Lecture No. 2 (2.3.1920)
Steiner subjected a metallic rod to the influence of a flame and measured its expansion, to later proceed to develop the formula of heat step by step and compared it (pages 20-21) with what is given in the Physics textbooks; from there the audience gathered that the formula in the texts is not the original one for it lacks small fractionary quotients which vary from material to material, this being totally excluded.
      He calls the public's attention towards the fact that if gases, solids and liquids exist as they do this is because they are under the influence of earthly forces as the higher-level conditioner.
      He continues the analysis of how the physics of his time was influenced by the ideas of the *Accademia del Cimento* (Florence, 1657-1667) and how the lack of proper understanding of old Greek ideas led to a lot of confusion, to terminate this portion by stating:

"Whatever was solids was called 'earth' in ancient Greece."
"Whatever was fluid was called 'water' in ancient Greece."
"Whatever was gaseous was called 'air' in ancient Greece."

Making the public also take notice of the forces involved in the phenomenon that, though heated things tend to increase in volume, frozen water does the same with the opposite phenomenon.

Lecture No. 3 (3.3.1920)
Steiner begins by making the public notice how the experimental results produce some strange phenomena not properly accounted for in the textbooks, namely that whenever one solid body is heated and changes of state (from solid to liquid and from liquid to solid) occur, there is no temperature change at the critical point
      Thus, a sort of "plateau" is arrived at when a solid melts and the temperature remains constant until it becomes a gas, when the temperature again begins to ascend; this is to make the public infer that other kinds of forces are involved in the mere dissolution by heat of a body, comparing also how Einstein and Crookes reached similar conclusion from totally different viewpoints:
      For Einstein the Fourth Dimension was the time factor pertaining to the solid under examination while for Crookes it was the gaining of more heat.
      He ends the lecture by indicating how pressure can compress a gas into a solid and how the solid already possesses within the factor a gas needed to change the state.

Lecture No. 4 (4.3.1920)
Steiner begins by making two different gases interpenetrate each other to demonstrate how this is possible and how when submitting a given liquid within a closed vessel with room for expansion, the gas pushes the liquid downwards at one place, thus creating an upwards flow at the opposite side ("the volume-pressure product is a constant at constant temperature").
      From this he continues what was told in Lecture No. 3 that only by leaving three-dimensional space, it is possible to gain an insight of how these simple processes actually occur and that if Physics' teachers were good at their trade they would make their students first notice this fact, for a purely mechanical approach cannot see all factors involved even in the simplest phenomenon.
      Also, he stands behind the idea of popularizing "rigorously exact science" in order to make the people aware of what science is actually about and at the same time, to do away with "established authorities" that only stay entrenched in their positions!
      He ends by discriminating how sensations are perceived by our whole organism and how, since all organisms are different, this may involve different degrees of qualitative perception for all of us.

Lecture No. 5 (5.3.1920)
He begins his lecture by making the public notice the difference between what can be accounted for within the two divisions of Mathematics (Arithmetic and Geometry) and those psycho-physiological factors that pertain only to the individual and have no symbol whatever in mathematics.
      Because of this short coming in expression, physicists tend to shy away from involving such factors in their science, thus leaving a huge gap capable of allowing the entrance of many mistakes (be they involuntary or not), stating that only the proper occult training can eliminate this deficiency, for it creates the possibility of a deeper penetration into actual material processes.

Note from the Reviewer:

Before continuing the review, I want to bring before the readership a personal feeling concerning the whole work: As I read all the lectures, I could not avoid thinking that many of the things Mr. Steiner referred to as being of a spiritual nature, but possibly of being proved experimentally, were already proven by Dr. Gustave Le Bon, about whom I have extensively talked about in my "The Complex Secret of Dr. T. Henry Moray" (including all the bibliography I could find in French for independent verification).

As I am not acquainted too deeply with Steinerian bibliography, I suggest those who actually are to find and read English (or German) translations of "Evolution of Matter" and "Evolution of Forces" published in French in 1905 and 1907 by Emile Flammarion Editeur of Paris. These two works are an excellent resume of Le Bon's important experimental discoveries and match very accurately the "spiritual viewpoint" Steiner urged his public to adopt in order to consider as included in common physical phenomena many factors that mechanical science could not explain or rudely excluded for not fitting its own pet theories.

