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Unlike Einstein or Newton, William Gilbert (1544-1603) seemed to be no theoretician. When he published his only physics work in his lifetime in 1600 in Latin, "De magnete, magneticisque corporibus et de magno magnete Tellure, physiologia nova, plurimis et argumentis et experimentis demonstrata" ('A new natural science, with many proofs and experimental demonstrations on the magnet and magnetic bodies and on the great magnet the Earth.') he was physician to Queen Elizabeth the First and president of the Royal College of Physicians - an eminent doctor and only a hobby-physicist (who put much into his physics). De Magnete was a specialised work mostly on magnetism with much polemic against mere theory and for the new science experiment method. The new physics theory it contained was repeatedly put, in a Latin that did not help clarify it, buried in experiment detail and pro-science argument and used unique teminology with no approved translation.
When experimental science proper was first developing in Europe,
the prevailing scholarly philosophy of nature based on mere
thinking was that of Aristotle backed by governments and religion.
In Aristotle's divine universe every thing was to some extent
self-acting (or 'animate') and thinking with divinely set
motivations and knowledge - so that objects fell to the ground
because they 'sought to move themselves to their natural place'.
Gilbert saw this as involving too much irrational supposition and
unable to describe the complex realities of actual natural
phenomena shown in experiments to accord with invariant laws of
behaviour. Gilbert in chiefly promoting experiment gave little
prominence to the new physics theory that he had developed.
Gilberts 'attraction theory' did retain a form of Aristotle
self-action for bodies though, unlike Aristotle, only as automatic
invariant law responses to emitted signals with no divine
involvement - so stones fell to the ground only with a specific
acceleration in response to a specific strength and direction of
gravity signals from the Earth. Gilbert postulated a robot
signal-response universe basically, which was very different to the
Aristotle divine universe though it did retain one element of
it.
Of course Gilbert had grasped the nettle of 'action at a distance'
- the most difficult theoretical problem for science to explain.
How could bodies, separated and seemingly with nothing in-between
them, influence each other ? Besides magnetism, De Magnete did
examine to some extent other 'action at a distance' phenomena
including especially static electricity and mentioning gravity. It
backed Copernicus on the Earth orbiting the Sun, developed more
fully in his later De Mundo, adding the proposition that the Earth
had a 24 hour spin because of its magnetism. But while Copernicus
and other earlier scientists had not sought to develop any theory
explaining the why / how of planetary motion or of any 'action at a
distance', Gilbert did. Gilbert's Magnetical Science was an
automatic-response-to-signals science involving different types of
attraction and/or repulsion 'magnetical' signals to which different
bodies responded - including for him at least 4 'magnetical' signal
types being magnetic, electric charge, terrestrial gravity and
inter-planetary attraction (Newton later concluded that the last two were
the same gravity). Emissions generally do show a decrease in intensity
with the square of distance from their source as Kepler noted, like
some action-at-a-distance forces.
Many early scientists were concerned with deriving improved
description of natural phenomena, and afraid of or not at all
concerned with trying to explain why nature acted as it did.
Thousands of years of mere clever thinking had achieved little
real, before the experimental science method emerged and produced
quite different ideas on the universe. Gilbert's 1600 De Magnete
was mostly just taken as being the most expert scientific work
using experiments to describe magnetism and how it works, and only
a few like Newton saw the significance of its physics theory.
Gilbert saw action at a distance as based on signals that bodies
emit (effluvia), and to which signals other bodies reacted
automatically and invariantly as robots. Despite Gilbert producing
the strongest disproofs of Aristotle's ideas and methods, his
robotic response theory was commonly misinterpreted as an Aristotle
animate universe theory, though it was really more an
information-handling robot universe theory perhaps more advanced
than the simpler mechanical clockwork-robot universe theory which
Descartes later produced.
Gilbert himself did many experiments, as did Newton but not
Descartes or Einstein. Gilbert centrally claimed that his
experiments proved that no inactive matter existed :- "Aristotle's
'simple element' - and that most vain terrestrial phantasm of the
Peripatetics, - formless, inert, cold, dry, simple matter, the
substratum of all things, having no activity, - never appeared to
anyone even in dreams, and if it did appear would be of no effect
in nature." ('De Magnete....' Mottelay, Book 1.17 pp.69). Gilbert's
'no dead matter' physics was somewhat in line with the later 'no
matter' philosophy of George Berkeley and opposed by the 'no mind'
mechanical physics of Rene Descartes. Where Descartes mechanical
physics was to require absolute properties of bodies to occupy
space and not be able to occupy the same space at the same time so
that body motion must push, Gilbert physics had only relative
requirements. Any body can be a signal, relative to some observer
body that can respond to it - and any body can be an observer,
relative to some signal body to which it can respond. The theory
also basically claims that physical observers, unlike intelligent
observers, always respond to signals in fixed predictable
manners.
