From Newton’s Gravity to the Hidden Forces of Organizations
1. The Force We Cannot See
In 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a work that fundamentally transformed humanity’s understanding of the universe. At the heart of the book was a remarkably powerful idea: the apple falling from a tree and the Moon orbiting the Earth were governed by the same force.
To understand how radical this idea was, it is necessary to look at the worldview that preceded it. Since Aristotle, Western thought has largely divided the universe into two fundamentally different realms. The earthly world was imperfect and constantly changing. Objects were believed to move toward their “natural places”—heavy things downward and light things upward. The heavens, by contrast, were regarded as perfect and unchanging. Stars and planets were thought to move according to principles fundamentally different from those governing the imperfect world below.
The heavens and the Earth were therefore understood as separate domains governed by different principles.
Newton challenged this ancient division. He demonstrated mathematically that the force causing an apple to fall toward the ground and the force keeping the Moon in orbit around the Earth were manifestations of the same phenomenon: gravity, the attraction between objects possessing mass.
The Moon, in Newton’s explanation, is constantly falling toward the Earth. At the same time, however, it is moving sideways fast enough to keep missing the Earth. Its orbit is therefore not fundamentally different from the falling of an apple. The difference is that the Moon has sufficient sideways velocity for its continuous fall toward Earth to produce an orbit rather than a collision with the surface.
The significance of this insight lies in more than its ability to explain natural phenomena with remarkable precision. Newton had demonstrated that a single invisible force could govern phenomena ranging from the seemingly ordinary fall of an apple to the immense motion of celestial bodies.
We cannot see gravity. We cannot touch it or observe it directly. What we see are its consequences: the trajectory of a falling object, the orbit of the Moon, and the motion of planets around the Sun.
Yet the remarkable order of these phenomena provides compelling evidence that an underlying force is at work.
Newton’s confidence in this idea rested on precise calculation. By using the Moon’s orbital period and its distance from Earth, he could calculate how far the Moon should fall toward Earth at every moment if the force acting on it were the same force that caused objects to fall on Earth and weakened according to the inverse-square law.
The calculated result closely matched the Moon’s observed motion.
The agreement was too precise to be dismissed as a coincidence. Newton had found a mathematical relationship linking an event near the Earth’s surface to the motion of a celestial body hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.
Yet Newton’s theory did not immediately settle every question about gravity. One major issue concerned the physical mechanism by which gravity could act across apparently empty space.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and other critics objected to the idea that bodies could exert gravitational influence across empty space without an identifiable medium or mechanism. Their concern was not simply whether gravity existed, but how such an interaction could physically take place.
Newton provided an extraordinarily precise mathematical description of how gravity behaves, but he did not provide a definitive physical account of the mechanism underlying gravitational attraction.
The problem of how physical influence could extend across space would remain a fundamental question in physics for generations.
2. The Four Fundamental Interactions
Gravity is not the only invisible interaction governing the universe.
Modern physics describes nature in terms of four fundamental interactions: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong interaction, and the weak interaction.
Electromagnetism governs an enormous portion of our everyday experience. When we walk across a solid floor without our feet passing through it, when we hold an object in our hands, and when we see light, we are experiencing consequences of electromagnetic interactions.
The electrons bound to atomic nuclei and the chemical bonds that allow atoms to form molecules are also manifestations of electromagnetism.
The modern theory of electromagnetism emerged through the work of many scientists. Experiments by Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, and others revealed deep connections between electricity and magnetism. James Clerk Maxwell subsequently expressed these relationships in a unified mathematical theory.
Maxwell had achieved something conceptually similar to what Newton had done earlier. Newton unified terrestrial and celestial motion under a common law. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism within a common theoretical framework.
The strong and weak interactions operate primarily at the scale of atomic nuclei and subatomic particles, realms far removed from ordinary human perception.
The strong interaction binds quarks together and, through its residual form, contributes to binding protons and neutrons within atomic nuclei. Without these interactions, the structure of ordinary matter would be radically different.
The weak interaction governs processes such as certain forms of radioactive decay and plays an essential role in the nuclear reactions that power stars.
None of these interactions can be seen directly by the human eye. Yet without them, there would be no stable atoms, no stars, and ultimately no material world in which human beings could exist.
Another remarkable feature of these four fundamental interactions is their relative strengths.
At the scale of two protons, the electromagnetic repulsion between them is roughly 36 orders of magnitude stronger than their gravitational attraction.
