Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 17: Empedocles: The Four Elements and Change as Mixture

Transcript
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And we can only kind of gather the things he says later on of what might have been a reason for doing this. And perhaps the best way to state this reason is to make an either-or argument out of it. That if there is one first matter, everybody at this point thinks, if there is one first matter, now the either-or statement, either that matter has some definite quality, or it has no definite quality, one of the two. Either it has some definite, it has no quality. Those seem to be the only alternatives. Now, we're going to proceed by the either-or syllogism. We're going to eliminate both of these, and then you're going to have to say whether they can't be one matter. Now, to some extent, already with Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes, they saw a difficulty in saying that the first matter has some definite quality. What is that difficulty? Everything would have to have that quality. Yeah. So if sugar was the beginning of all things, and sugar has a definite quality of being sweet, and everything is then made out of sugar, everything should be sweet. But, in fact, we live in a world of contrary things, of sweet and bitter things, right? Okay? Hard and soft things, wet and dry things, and so on. So, when they moved from Mother Earth towards water, and then towards the unlimited or true air, they seemed to be moving in the direction of a matter that had no definite quality, as if they saw the different quality in that alternative. But now, if you say that the beginning of all things is something that has no qualities whatsoever, then maybe there's even a greater difficulty. Not just that of getting the contrary quality, but of getting any qualities whatsoever in the universe. And as Empedocles will say that are on, you can't get something out of nothing. Now, as a child, you might have made Kuwait, and what? You add to water, which has no color and no taste to speak of. You add something that gives it a color and a taste and makes it sweet and so on. But you have to add to water something that has color, that has taste, in order to get something with color and taste, don't you? If you add it water to water, you'd still have something colorless and tasteless and so on. So, if everything is made out of one matter, and that matter has no qualities, how would anything have any qualities? Not just the contrary qualities, but any qualities whatsoever. You can't get something out of nothing. So, there's a difficulty in either one of these two positions, isn't there? Now, that's the first step, right? So now you're saying there must be more than one first matter. And those first matter will have to have some quality, otherwise you'd get something out of nothing. Now you know when you cook, when you make a wine sauce or a salad dressing even, you can combine different things and get a kind of new taste. But you have to start with something that has some kind of taste to it. Otherwise you wouldn't get this new taste by combining these things. Okay, now, the next step, if there's more than one first matter, which is the conclusion from this first step, would it be reasonable to distinguish the first matters, in the plural now, by opposites? This is going to be the next step, huh? This is the first step now. There are many. When I say many, I mean more than one. There are many first matters. We see the reason for saying that, but we see through our argument. So it's reasonable. I don't say necessarily the truth, but it's reasonable. Now, the next step. The many first matters are distinguished by opposite qualities. Now, would that make sense to distinguish the first matters of opposite qualities? Would it make sense to divide human beings into male and bad, or female and good, or male and good, or male and bad? Would that make sense? Yeah. But where would you put Christ, or where would you put St. Paul? With the males or the good ones? You see? You see? So the same thing could be both the male and good. So it doesn't make sense to divide human beings into male and good, does it? Okay? It makes some sense to divide human beings into male and female, right? Some sense to divide them into good and bad. Because you can't be both the male and female, you can't be both good and bad. Or divide them into young and old, or something. But young and male? Does that make sense? No, because the same person could be young and male. So you have no place to put such a person. So you divide by opposites. That makes sense, doesn't it? Now, we don't know how far Empedocles got, but what opposites would seem to distinguish the four that he comes up with? Earth, air, fire, and water. And undoubtedly he was influenced by the thinking of those before him. Some of whom had taken Mother Earth, some water, some air, some fire. But he's going to take all four of them. But by what