Search for the Primitive c. -600–1500
Evolution of the Ultimate “It”
The history of physics transcends a simple record of equations and tools. At its core, it embodies an ontological pursuit: a millennia-long exploration of the “Ultimate It.” Throughout human thought, responses to the query “What is the world made of?” have alternated between two opposing views. One envisions reality as continuous, a seamless plenum without voids. The other sees it as discrete, built from indivisible units traversing an empty space.
We begin a reconstruction of that intellectual path, navigating the “Boundary of Physics,” where metaphysics solidifies into empirical principles. Conventional accounts often trace a straight, Western-focused line from ancient Ionia to modern Cambridge. Yet physical ideas weave a complex network of concurrent innovations and exchanges. Grasping the “Ultimate It” requires mapping the conceptual exchanges that paralleled trade in goods, linking notions of mass, extension, duration, and emptiness. It demands comparing and contrasting dynamics against collisional models, and tracing how theological concerns spawned inertia and absolute space.
Popular retellings of history portray physics as incremental progress toward a mechanical cosmos. In truth, it unfolded amid philosophical clashes, sharp critiques, religious tensions, and paradigm shifts that eroded traditional views of reality.
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│ THE EVOLUTION OF THE ULTIMATE "IT": A TIMELINE │
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THE DISCRETE (Particles) THE CONTINUOUS (Plenum)
(Reality is points in void) (Reality is flow/resonance)
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[GREECE] Democritus (Atoms) [CHINA] Daoist Qi (Breath)
[INDIA] Vaisheshika (Paramanu) [GREECE] Aristotle (Horror Vacui)
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THE MECHANISTIC THE FIELD & WAVE
REVOLUTION REVOLUTION
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[1700s] Newton (Corpuscles) [1600s] Descartes (Vortices)
[1800s] Boltzmann (Statistics) [1800s] Maxwell (Ether/Fields)
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THE CRISIS (1900-1925)
(Particle-Wave Duality & The Ether Failure)
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THE QUANTUM DISSOLUTION
(Heisenberg / Bohr / Schrödinger)
"The It is a Probability Amplitude"
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THE INFORMATIONAL TURN
(Wheeler / Bekenstein / 't Hooft)
"The It is a Bit (Horizon Entropy)"
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THE COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCE
(Causal Sets / Loop Quantum Gravity)
"Space and Time are emergent from Code"
The Pre-Socratic “Cut” and the Crisis of Becoming
The earliest recorded physical inquiries in the Western tradition emerged in the 6th century BCE in Miletus, a prosperous Ionian port city where the convergence of cultures sparked a new mode of thinking. Here, the wise sought the arche, the originating principle or source substance from which all diverse phenomena are derived. Thales (c. 624–546 BCE), often cited as the first philosopher, posited water as this fundamental “It.”
While this might seem like a naive chemical observation to the modern reader, Thales’ reasoning was deeply empirical and physiological. Observing that all things derive nourishment from moisture, that heat is generated from and sustained by moisture, and that the seeds of all living things are moist, Thales concluded that water was the material cause of all things. This was a monumental shift: it posited that underneath the plurality of forms (wood, flesh, stone, steam), there is a single, unifying substance that persists through change.
However, Thales’ student, Anaximander (c. 610–546 BCE), recognized a logical flaw in identifying the arche with a specific element like water. If water is the fundamental substance, how can it generate its opposite, fire? To solve this, Anaximander introduced the concept of the Apeiron, the Boundless or the Unlimited. The Apeiron was an indefinite, infinite primordial mass, distinct from the observable elements, from which the opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry) separated out. This was a striking leap of abstraction: the “Ultimate It” was a theoretical entity, a precursor to the modern concept of an abstract field or energy vacuum.
The progress of early Greek physics was abruptly halted by a crisis of logic introduced by Parmenides of Elea (c. 515–450 BCE). Parmenides fundamentally challenged the validity of sensory experience and the very possibility of change. His argument was stark and devastatingly simple: Anything that can be thought or spoken of must exist (“Being”). “Nothing” (Non-Being) cannot exist, nor can it be thought of. For change to occur, “what is” must either come from “what is not” (generation) or pass into “what is not” (destruction). Since “what is not” does not exist, generation and destruction are logically impossible.
Parmenides concluded that reality is a single, static, ungenerated, and indestructible sphere of “Being.” Motion is an illusion; the universe is a frozen block. This position, diametrically opposed by Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–475 BCE), who argued that “all is flux” (panta rhei) and that fire, the agent of change, was the arche, created a deadlock in natural philosophy. Physics could not proceed if motion was logically impossible. To save the phenomena of the physical world, thinkers had to find a way to reconcile the permanence of Being with the evident reality of change.