At ordinary particle-physics scales, gravity is therefore extraordinarily weaker than the other fundamental interactions.
Yet gravity dominates the large-scale structure of the universe.
Stars form under gravity. Planets orbit stars. Galaxies assemble and evolve under gravitational influence. The large-scale architecture of the cosmos is shaped overwhelmingly by gravity.
Why can such a weak interaction become dominant at astronomical scales?
One important reason is the structure of the forces themselves.
Electric charge comes in positive and negative forms, allowing electromagnetic effects to cancel one another on large scales. Ordinary gravity, by contrast, is universally attractive for ordinary matter. There is no established gravitational analog of positive and negative electric charge that would allow ordinary gravitational effects to cancel in the same way.
As matter accumulates, electromagnetic effects can often cancel out. Gravitational effects continue to accumulate.
Gravity, therefore, becomes increasingly important as we move from the microscopic world to astronomical scales.
This reveals an important principle: the strength of an interaction is not the only factor determining its influence. Its structure and the way its effects accumulate can matter just as much.
Physicists have continued searching for a deeper framework that might connect the fundamental interactions.
Albert Einstein spent the later decades of his life searching for a unified field theory that could bring gravity and electromagnetism into a single theoretical framework, but he never completed such a theory.
Later developments in twentieth-century physics showed that electromagnetism and the weak interaction could be understood as aspects of a unified electroweak theory under appropriate high-energy conditions. Subsequent experiments provided strong support for this framework.
Physicists continue to search for theories that could incorporate gravity and the strong interaction into a more comprehensive description of nature.
The fact that this problem remains unresolved is itself revealing.
Understanding the invisible interactions that organize the universe remains one of the deepest intellectual challenges in modern physics.
3. Newton’s Years of Isolation
Newton’s discovery that unified the falling apple and the orbiting Moon is often portrayed as a sudden flash of inspiration beneath an apple tree.
The historical reality was far more complicated.
In 1665, an outbreak of plague spread across England. Cambridge University closed, and the twenty-three-year-old Newton returned to his family home in Woolsthorpe. He spent much of 1665 and 1666 away from Cambridge, working largely on his own.
According to the famous story, it was in the garden there that Newton watched an apple fall.
The popular version—that he immediately discovered the complete theory of gravity at that moment—greatly simplifies what was actually a much longer intellectual process.
What is historically significant is that during this period, Newton began developing ideas about whether the force responsible for falling objects might also explain the motion of the Moon.
The period proved extraordinarily productive.
Newton worked on the mathematical methods that would become calculus, investigated the nature of light and color, and developed ideas concerning gravity and celestial motion.
This period later became famous as one of the most productive phases of Newton’s intellectual life.
Yet the ideas formed during these years did not immediately become a finished theory.
More than twenty years would pass before Newton’s mature theory appeared in print.
After returning to Cambridge, Newton continued to work on the problem largely in private. He was not particularly eager to publish his ideas.
The person who ultimately played a decisive role in bringing Newton’s theory into the world was the astronomer Edmond Halley.
Halley had been debating the mathematical problem of planetary orbits with other scholars. In 1684, he visited Newton and asked what orbit would result from an inverse-square force. Newton reportedly replied that he had already solved the problem.
When Newton could not immediately locate his earlier calculations, however, he reconstructed the argument.
Halley recognized the importance of Newton’s work.
He encouraged Newton to continue, helped finance the publication, and played a major role in persuading him to organize his mathematical arguments into a complete work.
The result was Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687.
Without Halley’s persistence and support, Newton’s ideas might have remained scattered across private papers rather than becoming one of the most influential scientific works in history.
The famous apple story itself is based on Newton’s later recollections.
According to one account, Newton told William Stukeley in his later years that seeing an apple fall had led him to consider why objects fall toward the Earth and whether the same principle might extend to the Moon.
How precisely this recollection corresponds to the original moment is impossible to establish.
What is much clearer is that Newton’s discovery was not the product of a single miraculous instant.
The apple may have provided the image.
The theory required years of mathematical investigation, calculation, verification, and refinement.
4. Inferring the Invisible
The stories of Newton and Maxwell reveal a common method.
Neither discovered the invisible force by seeing it.
They observed its consequences.
Newton examined the falling of objects and the motion of the Moon. Maxwell examined the mathematical relationships revealed by electrical and magnetic phenomena.
