This web page is on a topic that I have wondered about. I would appreciate any feedback that you might be able to provide. Especially errors in concept or calculation. Please send an email to jdj@mcanv.com if you would care to comment.

Beginning with the Pebbles and People page we are looking into how human beings can redirect the stream of events, changing the state of the universe to suit their desires (or trying to, bearing in mind the law of unintended consequences). Before getting into the more detail on the people part let's look into how inanimate matter makes its way through the universe.

A great deal is known about how bits of inaminate matter interact. A quick review of the interactions of material objects, in plain language without the mathematical details that often obscure the subject, is found in the Chapter 1 Section 2 of Volume 1 of the famous "Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Richard Feynman. Please read this excerpt, linked above, because I will be referring to it later. These lectures were presented in the early 1960s but nothing we have learned since then invalidates Feynman's explanation of how matter interacts. The full transcript of these lectures is still in print and available at Amazon. If you have any idea of pursuing a career in science you should have at least Volume 1 of this series and start reading it as soon as you finish high school (or before if you have a talent for physics).

To make his explanation of the interaction of bits of matter understandable Feynman has necessarily glossed over a lot of detail. The uncertainty and statistical nature of quantum mechanical effects are involved in the internal structure of atoms so we will leave that detail hidden. The forces among the atoms that make them attract at moderate distances and repel at close distances as described by Feynman involve the interaction between matter and radiation but we don't not need to go into those details here either. Finally Feynman is justified in ignoring the effect of gravity in his context since it is so weak compared to the forces in and among the atoms. Gravity is important in the large scale interactions of matter, keeping satellites in orbit, holding the solar system together, making new stars out of the fragments of old stars and so on.

The interaction of an object with the space around it is called gravity. In accordance with the general relativity principle, a massive object like Earth significantly curves the spacetime around it. The curved spacetime determines how objects move in the absence of external forces. Experience tells us that a dropped baseball falls freely toward the center of the planet. Of course gravity operates between any pair of objects in the same way so the Moon is also falling toward the center of the Earth, even though its tangential velocity makes that fact less obvious. In fact the path that any object takes when falling freely, without aid or interference, is determined by the curvature of spacetime in the neighborhood.

If an object is responding to the curvature of spacetime but is somehow constrained, it will follow a geodesic as closely as the constraint allows. For example the dropped baseball follows the geodesic that happens to be a straight line through the center of the earth until it collides with the earth surface. Thereafter it just lies there, doing its best to follow that geodesic but prevented from moving closer to the center of the planet by all the stuff in the way. If a metal ball is connected by a light rod to a pivot point, making a pendulum, the ball will try to fall to the center of the earth but the constraint forces it to swing in an arc, constantly overshooting the point of closest approach to the earth center so it swings back and forth.

Just a quick review of the electric nature of atoms is due here. All atoms consist of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. Normally the number of electrons surrounding the atom equals the number of positive charges in the nucleus, leaving the atom as a whole, electrically neutral. Now consider two objects, say a few centimeters apart. That distance is so large compared to the separation of the negative and positive charges in the atoms of the objects, that the two objects appear electrically neutral to each other so they have no influence on each other's path. Each object goes coasting along its own geodesic without regard for the other. If their geodesics happen to intersect and if the objects were to arrive at this intersection at the same time, at some point they would come close enough together that the negative electric charges surrounding the atoms of the objects will come close to each other relative to the distance between them and their positive nuclei. The repulsive force between these negative charges will build up rapidly as more and more atoms get involved and the two objects will be forced off their original geodesics and find two new ones that diverge from one another. The attractive force between atoms in very close proximity, that Feynamn speaks of, does not come into play except between specific combinations of atoms that readily form molecules.

That is about the story as far as inanimate lumps of matter go. They drift along whatever geodesic they are on at a fixed speed including possibly zero speed, until something comes along and pushes them off course, changing direction, speed or both. Thereafter they follow a new path until the next bump. Under some circumstances inanimate matter can be induced to behave in much more complicated ways. We will wait until later to examine this situation on the Economy and Extravagance page.

The point of all this discussion of how matter interacts, is that the interactions we are considering are governed by "laws of nature" that are expressible as mathematical relationships tying conditions after the interaction to conditions before the interaction. The implication of this mathematical binding of events is that every event lies on a stack of precursor events all the way back to the beginning of time and likewise all future events are fixed by events in the past locked in an unbroken chain of cause and effect.

I think that the only way people can alter the future state of the universe is to move small objects in the vicinity, taking them off Nature's preferred path and shifting them to another geodesic in the neighborhood. It is only through the manipulation of matter that human beings exercise their authority over events. The details of how a person decides what moves to make and how those moves are accomplished remain to be explored. Before we can get into that we should think about the mechanical differences between inanimate matter and living beings.