Vinaire's Blog

Reference: Course on Subject Clearing

Any theory must have staring postulates. It is the consistency among staring postulates that keep the theory consist. Furthermore, the lesser is the number of starting postulates, the more consistent the theory would be. That is the concept underlying the principle known as Occam’s Razor.

OCCAM’S RAZOR
The principle (attributed to William of Occam) that in explaining a thing no more assumptions should be made than are necessary. The principle is often invoked when solving problems.

Recently, I was having a tough time in trying to understand the Description Theory as described at: Description Theory Playlist. So, I applied the approach of SUBJECT CLEARING. I started to locate the KEY WORDS and how they were defined in this theory. The first word was description, which was defined in terms of the contrast between a foreground and a background. The foreground was described relative to the background; and the background was defined as the environment which was not the foreground. There were other starting postulates but something was not making sense, until I realized that the background was left as something arbitrary.

Then I realized that the pure description of something would be to contrast it from nothing. So, the ultimate background is nothing or emptiness. Since we understand the universe of things through our postulates, then emptiness would be defined as follows,

Emptiness is absence of all postulates.

I realized that an empty background has to be the first postulate if one were to describe anything in its purity. But the originator of the Description Theory looked at the description in relative terms only. His theory had no concept of pure description. This made the Description Theory very complicated. Once I realized this, I could move through the study of this theory very fast, but I kept on running into the arbitrary associated with the concept of background.

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NATURE OF STARTING POSTULATE

The relative nature of descriptions in the Description Theory, make the theory fundamentally inconsistent. The subject of Physics has the same problem. It is fundamentally inconsistent.

In physics, we have relative motion only; and no concept of “absence of motion.” Newton approximated the “absence of motion” by postulating the background of stars to be fixed in space. This worked perfectly for motion in most cases, but it could not predict the orbit of mercury with precision. This anomaly could not be resolved until, couple of centuries later, Einstein came along.

Einstein examined the problem of calculating mercury’s orbit using the equations derived from Newton’s theory. There was the phenomenon of the aberration of light that showed that celestial measurements were being affected by the observer moving with the Earth relative to Mercury. The measurement of the speed of light was found to be unaffected by Earth’s motion. When Einstein used the speed of light to account for the observer’s motion he could predict the motion of mercury’s orbit correctly. Einstein then proposed his revolutionary Theory of Special Relativity using the starting postulate of a universally constant speed of light.

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity has been highly successful, but it has given rise to anomalies in the very concepts of space and time. Moving the “Frame of Reference” from Earth (or matter) to Light has certainly improved the accuracy of celestial measurements. This means that the “reference frame of light” is more accurate than the “reference frame of matter.”

The anomaly of space and time reduces to the anomaly of how we measure motion. The very concept of motion depends on the concept of an infinitesimal “particle” in which “substance” is concentrated as mass. From matter to light, the concentration of “substance” in the “particle” reduces greatly. Matter has mass, but light has no mass. However, light still has some momentum, so light still has some substance. 

Space and time exist because substance exists—space is the extent of substance; time is the duration of substance. Space and time shrink or expand depending on the concentration of substance.

When the “reference frame” frees itself from its dependency on “substance” we can expect to have the purest “reference frame” to measure substance, space and time.

And this brings us back to the concept of emptiness.

The starting postulate for any universally applicable theory has to be the postulate of “emptiness.” 

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