Gilbert's basic physics theory reasoning was very soundly based
as explained by him in De Magnete book 2 chapter 2. He saw action
between 2 bodies as needing some form of contact, and so concluded
that at-a-distance action must involve something being emitted by
one body and contacting the other body. But he saw contact as not
needing to involve pushing and concluded that the attraction,
repulsion and other motions of magnetism could not be due to any
form of simple pushing. Gilbert like Newton saw pushing as
indiscriminate, so that light things like air should be pushed by
any push-magnetism, push-electricity or push-gravity, but Gilbert's
experiments proved that was not the case. So he deduced that these
at least were not indiscriminate push forces, but must be discriminating
signal response forces.
Some saw Gilbert 'animate' motion as Aristotlian and some as in
line with Jean Buridan (1300-1358), though Gilbert's motion is
distinctly his own in concluding that his experiments proved his
new theory of active bodies responding automatically in proportion
to different emission signals they receive. While Gilbert had studied
and referenced widely technologies and ideas both current and even
from early Chinese, Arab, Greek and other societies of any relevance
to his science, later physicists largely confined themselves narrowly
to only what were current local science-journal issues.
Gilbert basically took all bodies as being simple robots that
emitted signals and responded to signals, and this was understood
at least by Newton who developed it for gravity especially, though
many saw his effluvia signal emissions as alchemist vapours or
spirits. The key to Gilbert's theory was bodies automatically
responding to whatever, and Kepler concluded that the heavenly
machine is a kind of mechanical clockwork whose motions are caused
by magnetic force threads. Kepler claimed in Epitome of Copernican
Astronomy (1618-21) to have built his astronomy "on the Copernicus
hypotheses, Tycho Brahe's observations, and the Magnetical Science
of William Gilbert" - with Gilbert's magnetical science
misunderstood or misrepresented as a forcefield threads science. Of
course in 1600 Gilbert's ideas were alien and generally not
understood correctly as there were no signal response robots built
then - the most advanced machines being perhaps the mechanical
clock and the compass.
Gilbert had delayed publishing anything till late in life, partly like
Copernicus who delayed publishing till on his deathbed just days
before his deathto try to avoid persecution. Soon after publishing
De Magnete, Gilbert died of the Black Death
and his younger brother took responsibility for publishing his
manuscript for a second book putting his wider Magnetical Science
or maybe Attraction Science. His
brother could not get De Mundo published, seemingly due to its
supression by Sir Francis Bacon, but soon after 1603 did
manage to provide a few people with a manuscript copy, apparantly
including Galileo and Kepler, and in 1651 after his death it did
get published. Gilbert, like Galileo and Newton, held a low opinion of
the majority of his peers and just trusted that his own proofs and
experiments would sufficiently demonstrate the correctness of his
theory whatever most of his peers concluded. Gilbert's Attraction
Science did gain some backing, but Descartes supporters were soon
to discredit Gilbert's theory without any disproof of it, and the
later 1651 publication of Gilbert's 'De Mondo' was too little too
late. Descartes 'dead-matter' theory generally prevailed over
Gilbert 'robot-matter' theory by name-calling and without
disproving it to Newton at least. Newton's disgust at Gilbert
attraction theory being dismissed by merely calling it 'occult' was
shown in him saying that in that case all theories involving
unseens should be called occult including Descartes' (and including
Einsteins theory since nobody has seen a spacetime
continuum).
Gilbert's physical universe had two types of fundamental things
;
1. Various types of robot observer particles that emitted and
responded to effluvia force signal emissions, which might mean
atoms or parts of atoms and maybe photons etcetera. The internal
structure if any of these 'blackbox' things mattered little in
Gilbert's theory, only their emission and response to effluvia
signals.
2. Various types of effluvia force signal emissions, causing eg
electrical, gravitational and proximity responses in some or all of
the above particles.
The latter seem less easily directly detectable than the
former.
Two main conclusions of Gilbert were that different types and
strengths of signal had different ranges - which for magnetism
could be less than an inch for a weak magnet to some miles for the
Earth's magnetism - and that signal strength diminished with
distance. He deduced from experiments comparing magnetism and
static electricity that different types of effluvia signal
emissions also had different abilities to penetrate matter, seeing
low-penetration electric charge signals as material particles and
high-penetration magnetic signals as non-material - so his effluvia
signal emissions were perhaps in modern physics terms 'quanta'.