opposites would you distinguish those four? Hot and cold, wet and dry. And you crisscross these divisions, as we've spoken of before, at the Rule of 2 and 3. And what is hot and dry? Earth, air, fire, or water? Fire. Fire is hot and dry. And what is wet and cold? Water. Now what is... What's the music? I got this wrong. Please. What is dry and cold? Well, if you dig down in the ground, it's cool. My cellar is cooler than my house. So we always store things down in the cellar, so the earth is cool, right? But if you take the water out of the dirt, it's what? Dry as dust, huh? So the earth is dry and cold. Now, if you go back to the way up and the way down, where you had Mother Earth in the middle and water on top of that and air on top of that and then fire around the periphery, the sun and the stars are fire, air is in between fire and water. Well, if you think of air now in the sense of what? Steam, right? Steam is hot and what? Wet. That's a little forest, a little. So air, if it's steam. So air shares of fire that it's hot and it shares of water that it's wet. So it's in the right place, isn't it? In between the two. It's got something in common with its two neighbors, but not identical. Now, if he used opposites to arrive at these four, we saw in general we should use opposites, right? He would arrive at these four by using these two pairs of opposites. And he would also think, well, gee whiz. Each of these other guys saw some part of the truth. The guy who said that Mother Earth was the beginning of all things, the poets, Thales, Maximinas, and Heraclitus, right? Each of them didn't miss their vote entirely. But they saw some part of the truth, but they both did that they had seen the whole. But is there any reason why hot and cold and wet and dry in particular should be the opposites we use to distinguish the first matters rather than, let's say, hard and soft and white or sweet and bitter? And we can think of many other pairs of contraries in the sensible world. So, is there any reason to say that the first matters are distinguished by hot and cold and wet and dry rather than by, say, some of these other pairs of opposites? So... Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think because the hearts and the others, they signify some kind of activity. Okay. And especially if you stop and think that hot and cold make the butter hard and what? Soft, right? So hot and cold are causes of hard and soft, aren't they? So if you're looking for the beginning of all things, the cause of all things, hard and soft would be not as good as hot and cold. Because they are effects of hot and cold. Likewise, if you have a sponge, you put the sponge in the water and it becomes soft. You leave the sponge out on the counter and it becomes hard like a rock. And you know how bread, you get a stick loaf of bread after a deer so it gets hard. It's not just so hard you can't even cut it. It just crumbles because it's dried out. But you moistened it and it would become, what? Soft again. So hot and cold, wet and dry are causes of the butter or the sponge of the bread being hard or soft. So if you're looking for the first causes of all things, the first roots, as he says, of all things, hot and cold, wet and dry would be a better guess than hard and soft. Do you see that? The same way black and white. You put white bread, let's say, into the toaster and it goes from white to red and eventually, if you're in the middle of it, it goes even to black. You put metal when you heat it and it gets, what, red hot? It gets even white hot, I guess, eventually. You see? So hot and cold changes the color of things. And you know how a garment looks different when it's wet than when it's dry. In the morning my hair is all over the place, so I wet it down and it becomes much darker. And then as the day goes on, it dries out, it's more and more gray or white, you see? So hot and cold, wet and dry are causes of the change in the colors of things, aren't they? So if you're looking for the first cause, hot and cold and wet and dry are causes of changes in black and white and the other colors. So not as basic a pair. And you all know the importance of cooking things and so on to change their flavor. It's important to cook the steak if you don't cook it too much, or even when they taste it something. So there doesn't seem to be any pairs or contraries more basic than in the world around us, than hot and cold, wet and dry. And so you have to distinguish the first matters by opposites, and these are the most fundamental opposites. Therefore these must be the fundamental matters. And it doesn't seem like there's any way to get around that. If you have more than one matter, you have to distinguish them by opposites. And these are the most fundamental opposites, so how could there be any more basic than these four? And this theory of the four elements lasted over 2,000 years. Shakespeare's, not as the only theory, but the standard one, from roughly, say, 500 B.C. when