I recently enjoyed e-mail exchanges with Ed Dellian.

Ed is one of the very few modern philosophers and science historians who read Newton’s Principia in original (and produced his own translation of Principia to German – published in 1988).

Ed’s position is that the real physical (Nature’s) laws reflect cause and effect in the form of geometric proportionality. The most fundamental being E/p=c, where E is energy, p is momentum and c is velocity – a proportionality coefficient, i.e. a constant associated with space over time.  This view is in line with the Poynting vector understanding of electromagnetism, also accepted by Heaviside in his notion of ‘energy current’. It even is the basis of Einstein’s E/mc = c.

The diversion from geometric proportionality towards arithmetic proportionality was due to Leibniz and his principle of “causa aequat effectum“. According to Ed (I am quoting him here)  – “it is a principle that has nothing to do with reality, since it implies “instantanity” of interaction, that is, interaction independently of “real space” and “real time”, conflicting with the age-old natural experience expressed by Galileo that “nothing happens but in space and time” “. It is therefore important to see how Maxwellian electromagnetism is seen by scholars. For example, Faraday’s law states an equivalence of EMF and the rate of change of magnetic flux – it is not a geometric proportion, hence it is not causal!

My view, which is based on my experience with electronic circuits and my understanding of causality between and energy and information transfer (state-changes), where energy is cause and information transfer is effect, is in agreement with geometric proportionality. Energy causes state-transitions in space-time. This is what I call energy-modulated computing. It is challenging to refine this proportionality in every real problem case!

If you want to know more about Ed Dellian’s views, I recommend visiting his site http://www.neutonus-reformatus.de  which contains several interesting papers.