A Rational Cosmology: Resolutions to Several Questions Regarding Motion

Essay XXXI

This is Essay XXXI 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.

The question might arise as to how one might precisely define the location of departure for a given moving object (i.e. the location from which motion was initiated) and its location of arrival (i.e. the location at which motion ends).

That is, how, given two different sets of spatiotemporal coordinates for an object at point A and the same object at point B, how can one state that the object moved from A to B and not vice versa?

The answer to such an inquiry would be that, out of all configurations of spatiotemporal coordinates pertaining to a given event of motion, the configuration with the smallest measurement of the entity's quality, time, also pertains to the location of departure, while the configuration wherein the entity's age is greatest out of the set pertains to the location of arrival, since arrival must take place after departure, and an object must accumulate age uniformly throughout the motion, as it would in stasis.

Furthermore, if we have two entities, X and Y, we can readily state whether X moved toward Y, Y moved toward X, or each of the entities moved some distance toward the other. If, on our coordinate system, X began at point A and remained at point A, then X must have remained in stasis. But if X began at point A and arrived at point B, then X must have moved from A to B. The same criteria would apply to Y or any other entity.

Thus far, we have spoken of an object's net displacement, i.e., the ultimate change in its spatial qualities as a result of motion during a given time interval. However, an object's motion from A to B in a straight line will be a different type of motion from motion in a zig-zag pattern from motion along a curve.