A Process Conception of Nature

Abstract

The powerful conceptions of nature that have been surveyed at this Symposium incorporate two recent revolutions and yet may still be upside-down in an interesting and suggestive sense. They employ spacetime to describe matter and process as though spacetime were primary and process secondary. The primacy of process has been urged by philosophers from Heraclitus to Whitehead and beyond. The dependence of our perception of spacetime upon dynamical processes was important during the conception of special relativity, when Einstein argued operationally from the invariance properties of Maxwell’s dynamics and light signals to those of spacetime geometry. Even theories using a deep spacetime structure recognize that the spacetime we see is surface structure, is at least renormalized. I believe that the way has been prepared to turn over the structure of present physics, to take process as fundamental at the microscopic level and spacetime and matter as semimacroscopic statistical constructs akin to temperature and entropy.