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William Gilbert - robot universe signal theory

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Unlike Einstein or Newton, William Gilbert (1544-1603) seemed to be no theoretician. His only physics work published in his lifetime, in 1600 in Latin, was "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.'). As physician to England's Queen Elizabeth the First and Royal College of Physicians president, he was eminent in medicine and a hobby-physicist (who published no medicine but put much into his physics). De Magnete was a new science work mostly on magnetism with much polemic against mere theory and for the new experimental science method. A new physics theory was repeatedly put, in a Latin that did not help clarify it, buried in pro-experiment polemic and detail and used unique terminology with no approved translation.

William Gilbert's science theory.

When experimental science proper was first developing in Europe, the prevailing scholarly philosophy of nature based on mere thinking was that of Aristotle and was 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 chiefly promoted experiment and initially gave little prominence to the new physics theory that he had developed, though promoting this more in his 'De Mundo' published long after his death. 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, and allowed that physical causations might involve either material or non-material energy signals or physical pushings.

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 probably due to 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-emitted-signals physics, 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]. Gilbert termed such signal emissions generally as 'effluvia' or 'emissions' and Newton generally called gravity signal emissions 'spirits emitted' or 'energy emissions'. (Though such emissions may not be currently directly detectable, many detectable emissions show a decrease in intensity with the square of the distance from their source similar to 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 universe theory that Descartes later produced and which won wide support. And Gilbert's universe had less requirement of gods or humans than Aristotle's and Descartes'.

Gilbert himself did many experiments, as did Galileo and Newton though not Kepler, 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 required absolute properties of bodies in their occupying absolute space and not being able to occupy the same absolute space at the same time so that body motion must push, Gilbert physics had only relative requirements. Anything corporeal or non-corporeal might be a signal, relative to some observer that can respond to it - and anything might be an observer, relative to some signal to which it can respond. The theory also basically required that physical observers, unlike intelligent observers, always respond to signals in fixed predictable science-law ways.

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 to a visible extent by any push-magnetism, push-electricity or push-gravity if they moved heavier things substantially, 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 - responses when signals touched bodies without pushing them.

Physics objections to objects touching-pushing come both from some supporters of 'field' forces and from supporters of signal forces, though some supporters of field forces did see 'fields' as themselves basically touching-pushing things if not objects - while others have avoided specifing what their 'fields' actually are at all. The zero distance required by Cartesian contact-physics is actually unmeasurable and so unprovable, while the finite distances of 'at-a-distance' physics are measurable and provable. And the differing abilities of Neutrons and Photons to penetrate bodies now suggests maybe that, unlike macroscopic objects, the ability of microscopic objects to penetrate other objects is less affected by 'pushability' or 'massness' properties of the objects than by some 'reactivity' properties. And this maybe backs doubts on pushability existing, though smaller Neutrinos having better penetration than larger Neutrons might give some little support to pushability ? Modern claimed differences in space-occupancy and other properties of 'matter' and 'energy packets' at the microscopic level are maybe doubtful. And for another modern physics argument that things generally do not touch or contact, based on evidence that the outside of atoms generally have electrons which electrostatically repel each other, see No Touching. Of course there is more to atoms and to matter generally.

Some saw Gilbert 'animate' motion as Aristotlian, especially as he of course often used the scholar Aristotlian words of the time he was writing in - though with new scientific meanings. This has been noted by some like Gad Freudenthal, ISIS 1983 and Stephen Pumfrey, CUP 2002. Some strangely saw Gilbert 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. Gilbert had studied widely and referenced all technologies and ideas of any relevance to his science - both current and from early Chinese, Arab, Greek and other societies. But later physicists were to largely confine their studies 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, but religion saw this as their thinking-spiritual arena needing to be dismissed as alchemist. 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 push-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 death to 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 Attraction Science. His brother could not get De Mundo published, seemingly due to its suppression by Sir Francis Bacon, but soon after 1603 did manage to provide a few people with a manuscript copy, apparently including Galileo and Kepler, and in 1651 long 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. The only known 17th century English university teaching of Gilbert was at Clare college Cambridge between 1658 and 1678 and that may well have been little. Descartes 'dead-matter' science 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 logically also including Einstein's theory since nobody has directly 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 currently 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 energies or 'spirits' - so his effluvia signal emissions were perhaps in modern physics terms 'quanta' that could be mass or could be energy. 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.

One substantial problem for 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 limited. 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 object 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 and having no place for gods, Gilbert's theory was labelled by many physicists as 'Aristotelian' god-derived - and was rejected in favour of the god-separate 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. While his natural signals emitted by objects causing magnetism, gravity etcetera were termed 'effluvia' by Gilbert, they were generally referred to by Newton as 'spirits emitted'. But Gilbert saw the evidence as indicating that some 'effluvia' natural signals emitted were corporeal particles and that only some were non-corporeal non-particle energies or 'spirits'.

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 to any physics. 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 existence 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. A big problem for any push-physics explaning is that pushing is basically indiscriminate but the actual universe includes different attractings including some discrimination attractings as well as different repulsions including some discriminating repulsions.

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 effluvia signal emission reaction.

Gilbert's theory might maybe be strengthened with a few additions that would basically make it a gauge 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 graviton 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 producing their own forces as maybe by emitting small particles in response to received signals like remote-controlled rocket engines. 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'.

A static electric charge stationary on the moving Earth, produces NO magnetic response from a detector compass that is also stationary on the Earth - but DOES produce a magnetic response from a detector compass that is moving relative to the Earth. This fits poorly with most forms of field physics theory, and better fits a Gilbert style theory where no 'magnetic fields' exist but electric charge signals are emitted and detectors simply respond electrically and/or magnetically to such signals motion relative to themselves. A stationary permanent magnet does produce magnetic restonses from another stationary permanent magnet, but the absence of macroscopic relative motion can still allow of their microscopic atoms or elementary particles having some relative spin or other motions. A 'stationary' electric wire can carry a moving electron current, and generally 'rest' can include motion and vice versa..

'De Magnete' title page :- - Click image to enlarge, or to get click-enlarging image.

GILBERT mainly saw himself firstly as a chief advocate of new experimental natural science examining everything, as against the mere dogmatism and philosophising of old natural philosophy and religion. He experimented and he talked with miners, sailors and others before writing his De Magnete somewhat in the style that Karl Marx was to later write 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 properly 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.

For a summary of a 'Gilbert-Newton' view of gravity and like forces see Attraction Physics

Gilbert's strongly anti-philosophising/reasoning and pro-experiment/experience position was maybe reflected around 1670 in 'Satire Against Reason And Mankind' by John Wilmot Earl of Rochester though that interesting work was perhaps just anti-science, anti-religion and anti-government ?

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