters of two forces which have found their balance and fine tuning. Otherwise the universe will be represented as being of so many forces in isolation, which does not correspond to our practical away of confronting it or living in it.

It so happens that the philosophy, or rather the numerous figures of his creatively conceived philosophy assume the presence of three cosmic forces, arising from the absolute itself, the One, and, as fundamental to its infinite dynamism underlying all of the its reality from its infinite resources. In this totality thinking, whose advantage of being a metaphysic of great simplicity is offset by his emergent determination to find a place for a creative God in the deepest unity of the All. Even there, though he sometimes expressed the opposed point of view, he had a desire to represent the theogony of the Christian Trinitarian God as itself working within those principles at their highest and ultimate purity.

We remain with the Einleitung, and its philosophical figure. He explains at the end that what he has tried to do in it is to set out a system “which finishes where the dynamic figure of Kant and his followers begin”. That is to say the positing of two forces which, one repulsive, the other attractive, as the constituents of matter, such that “by attraction alone, without repulsion, no matter is possible”.[90] Nevertheless he includes along with those two fundamental forces the force of gravity as their bond. So what he is a proposing is a substructuring to Kant’s dynamics which goes back to the origination of the forces and their building up – through the processes of “producing” and “product” – to the point where the two forces can be observed as active. Though professional reasons dictated that his philosophy should not distance itself formally from Kant’s, this could be described as filling in a lacuna. At this stage in his career, so soon after ceasing his studies, Schelling’s self-assuredness allowed him to take on and upstage firstly Fichte, and then in effect to do the same with Kant (who died in 1804), and whom he must had discovered was at this stage closed up in himself and would not become aware of the criticism. The experience of Fichte with Kant showed that he probably would not (without assistance) understand it. It must be said that compared with the ebullience of this Einleitung and its range and complexity: the most complex of all of his figures for a philosophy of nature, Kant’s thought appeared as decidedly grey and lifeless, lacking in speculative élan.

We give below a further extract from the summary which we made of the Einleitung, for which no English translation (to the best of our knowledge) exists. It was a good inspiration which led the then West German publisher, Reclam, to publish a hand edition in their Universal-Bibliothek (No.8472, Stuttgart 1988, ed. W.G. Jacobs), though this is now out of print.

There are evident differences in setting. Where modern cosmogony almost universally accepts the singularity of the Big Bang, and does not derive the cosmos as the communication of God himself, the setting of Schelling is in hen kai pan as a communication of the absolute, with infinite energy, into the All – according to Schelling the Seyende, in which God is “what the Seyende is”. The figure is of product emerging from productivity as the third force arising from opposed forces, better called potencies, which fill the All as “able to be”: “Seynkönnende”. In its full setting absolute identity is expressible as A=A. By their tendencies the potencies which have separated out from this source emulate their original unity and seek to return to it by activity. The first two are opposed and rise to find harmony or ‘indifference’ in the third and highest.

Here the appearance of potencies in its earliest comprehensive form in his Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie [Presentation of my System of Philosophy] of 1801, presented in a Spinoza-like form, presents A=B, the dislocation of subject from object, as a fact of universal existence out of the absolute which needs relating to the absolute. He does it symbolically. Firstly the particular shortfall needs integrating in the perfect unity of absolute identity: A². So (A=B)=A². But that whole has need of rising as a unity into absolute identity (or even an analogous reality such as light), represented as A³.The whole can be represented linearly as either rising: (A=B)=A²= A³, or descending: (A=B)=A²=A³ (v. the various elements of ib. §57, SWI,4 pp.148-150). It is clear that evil of all kinds can be included in (A=B).

In a later formulation of the same process he expressed it as three states of “able to be”: Seynkönnende = A. So, -A+A±A. From purely able-to-be as Seyende (-A), through fully Seyende without further potentiality (+A), ending in a state in which two elements of -A and +A find their due proportion in "A: the synthesis "excluded" from the other two, in which each thing finds its intended final state. In this process, -A represented – especially in his Philosophie der Mythologie – a state into which –A falsely objectified itself as B. That provoked a further instantiation of A as +A and a conflict between it and B to repress it back into its original natural condition. Finally the emergence of ±A as the state of harmonising or indifference confirmed the original relationships. Clearly –A with its subjective capacity of objectifying itself in a false condition can include evil as all kinds. (v. two adjacent formulations from the Einleitung in der Philosophie der Mythologie [Introduction in the Philosophie of Mythology] (SW II.1, pp.390-391). The first is exclusively in terms of -A+A"A; the second refers to the same as a series A¹A5A³. Both indicate the place of conflict in the process of the second objectification of A annulling the false objectification of -A. Schelling refers to that as the “absolute process”: not exclusively religious, and which “the true science” sets out in mythology (ib. pp.216-7).

