A Rational Cosmology: The Nature of Motion

This is Essay XXX of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

Motion is the change in the three spatial dimensions facilitated by change in the one temporal dimension.

Having now an understanding of the four different qualities we know as dimensions, three spatial and one temporal, which entities must exhibit all four of and cannot conceivably exhibit any more than four of, we may proceed to describe a phenomenon which is a subcategory of the broader term, "change," namely, motion.

When we observe motion, what we truly perceive is the change of measurements of the three spatial dimensions pertaining to an entity. The entity's uniform accumulation of the quality, time, is, of course, what makes this change, like all other changes, possible.

We can verify the occurrence of the motion of a given entity when we note that its spatial separation from other entities has changed in some manner; that is, the threefold magnitude of the relationship, "space," between that entity and certain other entities has been altered.

Such relations of multiple entities' past and present positions are sufficient to assert beyond doubt that motion has happened, but they do not in themselves define what motion is. This is so because entities' relative positions to one another can change due to a multitude of different events taking place.

A can move toward B until they are separated by X units, or B can move toward A until they are separated by X units. These two events are not one and the same, though defining motion solely in terms of relationships among different entities would conflate them. The sole means of avoiding this pitfall is to define motion solely in terms of the entity said to be moving, which would entail the use of an indispensable spatial coordinate system.