The Atomist Divergence: Greece and India
In response to the Eleatic paralysis, two civilizations, separated by thousands of miles, independently arrived at the same solution: Atomism. This simultaneous genesis suggests that the concept of the “atom” is not a cultural artifact but a cognitive necessity when the human mind attempts to reconcile the discrete and the continuous.
Leucippus and his pupil Democritus (c. 460–370 BCE) solved Parmenides’ riddle by redefining the nature of “Non-Being.” They proposed a radical ontological innovation: the Void (kenon) exists just as much as the Full (pleres). By granting existence to the Void (“what is not”), they provided a stage upon which “what is” (the atoms) could move.
Democritean atoms (atomos, “uncuttable”) were infinite in number, eternal, and unchangeable, satisfying the Parmenidean requirement for “Being.” However, by moving and rearranging themselves within the Void, they generated the appearance of change, satisfying the Heraclitean observation of flux. These atoms possessed only primary qualities: shape, size, and arrangement. Secondary qualities like color, taste, and temperature were merely conventional, artifacts of sensory interaction. “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: but in reality atoms and void,” Democritus famously declared.
This was the birth of the mechanistic universe. The Democritean world had no purpose, no divine design, and no “prime mover.” It was a world driven by necessity (ananke), governed by the blind collisions of matter in the dark. However, this model had a significant limitation: it lacked a dynamic agent. Democritus could explain that atoms moved (perhaps by an eternal chaotic motion), but he struggled to explain why they combined to form complex structures beyond the primitive mechanical analogy of atoms having “hooks” and “barbs.”
Remarkably, in a nearly synchronous development on the Indian subcontinent (approx. 6th–2nd century BCE), the sage Kaṇāda founded the Vaisheshika school of philosophy, formulating an atomic theory that was, in many respects, more logically rigorous and structurally complex than its Greek counterpart.
While the Greeks were driven to atomism to solve the problem of motion, the Indian thinkers were driven by the problem of divisibility and the logic of parts and wholes. The Vaisheshika Sutras argue via reductio ad absurdum: if matter were infinitely divisible, then a mountain and a mustard seed would be of equal size, as both would contain an infinite number of parts. To preserve the distinction of magnitude, there must be a limit to division: the Paramanu (ultimate particle).
Unlike the qualitative barrenness of Greek atoms, Vaisheshika atoms were classified qualitatively into four types corresponding to the eternal elements: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Each Paramanu possessed specific inherent qualities (vishesha) that distinguished it from others.
Most crucially, Kaṇāda provided a detailed, constructive mechanism for atomic combination that the Greeks lacked, anticipating the modern logic of molecular chemistry. The Vaisheshika model posited a hierarchical architecture:
- Paramanu: The indivisible, eternal, spherical atom. It is imperceptible to the senses and exists in a state of potentiality.
- Dvyanuka (Dyad): When two Paramanus combine, they form a Dyad. This entity is still imperceptible but possesses the quality of “minuteness” (anutva) and “shortness.”
- Tryanuka (Triad): When three Dyads combine (totaling six atoms), they form a Triad. This is the smallest perceptible unit of matter, described poetically as the size of a mote of dust visible in a sunbeam entering a dark room.
This explicit quantification, that the visible world is constructed from specific integer-ratios of invisible particles, represents a profound leap in physical intuition. It bridges the gap between the quantum (imperceptible) and the classical (perceptible) realms with a defined structural logic.
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│ THE VAISHESHIKA HIERARCHY OF ASSEMBLY (c. 600 BCE) │
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LEVEL 1: THE INVISIBLE POTENTIAL
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( o ) ( o ) ( o ) ( o )
Paramanu Paramanu Paramanu Paramanu
(The Eternal Point / Quantum of Substance)
LEVEL 2: THE FIRST STRUCTURE
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( o ) + ( o ) ( o ) + ( o )
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[ o-o ] [ o-o ]
DVYANUKA DVYANUKA
(Dyad) (Dyad)
(Possesses "Shortness" & "Minuteness" - Still Imperceptible)
LEVEL 3: THE EMERGENCE OF THE REAL
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[Dyad] [Dyad] [Dyad]
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
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│ T R Y A N U K A │ (The Triad)
└───────────────────┘
(Possesses "Magnitude" - The smallest visible mote of dust)
KEY INSIGHT:
The visible world is not a heap of atoms, but a structured
hierarchy of specific integer combinations (3 Dyads = 1 Triad).