The summary of the passage from the Einleitung has a much more complex figure than this. The overall characteristic is that of contrary forces – but more with the contrariety within themselves (as with electricity and magnetism) not with the contrariety between one type of force and another which have these characteristics relative to each other, as in the ratios given by Rees – as between the attractive force of gravity and the expanding forces of electrical origin. Nevertheless as forces with vast fields in their evolution as a substructure to the far horizon of Kantian dynamics, and rooted in the absolute, the forces in Schelling are affine to those in contemporary cosmogony, both active within totalities or significant parts of totalities. Your attention is particularly drawn to the two possibilities of what may emerge from a contrariety of forces: either a product, which closes off the process, or a further process. With a single universal origin, which I have called ‘monodicean’ in order to indicate that his interest there changes from considering the continuing progress of the whole, back to the origin. So there is a variety of dualities and triplicities of forces – as there is in modern cosmogony. So could not a similar discernment use analogous facilities to make the process more actual by indicating the creative achievements and their disturbances in cosmic history?

There is naturally one great difference which would affect the grouping of factors. The process in the development of the ratios of energies given in Rees’s book is for the most part chronologically parallel. Those of Schelling are for the most part chronologically consequent, besides being conceived of in a different and special arena. The different setting of Schelling actually brings the differences into relief, whilst suggesting the modalities of another style in which scientific cosmogony could ultimately be placed in all of its details, not clad the garments of realism, but conveniently set out in the realism of overlapping forces and their creativity, as well as the turns in their history accounted for, not as jumps but of a renewed productivity accepted in place of a new product, as a continuity from the previous one.

In this passage we particularly commend the reader’s attention to the perception of a union of opposition and identity: the theme is the passage is in these words: without opposition, there would be no striving after identity, and without identity the opposition could not persist.

So here is the summary of the end of final section A, and all of final sections ‘B’ and ‘C’ of the Einleitung (SW I,3 pp.306-320) as is found in my MS:[91]

“ … one must raise ones view from the limitations of individual products to nature itself, where "the One [der Eine], so to speak struggling against freedom [der Freiheit sich gleichsam wehrende], pursues productivity through all the turns and bends to the point where, finally, it is compelled to die in a product". This leaves perplexities about a degree of monodicity which intrudes with this One, the struggle of such a principle against freedom, and the significance for the infinite activity of dying in a product.

He then lists the basic principles of a universal theory of nature (B), lettered a) to f), but unevenly interrupted and extended. The finesse of the distinctions in the reality and thought of integral wholes explains their appearance under different expressions. Those here are a particularly sensitive group. What they say has to be sought for in what their expression according to the normal suppositiones[92] would render too coarse and contradictory. a) the limitation of production must derive from a difference which arises in productivity itself. A note to this contains a formulation of the duality in unity: not his final thought, but highly significant for its quality and intensity. The opposition must be thought "completely purely" within the "pure identity" of nature, and as a pure activity without a substrate.[93] b) productivity is basically determined by this difference: drawn into it, and yet repelled, in the alternation between expansion and contraction. The alternation itself brings about a common entity [ein Gemeinschaftliches] which consists in the alternation itself [nur im Wechsel]: the activity in the alternation is productivity in itself divided into two. c) fixity must come from a third factor (α). He then reflects (β) on how this third is related to the opposed two factors, and to the original identity of nature (without opposition, there would be no striving after identity, and without identity the opposition could not persist).

The third factor will be a pursuit of "indifference", for difference can only be regarded as difference through a third factor. This must be the One [das Einzige]: the substrate which presumes, and is presumed by, the alternation. (This was in the text itself, and preceded the "without a substrate but activity" of the note to a).) As for unity here, he goes as far as unity in time: "difference and striving for indifference is in time simply speaking one and simultaneous". The variations exemplify further the variety of expressions which arise from pursuing a distinction not envisaged by conventional suppositio.

Still in c)ß) he says there is no absolute identity in nature, only indifference: the finding of equilibrium between contrary forces, the duration together of opposition and the third factor in which they find their indifference. With the same schema as in the System des transzendentalen Idealismus [System of Transcendental Idealism] (of the same year), where an absolute self which, by an absolute and free timeless act of self-consciousness, constituted a synthesis of all knowing, all actions and all willing, as the "infinitely extended limits" of absolute indifference, within which products were brought to relative indifference, where the striving towards indifference endlessly leaves behind an unrecognized part of the difference, while the absolute opposition remains intact. c and d are united in A, but b and e take their place, and when they are united in B, a and f take their place, and are united in C. But, while a part of the difference remains unreconciled, the previous reconciliation contains it: thus the unity in A supports the opposition in B; the unity in B supports the opposition in C. The opposition remaining in A is "only One, in which again B and C divide themselves." Thus each product has a duality in its structure, which is brought to indifference in the following product, while remaining supported by the unity-in-indifference achieved in the synthesis of the previous product. He envisages an endless onward development, established by the impossibility of ever terminating the opposition; but with the significance that that the origin is not forgotten, and the universe is conceived as a circle, or sphere, extending its periphery from a common centre. It could be brought into a monodicy more surely than most of the Entwurf. The synthesis in the product is exemplified in gravity: as A is the cause of the unity and the duality in B, and gravity is the force which ensures the mutual adjustment to each other of the expansive and contractive force of which every body is composed, A is the cause not only of the opposition in B, but also its gravity, whether it is at rest or in motion. Then, not considering the production of particular products, Schelling sees at every moment a universal re-erection of duality and its removal: appearing as a striving towards a third factor, which itself is an abstraction from the productive tendency (with a real value of 0), contrasted with those within it.[94] But there is a universal field of gravity, with a universal point of indifference, and given the allocation to gravity of a function interior to each thing. The variety of their tendencies to move in a straight line signifies their individual deviance from the universal field. But that lineal tendency which is extrinsically evident is only the result of different movements coming together: the intrinsic movements of expansion and contraction, and the attraction within the universal field (not to exclude any magnetic or electrical causes of which it is the tangible result). Here he gives a more extensive internal development of the paradox of the Entwurf that mass is proportional to gravity: "the mass of a body is only the expression of the factors with which the opposition in it is removed": the moment of unity, in which it registers its detachment from a previous duality, and its constitution as a product - before productivity continues in another mass demands a further opposition.