Empedocles was writing, down to the time of Shakespeare. If you read Shakespeare's plays, there's all kinds of references to the four elements. You know, Peopatra, I'm all fire and air, and my beast elements I give to the earth. And Shakespeare has sonnets, I don't know, to deal with the four elements. The agile elements, you know, fire and air, and the more clotting ones, the water and the earth, and so on. And all kinds of, you know, people refer to these problems they were composed of. There can't be any way to get beyond that. There's no obvious way of getting beyond that. There had to be a very roundabout way with some kind of, what, subtle experiment that would suggest something before water, like hydrogen. But in terms, simply of using your senses, and having to distinguish by opposites, the senses don't know any opposites more basic than hot and cold, wet and dry. See, in our experience, we can see that these are more basic than hard and soft, and black and white. But the senses know no contraries or opposites more basic than these. And if you're distinguishing different manners, they've got to be distinguished by opposites. So, this seems to be it. And so, most thinkers accepted this theory of the four elements for the rest of, what, 2,000 years, huh? It's the longest lasting chemical theory in history. It doesn't mean it's true, but you can see why it would seem to be inevitable. Now, DK38 is touching upon these two, but not as clearly as DK6. But now, in DK96, you can see Empedocles, in accordance with his thinking, that men see a part of the truth, and they boast of having seen the whole. He's going to combine now with the thought of all his predecessors, they're thinking of, what, Pythagoras, that things depend upon numerical ratios. And he's going to be the first man now to say that the compounds, like flesh and blood and bones, are composed of these elements in different ratios. Now, this is very fragmentary, so you don't know his whole theory, but just look at the two fragments that we have here. But the pleasing earth and its broad melting pots receive two of the eight parts of glittering nestes. Now Anistis, as we saw in the first fragment, is what? Water, right? Two parts of water. And four of Hephaestus. Now Hephaestus was the god of what? Fire. So two parts water and four parts of fire. And these became white bones begotten divinely by the bluing of harmony. Now, notice the chemical formula there so far as we have in that fragment. Bone equals what? W2F4, right? Maybe a little more modern. Now notice, huh, the ratio of these. The ratio of the dry element, which is fire, is greater than that of the wet element, which is water. And that would help to explain why bone is the driest part of our body. It has more of the dry element in it. And so we have an expression here today, we speak of something as being bone dry for this fragment. Now I compare that to the next fragment here. The earth, anchored in the harbors of Cyprus, on the goddess of love, came together with these in about equal measure, with Hephaestus, water, and the all-shining upper air, either a little more or less than a greater share. And from these, that should be these, not thee. And from these came blood and the forms of other flesh. Well, notice that the ratio of the elements is different in the case of flesh and blood. And there's more of the, what, moist element, huh, than there was in the bone. How far we develop this, we don't know, but at least he has the rudimentary idea that there are these four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. And secondly, they combine in different numerical ratios to form flesh and blood and bones. And that's the same idea we have in modern chemistry, that there are different kinds of matter that combine in different numerical ratios to form the chemical compounds. So water is H2O, and something else is C6H12O6, and so on. Okay, and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, huh, have a different ratio, and one will kill you and one is okay. So notice he's bringing together the thought of almost everybody before him. He's bringing together the thought of the poets, and he talks about earth as the beginning of things, and Heraclitus, he says, fire, and Thaddeus, he says, water, and Heximus, he says, air, as if each one of them saw part of the truth, but out of maybe human weakness, they boasted, huh, that's a form of, as Gregory the Great says, that's the first species of pride, right? They boasted having seen the whole. And, but then he brings in the thought of what? Of the Thaddeus, that there are numerical ratios in things. And he combines them in saying, well, there is a different numerical ratio of the four elements, in bone, in flesh, in blood, and that explains, huh? And even in temps, you might say, to explain why the bone is drier than the flesh or the blood, because it has a greater ratio of the dry elements in it. I guess that's very interesting, what he's doing