Some have interpreted his signal range in terms of a force field,
though the idea of force fields is a quite different idea requiring
all space to be filled with something like an energy version of
Descartes material ether. From our atmosphere attenuating with
altitude, Gilbert concluded that just a few miles above the Earth
was empty space containing nothing - but through which his signals
including gravitation effluvia 'gravitons' could pass. Planet
orbits not having drag made Newton support Gilbert's empty space,
though Descartes like Aristotle and perhaps Einstein thought empty
space was not possible largely on theoretical grounds.
It is to be noted that Gilbert did not conclude that magnets or
magnetic signals contained contrary properties because they
attracted iron and did not attract ice. Gilbert like Newton taking
science as not allowing actual contradictions, saw the difference as
being in iron and ice having different responses, without any
contradiction, to the same unitary thing. Einstein and others
unfortunately later made what is maybe an anti-science mistake of
taking light (and particles) as both being wave and being not-wave,
and adopted the self-contradictory self-disproved 'Duality Theory'
instead of accepting that different responses as to light do not imply
different source properties as of light.
The main weakness to Gilbert's theorising came from magnetism being
one the most complex of the physical forces, so his many measured
experiments could not yield him the simple mathematical laws that
Newton was to later develop in applying Gilbert's theory to
gravity. While the other physical forces are simpler central attraction
or repulsion forces, magnetism involves poles and includes turning or
partial-rotation responses. Though Gilbert had been an examiner in
mathematics, he distrusted mathematical deduction as being mere logical
philosophising as against being experimental proof science, and so stood
by minimal logic and minimal mathematics. And a bigger problem to developing
his theory further was the fact that his knowledge of mechanics and motion
being pre-Newton and pre-Galileo was poor. A couple of bits of Gilbert were
disproved by later experiments, but were entirely inessential to his theory.
Kepler unintentionally showed that good mathematics could be successful
even within a poor explanation physics, but not until Newton
was Gilbert's 'attraction theory' properly mathematised.
The old legal joke "There are three types of unreliable witnesses :
simple liars, damned liars, and experts.", was made a statistics joke
as "There are three kinds of lies : lies, damned lies, and statistics."
But some supporters of experimental 'real' science might prefer
"There are three types of doubtful science : hypotheses, science fiction,
and mathematics."
While Gilbert produced his useful working mini magnetic planet models
('Terrellas'), nobody has made useful working mini gravitational planet
models as gravity seems insignificant for normal small bodies and
atomic repulsions prevent substantial compression. (Strangely perhaps it
has not yet proved possible to use the fact that neutrons and neutrinos
should be more easily compressible.)
Despite Gilbert disproving Aristotle many times in his works,
Gilbert's theory was labeled by many physicists as 'Aristotelian'
god-derived - and was rejected in favour of the limited-god
Descartes mechanical-robot science (fully published by 1644) but
maybe akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water ?
Information handling robots are a more modern technology than
mechanical robots, and modern information theory is now doing much
work that is basically along Gilbert signal theory lines, though
without any great impact on physics theory as yet. Despite the
almost universal use now of televisions and mobile phones all
acting in response to remote emitted signals, which perhaps at
least partly confirms Newton's view that Gilbert signal theory was
at least plausible ? But the majority of physicists still claim
that action at a distance is impossible - when most people know it
IS possible and works by SIGNALS emitted and responded to as
Gilbert concluded that magnetism, electric charge and gravity work.
Gilbert termed those natural emitted signals 'effluvia' - from
Latin at the time generally taken as meaning 'non-visible
characteristic emissions from bodies such as their smells'. But in
his preface to De Magnete did clearly state that his use of words
often involved new scientific meanings for them.
The actual observed difference between magnetic behaviour and
gravitation behaviour is substantial, so that producing one simple
theory to cover both is a substantial problem. Hence magnetism
involves attraction, repulsion and orientation affects, while
gravity involves only one simple attraction affect. Gravity being
basically simple could easily seem to suit a simple Descartes
mechanical push theory, which was very difficult to apply to
magnetism. But magnetism being more complex perhaps more suits a
Gilbert signal response theory, which also was easy to also apply
to gravity as attraction theory as Newton showed. And notably
gravitational and electromagnetic forces have some common aspects
that Gilbert signal response theory handles well. They both have
directionality though it may be only directionality relative to
another object, and their action also seems to involve a mutuality
relative to another object. In fact these forces may well have no
objective existance for one object alone, in line with William
Gilbert's signal-response theory of forces ?
Some like Einstein followed Descartes basically by taking gravity
as being fundamental, and taking magnetism as being an inessential
of less importance to physics theory. Though in science all well
confirmed facts are basically equal, Newton did little to oppose
the magnetism-does-not-matter position. But the fact that magnetic
and electric charge forces give BOTH attraction AND repulsion
behaviour, does strongly suggest that the 'force' of these forces at
least is NOT in the force itself but in bodies responses - as in
Gilbert's signal response theory.