Sections B a) - c) have considered the construction of matter in general; now its specific differences must be considered (d). While each product (A, B, C, etc.) is a complete synthesis through gravity of duality with unity, the duality which it receives (from within the infinite extension of a from f) is not extinguished, and what remains is taken on to be synthesised in the next product. What remains from the original difference in A is passed on to B and C, which still only remove it in part. The different products are distinguished not only by their completed syntheses, but also the not exhausted oppositions. Gravity is passed on through and with the intrinsic contrary forces of which the things are constructed, adjusting itself and them to their new conditions: all of which variations lie within the "central attractive forces". So many new factors have been imposed on to Newton's universal law of gravitational attraction (which is related to the inverse square of the distance) that it cannot be the same for superior bodies in the world as for the inferior. That the balance of forces in the new product may be different from the producer, e.g. the predominance of the positive (expansive) force being replaced by the predominance of the negative (attractive) force, is parallel to a positive-electrical body making another negative-electrical. To which he immediately adds "All differences are only differences of electricity".

Section e) considers the situation (so far not discussed) where a number of different products emerge. Starting from the principle already in place that "there are as many steps in the dynamic process as there are steps of the passage from difference into indifference", he sets out three steps. α) presumes the continual repeated emergence of opposition and its removal at every moment, the opposition being dissolved in universal gravity. The repeated emergence is perceptible in objects which gravitate in relationship to each other. He takes the special example of the earth and a magnetic needle. In the perceptible fluctuations of the needle's position can be detected the continual removal of the (really magnetic, but apparently) special gravitational attraction to the indifference found in the polar direction, and the continual re-establishment (passively, and through the needle's repulsive force) of its identity (by sinking) with the universal gravitation force, and towards its point of indifference. Here is displayed not an object, but the act of becoming an object: attractive and repulsive forces brought together within gravity, but before the opposition is dissolved into universal gravity to permit the emergence of the unity of the product. ß) sees the opposition leading to a division into two different bodies, each having a preponderance of each of the opposed factors. At first they are kept gravitationally attracted to each other, but when the relative balance is re-established in each, the attraction changes into rejection, in which Schelling sees a parallel with the opposed electrical polarity of individual bodies. At γ) the relative preponderance of one factor in each body becomes absolute, so that the original division is fully represented in the separation: each has become a unity, and the material returns to the first step in which the opposition can re-emerge. So, in summary, the steps are: pure difference (within the object, from which the substrate for the new product comes) - the simple factors of two products - two opposed products, as "difference in the third potency". "Potency" is here schematic, standing for "degrees of accentuation" of difference and, in this sense, force.[95] With this conception of gravity, internal gravitational indifference must be removed, so that they may gravitate (as in γ) as products in relationship to each other. Here gravity must be overcome to allow the chemical process of total unification to take place. Finally, he asserts that the two sides of production correspond, in so far as the striving to move out of difference (in opposition) can only end in the indifference of the product: it passes through all the stages which lie between the extremes (interpreted in relationship to the regulative function of gravity as degrees of specific gravity), until the product is fixed at the point of indifference.

Section e) is followed by a "General Note". The passage of productivity from identity through duality back into identity is formally described as thesis-antithesis-synthesis. To the ever repeated process of the emergence of duality and its ending in synthesis, which he had explained from internal principles (though the division itself was absolute, and repeatedly embodied) Schelling adds the intimate action together of light and gravity. Internal gravity as regulator of the opposition of forces is dissolved in the chemical process through the action of light, and especially of the sun. Burnable chemical elements are electrically positive; unburnable elements are negative: for "bodies are thickened (hemmed-in) electricity", and light accompanies positive factors (while negative factors are invisible). Magnetic variation is understandable in this contrariety as related to light; and light is the beginning and end of the chemical process, in which the contrariety is dissolved. In a note he adds that there is a need to bring the magnetic, electrical and chemical processes, and even the organic, into a union. They are related in a chain which begins from magnetic to volcanic phenomena. So far the "central experiment" has not been made to verify the "central phenomenon": the single phenomenon appear in all these functions of matter. Were such a discovery made, it would do for the whole of nature what Galvanism has done for organic nature (i.e. demonstrate the active universal presence of electricity).

