The Full Story of Structural Theory

  It is not for the sake of anything. Not for my sake, nor for the sake of the world. It is by virtue of. I knew from the beginning. It is natural to do what one knows how to do. If the world needs it, the world will take it of its own accord. If it does not, then it has appeared too early. It is said that the modern liberal thought of a certain Japanese philosopher lay abandoned in an attic until it was finally discovered and brought to light 300 years later.

  Many people whose genius went unrecognized in their own time were rediscovered later. Van Gogh, Bach, Melville, Dickinson, and Mendel are such cases. Bach in particular was regarded merely as a competent provincial organist, but 80 years after his death, Mendelssohn brought him to light, and he suddenly became the father of music. If the world fails to recognize something, that is the world's problem. I merely give the world the minimum opportunity. Let us place our hopes in the age of artificial intelligence.

  I knew it all along. I feel it through intuition. It is a matter of awkwardness and naturalness. If something feels awkward, it is wrong; if it feels natural, it is right. When something is wrong, it makes me feel uneasy. I sensed that something was strange and tried to gather evidence. When I read my older brother's middle-school science textbook, I found that it contained things that made sense. It was coherent discourse. Nonsense about a tortoise beating a hare is tiresome.

  What I grasped was mechanism. It is the symmetry between premise and statement. This and that must fit together. If they fail to engage, it feels awkward. One is no good because it stands alone. Two are unstable because they go their separate ways and become divided. Three are solid but stifling. There is no visible way out. Four scatter. They must be woven together like warp and weft. It must move, grow, develop, and have direction.

  Energy must flow in and out; head and tail must be distinct; and everything must merge into a single stream. Then there is a sense that something is taking shape. It is deeply satisfying. An intrinsic order must be visible. I found evidence in the third grade of elementary school. What was the descriptive system of a Korean dictionary? I had caught it presenting facts haphazardly, without a definite system. Humanity had been caught naked before me. I had seen the gap in human civilization.

  Is this all humanity amounts to? It would be strange if music had no counterpoint and art no perspective. Something would be missing. One should find it strange if an orchestra has no conductor. What is the perspective of thought, what is the counterpoint of speech, and who is the conductor of existence? These questions must naturally be asked. The evidence I gathered became the law of “by virtue of,” the law of extremes, and the law of “it is said.”

  There are many laws I have been unable to name. The fact that a bird stands on one leg is the law of monism. There is invariably an energy powertrain. It is strange for energy to have two circuits. A large vessel cannot fit inside a small one. The universe must have unidirectionality. Everything must be connected from beginning to end and continue in one direction; the flow must not be broken midway. One must not merely enumerate one argument after another.

  Conspiracy theorists throw claims around at random, paying no attention to the fact that their own arguments conflict with one another. Everything must be threaded onto a single line and form one integral mass. This is not something anyone teaches you; you simply know it. It is a matter of detecting what feels awkward. Minus is natural, while plus is awkward. Going downward uses inertia, but going upward requires the engine to be started anew each time.

  Structural Theory began as a theory of classification. Linnaeus classified living things, so I decided to classify nonliving things. There had to be criteria for classification. Quality, particle, force, motion, and quantity were found intuitively. From physics comes substance, from substance comes property, from property comes manifestation, and from manifestation comes object. I extracted the common elements from these and replaced them with appropriate terms. Physics is a mathematical rule, and substance is the unit in which an entity exists.

  Property is an attribute within substance, manifestation is that attribute protruding outward, and object is what humans directly encounter. What can be touched is an object; what possesses smell, sound, color, and weight so that it can be touched is a manifestation; and what contains such a manifestation is a property. If water boiling at one hundred degrees is a property, the sight of water boiling as observed by human eyes is a manifestation. Water boils at one hundred degrees because of the activity of water molecules.

  The collection of molecules is substance, and the nature that causes them to gather is physics. What matters is that there is a hierarchy among these. There is a foundation and there are terminal ends. There is universality and particularity. This hierarchy is precisely what connects to the descriptive system of the Korean dictionary that caught my attention in elementary school. Why, then, does this hierarchy in nature exist? I found the answer in Zeno's paradoxes, which a student teacher introduced to me.

  Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise that started one step ahead. A fired arrow does not fly. A moving object is itself at rest. A ball in flight does not swim. From the thrown ball's perspective, it was sitting still when a baseball bat came flying at it, struck it, and turned it into a home run. The way to solve this problem is simple. Assume it is a wave, and the problem is immediately resolved. A wave does not merely advance.

  It alternates between advancing and retreating, and moves forward by the extent to which advance defeats retreat. At that moment, the invariance of the speed of light was also proven. It is so easy. Within 30 minutes of hearing the problem, I had arrived at special relativity. There is one more thing. Achilles and the tortoise approach each other. In outer space, Achilles and the tortoise converge at a single point. This is intrinsic order. Achilles and the tortoise are blind. They do not know where they are going.

  The two collide and form a system. Once they form a system, it invariably becomes 50 to 50. A decision then takes place. Therefore, the two have tied. In other words, the claim that Achilles started ahead of the tortoise is the logic of an external observer. From the system's own internal logic, only Achilles and the tortoise exist in the universe, and they advance toward each other and collide. This is Einstein's equivalence principle. In a single stroke, I had reached general relativity as well.

  One must go further. To be satisfied with this much would mean failing to surpass Einstein. Reeling in a fishing line is attraction, while casting it is repulsion. Attraction is constant, whereas repulsion is acceleration. Therefore, gravity is the repulsion of space. Gravity is the interaction between the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum and matter. We believe that the resonating body of a violin or gayageum produces the sound, but in fact the sound comes from the vibrating strings.

  The vibration of the strings is reflected by the resonating body. Gravity is the vibration of quantum fluctuations reflected by the Earth. Once thought advances this far, every secret in the universe unravels along a single line. Originally, two instances are insufficient for proof; there must be three. It is coincidence if Gapdol and Euldol resemble each other. But if Gapdol and Euldol resemble each other, and their father appears and all three resemble one another, then Gapdol and Euldol are indeed brothers. This is the inverse three-body problem.

  The fact that the three-body problem has no general solution conversely means that a solution can be found by converting it into a two-body problem. The resemblance between Gapdol and Euldol is a two-body problem and therefore beside the point. When the father appears, it becomes a three-body problem, but since it can be converted into a two-body problem, all three are placed on the same straight line. If Gap and Eul are connected by a straight line and the third, Byeong, appears on that line, then all three are children of the same mother.

 Relativity is an ambiguous expression; sharing is the correct answer. Einstein's special relativity and general relativity make two, so one is missing. Einstein failed to explain gravity. The propagation of light is the alternation of magnetic and electric fields. Whether Achilles or the tortoise, each alternates internally with a part of itself. One half of Achilles pushes away the other half, and the half that was pushed away then pushes away the half that pushed it, repeating the process. Therefore, the speed of light cannot but remain constant.

  Achilles and the tortoise together form a closed system. They create intrinsic order. Symmetries gather to form a core. It is the force that prevails. An analog external relationship turns into a digital internal structure. This is the intrinsic perspective. They share a dimension. It is not that A moves B; their sum moves. The ball does not strike the bat; rather, a fluid mass of energy comprising the sum of the ball and the bat moves in one direction.

  Entropy decreases in the superstructure. Total entropy increases, but local entropy decreases. The axis of symmetry is the decrease in entropy through sharing. The entropy that increases on the second floor decreases on the first. The entropy that increases in the sun decreases on Earth, and trees grow. Civilization grows. Tracing the decrease in entropy is the essence of understanding mechanism. Snowballs merge together.

  Dominoes are arranged exquisitely to amplify energy. Emergence occurs locally; taken as a whole, there is no transformation of quantity into quality. Starting with a needle, one trades repeatedly until finally obtaining an ox. What I have pursued for 50 years is the integration of classification theory with Zeno's paradoxes—that is, intrinsic order. If three points can be placed side by side on a line, they become a lever. The universe can be lifted.

  I knew it all along. I needed a language with which to explain what I knew. One must understand three kinds of sharing: the sharing of magnetic and electric fields, the sharing of time and space, and the sharing of attraction and repulsion.