L. Ron Hubbard on
Calculus, RAM soundfile (642kb). Excerpted from Philadelphia Doctorate Course, Tape #58
"Rate of change is this mathematics known as Calculus. Calculus, it's a very interesting thing, is divided into two classes -- there's Differential Calculus and Integral Calculus. The Differential Calculus is in the first part of the textbook on Calculus, and Integral Calculus is in the second part of the textbook on Calculus. As you look through the book, you'll find in the early part of the book on Calculus, "dx" over "dy", a little "dx", and a little "dy" -- and one's above the other on a line -- predominates in the front part of the book, but as you get to the end of the book you find these "dx" and "dy"s preceded by a summation sign, or are equating to a summation sign, and the presence of this shows that we are in the field of Integral Calculus.
Now I hope you understand this, because I've never been able to make head nor tail of it. It must be some sort of a Black Magic operation, started out by the Luce cult -- some immoral people who are operating up in New York City, Rockefeller Plaza -- been thoroughly condemned by the whole society. Anyway, their rate-of-change theory -- I've never seen any use for that mathematics, by the way -- I love that mathematics, because it -- I asked an engineer, one time, who was in his 6th year of engineering, if he'd ever used Calculus, and he told me yeah, once, once I did, he said. When did you use it? And he said I used it once. Let me see, what did you use it on? Oh yeah. Something on the rate-of-change of steam particles in boilers. And then we went out and tested it and found the answer was wrong.
Calculus -- if you want to know -- there is room there for a mathematics which is a good mathematics. And it would be the rate of co-change, or the rate of change when something else was changing, so that you could establish existing rates of change in relationship to each other, and for lack of that mathematics, nobody has been able to understand present time -- you just can't sum it up easily -- or let us say, for lack of an understanding of what present time was, nobody could formulate that mathematics. So, actually there's a big hole there that could be filled -- a thing called calculus is trying to fill that hole, right now, and it can't.
But the rates of change -- it comes closest to it. I think it was one of Newton's practical jokes. Here we have Calculus, and it's trying to measure a rate of change. Well, if we had something that was really workable and simple, it would be formed on this basis. The present time, and gradients of time were gradients of havingness, and as one havingness changed, you could establish a constancy of change for other related havingnesses. But because the basic unit of the universe is two, you would have to have a rate of change known and measured for every rate of change then estimated. The mathematics won't operate in this universe unless it has simultaneous equations. If you have two variables, you must have two equations with which to solve those two variables. In other words you have to compare one to the other simultaneously. Otherwise you just get another variable. Of course, people laughingly do this. They take an equation with two variables, and then they solve it. And then you say "What have you got?" And the fellow says "K". And you say now just a minute -- you got "K", huh? Well, what is "K"? Well "K", we have established arbitrarily as being -- well, say, why did you work the equation out in the first place? You had "K", didn't you?"