7 In His Own Image
With earth’s
first clay they did the last man knead,
There of the last harvest sowed the seed,
And what the first morning of creation wrote,
The last dawn of reckoning shall read.
Edward
Fitzgerald
The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam
Causality is the
rock on which the bottom turtle stands.
“It’s turtles,
all the way down,” said the little old lady of Chapter 4 as she explained the
world’s support system. To understand where the turtles stopped and something
else started, we alluded to the need for establishing a basic foundation on
which all else rests. This foundation we term causality. The story is a metaphorical reference to recursion;
turtle upon turtle upon turtle. Causality then is the terminus of recursion.
Within the model of social systems that we have suggested, causality is the
seminal point on which a trust infrastructure can be based and from which trust
may be conveyed throughout the infrastructure. We suggest that any trust
infrastructure is grounded in causality; even that governed by the well defined
laws of our physical ecosystem.
Various forms of
celestial calendars passed down to us from antiquity demonstrate that humans
have for millennia made detailed observations of the motions of the sun, moon
and stars. Causality of the observed movements has long been the source of myth
and mystery. Over the centuries, astronomers from many civilizations
accumulated ever increasingly detailed observations of the paths of these
celestial bodies. Through the ages, the movements of the heavenly spheres were
endowed with supernatural justification. Indeed, it was not until the XVIIth
Century scientist Sir Isaac Newton proposed a relationship between the mass of
bodies and an interaction force termed gravitational attraction that the myths
surrounding them were slowly and grudgingly replaced by more quantitative causality.
Newton’s equations of motion predicted the
observed paths within the accuracy of the measurements of the day. However,
over time the accuracy of the measurements was continually enhanced to the end
that the causal explanation no longer fit the observations.
One of the more
obtuse such measurements was the precession of the perihelion of the orbit of
the planet Mercury. The orbits of all the planets around the Sun take the form
of ellipses, with the Sun located at one of the foci of the ellipse while each
planet’s orbit traces out the ellipse itself. The equations applied to systems
of masses in motion and subject to gravitational attraction suggest that the
major axis of a planet’s orbital ellipse should rotate under their influence.
As the closest planet to the Sun and hence the planet with the highest orbital
speed, the precession of Mercury’s orbit is most easily measured. When Newton’s equations of motion were used to
explain this