there. Sure. And that fragment that we'll come back to again, that men see a part of the truth, they boast of having seen the whole, that's a lot of the reason for disagreement among men, huh? That they do see, we tend to see, a part of the truth before we see the whole truth. And out of pride, we might think we've seen more than we've seen. And then we'd boast if we'd seen the whole. So in the 19th century, there you have Karl Marx, and Karl Marx says, The economic mode of production explains everything! It explains our what? Not only our industry and so on, but it explains what? Our social structure, and eventually our government, and even all our ideas and our philosophy. Karl Marx goes back to economic mode of production. Now undoubtedly, he saw some part of the truth. The economic mode of production does determine a lot of things, or influence a lot of things. It does explain everything, huh? And then along comes another Jew, right? And he said, Well, no, no, no, sex explains everything! You know, it explains what you'd philosophize, see? And so on. And... Well, undoubtedly, sex does explain some things, but does it explain everything? It's like, you know, Freud saw part of the truth, maybe, but he blew it up. This explains everything. Someone else remarks another one. It's more likely that each of them saw some part of the truth, rather than this is the whole truth that they saw. So Empedocles, in a way, is following his own, what, dictum, well, because he is gathering parts of the truth that seem to him to be scattered amongst these men. And he comes up with something that we still have, that there are more than one kind of matter, and they do combine in different numerical ratios. Now, the next group of fragments, which we're going to look at individually, but take them as a group, the one starting at the bottom of page 3, which is DK8, and DK9, and DK11, and DK12, and DK15, those five fragments, huh? They're marvelous fragments, but we're taking them together, huh? And they bring out something very interesting here. What you'll see in these fragments is that Empedocles thinks that the only change in the world, that there is, is change of place. So, change of place is the only kind of change in the world. If you recall when Aristotle talked about nature as a beginning and cause of motion or change, he spoke of many kinds of change, huh? One of which is change of place. But growth is another example of another kind of change. Or alteration of quality is another kind of change. And a fortiori, generation, huh? And death are another kind of change. But in Empedocles now, and we think this may be, you know, a thought in all the early Greeks, but we'll see it explicitly in Empedocles and in Anaxagoras too, change of place is the only kind of change in the world. It's thought that what might appear to be another kind of change, and a more inward change of a thing, changing its qualities, changing its size, and especially coming into existence and going out of existence, birth and death and so on. None of that is really so. It's just a disguised form of change of place. So you see explicitly, we'll see it in the fragments here, from Empedocles and in those of Anaxagoras, this idea that change of place is the only change in the world. It's the only kind of change that they can really understand. And it's, there'll be this attempt to reduce any apparently different kind of change to merely a disguised form of change of place. Now, something like this happened in modern science too. Because modern science begins really, it's going in the 17th century with Galileo and Kepler-Newton. And for the most part, Galileo and Kepler-Newton are perfecting our knowledge of change of place. So they begin with this study of change of place. So Galileo is talking about the free fall of the body to the Earth. And Kepler is talking about the movement of the planets around the sun and so on. And Sirajan Newton is uniting these two. So modern science begins with the study of change of place. But then you see that same tendency of modern scientists to try to make what might seem to be some other kind of change merely a disguised form of change of place. And Aristotle will reject the idea of the change of place as the only kind of change in the world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And starting especially with quantum theory, in the 20th century, the physicists began to challenge the idea that change in place is the only kind of change in the world. That there are some changes that can't be understood as changes of place. But this is where it begins, right? So it's not unique to the Greeks, huh? We have the same tendency. And it's very hard for us to understand, really, how these other kinds of change are possible, even though somewhere in the back of our mind we really think that they exist, huh? Let's look at the fragments of Empedocles and we'll begin to see his position and maybe something of his reason. And I will tell you