Contiguity

Definition

A state in which two or more physical objects are physically touching one another or in which sections of a plane border on one another.

Context

• The philosopher Aristotle came up with the three basic Laws of Association: law of contiguity, law of similarity, and law of contrast. The Law of Contiguity states that we associate things that occur close to each other in time or space.

  Whenever therefore, we are recollecting, we are experiencing certain of the antecedent movements until finally we experience the one after which customarily comes that which we seek. This explains why we hunt up the series (of kineseis) having started in thought either from a present intuition or some other, and from something either similar, or contrary, to what we seek, or else from that which is contiguous with it. Such is the empirical ground of the process of recollection; for the mnemonic movements involved in these starting-points are in some cases identical, in others, again, simultaneous, with those of the idea we seek, while in others they comprise a portion of them, so that the remnant which one experienced after that portion (and which still requires to be excited in memory) is comparatively small.

• The continuity principle or continuity equation is another principle of fluid mechanics that states that what flows into a defined volume in a defined time, minus what flows out of that volume in that time, must accumulate in that volume
• In physics, contiguity refers to the principle of locality which states that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. Again from Aristotle:

  Wherever we have something capable of acting and something capable of being correspondingly acted on, in the event of any such pair being in contact what is potential becomes at times actual:

• Electromagnetic effects were known at the time of Plato, but the source of the effect was attributed to gods or other unknown entities. (The oldest known name for Lodestone was Heraclean Stone,)

  Moreover, as to the flowing of water, the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones, — in none of these cases is there any attraction ; but he who investigates rightly, will find that such wonderful phenomena are attributable to the combination of certain conditions” the non-existence of a vacuum, the fact that objects push one another round, and that they change places, passing severally into their proper positions as they are divided or combined

Problem

• The idea of action in the ancients was that direct contact was the only way to impart motion, other than live objects that could initiate motion by themselves.
• Scientists up through Newton added the concept of gravity that could act on objects at a distance: A force field.
• Scientists up through Maxwell added the concept on an electromagnetic force field that could also act at a distance.
• The Pauli exclusion principle says that no two particles can have the same quantum identity. See the wiki page on Identical Particle.

Solution

• Force is not transmitted by Contiguity but only by field.
• What some call Contiguity force is nothing other than the repulsion of one "solid" collection of particles by those on some other "solid" body.
• Clearly kinetic energy can be very high and its effect very damaging, but that should not imply what Aristotle claims above.
• Even at the nuclear level in a particle accelerator, there is no Contiguity force, only the force of one very energetic particle's field on another's.