Fire, Page Four

The Phenomena of Heat—Heat and the Other Elements

Steiner shows us that our eyes and our ears, the organ systems by which we perceive what is revealed by light and sound, were created in the etheric world by these respective ethers. The impingement of light ether upon the etheric body created a wound that, in the healing process, became an eye. Thus, our eyes were created by the light for the light. The same with our ears and sound. The situation is different when we come to the action of the fire ether and our ability to perceive heat. We have no organ for that. Rather our entire body is the organ that detects heat, just as molecular heat pervades our body and the etheric heat regulates our body temperature (at approx. 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit regardless of surrounding temperature).

And yet our sense of heat is subjective. Our whole life is bound up with the fact that we have no zero or heat reference point within us. If we immerse our right hand in hot water and our left in cold, then put both of them in temperate water, the right hand will say the water is cool while the left hand will say it is warm. There is, of course, molecular heat in every object that is above what we call "absolute zero" (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). Earthly life absolutely cannot exist for an instant at such temperature; instant death would result.

This brings us to an observation that should point the direction for our examination of the nature of the heat being. For instance, how long can a human being remain alive on Earth as access to the four elements is successively removed? It stands to reason that those closest to the spiritual world are the most necessary while those furthest from it are the least. Or to put it another way, we can survive longer without those furthest from, than we can without those nearest to, the spiritual world. Thus, when fire (heat) is removed, death occurs instantly. One can survive for a matter of seconds or minutes without air, for a short number of days without water, and for a rather lengthy number of days without solid food (earth).

However useful science's own concepts of heat have been in working with the mineral-physical world, and they have been that, they will never lead into an understanding of the higher plant, animal and human kingdoms, and actually impede those investigations. What it knows in these realms is only about their mineral-physical content. Life and soul itself are, and will remain, ever more mysterious the deeper they penetrate into the mineral-physical.

It is noteworthy that science has fashioned its most widely used measurement of heat, the centigrade system, on a basis from zero to one hundred degrees, to reflect the condition of the most basic fluid element, water, in its fluid condition. Below zero it becomes a solid, while above one hundred it becomes a gas. We cannot begin to understand the nature of the heat being until we begin to see what happens to it, the heat being, at these points of transition. Steiner leads us into a provocatively insightful discussion of these. I shall attempt to give below a portion of the picture he presents.10

If we apply constant heat to any solid, its temperature will:

      a. rise constantly until melting commences,

      b. remain constant until fully melted,

      c. rise constantly until evaporation commences,

      d. remain constant until fully evaporated, and

      e. commence rising constantly as gas thereafter.

Thus on a graph the heat applied can be represented by an ascending diagonal line that is uninterrupted in its rise, while a line representing temperature is interrupted and stays at one point during the periods when the substance changes from one state to another by melting or evaporating. What happens to the heat during the times of transition from one state to another? It falls outside the realm of the line drawn for temperature. In other words, we cannot grasp what happens to the heat applied by representing the temperature as an ordinary geometrical line. Even if we extend the graph to three dimensions, we get the same result. The heat condition, insofar as it is revealed by temperature, cannot be expressed in three-dimensional space. The heat applied disappears. Science says that the heat that has disappeared is used in converting from one state to another, but pays no attention to the significance of this.

Steiner tells us that there is a relationship between science's ignoring this fact and its ignoring of another heat-related phenomenon. All solids, fluids and gases expand when heated. Physics textbooks, in calculating the expansion in area and volume of metals when heated, leave out the terms in the equations that involve the second and third powers (the squares and cubes) of the coefficient of expansion of the metal multiplied by the squares or cubes of the temperature change. This is done because coefficients of expansion are very small fractions, which makes their second or third powers extremely small, so terms involving them are considered insignificant in practical physics. But Steiner says that the more important things are obscured by leaving out calculations that seem insignificant or that cannot be handled adequately, for these second and third powers of temperature are related to the disappearance of heat from three-dimensional space.

How can this fail to grip the attention of anyone interested in spiritual matters—fire (heat) simply disappears from the radar screen of matter, only to again reappear? Surely there must be some connection with what Christ came to cast upon the Earth.

The disappearance of heat is a "sign"—a sign or phenomenon whose meaning science and theology have ignored. All creation gives us signs (Ps 19, Rom 1,19-20). Even in his day, Christ said, "You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. . . ."11 We are told in Gen 1,14 that the "lights in the firmament of the heavens" are to "be for signs," yet science and religion ignore them still. The disappearance of heat is a sign in our quest for the meaning of things and of our own being. The disappearance of the very thing (fire) that Christ came to cast upon the Earth cannot be ignored.

Steiner pointed out that the physicist Sir William Crookes concluded that temperature changes had to do essentially with a kind of fourth dimension in space, but that "the relativists, with Einstein at their head, feel obliged when they go outside of three-dimensional space to consider time as the fourth dimension." The problem with this is that time only applies in three-dimensional space perception. Movement of a three-dimensional object from one spot to another involves time. It can occupy space only in time. But to understand what happens to the heat during these transitional periods, we need another dimension and it is not time. We must go out of space altogether.
   

Fire, Page 3

Fire, Page 5