In a final point, f), he says that the dynamic process is a second construction of matter, with just as many steps as the original construction. Here, he says, is the reverse [der umgekehrte] of e), which had considered matter as in a state of indifference (i.e. as a transitory construction at the third step of production). Just as "the secret of production" in organic nature was based on the steps of sensibility, excitation, and the drive to construction [Bildungstrieb], so the secret of the production "of nature out of itself", not only of matter but of the whole of nature, was the schema of the categories of magnetism, electricity and the chemical process.

So (in C) he reaches the end he had set himself: to find a common expression for the construction of both inorganic and organic nature. Without referring back to the thesis of the Entwurf, that the organic is the primary production and the inorganic derived from it, he repeats that inorganic nature is a product of the first potency, and organic nature a product of the second. The organic begins from products which have again become factors, and should be described as "have arisen" [entstanden], while the inorganic begins from factors which appear to have been always in existence. Organic things cannot come to indifference in the same way as inorganic, because their life prevents the "absolute" passage from productivity to product, which is required [abgezwungen ist] for nature. He envisages that the working of the potencies is consecutive and the process from magnetic through electrical to chemical takes place twice in the organic. Organic production is "the productivity of a product": of an inorganic product already constituted by the first potency. It begins with the limiting of this consequent productivity. Organisms also have an alternation between expansion and contraction, which involves their organic and inorganic nature together. Initially it seems that while the inorganic has a duality of principles (in a simple product with contraries), the organic has a triplicity (as a producing product) which, at its third potency, would produce, rather than come to indifference, and precisely through the ("galvanic") process of excitation. In consequence the organic process will terminate not in a single product but in different ones. It also sparks off a new process of excitation, leading to further productivity, which never arrives at indifference.

In consequence, for all the analogy between magnetism, irritability and the chemical process, and sensibility, excitation and formation-drive, the organic being the second potency of the inorganic, the difference between organic productive product and inorganic indifference at the third potency prevents there being a common expression for the construction of their products. Were the organic function only higher functions of the inorganic, a higher synthesis might be found for them within nature as a whole. The distinction between organic and inorganic nature lies only in nature as an object: that points to a point of unity being in nature as a subject. But this would entail a single originating source for everything in nature, even an absolute identity. But, while the figure of the Einleitung makes excursions in this direction, it normally exploits the facilities for explaining dynamism from an original duplicity. Here, almost as if to distract his readers from pursuing this possibility, her adds tantalisingly, "and that nature as originally-productive hovers over both". From the point of view of reflexion, productivity is explained by the coming of gravity as a third factor to the opposed expansive and "attractive (or retarding)" forces, which "first make the contraries what they are." This cannot be used for "synthesis", he says: that process by which dynamic physics would connaturally, from the standpoint of intuition, follow out the continuity in evolution in productivity, of which he spoken before in section l). Again, such an intuition would totally coincide with a monodicy grounded in absolute identity. There is undoubtedly irony in his saying that all he has been able to achieve is to provide the foundation for the opposition of forces on which "Kant and his follower" (probably Eschenmeyer) began their dynamic physics. That is, the opposition already established in the product, but with no attempt to come to terms with the process of productivity. Schelling’s method with other philosophers, and already with Fichte, was to show how their views were partial when compared with the more complete lay out of his own system. But that would require a figure which proceeded out of a speculative insight, of which he was perfectly capable, but which for this figure the derivation of dynamism from an original opposition prevented him from attempting. However those occasional exercises in the direction of a single origin, or reference point, for nature were eloquently muted probes.”

Kant constructed an essential simply metaphysical basis for the dynamic element in the science of nature. It saw material itself as composed of two forces: expansive and contractive.

This is far exceeded in range by the factors in play in the physics of modern cosmology, which are also governed by a conception of the contrariety of expansive and contractive forces, the former being electrical, the latter being gravity.

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie speculated on the forces which lay behind the production of the material world, and the history of those forces. Where Kant had begun with their product Schelling looked at the production from which it came. To him light and gravity were two universally present forces, with their own fields, as it would later be called. Schelling correlated them speculatively, for which he could only apply his intelligence and his imagination. In this activity he made frequent use of isomorphs and their complementary opposites, enantiomorphs. Yet he kept himself well informed about the latest scientific discoveries, himself remaining committed to realist speculation and rejecting the relevance of the beginning of arithmeticisation. From Kepler he had learnt the value of geometry for expressing speculations on the objects of a science of nature.

Yet, Schelling’s speculations in these domains have an openness for parts of cosmogony-cosmology as they have subsequently been developed: with ever increasing range and speed.

Through its relationship to the dualities of contrary forces there is an unintended connaturality to the dualities as he knew them from the science of nature of Kant: expansion and contraction.