The Vaisheshika system also addressed the cause of atomic motion, a point where Democritus was vague. Kaṇāda posited that while some motion is caused by impact (nodana), the initial motion of atoms at the time of creation or specific phenomena (like the upward motion of fire or the attraction of a magnet) is caused by Adrishta, literally “the Unseen.”
While often interpreted in a religious context as the force of karmic merit/demerit (Dharma/Adharma) driving the universe toward a moral order, in the context of physics, Adrishta functions as a placeholder for non-mechanical forces. It explains action-at-a-distance and motions that have no visible cause. This concept of an invisible, latent potential causing physical displacement arguably foreshadows later concepts of gravitational and magnetic fields, an “unseen force” that governs the behavior of the visible.
The combination of atoms was governed by two distinct relations: Samyoga (conjunction), which is a temporary, mechanical contact, and Samavaya (inherence), a permanent, binding relationship that makes the whole distinct from the sum of its parts. This sophisticated mereology allowed Indian physicists to argue that a pot is not just a heap of clay atoms, but a new distinct ontological entity, a “composite whole” (avayavin).
The earliest physical theories converged on the insight that reality is not a seamless plenum nor a single substance, but a plurality of indivisible atoms moving in a void that possesses its own ontological status (Democritus–Leucippus) or qualitatively distinct ultimate particles (paramāṇu) bound by an unseen directive principle (adriṣṭa) in the Vaiśeṣika. The 3-cycle hierarchy of assembly (paramāṇu → dvyanuka → tryanuka) and the concept of an invisible non-mechanical cause (adriṣṭa) prefigure molecular structure and field theory by two millennia.
The Asian Divergence: Void, Qi, and the Logic of Resonance
While India and Greece descended into the granular, dissecting reality into its smallest bits, China developed a physics predicated on continuity, flow, and resonance. This divergence highlights a fundamental split in human cognition regarding the “Ultimate It.”
During the Warring States period (c. 475–221 BCE), a rival school to Confucianism known as Mohism (founded by Mozi) developed a corpus of optical, logical, and mechanical knowledge that rivaled the works of Euclid and Archimedes. The Mo Jing (Mohist Canon) contains definitions of space, time, and motion that are startlingly modern and mathematically rigorous.
The Mohists defined a geometric “point” analytically as “the line which has no remaining parts,” a definition nearly identical to Euclid’s, yet developed independently. In mechanics, they formulated a proto-law of inertia, stating: “The cessation of motion is due to the opposing force. … If there is no opposing force, the motion will never stop.” This insight, that motion is a state that persists until inhibited, is intuitively difficult to grasp in a friction-dominated world and took the West another two millennia to formalize under Newton.
In the realm of optics, the Mohists were empiricists par excellence. They documented the camera obscura and the straight-line propagation of light, correctly explaining that the inversion of the image through a pinhole occurs because the light from the top of the object travels in a straight line to the bottom of the screen, and vice versa.
Perhaps most fascinating was their conception of Spacetime. Unlike the Newtonian “Absolute,” the Mohists viewed space and time as interdependent. They defined “duration” (jiu) as encompassing different times (past and present), and “space” (yu) encompassing different locations. They argued that an object’s position cannot be defined without a time coordinate, anticipating the four-dimensional manifold of modern physics.
However, the Mohist logic did not become the dominant paradigm of Chinese science. The unification of China under the Qin and the subsequent rise of Han Confucianism and Daoism shifted the focus from discrete analysis to holistic synthesis. The dominant physical concept became Qi, a vital matter-energy that fills the universe.
In the Daoist cosmological model, space is not a “Void” (a non-existent emptiness) but a “Vacuity” (Xu), a fertile, dynamic openness. As the Tao Te Ching notes, “Everything in the world is born from Being (You); Being is born from Non-Being (Wu).” Unlike the Democritean void, which is a passive stage for atoms, the Daoist void is generative and filled with potential.
This view precluded atomism because if the “It” is a continuous, resonant breath (Qi), it cannot be cut into independent, immutable parts. Matter was viewed not as built from discrete bricks, but as condensations of Qi, similar to how ice forms from water. Action occurred not by mechanical collision, but by Ganying (Resonance) or “Action at a Distance,” the idea that things of similar Qi affect one another across space, just as plucking a string on one lute causes a sympathetic vibration in another. This reliance on wave-like resonance meant that Chinese physics was uniquely positioned to understand magnetism and tides, phenomena that baffled the mechanical atomists of the West, but it steered them away from the geometric reductionism that led to Western mechanics.