For comparison with other physics theories, Gilbert's three laws of
motion would be ;
1. Every observer body will remain at rest, or in a uniform state
of motion unless effluvia signal emissions act upon it.
2. When effluvia signal emissions act upon an observer body, it
accelerates itself proportional to the signal strength and
inversely proportional to the mass of the body and in the direction
required by the signals.
3. Every effluvia signal action evokes an equal and opposite
reaction.
Gilbert's theory might maybe be strengthened with a few additions
that would basically make it a guage bosons particle exchange
theory such as some modern particle physicists favour ;
1. Observer bodies emit various effluvia with speed of light
velocity in response to various effluvia being received by
them.
2. All motion and other natural phenomena are caused by this
process (including seemingly causeless radioactive decay).
3. Effluvia are conserved.
4. All observer bodies are aggregates of effluvia.
Then we might have the basis of a relativistic quantum mechanics
physics without fields or continua, or of a no-ether Descartes
particle push physics without fanciful corkscrew-particle-push or
boomerang-particle-push attractions ? Maybe a high-reaction
gravition causing the emission in the same direction of a particle
pair of a similar low-reaction graviton plus another high-reaction
particle (normally multi-directional) giving the gravity momentum
effect ? Whatever it would mean, that physics would be about how
many different types of effluvia exist and their properties, how
many different types of effluvia-aggregates exist and their
properties including what influences effluvia aggregation and
dis-aggregation ? And maybe unlike mass, charge and spin could be
just signal response properties ?
One apparent difference between Gilbert-Newton signal attraction
theory and Descartes push theory is on 'action and reaction are
equal and opposite'. Though Gilbert and Newton proved that this did
hold for attractions, it may seem that a push must give an equal
effect while a small signal might give a big effect. But this
apparent problem can also occur in mechanics and can be fully
resolved with lever, trigger and conversion (eg E=Mc2) effects. And
if particles like neutrons are themselves complex systems, then a
graviton signal might trigger a series of events including eg
neutrino emission that actually produce motion responses ?
The supposedly separate two processes of force-production and
acceleration-by-force, may actually be basically one process - ie.
bodies in Gilbert theory terms maybe basically respond to external
forces by accelerating themselves by emiting their own
forces. This could give a natural 'equivalence' of forces and acceleration
having a wider cover and making more sense than Einstein's little
Equivalence Principle applying only to gravity. Supporting this is
Gilbert and Newton often positing the mutuality of forces between
multiple bodies, and as we are in a multiple body universe there
can maybe be no proof that one single isolated body would have any
force of gravity or any other force ? This mutuality seems clearly
related to the 'entanglement' property in quantum information theory
(from experiments suggesting that atoms can split one photon into two
mirror 'entangled' photons of eg opposite spin polarisation and half the
energy with some claiming that these remain somehow linked or
'entangled' even when distantly separated). A signal physics can more
naturally handle multiple-signal emissions having related information and/or
separate mutual signal emissions having related information, without
requiring any mystical 'entanglement'.
'De Magnete' title page :-
- Click image to enlarge,
or to get click-enlargable image.
GILBERT mainly saw himself firstly as a chief advocate of new
experimental natural science as against the mere philosophising of
old natural philosophy. He experimented and he talked with miners,
sailors and others before writing his De Magnete somewhat in the
style that Karl Marx later wrote his Das Kapital. Gilbert further saw
himself the originator of a new signal response physics theory covering
magnetism, electricity, gravitation and mechanics - which he sought
to prove chiefly through his experiments on magnetism. And finally he
saw his lesser role as establishing some of the real facts of magnetism
and electricity - though commonly only this role got acknowledged.
While there should be freely available some English or translatable
online versions of Gilbert's two major publications, his 16OO
'De Magnete' and his 1651 "De Mundo Nostro Sublunari Philosophia
Nova" ('A Philosophy of our Sub-lunar World, or A New Science of
everything under the moon'), somehow neither seem available online.
We will try to put more of it online on this website soon, but for now
our Gilbert sections have only English extracts and full online Latin
image versions or links.
Gilbert's strongly anti-philosophising/reasoning and
pro-experiment/experience position was reflected around 1670 in
'Satire Against Reason And Mankind' by John Wilmot Earl of
Rochester though that interesting work was maybe just anti-science
ant-religion and anti-government ?
Or for now you can maybe read online or download free
'Alices Adventures in Wonderland' by Lewis Carrol, 0.28mb PDF -
up to 3 minutes to load.
(you may need the FREE PDF reader available from www.Adobe.com.)
Or if you might want to buy Gilbert books in our USA
Gilbert books or UK
Gilbert books sections.
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