Schelling saw these forces as interrelated in their contrariety, and he posited gravity as holding the opposites together at a microcosmic level, not excluding it for the macrocosm. Gravity was communicated further to whatever product emerged from an original contrariety.

As is now known the ultimate nature of gravity lies in the graviton, which is a carrier boson: a subatomic particle, of which it has the function of carrying other fundamental forces. In this it is in the same class as photons. Both have a charge describable in electromagnetic units from which are built their corresponding physical realities of gravity and light. Not only does the discernment of these sub-particles place them within a general category of electro-magnetic force, but also raises the possibility of the long desired union of quantum mechanics and relativity.

Not counting nuclear forces, we are here in a domain of subparticles in which the identity of mass with energy can be seen as in fact realised.

The features of Schelling’s account of nature in his Einleitung have an openness to the factors of Schelling’s science of nature and philosophy of nature.

The extract given above found a union and substrate of opposed forces in the activity of the two forces alone, without any further substrate. Locating them as interrelated contraries seems particularly appropriate for viewing the original hydrogen plasma, which on cooling found the condition for completing its complementary electrical structure with electrons, and passing on, by fusion with the other protons and neutrons, to form the abundant helium. The initial enormous expansion under the intensest heat would lose nothing from its initial physical interpretation.

The ultimate substrate in the activity – energy – itself raises the level of instinctive image-building and analogy construction above the elementary imaging, based on hylomorphic conceptions derived from Aristotle’s physics of matter and form, and his metaphysics einai-esse, which demanded the presence of a substance in the reality itself. The factors in Schelling’s appreciation of products deriving from production is particularly open to describing a history with changes in dualities, and product-triplicities. Instinctively the mind will go to the interrelationships of energies implicitly acting within fields – already known but not microphysically understood as characteristic of gravity and light.

His conception of “indifference”, in which contrary forces find a harmony full of tension – which also characterises the continuity of cosmogony, takes attention to the creative unions of contrary forces and their establishment as the third potency in Schelling’s triad of –A+A±A.

Bipolarities of different kinds may very well be expressible as the bipolarity of an ultimate electrical force.

The hypothetical placing of chemical energy as a form if electro-mechanical energy should not be forgotten at the stage of the continuities when the cosmogony is of simple elements and their regulation.

Later comes planet-building from supernova debris, and then a relationship between the organic and inorganic.

Schelling naturally looked at their relationship to find, in fact, a related cosmic origin to both.

Modern cosmology research has undertaken a vast research of a more distant past, not only of its chronology but of the interplay of factors in the closest hardly expressible affinity.

Here perhaps Schelling’s facilities provide a help or a prompt to something more embracive, especially of continuity in creativity in the condition of indifference realised or supplanted.

The proposition for factors being currently explored may be helped at least in their original conceptualisation by the sophisticated and subtle conception of a union of energies at tension with no more than their energy as a substrate.

NOTES:

[1] v. Report in BBC News Science/Nature 16 Nov 2006.

[2] v. “Dark matter mapped”, K. Sanderson in news@nature com 7 January 2007 : doi:10.1038/news070101-7; “Hubble makes 3D dark matter map”, P. Rincon in BBC NEWS Science/Nature, 7 January 2007.

[3] op.cit. p.92.

[4] This is the second of Rees’s six numbers. Two descriptions arise in the text: i) it “defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth are made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common, whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If ε were 0.006 or 0.008 we could not exist” (p.2); ii) “These processes depend on the strength of the ‘nuclear force’ that glues together the protons and neutrons within the nuclei of these atoms – measure by the cosmic number ε = 0.007 that denotes the proportion of energy that is released when hydrogen fuses into helium” (p.58).

[5] ib. pp.93-5.

[6] ib. pp.95-6.

[7] v. J.D. Barrow and F.J. Tipple, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford 1986, using the corrected paperback edition of 1988), ch.8.: “The Anthropic Principle and Biochemistry”, especially 8.7 - pp.556-570.

[8] Informed clarification would be welcome here, and it may entail the rewriting of some of what follows. Malcolm Dykes has offered this comment: “I am convinced he means the net force; not clear it makes sense otherwise. It is not evident that the net force is attractive, some analysis is necessary to show why it's attractive.”

[9] Despite its relative weakness, “Gravity is the organising force for the cosmos”, Rees p.35.

[10] [10] After saying that the self-gravity of small terrestrial objects is negligible Rees gives an idea of this limit as it acts with objects the size of solar planets: “Self-gravity is not important in asteroids, nor in Mars’s two small potato-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos. But bodies as large as planets (and even our own large moon) are not rigid enough to maintain an irregular shape: gravity makes them nearly round. And masses above that of Jupiter get crushed by their own gravity to extraordinary densities (unless the centre gets hot enough to supply a balancing pressure, which is what happens to the Sun and other stars like it). It is because gravity is so weak that a typical star like the Sun is so massive. In any lesser aggregate, gravity could not compete with the pressure, nor squeeze the material hot and dense enough to make it shine” (ib. pp.32-33).