The Aristotelian Stranglehold and the Archimedean Resistance
Back in the Mediterranean, the post-Socratic era saw a retreat from the bold atomism of Democritus. Plato and Aristotle, the titans of Greek philosophy, rejected the atomist model. Aristotle’s physics became the orthodoxy that would dominate the Western and Islamic worlds for nearly 2,000 years, often stifling the alternative currents of thought.
Aristotle argued that a Void is logically and physically impossible. His reasoning was based on his dynamics: he believed that the speed of an object is proportional to the force applied and inversely proportional to the resistance of the medium. If a Void existed, the resistance would be zero. Consequently, the speed would be infinite. Since infinite speed is absurd (an object would be everywhere at once), the Void cannot exist. “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
This led to a Plenum physics: the universe is full. Motion is only possible because as an object moves, the medium (air or water) rushes around to fill the space behind it, pushing it forward, a process known as antiperistasis. This clumsy explanation for projectile motion (the air pushing the arrow) would become the “weak link” in Aristotelian physics that later critics would attack to unravel the whole system.
Amidst this philosophical dominance, Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212 BCE) stood apart as the supreme practitioner of mathematical physics. While Aristotle wrote about physics using qualitative categories, Archimedes did physics using geometry and quantities. He is the essential bridge between the theoretical speculation of the philosophers and the engineering reality of the world.
Archimedes introduced rigor where there was only speculation. His work On Floating Bodies established the first correct laws of hydrostatics, determining that a body immersed in fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. This was not merely an empirical observation; it was a mathematical proof derived from axioms, indistinguishable in its rigor from Euclidean geometry.
Most significantly for the trajectory of physics, Archimedes developed the “Method of Mechanical Theorems.” As revealed in the Archimedes Palimpsest (a text lost for centuries and only recovered in the 20th century), Archimedes used infinitesimals to calculate areas and volumes, a precursor to integral calculus nearly two millennia before Newton and Leibniz. He mentally sliced geometric forms into infinite strips and weighed them on a virtual balance to find their centers of gravity.
In his work The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes tackled the concept of the infinite directly. He set out to calculate the number of grains of sand that would fit into the universe. To do this, he had to invent a new system of naming large numbers (exponents) and estimate the size of the cosmos (heliocentric model), demonstrating that the universe was vast but finite and calculable. Archimedes represents a “lost path” in physics, a mathematical experimentalism that was largely ignored by the Roman and early Medieval inheritors of Greek thought, who preferred the qualitative descriptions of Aristotle. It was only when this Archimedean thread was picked up again, first by the Arabs, then by Galileo, that the “Boundary of Physics” began to shift.
While Greece and India chose discreteness to rescue motion from Parmenides, Chinese natural philosophy selected continuity: Qi as vital breath, Vacuity (xu) as generative openness, and action through resonance (ganying). The Mohists alone developed a rigorous discrete mechanics (inertia, geometric point, relational duration) but were eclipsed by the holistic synthesis of Daoism and Confucianism.
The Golden Bridge: Islamic Physics and the Transmission
The standard Western narrative that science “slept” between the fall of Rome and the rise of Copernicus is a fabrication. In reality, the center of gravity shifted to the Islamic world, where scholars not only preserved Greek texts but aggressively critiqued, experimented upon, and expanded them, synthesizing them with Indian mathematics and philosophy.
Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (973–1048) stands as a monumental figure in the history of physics, representing the active fusion of Greek, Islamic, and Indian thought. Fluent in Sanskrit, Al-Biruni traveled to India, where he studied the sciences of the “Hindus.” He translated Indian texts, such as Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras and parts of the Samkhya school, into Arabic, effectively transmitting the concepts of Indian atomism, the void, and the vague notion of Adrishta to the Islamic West.
Al-Biruni was a rigorous experimentalist who despised unverified theory. He determined the specific gravity of 18 precious stones and metals (including gold, mercury, and emeralds) with a degree of accuracy that compares favorably to modern values, utilizing a conical instrument and hydrostatic balance influenced by Archimedes. This work was crucial because it transitioned the concept of “matter” from a qualitative philosophical category to a quantifiable physical property (density).
His most profound contribution to the “Boundary” of the physical world was his measurement of the Earth’s radius. While stationed at the fortress of Nandana (in modern Pakistan), Al-Biruni developed a novel trigonometric method using the dip angle of the horizon observed from a mountaintop. He calculated the Earth’s radius as 6,339.6 km, agonizingly close to the modern equatorial value of 6,378 km.