It was actually Le Bon who discovered radioactivity and atomic energy (BEFORE the Curies) and not Henry Becquerel; Mr. Becquerel (and you can verify this by reading his 1896 and 1897 articles in "Comptes Rendus") believed radioactivity actually to be a "form of light" which could undergo all phenomena (polarization, refraction, reflection, etc.) usually associated with light. This will also show how the Nobel Prize is award and how only establishment-related people get it!

Lecture No. 6 (6.3.1920)
Mr. Steiner begins by placing mercury within a tube and later placing the tube within a mercury-filled vessel, in the manner of the "open" thermometers of antiquity.
      He does the same thing for three other liquids: water, alcohol and ether, and proceeds to heat the tube's upper portion to show how expanding gases push the liquid downwards and make the level of the vessel flow upwards. He did so to show how heat changes the bodies and how cold returns them to their former state.
      He proceeded by showing how ice can be melted and refrozen by means of a wire from which a weight is hung and which is placed upon the ice; by this method he also shows how the same effects can by attained through pressure.
      He further mentions that three certain metals, when taken separately, only melt over +250 degrees C but when fused into an alloy they do so at +94 degrees C, to show how a synergistic effect happens.
      The main idea in this lecture is to show -- apart from synergistic effects -- how each state of matter is no more than the degree of packing of the constituting atoms and he ends by adding:

"In solids we have the images of the fluid state."
"In liquids we have the images of the gaseous state."
"In the gaseous we have the images of the warmth state."

He did this to have an image of the gaseous state that is accessible to human observation and to eliminate complicated theories that only confuse the issue, also to indicate that unknown factors are at work to maintain solids, liquids, gases, etc. as they actually appear to us.

Lecture No. 7 (7.3.1920)
He begins by drawing the public's attention towards the words by 19th-century physicist Edward von Hartmann - which were a product of the time they were issued, with all the deficiencies this entails - and how those OLD thoughts, with plenty of gaps within, had found their way into the physics of the time (1920).
      He indicated also the need to have research institutes foster the Anthroposophical viewpoint and how physicists should not strike out everything that cannot be expressed mathematically (remember Lecture No. 5).
      By means of an experiment he leads the public into the knowledge that solids "take up" gravity into themselves to appear in such a state, water is a kind of "null point" for gravity only serves it to make it have a surface.
      Mr. Steiner furthers this example by taking a solid tetrahedron and indicating that if he were to make it entirely disappear and that its occupied place would remain as such by any other matter or energy, actually within it we would have "reversed" physical laws other than those making the solid tetrahedron as such.
      The sphere is the intermediate body between the solid and "empty" tetrahedrons.
      His idea in this lecture is to set up a scale of values, from the greater to the lesser, for densities of different atomic realms and non-atomic ones and their associated effects, to wit:

X
Warmth
Gaseous (acoustical effects most pronounced)
Fluid
Solid (mechanical effects most pronounced)

Lecture No. 8 (8.3.1920)
Continuing with the postulates by Edward von Hartmann, Mr. Steiner analyzes the so-called "warmth death" our universe is experiencing because of "unstoppable negative entropy" and draws his public's attention to the fact that the formulations belong to an age of history when science was not too developed and physicists considered only mechanical work and heat as the most basic factors of creation.
      What Mr. Steiner asks his public is if the universe (or, in a lesser stage, the world) actually is a closed and negatively-entropic system as 19th-century physicists believed (please notice that this assumption was never proved experimentally).
      By analysis he reaches the conclusion that a "perpetuum mobile" is always trying to appear in Nature, but Nature itself prevents its formation as soon as this tendency appears.
      This is why solids exist, because Nature prevents the atoms from separating themselves totally from those of its own kin.
      But, also with existing dissolving forces (to call them this term for the sake of identification), the form of the solid disappears in the fluid realm, which loses its attribute of surface when entering into the gaseous realm; and gases "lose themselves" into the heat zone.
      In short, Mr. Steiner proposes the following stages and conditions for their individual existence and inter connections:

