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

Trust through Causality

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 XVII^th 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