In case you have not heard the term before, what I refer to as Universal Theories are, simply, theories that apply in virtually every place in our known world, and at all times in history. (Sometimes they are called unified theories).
Relationships between temperature, pressure, volume, between mass [1], velocity [2], and force, between electric and magnetic fields and charges, between light, brightness, darkness etc. can all be governed by universal theories.
Such theories, predicting the behaviour of all the phenomena mentioned above, have been used by humans from time immemorial to the present day. For example, knowledge of the relationship between mass and force was used to construct levers (and other devices) to overcome gravity to lift the enormous boulders that were needed to build the Pyramids – I’ll give them a capital ‘P’ since they are so important – in Egypt over 3,000 years ago.
Relationships between electric and magnetic fields, theories of physics, electronics, optics, materials science and electrochemistry (among many others) were used building the laptop that I am using to type this page.
And the same theories that were used to build the above-mentioned Pyramids in Egypt were used by the Inca building their wonderful buildings in Peru, and by our own ancestors to build Newgrange.
We may even observe an animal having an instinctive knowledge of such relationships as it uses the well-known universal theory of gravity to (for example) topple a fruit from a tree. It knows that it will fall down, not up. And I saw a very entertaining Youtube video of a crow using some form of leverage with a stick to get food from behind an obstacle.
But enough of that – I’d say you know what I’m getting at by now!
All the above are examples of the use of Universal Theories in the physical world.
The remainder of this Chapter will explore their equivalents in the world of humanity – the natural world that I referred to near the start of the website.
[1]. Mass used in this context means the gravitational force that applies to anything. On Earth we usually refer to it as weight – but mass will be different under different gravitational conditions. For example, the mass of the same body is different on the Moon than it is on Earth because the gravitational pull of the Moon is a lot less than Earth.
[2]. Velocity is slightly different to speed. It refers to the change in position of a body in a particular period of time rather than the distance covered.