[11] Rees p.52.

[12] ib. p.34.

[13] ib. pp.2, 35.

[14] ib. p.34.

[15] ib. p.2.

[16] I gratefully acknowledge the criticisms and help of Malcolm Dykes in reformulating this section.

[17] Ib. p.2.

[18] Ib. ch.4.

[19] Optical spectra from elements in the stars can be matched against optical spectra produced from terrestrial elements.

[20] With the age of the cosmos estimated as thirteen and a half billion years, the measurement of the breakdown radio-active atoms (through half-lives) gives the age of the Earth as 4.55 billion years: So there was time for what follows! The reader should be looking at the fine-tuning at cosmic levels as the product of microcosmic processes.

[21] ib. pp.99-100.

[22] ib. pp.82, .97-100.

[23] ib. p.82.

[24] ib. pp.82-3.

[25] ib. pp.2-3.

[26] Ib. p.84.

[27] ib. p.84.

[28] ib. p.89

[29] “Light shed on mysterious particle”: BBC News, Science/Nature: 31 March 2006.

[30] Drawing on Rees, p.108; Einstein seems to have used a capital-Λ. The writer has known as a boy in his parish someone who became an important, but modest, designer of optical telescopes, one of which used masks which cut out all non-galaxies and collectively measured spectroscopically the red-shifts of the galaxies. The parish also had an engineer who worked with experiments at CERN at its epoch of great expansion, from the time of the “British Bubble Chamber’ onwards. The macrocosm and the microcosm!

[31] Rees pp.102-7.

[32] He indicates latent particles and antiparticles, and “strings”: “a seething tangle of strings, manifesting structures in extra dimensions”, pp.108-9.

[33] ib. p.107.

[34] ib. pp.109-11.

[35] Ib. pp.113-4. Here Rees does not labour the fine tuning. Partly because there are so many factors to bring into relationship and in unstraightforward ways, with ovelappings. A geometrical construction like Newton’s parallelogram with “two forces acting jointly describing the diagonal” (Principia, Axioms Law 3 coroll. 1) would be totally unconstructable. cf. Hegel on this, Dissertatio philosophica de Orbitis Planetarum, ed. Neuser (Weinheim 1986), p.8 “so many forces had to be invented, of which nature knew nothing [quas natura ignorat].”

[36] ib. p.116.

[37] ib. pp.116-7.

[38] ib. pp.117-8.

[39] ib. pp.119-21.

[40] ib. p.125.

[41] Ib. pp.123-7.

[42] Ib. pp.127-9.

[43] v. Newton’s introductory note to Principia book 3 (Cohen edn. p.793): “I composed an earlier version of book 3 in popular form, so that it might be more widely read. But those who have not sufficiently grasped the principles set down here will certainly not perceive the force of the conclusions … I have translated the substance of the earlier version into propositions in a mathematical style, so that they may be read only by those who have first mastered the principles.”

[44] The conception was so designated by Fred Hoyle the Cambridge ‘theorist’, “as a derisive description of a theory he didn’t like’ (Rees, p.75).

[45] Ib. p.133.

[46] In view of what we shall go on to say about him, it may be mentioned here that in his philosophy of nature, Schelling readily found a place Faraday’s findings.

[47] ib. p.134.

[48] ib. p.135.

[49] Spinoza, Letter 50.

[50] Rees p.137.

[51] ib. pp.137-9.

[52] ib. pp.140-4

[53] ib. pp.144-5.

[54] ib. pp.146-8.

[55] In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit de Antiken Welt (ed. T. Klauser, Stuttgart in progress 1950 onwards, IV (1959) (coll. 269-310); contains a reference to (parts of) the article by R. Rocques “Dionysos Areopagita”, in. ib., III (1957) coll. “1090f”.

[56] De Coelo I 286^a12; art.cit, col.293.

[57] In connection with this we must mention the work of the so-called Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London 1678). It was a work of immense erudition of classical and patristic texts with the apologetic intention of showing that the world “intellectual history” – principally of Greece, Rome, Egypt and India (the two latter culled from Greek and Latin writings). A Latin version with critical notes, and with a full citation of the sources not given with the original, was produced by Lorenz Mosheim (two vols. in one, Jena 1733¹; the Hague 1773²). Schelling’s preparations for a Geschichte des Gnosticismus (a notebook in the Berlin Schelling Archive, MS 28) gathering a bibliography with a few thoughts under ordered page-heads), dating to June/July 1795, has never been published, but I have transcribed it, having had virtually all of the books in my hand and included with the customary references from some visits to important German libraries, paginating (only on my version!) its inverted pages from the inside front cover. Some of the books included there were quoted by Schelling up to fifty years later. A recall now with amazement the coincidence which led me to identify the lines of Greek (without title or author) on pp.170-71 as being a passage from Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (369B-E). And a second coincidence, when, after Dr. J.J. Hall, of Cambridge University Library, had noticed a reading not in any of their collection of editions, I found it followed the text as cited by Mosheim (1 edn. p.235; 2 edn p.404), even to capitalising the first letter of the first word as “Διο”, and other equivalences. Schelling must have read Plutarch carefully, and he would have found a text (in ch. 36, 365B-C) which would coincided with his postulation of three potencies working together in an absolute process: “for the God is a source, and every source, by its fecundity, multiplies what proceeds from it; and for ‘many times’ we have the habit of saying thrice. I have heard modern physicists highly critical of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, yet it sympathetically offers facilities for the consideration of the cosmic processes brought together by Rees, it made in a normally unread text that union of time and space dimensions by reference frame which Einstein himself thought that philosophers had never done, and even by his εν και παν philosophy encouraged the Danish Oersted and the German Ritting, followers of Faraday in the unification of electricity and magnetism.