Crucially, Al-Biruni engaged in a famous correspondence with Ibn Sina (Avicenna) where he attacked Aristotelian physics. He defended the possibility of the Earth’s rotation, arguing that the “attraction” (gravity) at the center of the Earth would hold objects down even if it spun, an early grasp of the interplay between centripetal force and gravity that defied the Aristotelian consensus.
While Al-Biruni mapped the earth, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, c. 965–1040) mapped the behavior of light. In his magnum opus, Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics), he dismantled the ancient “extramission” theory (that eyes emit rays to touch objects) and established the “intromission” theory (light reflects off objects and enters the eye) through experimentation.
Ibn al-Haytham is arguably the father of the scientific method. He insisted that no theory is true until supported by experimental confirmation (iʿtibar) and mathematical verification. His work on the camera obscura provided the physical link to the earlier Mohist discoveries (though likely derived independently). He also formulated a concept of inertia, stating that a projectile would move forever unless stopped by a force or resistance, anticipating Newton’s First Law by centuries. His influence on the West was direct; his book was translated into Latin and deeply studied by Roger Bacon, Kepler, and eventually Newton.
The most significant theoretical leap regarding the “Ultimate It” in motion came from Ibn Sina (Avicenna). He found Aristotle’s explanation of projectile motion (the air pushing the object) ridiculous. Ibn Sina proposed that the thrower imparts a quality to the object called Mayl (inclination).
For Ibn Sina, Mayl was an internal quality that sustained motion. He categorized it into three types: psychic (in living beings), natural (gravity), and violent (projectile motion). Critically, he argued that in a void (if it could exist), Mayl would not dissipate. This was a crucial step toward inertia: the realization that motion is a state conserved within the object, not a process sustained by the medium. However, Ibn Sina stopped short of the modern view; he still believed Mayl was a temporary quality that would naturally fade, distinct from the “permanent” nature of the object itself.
A unique and often overlooked contribution of Islamic theology to physics was Ashʿarite atomism. Facing the challenge of Greek determinism (which limited God’s power), theologians like Al-Ghazali and the Ashʿarite school proposed an atomism of time and space. They argued that the world is composed of “atoms” of substance (jawahir) and “accidents” (aʿrad) that do not endure two instants of time.
In this view, God destroys and recreates the universe at every single instant. There is no “natural cause” connecting fire to burning cotton; there is only God’s “habit” (ʿādat) of creating the burning at the moment of contact. This “Occasionalism” denies intrinsic causality in matter. While primarily theological, this model presents a universe that is discrete in time, a “cinematic” reality that foreshadows the discrete states of quantum mechanics. It represents the ultimate “It” not as an enduring substance, but as a transient event, flickering in and out of existence at the will of the observer (God).
The Momentum of Thought: From Mayl to Impetus
The transition from the Medieval to the Early Modern world was driven by the evolution of the projectile problem. The critique of Aristotle traveled from Philoponus (6th Century Byzantine) to the Islamic world and then to Latin Europe, gathering momentum.
John Philoponus, writing in Alexandria in the 6th century, was the first to systematically dismantle Aristotle’s dynamics. He argued that if the air pushes the arrow, then waving one’s hands behind a stone should make it move, which is empirically false. He proposed that the mover imparts a “motive power” to the body. This idea, ignored in Europe for centuries, was picked up by the Arabs (who called him Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī) and became the basis for Mayl.
In the 14th century, the French philosopher Jean Buridan (c. 1300–1358) refined Ibn Sina’s Mayl into the theory of Impetus. Buridan made a crucial modification that bridged the gap to modern mechanics: he argued that Impetus was a permanent quality (res permanens). Unlike Ibn Sina, who thought it might self-dissipate, Buridan argued that impetus would stay in the body forever unless opposed by external resistance (air friction) or gravity.
This was the intellectual tipping point. Buridan wrote, “If a mover sets a body in motion, he implants into it a certain impetus.. which moves the body in the direction in which the mover set it in motion.” He explicitly linked this to the rotation of the heavens, suggesting that God gave the planets an initial impetus at Creation, and since there is no friction in space, they have been spinning ever since. This paved the way for celestial mechanics, removing the need for angels to push the planets. The “Ultimate It” of motion was no longer a force being constantly applied, but a quantity conserved.
Through Philoponus → Ibn Sina (mayl) → Buridan (impetus permanens) → al-Biruni’s defence of Earth’s rotation, the Aristotelian horror vacui and antiperistasis were dismantled. Ashʿarite occasionalism introduced discrete instants and denied intrinsic causality: a theological move that nevertheless furnished the conceptual template for quantum discreteness.