This book performs a lasting service to all natural philosophers and physicists. It discloses why and how the physical universe is the world of space and time. Larson's work thus continues the important contribution of Einstein when he challenged and changed some of Newton's conjectures about the nature of space and time. Newton's scholia erroneously avowed that space and time are essentially unrelated (exist absolutely independently of one another). Einstein's space-time continuum postulate avers correctly that they are related essentially and inseparably, without revealing in what the relation between space and time physically consists. In the book, as in his other books, Larson convincingly discloses in what the unity of the world of space and time consists. Not its materiality, but instead its motion.
In spite of Parmenides, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Kant, Bradley, etc., no one after Larson will argue successfully that space and time are not real. Though not concrete, they are real. Nor will anyone later prove that space-time or motion is a merely property or form of the existence of matter. In fact, matter, magnetism, electricity, light, etc. are all motion and nothing but motion.
Larson has established beyond a reasonable doubt in all his books, including the latest, that motion is the ultimate reality of the physical universe. This Larsonian proposition implies the corollary fact that in the absence of either space or time no such universe could be or begin to be. Motion is a relation, actually an inverse or reciprocal relation, between space and time. Less space and more time mean slower motion. More space and less time mean faster motion. Larson calls his theory of physics the Reciprocal System of physics, for its recognition of the multiplicative inverse nature of the motion relation and because the whole nature of the physical world derives from this relation between time and space. Motion, furthermore and due to its reciprocal character, is a quite symmetrical scalar relation between space and time. Time, compared with space, is not one-dimensional, time has no dimensions in space. However, time, like space, has three dimensions of its own. For motion in time its three dimensions must be taken into account just as the three dimensions of space are taken into account for motion in space. Space may be regarded as a scalar only for motion in time. Similarly, time may be regarded as a scalar only for motion in space.
Space and time are nothing but motion. Space-time is neither immovable nor elastic. Since neither space nor time is infinitely divisible (continuous), space-time is a scalar progression at the absolute uniform speed of the space-time location of a photon, the unit speed of one natural unit of space per one natural time unit.
In his present work, Larson shows that the unity of the physical universe consists ultimately in its scalar motions, the source of the fundamental forces of physical nature. The latter specifically include: 1. the space-time progression force (the "repulsive" force of the (Hubble) recession of the material galaxies and also the attractive force of solid cohesion) and 2. the force of gravitational motion (the "repulsive" force of solid cohesion and also the attractive force of galactic, stellar, solar, planetary, etc. aggregation and cohesion).
The author of the Reciprocal System dares to challenge the established effort to unify physics on the reductionist basis of logical positivism and operational pragmatism. His theory is designed to describe the fact that the physical universe consists of two main sectors, a material sector and its multiplicative inverse, a cosmic sector (or "antimatter" sector). There would be no objection to denoting the sector inverse to the matter sector the "antimatter sector" if the term did not convey the misleading connotation that the inverse nature of the sector is additive rather than multiplicative. Larson has carefully chosen the term "cosmic sector" to denote the inverse sector, simply because the conspicuous evidence for its existence is cosmic radiation. The primary particle of cosmic rays is the cosmic proton (the "anti-proton"), not, as previous supposed, the proton.