[58] ib. pp.149-51.

[59] ib. pp.152-55.

[60] Ib. pp. 155-6.

[61] According to Aristotle “quality” is an accident, and he has two accounts of the nature of accidents one of which is real, the other a category, but whichever is taken the accident is not as many people seem to think something like a shell to the substance, at its surface or even exterior to it. Like other accidents the substance is taken again and viewed from a different viewpoint whilst having a real basis.

[62] As it is understood by investigators it cannot be defined as a creation of the interior senses, with time as a creation of the exterior senses, as Kant wanted: he reduced all reality to phenomena in order to handle them more simply and more uniformly. His transcendentality saw them as derived from the mind as giving them a necessary formality, without which they would be unknowable as objects, and noumena in the first place have this derived reality alongside phenomena. Yet he asserted the existence of matter and rejected idealism. To some extent these anomalies can be lessened by the considerations that his initial problematic was Leibniz’s problem to bring unity to universalities, and so his reference frame is not that of idealism against realism, and by the fact that he has arbitrarily taken out a part of a complete transcendental philosophy to analyse it in certain contexts of knowing. But there is an internal change in position which is there to be read, that the reason – with all of its acknowledged great powers, is delegated to pursue the serialisations of contingent connections, and transcendentality is extended to pursue them, where its rigidities had been seen as the cause of the unnatural rigidities of reason, where the limited activity of the understanding was more compliant by being less demanding.

[63] The writer who depends on informed explanations of the essences of things compares the situation as it appeared in the Scientific American of September 2004, which did little more than catch onto its plurality of dimensions, with the far more rigorous but still manageable explanations, in the new section on ‘Quantum Gravity’: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_ss.html#mtheory , added to but still separated from the internet series Cambridge Relativity: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/ . Also to be recommended are the more technical articles, beautifully cross-referenced and kept up to date, in the Internet Wikipedia.

[64] Rees, p.144.

[65] ib., p.199.

[66] ib. p.162.

[67] For this see the Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory, which dates this “superstring” theory from 1995, and that Edward Witten was the leading light on this path.

[68] Here the element of empiricism in Stephen Hawking’s position is even compellingly attractive: “I take the positivist viewpoint that a physical theory is just a mathematical model and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observation”: Stephan Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton 1969), pp.3-4; cf. p.121. Also in the question of the big bang being a totally new event, a creation (i.e. a “singularity”), Hawking says that he and Penrose had proved in theorems that “according to general relativity [the theory of Einstein], there should be a singularity in our past” (ib. p.75). And so, “This led to the abandonment of attempts (mainly by the Russians) to argue that there was a previous contracting phase and a nonsingular bounce into expansion. Instead, almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang” (pp.19-20).

[69] The work is obscurely placed in Schelling’s collected works: SWIX pp.375-388

[70] Near the end of his life he wrote to his son: “Hen kai pan, Lessing said that in his time; I know nothing other. I also know nothing other” (quoted from a virtually untraceable source by Arsenij Gulyga in Schelling Leben und Werk (transl. from the Russian by Elke Kirsten, Stuttgart 1982) p.377. But he did distance himself from its purest form by pursuing the distinction by positing the unity of the absolute as “das Seyende”, and God as “was das Seyende ist”. In his early writing it is astonishing what he contrived to place within this figure or derive from it, using hen kai pan as a facility. But he always constructed his sometimes embarrassingly varying philosophical figures as artistic expressions.

[71] MS pp.63-4.

[72] Einstein’s Grundzüge der Relativitätstheorie, (8^th, twice enlarged edn of Vier Vorlesungen über Relativitätstheorie (1922: Braunschweig/Weisbaden, 1990) p.33 (English transl. By E.P. Adams (later edns, cum al): The Meaning of Relativity (London, original version 1922; later in Science Paperbacks (London 1967) p.29).

[73] Elsewhere in the MS, not cited here.

[74] ib. pp.33-34; transl. pp. 29-30. This paragraph from MS pp.7-8.

[75] v. R.C. Stauffer, “Persistent Errors Regarding Oersted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism”, Isis 44, December 1953, p.307.