X
Becoming Spiritual (Rarefaction)
Heat
Gas (Negative Form)
Fluid Becoming Material (Condensation)
Solids (Form)

In order to advance further, he looks into the "X" realm beyond rarefaction and condensation, for if these two conditions exist then matter is also present there, no matter how attenuated its condition of materiality.
      Also, he looks into the opposite way within a realm of greater materiality (if this is not a prophecy of transuranic elements, I do not know what it is; it is even more impressing when he speaks about "negative matter" called "anti-matter: in the experimental Physics of today!), and binds both ways of looking when viewing the rainbow of the color spectrum; indicating the existence of vibrational realms beyond the Violet and before the Red, he ends with Goethe's theory of color that encompasses not only the colors themselves arranged circularly (thus making it easier to understand color) but also the invisible vibrational realms that contribute to their existence!

Lecture No. 9 (9.3.1920)
By means of a simple experience, Mr. Steiner draws his public's attention towards the crudeness of the measuring instruments then existing.
      Also indicating how Physics (then and now) separated the experience from the human being, and how it all originated in an 1842 paper by Robert Julius Mayer on the theory of heat.
      After emphasizing the nonsensical approach of the formerly-explained position, he proceeds to continue with the analysis of the different interconnected states, but with this new subdivision:

Z
Y
X Materialization - Dematerialization
Heat Region
Gaseous Bodies Rarefaction - Condensation
Fluid Bodies
Solid Bodies Form
U

Mr. Steiner explains again how each realm (from solidity to disintegregation of atoms and beyond going upwards) foreshadows the features of the upward-existing one and postulates the existence of another realm called "U" by him those characteristics make it foreshadow the level of form and solids. In the end, this "U" region is the one of formative forces for solids.
      Continuing with the analysis, he passes into tone and there he discriminates the tone itself from the compression and rarefactions of atmospheric gases that accompany tone, but are NOT in it!
      This he did in order to separate fantasies created by thought generated by the imperfect perception of an experimental result and by an excessive over-generalization of it.
      Mr. Steiner goes back to Goethe's theory of color and makes his public notice that the usual rainbow is associated by another one - of smaller size and reversed order of colors - that is usually passed over in Physics textbooks; the aim of this explanation is to "bind" into a circle the realms shown staged above as Goethe bound the colors, and to relate this new arrangement with cosmic order.

Lecture No. 10 (10.3.1920)
Mr. Steiner begins by making a full-spectrum beam of light fall upon a goblet where a chemical is place by placing in the beam's path different chemical solutions he blocks selectively those different portions of the spectrum (either visible or invisible) that create different physical effects (chemical effects, heat effects, photoelectrical effects, etc.).
      [As I state in the "note" before, this was explored much more in deep by Dr. Gustave Le Bon and I urge Steiner's followers to read him by any means!]
      He further repeats the experience of increasing temperature by using an ice magnifying glass and indicates that "there are more things" in this fact than those dreamed by science, for the ice magnifies heat but is not affected by it!
      He disproves the concept that heat transmits itself from particle to particle by hypothesizing that if you place a group of boys upon a metal beam and heat it so that each boy will yell when heat reaches his own place, you cannot state that the yell is transmitted because of this!
      (Personal note: actually heat is - like electricity - an external effect in metals as long as it does not penetrate its innermost portions and thus the metallic piece retains its shape; when heat penetrates into the metallic piece, it becomes fused. Jorge Resines).
      By placing five different metal rods into boiling water, by means of a dye, he shows his audience how not all metals transmit heat in the same proportion, backing experimentally his statements of Lecture No. 2 of how some fractionary quotients are eliminated in the general formula of heat.
      Afterwards, he continues with the analysis of the different stages analyzed in the former lecture and how they apply to the human being, emphasizing that to each effect a counter effect is attached, indicating how they balance each other.
      Extending his thought into the sphere of matter he states: "Modern (1920) physics has not developed at all this concept of negative matter, related to external matter as a suction is to a pressure. This is unfortunate for modern physics."

