Question: Hi, this question actually comes out of a conversation that my friends and I had, on the way up to the cadre school yesterday. The question ,.. well, it was actually a couple questions that we ended up with, by the end of the conversation, but I'll ask you those questions in the form of this one. The question is: what is the principle that allows us to know the universe, as a whole, is knowable?

LaRouche: Just one question?

Okay. It's a matter of knowledge. You have to start from knowledge. You can't start from outside knowledge. All you have outside knowledge is contradiction. The first thing is: what's a contradiction?

If you say, ... either you have a chaotic universe, or one that makes sense. Now, if it's not chaotic, and makes sense, the first thing about a universe is, it must be a universe. Which means there's nothing before, after, or outside it. And never was. Right?

Secondly, that the principle that you adduce, must always exist in that universe, throughout that universe. If you deny either of those things, you don't know anything. That is, if you deny the universe's existence, if you define the restriction, "what do you mean by universe?," if there's nothing in it, outside it, or before it, or after it. Number one. That to be universal, a principle must be always-existent, efficiently, in the universe. There's nothing outside, no condition outside, before or after, in which that is not true.

That's the question of scientific method.

Therefore, the inverse is, that if you've validated a discovery, then it is a universal principle. Then you get the qualification... but it's not all! This gets into the question of Riemann.

Now, Gauss, under the influence of Kaestner, was the first modern figure to pose explicitly the question of what is a principle of physical space-time. What Gauss identified essentially, in his 1799 paper, which I keep emphasizing, is that there's nothing that exists outside the principle of universal physical space-time. There are no definitions, there are no axioms, there are no postulates, which presume, which pre-exist prior to physical principles.

Therefore, the universe is composed of only the interrelation of universal physical principles, which I've just said earlier, there are three types -- the Vernadsky types: the abiotic; the living, and the spiritual. No other physical principles exist. They're not known. No one has ever found one.

Therefore, the universe is composed of those universal physical principles, which fill out these categories. All of these principles are interactive, or, as is said, multiply connected. So, therefore, the geometry of the universe is these principles. We don't know all of these principles. Life is the discovery of additional principles. But the significance is, the principles we know, are the principles we can act upon. Therefore man's action on the universe, is defined by the interaction of all those principles which we know, which we're utilizing to act on the universe.

We don't know what we don't know. But the difference is this: what we know of the principles of the universe, are principles which existed before we exist. They were always there. By our adopting these principles, these principles come in our power of practice. Therefore, what we know is our ability to change the universe! And we don't know anything more. All we know is there's more to discover.

So, therefore, in a Riemannian geometry, the number of known principles, universal principles, is the only physical geometry which is allowed. That does not mean that these are the only principles that exist; we have more yet to discover. This is called, in terms of Gauss, Gauss reduced this question to a question of curvature: that as we add new principles, as efficiently considered, in respect to the universe, the curvature of the universe of our action, is changed. So, what you can measure is the curvature of the universe.

For example. When we introduce new physical principles, to change the environment -- that is, to change the infrastructure of society -- even if we don't change the productivity in any factory as such, within the factory, or farm, we've increased the productive powers of labor in all factories and all farms, by making transportation more efficient, by improving the power available for production, by improving water supplies, by improving health care, by improving education. Without doing anything inside any factory, just by adding these changes in infrastructure, we change the curvature in which the action in the individual plant, the individual farm, occurred. Which means there's more power. Your action is more powerful, even if you didn't do anything to change it otherwise, by changing the environment.

So, by adding new principles, to our repertoire of practice in the universe, we change the curvature, or the effective curvature, of our action on the universe, and that's the way we get a gain in productivity.

These are things we can know, we can demonstrate. By being able to demonstrate them, we also know what the area is, that we don't know. And we know that the way to solve many of our problems, is to look for those new principles, which we've not yet discovered.

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