another thing. There is no birth of any mortal thing. Nothing really comes into what? Existence, like the word birth or generation might seem to indicate. Nor end in destructive death. There's no such thing, huh? But there is only a mixing and an exchange of what has been mixed. Birth, however, is a name given to these by men, but by ignorant men, huh? Who think something's more significant going on here than a mixing and separating of things. You see his position there, right? Okay. But they, meaning men in general, when these have been mixed in a way suited to men, or to the race of wild beasts or to bushes or birds of prey, say then that this has been born. There's something that has come into existence, huh? And when these have been separated, huh? They call it wretched death. They do not name these things rightly, but I also follow the custom. Well, just like a modern scientist, you might say, you know, the sun rose at 6 a.m. today, right? Or the sun set at 5 p.m. or something today. And you say to him, no, is that really so? He says, no, no. The earth is turning on its axis, the sun is not rising and setting. But I also follow the custom or custom to speak this way. So I speak that way too, but that's not really scientific to see that the sun rose and the sun set. And so Pedocles is telling us, right, I often speak of so-and-so is dying, you know, because people won't understand what I'm talking about if I don't say this, right? But really what's happened is that earth, air, fire, and water have been separated and mixed in some other combination. And you really shouldn't call this birth and death, huh? And the example I give in a class sometimes, I say, if Berquist, you know, starts passing out cigars because his philosophy of nature class, or whatever it is, has been born, huh? At Assumption College. And a new birth, you know. And then at the end of the class, you know, Berquist, you know, is wearing a black armband and so on, but class has died and so on. Well, that's ridiculous, right? What's happened is that the students were mixed in one combination in your class, then they are separated and mixed in other combinations in other rooms and other places, right? And nobody's really kind of into existence or out of existence, right? And you're passing out cigars for a place and you're wearing a black armband and warning and so on, is implying there's some more radical change, some inward change, huh? That something really came into existence, went out of existence, instead of always existing things have been mixed in a new way and separated. So I shouldn't go to the funeral house and say, so-and-so has died. Oh, I see, a new mixture, huh? You see? Or a separation, see? Now, something in the back of our mind might tell us, there's something not quite right about that thinking, but we'll see why he has a difficulty in understanding it. Just like Bertrand Russell said in the 20th century, he would think, you know, there were more or less just a mixture of atoms and molecules, you know, and so on. And yet he spends the last few years of his life running around to all these conferences against atomic war and so on. Like atomic war is something more than a rearrangement of molecules and atoms. Yeah. Now somehow he sees this as more than that, right? Uh-huh. But that's all it is, you know, a rearrangement of atoms and molecules, what's the big deal about atomic war, right? Just a rearrangement. More efficient. Yeah, but it's just a rearrangement of atoms and molecules, right? And a new combination, huh? And it's not like, there's no more than my class, you know, the bell or whatever it is. And they, you know, are separated and they're mixed in other combinations. No big deal. See, with something in the back of his mind, he's telling them there's something more about atomic war, right? You know? Before we're going to be dying, you know? It's not just atoms and molecules being segregated and mixed in new combinations. But he can't quite understand how there could be anything more than that. Now, next fragment, fools! Now the fool is the opposite of a wise man, for they have no far-reaching minds who think that what before was not comes to be, or that anything dies and is destroyed utterly in every way. Now he's denying that anything really comes into existence, right? Or that anything really is what? Annihilated, destroyed. Now, in the next fragment, DK12, you get something of the reason why nothing has really come into existence. Because if something really came into existence, then before it came into existence it would be nothing. And then you'd be getting something out of what? Nothing. Only a fool would think that, huh? For it is impossible that anything comes to be from what in no way is. You can't get something out of nothing. So you might go down in your basement and yesterday it was all dry, you go down there today and it's all filled with water in your basement. Something out of nothing, right? Fooled! Have no far-reaching