Lecture No. 11 (11.3.1920)
He continues, to a certain extent, the experiments of Lecture No. 10 and indicates how because of earthly conditions the light spectrum as arranged by Goethe must be presented as an image.
      By extending outwards this circular spectrum, he makes some colors disappear into the non-visible, reversing the original process of formation.
      Because of earthly conditions, he explains, colors are made to arise from the invisible realms, and its circular Goethean arrangements broken into a straight line making some of them disappear.
      By analyzing materialization and its opposite, he reaches the follow equations:

Rarefaction = Dematerialization = Brightening
Condensation = Materialization = Darkening

and also to the conclusion that some properties of one condition are present in the other and vice versa.
      Dematerialization is equated with heat-produced effects and also with the fact that the transmission of heat produces an increased motion of atoms of intensive character (and not of extensive character, as I indicated in my note to Lecture No. 10).
      Besides, in self-heated bodies such as mammal organisms, heat is a "borderline" of the following character"

Spaceless Suction / Heat Region / Space Pressure

Because our organism (for example) is kept together by pressure forces (as do all solids) and suction makes it tend towards dissolution, heat being the result of both forces in balance.
      The remnant of the lecture was dedicated to examine, from Steiner's spiritual viewpoint, the conceptions of two famous physicists of his day, Max Planck and Ernest Mach, and the faults that plagued each in their respective judgements of experimental findings; adding in the end:

"If you consider how fruitful the one-sided (materialistic) concepts have been for technology, you can imagine how many technical consequences might flow from adding to the modern (1920) technology - which takes into account only pressure forces - the possibility of making these suction forces fruitful also; and by these I mean not only spatially-active suction, which is a manifestation of pressure, but suction forces qualitatively opposite to pressure forces".

And one wonders whether or not this conference and the former were attended by Austrian Forestmaster called Viktor Schaubeger, who might have been greatly impressed by these wise words.

Lecture No. 12 (12.3.1920)
Steiner first makes reference to his "Course on Light" and to the theories that speak about "rays of light" and how transparency and opaqueness of bodies is referred to the amount of these theoretical "rays" that they do allow to flow through them, warning his public against taking too seriously what are only unproved theories.
      Mr. Steiner goes on analyzing temperature difference between one cold and one hot zone and an intermediate region that serves as conductor, indicating that great care must be taken in the mathematical expression of this for the heat distribution is not uniform.
      From this he goes back to the light spectrum with its zones of warmth and chemical effects indicating that if formulae are used to relate light and warmth and chemical effects, then imaginary numbers must enter into the calculations and how super imaginary numbers (originated by the late Paul A.M. Dirac) must be introduced when things get more complicated.
      But warning his public that as he did in Lecture No. 5 the limitations of mathematics leave plenty outside of consideration.
      He ends the lecture by establishing the terms of "warmth ether", "chemical ether", and "light ether" as helpful in designating those subtle forces acting within the spectrum that create the forementioned respective effects and indicates that mathematics are to be reformulated in order to incorporate a broader range of factors not yet included.

Lecture No. 13 (13.3.1920)
Steiner makes some experiments by using the different portions of the light spectrum blocking them by the usage of the appropriate chemical solution, and returns to his old saying see Lectures No. 8 and No. 9 of how each realm foreshadows the qualities of the following one (when going upwards).
      He relates gases with light, fluids with chemical effects and solids with life effects, making the heat realm act as a "balancer" in this scale of effects:

Z Life
Y Chemical Effects
X Light
Heat
Gaseous Realm
Fluid
Solid
U

To further indicate that, in the dim past when the planet was not totally solid, atoms and ether flows behaved in a different manner to today:

