Just Thinking

This is rather an unusual topic. I haven't found anyone putting this idea forward before. However it seems to me to be an inevitable result of truly understanding what things are. Of course nouns and things are the same thing. Well excluding all the other even weirder categories of nouns they are.

To put forward this idea with any clarity, it is first necessary to discover what things (the main class of nouns) are. Things are made of stuff that we call matter. We think of matter as substance that exists and then behave so that it can act as subjects or objects in sentences that have verbs. However I want to turn that idea on its head, or at least make it so that people can see another angle on all this.

If we know that a thing "exists", then it must already not be stable and constant. If it were stable and constant then we could not know of its "existence". We only know of existence through our senses: we see, feel, hear, taste or smell something. We can only sense something if it is putting out some sort of substance or vibration that our senses detect. So it isn't the "thing" that we detect at all, it is these other substances or vibrations that we hear or smell or see. Without these substances or vibrations issuing forth from our supposed "thing" we would be oblivious of its existence, indeed we would conclude that it didn't exist at all, or rather it would never enter our mind in any way to consider its existence.

So all that thinginess of things is actually a result of a flux of some sort: of light or sound waves, of matter in liquid or gaseous form that can be tasted or smelt, or of somehow occupying space in a pushy sort of way so that we can feel it. Now the more cunning of my readers are already getting their objection to this voiced with "but the light is only reflected" or "there is no flux from matter that we feel", so I will have to go into these if I am to have a chance of convincing you.

Of course there is some truth that light is reflected, but not that it is "only" reflected. Things have colours and these result from the selective reflection of the light that falls on them. Each different object absorbs some colours and reflects others in various proportions giving each its particular shade, brightness and purity of colour. In addition, all that absorbed part is also re-emitted at some other wavelength meaning that the object is also putting out a flux that is not reflected at all - this is an inevitable result of the partial reflection.

So when it comes to colour and our ability to detect shape and size by visual means, it is the objects interaction with fluxes of light and the like that we allow us to know of its existence. You have to agree that that word "interaction" is a verb and not a noun. The key to existence lies in the verb behaviour of nouns.

But of course I have yet to deal with the sense of touch which will be the last refuge of those that haven't fully accepted my argument so far. From our bodies point of view, touch is a rich sense, not just the mere presence of something. We detect all kinds of texture, roughness, coarseness, smoothness, softness, hardness, yielding or unyielding, warm and cold, and a host of special properties like fluffiness, furriness, spikiness, sharpness, and on and on. All of these properties result from interaction between the object and our nerves with which we feel. There has to be interaction or we cannot detect the properties. Again, the essence of existence is action, noun does not exist without verb.

So I feel that at least I have introduced you to a new idea. No doubt I will have to argue this with some people and I look forward to that. Please leave a comment here and I will let you have your say and answer you.

Before I go for now though, I want to take this a step further. To show that what I say is true at an even deeper level. I am talking fundamental physics and the laws of nature here. To do this is is necessary to ask the question "What are elementary particles?" and to look at it in a way that is different to particle physicists.

I suggest that the correct answer to this was first offered by William Clifford, a man of recognised brilliance in mathematics and philosophy. When Maxwell, himself a brilliant physicist, developed his famous equations for electromagnetism, Clifford realised that there must be solutions to those equations that are concentric spherical standing waves. He saw that those solutions must in fact be what we call matter. This at once solved the problem of what those standing waves of electromagnetism which must exist would appear like, and explained once and for all what matter was. Unfortunately this idea seems to have been forgotten and so it happened that people became confused about how matter could travel through a tensile medium, the luminiferous aether, and not have any resistance. This lead to all the problems of the Michelson-Morley experiment because people thought that matter was stuff rather than a process.

The next chance to get it right was when Louis de Broglie put forward his famous work on understanding matter as waves which lead to successful experiments and a nobel prize in physics. However he was not fully understood and spent the rest of his life trying to get physicists to understand that matter really was waves. Schroedinger also had this view, but they were both ignored and Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics prevailed and set physics back over 100 years.

A third chance happened when the famous physicists, Wheeler and Feynman, came to understand that an electron behaved as if there were both advanced and retarded waves happening around it. This did not mean that electrons were dim, but that they acted as if at all times there were waves converging on it and also as if waves were coming out of it. generally physicists found this idea incomprehensible because they didn't see how the universe could organise the incoming waves -- it would have to know where the electron was going to be in the future to make the waves converge there! Or even worse, they started talking about waves going backwards in time! Yikes!! Actually, no, that is not the case. the waves do not converge where the electron is, the electron is where the waves converge. The electron is nothing other than this convergence of waves.

Although the idea has never caught on to physicist as a whole, there have been the above mentioned incidents and some physicists such as Milo Wolff have persisted with the idea. Milo found me on the internet when I proposed this idea that he had already had.

So physicists went on believing six impossible things before breakfast, well maybe even twelve. All the weird stuff that supposedly exists in physics results from this failure to understand what an atomic particle is. It is nothing other than a standing wave of electromagnetism. That means that at all times there is an inwards flux of electromagnetism and after that flux passes through the central region there is an outwards flux. Together the two fluxes make the standing wave. Matter is made of particles and particles are a flux and nothing more. Matter is made of waves.

All matter is simply a flux, a process, a verb. All nouns are really verbs. However they are slow verbs in the sense that the flux is rather stable over time so that it has a thinginess sort of look to it. So there I rest my case that nouns are slow verbs.