mind, huh? That water couldn't come to be out of nothing. What do you mean? There was nothing there yesterday, huh? Yeah, but it must have, what? Changed its place, huh? It was out in the soil or up in the clouds and then down in the soil and then it's found its way in through the wall and you didn't see it coming in, but it was just a change of place really. It's not water coming into existence out of nothing. Only a fool could think it was such a stupid thing, huh? Right? But you have no far-reaching mind. You can't trace it, how it got through this crack in the wall and saw it. Do you see that? Now the other side is maybe more clearly explained in a fragment that we'll see in the great Anaxagris. That what is should perish completely is not accomplished or heard of. Well, could I annihilate you or annihilate this desk, huh? Could I cut you up so there's nothing left of you? Well, as Anaxagris would say, what is cannot cease to be by being cut? You've cut something up into what it's made out of. So if I could cut you up into nothing, you'd be made out of nothing. That's absurd, isn't it? Only a fool would think such thoughts, huh? So nothing really comes into existence, because you can't cut something out of nothing. And you can't cut something up into nothing, because you cut something out into what it's made out of. Something can't be made out of nothing. So you really cut it into, all you're doing is separating things that make it up, huh? And that's why he ends up that fragment by saying, for it will always be there where anyone ever puts it. Okay? But now if you don't have that far-reaching mind that Empedocles has, say, Birquist puts a log on the fire, see? And the fire annihilated the log, right? The log has gone out of existence. Fool, you'd say, had no far-reaching mind. You can't turn a log into nothing. Everything that's in the log still exists. What do you mean? Well, look under the grate there. You see those ashes down there? That's part of what was in the thing, huh? Now we go in the backyard and look up in the sky, and you'll see that you're kind of polluting the neighborhood and so on, that all those little specks of them, and you're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So everything that's in the log still exists, but someone's down in the grate and some's up there, and you don't have a far-enough-reaching mind to trace it, and you think it became what? Nothing, yeah. See? Like a magician, you know? He reaches your pocket and pulls out something that wasn't there, right? Getting something out of nothing. No, you have not a far-reaching mind. You had the rabbit or the bird or whatever, he was up his arm somewhere. It didn't come to be out of nothing, did it? Only a fool would think such thoughts, huh? Yeah. Magic show, making a magic show out of the natural world, huh? Ridiculous. Now, in the next fragment, DK15, you have the opposite, of course, of a fool that you had in DK11. For a wise man would not guess such things in his mind. This is an unreasonable guess, right? A crazy guess. As that as long as they live what they call life, so long they are, and experience wretched things and good things. But that before mortals are fastened together, and after they are unfastened, they are then nothing. But notice, if Empedocles' wife or his son or his friend died, he'd probably react like we all would react, right? There's something more than just a, what, rearrangement of earth, air, fire, and water that's taking place there. Someone who was is no longer, right? Or if his wife is birthed to a baby, right? You know, a new person has come into the world. He's going to react, you know, that this is more than just a new arrangement of earth, air, fire, and water. But he can't quite understand how this is, what, possible. Now, the other side of the coin is, you're denying any inward change, because change in place is kind of an outward change, but there's no inward change of quality or of substance. And you can't understand how an inward change is possible. One of Aristotle's main contributions to natural philosophy, that we'll see later on, is to understand how an inward change is possible. And that's tied to Aristotle's understanding of the ability that is matter, of the potency that is matter. But this is a very hard thing to understand for us. The difficulty is in it, not in us. But we can't understand this ability of potency very much. But in quantum theory in the 20th century, where this idea that there's only change of place broke down. In quantum theory, you know, they were, especially in studying the atom, they first tried to understand the atom as a kind of a miniature solar system. You know, the nucleus is kind of like the sun, and electrons going around it. And then they started to run into all kinds of contradictions. And, for example, if the electron goes from one orbit to another orbit, if there's a change of place, there should be a continuous emission of, what, energy. But that