My Talk on Local Motion or Action-at-a-Distance: The Permanent Debate

On August 27th, 2023, I gave a talk entitled “Local Motion or Action-at-a-Distance: The Permanent Debate.” It was presented to the Rising Tide Foundation. The video of the presentation (1 hour of presentation plus 1.5 hour of discussion) can be found here:

Here is the abstract:

With the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century came the understanding that the same scientific laws govern events in the heavens and on Earth. With this change of outlook came a new problem: How can bodies that are very distant from each other mutually affect their respective motions?

Broadly, two points of view have confronted each other over this question: local motion vs. action-at-a-distance. Over the centuries, philosophers and scientists have taken up one of these positions, trying to explain phenomena as diverse as gravity, magnetism, electricity, weather and quantum effects.

Working through the subtleties of these positions, the following questions have repeatedly recurred: Do atoms exist? Is it possible for a vacuum to exist?  Or is there always some sort of medium, plenum or aether? Do (magnetic, electric, gravitational,...) fields exist? And so on.

In this talk, I will show how this recurring debate addresses the most fundamental questions in the history of science. The talk will consider the opinions of key philosophers and scientists over the centuries, including Plato, Aristotle, Sarpi, Galileo, Kepler, Hobbes, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Coulomb, Ampère, Weber, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein. 

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