The most frightening things around today are AIDs and the hole in the ozone layer. Either of them would take years to kill you if you were exposed to them. But I grew up in the shadow of a more speedy killer, nuclear holocaust.

As long as I can remember (since the early 1950s), some of the people around me have been scared silly that we might all go up in a big mushroom cloud. Or die shortly later from radiation poisoning. (See Neville Chute’s book, On the Beach, and the movie based on it.

Of course, nuclear Armageddon never happened. We’re still here. At least, we here’s until some terrorists succeed in smuggling a homemade H-bomb into our home town Or the Super Bowl (see Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears). With the collapse of the Soviet regime, nuclear terrorism is probably the only likely way such a disaster might still happen.

What made these fears possible, of course, was Einstein’s great discovery, symbolized as E = mc². Very simply, this means that the amount of energy in a given quantity of matter is equal to the product of the amount (mass) of that matter and the square of the speed of light. Find a way to convert all this matter into energy, and a vast power source is yours. And today, of course, we have both weapons and power plants that operate on this principle (those that haven’t been decommissioned, that is).

How did we learn of this? Was someone tinkering around with a lump of matter and boom! Lots of energy suddenly appeared? No, indeed. It wasn’t at all like the discovery of gunpowder or dynamite or TNT or any of the other great explosives. And for a good reason.

With atomic energy, we are not talking about chemical reactions you can set up in your basement. We are not dealing with observable, perceptual-level entities, but with reactions occurring on the microscopic level and which are invisible unless a very great many of them occur in close proximity to one another in a very short time.

No, our route to nuclear knowledge was very indirect. It involved such theoretical speculation and manipulation of symbols and equations, before the first glimmer of practical applications appeared. It was not through a series of repeatedly verified laboratory experiments, but by a long process of deduction involving numerous physical concepts and principles, by which Einstein arrived at his deceptively simple result: E = mc². (For details, consult any standard college physics text.)

The concepts that comprise our knowledge of nuclear physics are quite a ways up the conceptual chain from everyday perceptual reality. Thus, it’s not likely that we could ever have arrived at Einstein’s equation inductively. Consider all the data that would have to be gathered and observations and calculations made in order to induce the matter-energy equivalence:

·        Measurements of both the mass (m) and the energy (E) contained in a given quantity of matter for many different kinds of substances.

·        Examination of the ratios and the square roots of the ratios between E and m.

·        Noting the equality (constancy) of these ratios across all the different kinds of matter.

·        Measurements of the velocity in a vacuum of light as well as all the other different forms of electromagnetic (em) energy.

·        Noting the constancy of those velocities (c) across all the different kinds of em energy.

·        Noting the equality of c and the square roots of the ratios between m and E:  c = (E/m)^1/2.

Only then (!) could an inductive Einstein have deduced that c² = E/m and thus that E = mc². It’s rather far-fetched to imagine a pre-Einsteinian scientist measuring masses and energy releases. Certainly the question of their relationship might have occurred to him. But how would he know how to initiate the energy releases without all the knowledge leading to and including Einstein’s equation?

Even with the technology of today, I’m not sure that an inductive Einstein would have the incentive to derive all this data, unless he already knew what he was looking for. Perhaps. (For a fictional treatment of this matter, see “How the Martians Discovered Algebra.”)

However the Einstein equation is arrived at, however, it has interesting questions and implications that I have never seen addressed. For instance, the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same quantity, a constant, c, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second. We might first ask: why is it a constant? What in nature makes the speed of light be what it is, and how? (Note: this is not the same as the question of whether the speed of light is the ultimate physical speed limit in the universe, a staple of science fiction novels.) And is it really constant, or is there a faulty premise, such as the rejection of the “ether” (a thin, hard-to-detect physical medium through which em radiation is propagated).

Consider also the fact that if c is a constant, so is the square root of the ration, for any substance, between energy and mass. Material entities are such that their mass and energy are related in this way. But what does this mean, ultimately? Is the speed of determined by the nature of the energy and mass attributes of material entities? Or are those energy and mass attributes determined by the speed of light? Or are both determined by another, more basic fact about material entities? Or are they both correlative, causally irreducible aspects of material entities?

What we can say is that material entities have several important attributes which are quantitatively related by Einstein’s equation. Each and every physical entity in the universe (we presume) is such that the square root of the ratio of its energy and its mass is a constant, which is equal in quantity to the velocity, also constant, of em radiation emitted by any and all physical entities.

Suppose we think of what a physical entity is, its attributes – such as mass, stored energy, and ability to emit or absorb em radiation – as what it can do. We can then see how thoroughly interconnected the various aspects of an entity’s nature are – i.e., how much of an ontological unity a material entity really is. This fits nicely with Aristotle’s view that cause-and-effect is the Law of Identity applied to action.

This is quite a contrast from John Locke’s view, which sees an entity as a kind of bundle of attributes, a sort of metaphysical pincushion, into which various attributes are stuck like pins. On such a view, with attributes regarded as discrete, accidentally connected features of a thing’s identity, rather than essentially connected and inseparable aspects of a thing’s identity, the ontological unity of entities must remain a complete and baffling mystery.

One also wonders what the arch-skeptic Hume would have thought at seeing such comprehensive interconnectedness of attributes across the entire field of an entity’s nature. Would he still maintain that those clear connections were just contingent, non-necessary happenings? Or would he abandon the atomistic, pin-cushion view of attributes and see the indivisible nature of things that exist?

I said earlier that AIDs and the hole in the ozone layer were the scariest things around. Well, although most people are blessedly unaware of it, modern philosophy is actually worse. Hume, Kant, and their followers all but wrecked the field for those seeking rational guidance for their lives. And provided the philosophical base for monstrous political regimes such as the Nazis and the Soviets. (See Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels.) This in turn provided the impetus behind the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Luckily, we have had people like Henry B. Veatch, Mortimer J. Adler, and Ayn Rand to combat these ideas and to offer us sane alternatives. The influence of their clear thinking on the foundations of science and mathematics may pave the way for there to someday be another Einstein. Another person who will lead us to even greater insights into the nature of the universe. Someone who will help us to understand the basic nature of matter and energy to an even more fundamental level. Someone who will explain why the speed of light (and the mass-energy ratio) is the value it is, rather than some other value.