doesn't take place. There's a, what, jump-like emission of energy. So they began to realize, hey, we can't, we're imagining falsely what the electron is doing. It's not moving from one place to another, right? Because it's a change that's more inward. But Heisenberg, who saw most of all how radical it was quantum theory, he said it introduced a quantitative version of the potency that Aristotle had, what, talked about. So it's interesting now that the part of modern science where this thought that's common to not only the early Greeks, but to the early modern scientists, the change of place is the only change in the world, the place where that was challenged or broke down, really, was also the place where Aristotle's understanding of potency was introduced. So if you look at Heisenberg's Gifford Lectures, almost every lecture is talking about that potency. It first started to appear in the 1924 paper, he says, of Bohr, Kramers, and Slater. Something entirely new, huh? But, you know, Louis de Broglie there, the father of wave mechanics, he talks about this a little bit, too. And he said, if you had asked, he says, a physicist of the 19th century, what happens when white light hits a prism and you get this spectrum of all different colors, he would have said, well, all those colors were inside the white light. What the prism has done is to separate those things. That's, in fact, his way of thinking, right? See? Those, all those different colors haven't come into existence out of nothing, right? They were all actually inside the white light, and all the prism did was to separate them. So there's a separation and a mixture of things, huh? But it's only a change of place in that way. He says, today we no longer think that's what happens, huh? Today we think that those different colors exist in the white light, he says, only as in a possibility. So this is, again, the idea of potency or ability that Aristotle was the first to bring out, huh? My friend Warren Murray had some conversations with Heisenberg. He speaks German and so on, huh? And he was asking Heisenberg one time with these more a Platonist or Aristotelian. And, of course, he was always coming back to Aristotle and potency, you know? Although Warren was saying, yeah, but aren't you a mathematical physicist? And Plato, as you know from Temaito, is very much into the mathematical science. Well, in that sense, he said, I suppose I'm more a Platonist than Aristotelian, right? But then he always come back, you know, to his appreciation of Aristotelian. as understanding of potency or ability, and how the theories in modern physics, especially quantum theory, are suggesting ideas like what Aristotle talked about. But we'll see how hard it is to understand that, but so long as you're ignorant of ability or potency, then this seems to be the only way that things could change. So there's this tendency then to try to explain any apparently different change as merely a change of place that you're too stupid, or your senses or your reason are not trained enough to follow. Let me just give a little bit of examples of that sort of thing, I'll take a very simple example. Perkos is watching the football game between Michigan and some other, like Michigan and Navy, I would say. So it's half time, right, and the University of Michigan marching band comes out in the field, huh? And first they play a tribute to the Navy, you know, and they march like this, and they're in the shape of a, what, boat, and they play Anchors Away, right? And then they march, and in the shape of, what, the state of Michigan, they play the Michigan song, you know, and so on. So Perkos is there, you know, and I discovered a new kind of change in the world. Really, Mr. Perkos, what have you discovered? Yeah. Change of what? Shape, huh? Yeah? I saw this thing, you know, changing its shape on the TV screen there, huh? Fool, he'd say, right? Put your glasses on, right? Look more closely, right? There are 150 members of the marching band, right? And all they're doing is what? Yeah. What you call a change of shape is really the gross appearance to your imperfect eyesight, right, huh? Of what? 150 changes of places, if it's stupid to follow. You see that? Okay. Now, take another example here. Berkos gets his coffee here, see? Oh, that's bitter, see? So Berkos gets called the room for a moment, huh? And you went over to the sugar bowl, you take a little bit of sugar, and you put it in Berkos' coffee, and you stir it up, and stir it up good so there's no sugar, you know, in the bottom of the cup and so on. Berkos comes back in, and you taste it again, and you say, ooh, ah, ah, that's much better, huh? There's been a change of quality, huh? I discovered a new change, change of quality. The coffee has changed from sweet to what? From bitter to sweet, huh? Hmm. Now, say what? Fool! They have no garbage in mind, huh? See? What you call a change of quality, nothing has really changed its quality. The coffee was bitter, and it still