"At that time the entire Earth was not solid as we now understand the solid condition just as little as was the corpse of today to a corpse of five days ago.
      Solids were not found in an independent state anywhere on the Earth and only occurred bound to the living; fluid existed only bound to chemical effects and gases only bound to light effects.
      In other words, all gas had an inner glittering, an inner illumination, an illumination that showed a wave-like phosphorescence and darkening as the gas was rarefied and condensed. Fluids were not as they are today but were permeated by a continuous living chemical activity. And at the foundation of all was life, solidifying itself as it solidifies now in the horn-formation in cattle, for instance and then passing back again into fluid or gas, etc.
      In brief, we are forced by physics itself to admit a previous period of time when realms now torn apart on Earth existed together.
      The realms of the gaseous, the fluid, and the solid are now on one side, and on the other side realms of light, chemical effects and life. At that time they were within each other, not merely side by side, but actually within each other." (page 160)

Further indicating that in those times heat was the equilibrium condition between the etheric and the ponderable material realm, for he thinks of heat as being ether and matter at the same time.
      Thinking of heat as a difference in level leads to a deeper level of analysis that makes one see how the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" has obviated because of its fundamental flaws and its mechanistic foundation the interralationships above indicated, and that all different phenomena should be taken as part of a circle as was the light spectrum by Goethe, where one process actually feeds the others and vice versa.


Lecture No. 14 (14.3.1920)
Mr. Steiner recapitulates some points of the former lecture and indicates to his public how the effects indicated in it actually happen at all levels of interrelation, but only by rising to a universal viewpoint is it possible for the not-too-educated man or woman to apprehend this.
      This is in entire agreement with the experimental findings of Dr. Le Bon, I permit myself to add, who obtained for example chemical effects on solids by making a beam of light fall up them!
      Steiner continues by indicating to his audience to conceive of the periodic arrangement of elements in octaves, so that their combination and interrelated assorted phenomena may be conceived as an outer reflection of an inner cosmic music.
      This is done to make different phenomena appear as the differences in levels of musical composition, therefore, simplifying the whole spectrum of chemistry and physics; so sadly confused in today's books.

Briefly, returning to the polar and material opposites of Lecture No. 11, he makes his public consider spaces full of matter and those emptied of it, with transition zones in between.
      This was done to make them understand that:

"We would be much better off, however, conceiving of these things as they were thought of by the intuitive knowledge of former times.
      Manifestations in matter, which are always accompanied by the imponderable, were then thought of as influenced by the whole cosmos instead of being misinterpreted as due to certain theoretical inner configurations." (page 171)

The idea behind this is to "tear space apart" in order to reveal what is behind each phenomenon instead of letting ourselves be dazzled by the event under manifestation.
      With this conception in mind, Mr. Steiner once again reminds his public of how deficient the quality of thinking is during his time of life:

"Nothing is sadder to contemplate than a future in which the way of thinking that has devastated the minds of educated people will be transmitted to people throughout the whole Earth by means of public school systems.
      If one wishes to found schools for the people, we must be sure that there will be something to teach in them, something whose inner configuration represents an advance. We first need the science that could be taught in these new schools." (page 175)

He continues by speaking against the over-specialization in science that today so deeply pervades our society and that was widespread in his time, but not as deeply as today, considering it a terrible evil that people of different branches in science would not bother to listen to what others had to state, and if they did so, the specialized jargon prevented the mutual and necessary deep understanding.
      He ended his lecture by asking his public not to surrender before the words "Build schools for people", but to fight for "First it is necessary to have something new to teach in these schools for "the people" (page 177); claiming also against "established scientific authorities: and for the need to cling to "rigorously exact science", which would lead to a mutual cross-fertilization of all fields in science and the total benefit of all.

It was a great pleasure for this reviewer to have written this somewhat lengthy review, but I have been obliged to condense into a few words or sentences what Mr. Steiner explained in several paragraphs or pages. Because of space, much detailed explanation was left out, but the way of writing this review as it was done was in order not leave out reading the most fundamental concepts involved, so that those who later read the book will understand what Mr. Steiner said and also have a "travel guide" uniting all concepts into a comprehensible whole without gaps. One warning, however; there are notes to the course in pages 181-197 which should have been indicated through asterisks by the publisher; as this is not done, the reader must carefully look at the page indicated in search of them.

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