[76] In case it may help a reader, here is a summary of its content, as introduced from the text [MS Book-2, pp.64-5 with n.293]: “The first six '' do reflect on a "speculative physics", but the later part develops some of the themes of the Entwurf, especially in the triplicities which arose out of the opposed dualities, and the role of gravity. The unevenness of the structure of the Einleitung suggests that it had evolved with its content. It begins with five ''s on the structural system of the philosophy of nature as speculative physics, followed by a sixth ' on "the inner organisation of the system of speculative physics". '6 has general principles in its sections I, II and III, after which IV has sub-sections a) - n) on its inner organisation. The final ones sprawl into long sections; "m)" is repeated, the first occurrence having subsections α) - ε), the latter with a long extension. After which he takes up the theme of finding a common expression for organic and inorganic products (which he had not completely done in the Entwurf), as sections A, B and C. C is the most complex with its principles for a universal theory of nature, under sections a) - f); of these c) asks two questions α) and β) about the relationship of "original identity" to the duality, and the identity to which nature strives (as synthesis and point of indifference: not absolute), e) has sections α) - γ) on the series of steps [Stufen] in nature, of which e) is followed by a "General Note," and f) uses the latest discoveries of Faraday to bring together the analogies of electrical, chemical and magnetic processes as the "categories of the original construction of nature".

[77] n.2 to p.319(-20) mentions the important contrariety in oxygen itself, that it is absolutely unburnable, but everything else burns through it. It exemplifies the principle that the unburnable is negatively electric, and it has attractive (=contractive) force. Phlogiston, on the other hand. is positively electric, and has positive force.

[78] ib., p.319, n.2 (=p.320).

[79] From MS “Book-2” pp.78-9.

[80] V. the English translation of the The Principia by L.B. Cohen and Anna Whitman (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1999, pp.943-4.

[81] v. ib.: the initial ‘Guide’ by Cohen, 9.3 and 9.4. A translation of the Draft Conclusion is given at pp.287-92. It begins with a comparison between electric and magnetic attractions those of gravity: “…Magnetism and electricity sometimes attract and sometimes repel; gravity always attracts …” (Latin text from Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, edd. A.Rupert Hamm and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge 1962).

[82] Einleitung, SWI,3 p.319 (was sind denn die Körper selbst als verdichtete (gehemmte) Electricität?”

[83] Schelling, Faraday, SWI,9 p.446 n.2.

[84] ib. p.447.

[85] ib. n.3 [?] of a new numbering, beginning on p.447; the passage is found on p.448

[86] ib. p.441.

[87] A pharmacist by origin. He edited simultaneously from 1803-6 the Neues Berliner Jahrbuch für die Phamarcie, and Neues allgemeines Journal de Chemie, the expanding the latter into Journal für die Chemie und Physik und Mineralogie. On the controversy between the empiricists and those who followed Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, there is an article by Andreas Kleinert, “Volta, the German Controversy on Physics and Naturphilosophie and his relations with Johann Wilhelm Ritter” (which just mentions Gehlen’s name). This is published on the web, as part of an Italian collana (findable in Google): ppp.unipv.it/Collana/Pages/Libri/Saggi/Nuova%20Voltiana4_PDF/p__029-039.pdf -

[88] James Clerk Maxwell, A DynamicalTheory of the Electromagnetic Field (London 1865): on light, p.477ff, especially 499; on gravity pp.492-3.

[89] cf. The position of S.Hawking, given above in n.63, on the relationship to reality in a highly mathematicized projection.

[90] In the propositions [Lehrsätze] 1-6 of ch.2: “Der metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Dynamik” [The Metaphysical Foundations of Dynamics] of his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenachaft [The Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature] (First edition 1786), A pp.33-60. Proposition 7 says that the attraction of all matter is “an immediate action through empty space of one matter upon another” A p.60. Einleitung SWI,2 p.326.

[91] MS Book-2, pp. 75-81. Most of the footnotes are omitted. The text has been lightly improved.

[92] Using the facility of the scholastic expression, ‘suppositio’, which means ‘what is under consideration at the moment.

[93] “The first postulate of the science of nature is an opposition in the pure identity of nature. This opposition must be thought with complete purity, without any other substrate than activity [Thätigkeit], since it is the condition for all substrates. Anyone who can think of no activity, no opposition without a substrate, is completely without competence for philosophy, since all philosophising must begin with the deduction of a substrate” op.cit. p.308 n.1.

[94] 0 will give itself into a distinction as 1 – 1, or as multiple distinctions 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 … . “Nature is continually so to speak hovering between null and unity” (ib. p.313 n.1).

[95] Later (in nn.1 and 2 to p.317), Schelling interprets these three steps concretely:

α) the pure difference within the unity of the product - magnetism; ß) the duality of the products: i.e. the two products each with a preponderance of a single factor - electricity (as the text had said); γ) the unity of the products - where the products (of step ß)?) dissolve into each other - chemical process. (Yet the chemical process is not confined to elements which had been united, but any which a process of oxidisation will bring into a state of penetration or intussusecption.)