is bitter, see? But some sugar has changed its place from the sugar bowl and into the coffee, right? And the sugar was sweet and still is sweet. There's been no change of quality there either. And what you're really tasting is the sweetness of the sugar. Well, I don't see any sugar in my coffee. Well, it's too small for you to see it. But, you see? See? So what you think, Berkos is a change of quality is really a change of what? Place for the sugar, huh? Okay. Um... Now, Berkowitz is going to have some tea, so he puts the water on the stove, and he feels the water, and it's cool. And shortly later, he puts his finger in there again, and now the water is warm. Ah! A change of quality, right? An inward change. The water was cool, and now the water is warm. It's changed its quality. It stayed in the same place, obviously, the water. There's been no change of place. But staying in the same place, its quality has changed. Well, just a minute, Mr. Berkowitz, huh? Where did that heat come from, huh? If there wasn't any heat in the water to begin with, then you're getting something out of what? Nothing, you see? Now, Einstein, in his book, The Evolution of Physics, he describes some of the first theories, even modern times. And he put a hot body and a cold body next to each other in a room, and you go out and even there together for a while, you come back in, and the cold body is not so cold anymore, and the hot body is not so hot anymore, see? Well, they had the theory that there was a substance, which they called caloric, which is by nature hot, huh? And some of the caloric in the hot thing, what? Flowed into the what? Cold one. Cold one, right? See? Well, it's just like the sugar, isn't it? See? You're trying to explain that change of the hot body from hot to warm, let's say, and of the cold body from cold to warm or something, by merely, what? A disguised form of change of place. It's just like the sugar example, isn't it? Not as easy to see, but, see? Now, later on, it got more, more, what? Sophisticated, huh? And so, Berkowitz is thinking that the water here on the stove is changing from cold to hot, but what the scientists would say is, hey, there's these little tiny things that we call molecules down there, and they're vibrating, see? And what you call this change from cold to hot is many of these things going faster and faster, see? And this is a kinetic theory of heat or something of this sort. And so, what you call hot is merely the gross appearance to your senses of all those, what? Hyperactive little molecules here, see? And that's why eventually the water starts to, what? Bubble, you know, which is kind of changing its place, and eventually it shoots out, right? Because it's merely, what? But before it even starts to bubble, before it shoots out, these things are going faster and faster, but not enough to make it, you know, bubble and to start shooting out of the pan and so on. But you're too small, I mean, they're too small for you to see, right? So what you call the change of quality of the water from cold to hot is really a change of, what, thousands and millions, right, of little molecules moving faster and faster, right? So it's really a change of place, isn't it? So you'll find that tendency, then, to try to reduce any apparently different kind of change to merely a change of, what, place that's disguised and, what, escapes us. And they seem to be forced to that because they can't understand how there could really be an inward change in a thing. If the thing really changes quality, and any force here, if it changes substance, you'd be getting something out of nothing. Where did that quality come from, huh? And sometimes I kid the students, I say, well, if this is really true, then what's going on when we teach, huh? Right? There must be a change of place from my mind into your mind. Because otherwise, right, I mean, if I continue to know what I'm knowing and you all of a sudden start to know, you're getting something out of nothing, right? So, obviously, there must be, you know, a change of place, so that the more I teach, the dumber I'm getting. There's nothing wrong with this theory, see? It doesn't explain even teaching, see? But how is that possible, see? Well, I would say, it's possible that I cannot get dumber, but you can get smarter, because you're able to know, huh? And your ability to know is being, what? Actualized, huh? What is this ability, you see? Kind of an odd thing to try to understand, huh? So, before they can understand ability, they're almost limited to this way of thinking. And you find that, as I say, in the modern scientists before quantum theory in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, that it begins, certainly change of place is the kind of change most known to us. And even Aristotle, he descends from the consideration of change in general to the particular kinds of change. The next thing he studies, the first kind of change in particular he studies, is change of place.