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A Mass-Time Triangle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Stuart Carter Dodd*
Affiliation:
American University of Beirut

Extract

When all sorts of material entities from atoms to people and from bacilli to stars are plotted on a scale of time and a scale of mass some very interesting alignments and symmetries emerge. It is observed that the data of the physical, biological, psychological, and social sciences form a neat isosceles triangle as shown in Figure 1 below. The facts are simple as graphed in Figure 1 on logarithmic scales; their explanation or interpretation is not apparent. Is Figure 1 merely an interesting diagram useful in teaching the masses and evolutionary ages of the phenomena of various classes of science, or has it some more fundamental scientific significance? The graph will be first described and then its uncertainties and possible implications will be discussed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1944

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References

1 These scales and the resulting diagram discussed here developed from a systematic Sociology, the “S-theory”, (“Dimensions of Society,” Macmillan, 1942) which involved log scales for the dimensions of time, space, and population. The data on masses of most of the entities plotted in Figure 1 were taken from:

Kermack, W. O., and Eggleton, P., “The Stuff We're Made Of”, Science Book Club, 1938.

The correlation of mass and size was calculated from a sample of entities as given by Prof. Harlow Shapley in “Flights from Chaos”, (McGraw-Hill Co., 1930), pp. 164–5.

2 When limited to the human.