From observable patterns, they inferred invisible causes.
This is one of the most fundamental ways human beings have learned about the natural world.
Chemists did not need to see individual atoms with the naked eye to establish the usefulness of atomic theory. They observed how substances combined, separated, reacted, and transformed, and from those patterns inferred the existence and properties of atoms and molecules.
Even the solidity of an ordinary wooden table is ultimately a consequence of interactions at the atomic level, including electromagnetic interactions between matter.
The table feels solid because the electromagnetic structure of matter prevents the atoms in our hands from simply passing through the table’s atoms.
The interaction itself remains invisible.
Its effect is unmistakable.
This method of reasoning will guide the argument developed throughout this book.
Organizations, too, appear to be shaped by forces that cannot be directly seen.
Power.
Information.
Relationships.
Reputation.
Authority.
Trust.
These are not physical forces in the sense used by physics. They are organizational influences whose effects can nevertheless be observed.
A single sentence can suddenly change the atmosphere of a meeting.
One piece of information may spread rapidly through an organization while another remains confined to a small group.
A decision may pass effortlessly through the formal hierarchy, while another repeatedly encounters resistance despite appearing perfectly reasonable.
A person with little formal authority may influence an important decision more strongly than someone occupying a much higher organizational position.
These phenomena are visible.
The forces producing them are not.
Just as Newton inferred gravity from the motion of objects, organizational researchers can examine patterns of behavior and decision-making to infer the hidden influences shaping an organization.
A similar approach helped reveal one of the most important structures in modern biology.
When James Watson and Francis Crick developed their model of DNA, they did not simply look at DNA molecules and see a double helix with their own eyes.
They relied on experimental evidence, including X-ray diffraction data from the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, along with other biochemical and structural evidence.
The resulting model showed how DNA could exist as a remarkably stable molecular structure capable of storing biological information.
The molecular interactions that help stabilize DNA are themselves invisible.
Yet their effects are extraordinary.
They help maintain the structure through which genetic information can be stored and replicated.
Again, the same intellectual pattern appears:
Observe the visible order.
Infer the invisible structure.
Test the inference against observable consequences.
Refine the theory.
This cycle has allowed human beings to understand phenomena that cannot be directly perceived.
It connects physics, chemistry, biology, and, potentially, the study of organizations.
5. The First Proposition
The first proposition of this book can now be stated clearly:
What we can see is not the whole of reality. Order is often created by forces we cannot see.
The falling apple and the orbiting Moon are organized by gravity.
Atoms form stable structures through fundamental interactions.
Stars shine through processes governed by interactions operating at scales far beyond ordinary human perception.
Galaxies form and evolve under the influence of gravity.
The visible order of the universe is therefore inseparable from invisible structures and interactions.
The same principle may offer a useful way of thinking about another kind of world: the organization.
An organization appears to consist of people, offices, rules, documents, meetings, positions, and procedures.
Yet these visible elements do not fully explain how an organization actually behaves.
Something else is at work.
People occupy different positions within organizational space.
Information moves along some paths more easily than others.
Influence accumulates around certain individuals.
Reputation alters the way the same statement is interpreted.
Relationships can strengthen or weaken the effective influence of formal authority.
Decisions accelerate in some places and slow down in others.
These patterns suggest that organizations may possess their own invisible forces.
The purpose of this book is to identify these forces, examine how they interact, and explore whether the logic of relativity can provide a useful conceptual framework for understanding them.
Newton showed that the same gravitational principle could explain phenomena separated by enormous differences in scale.
Einstein later transformed our understanding of gravity by showing that gravity could be understood through the geometry of spacetime rather than as an ordinary force acting through empty space.
The next step of this book is to examine whether a similar conceptual shift can help us understand organizations.
Perhaps organizational behavior cannot be fully understood by looking only at people, rules, and formal structures.
Perhaps the position of an individual within organizational space, the movement of information, the distribution of power, and the relationships among actors alter the reality experienced by each person.
If so, an organization may possess something analogous to its own space, its own time, and its own forms of relativity.
That is where the journey begins.
Organization Relativity Theory
Chapter 1 — The Invisible Forces That Govern the Universe
From Newton’s Gravity to the Hidden Forces of Organizations
Category: Organization Relativity Theory
Tags: Organization Relativity Theory, Organizational Theory, Newton, Gravity, Einstein, Invisible Forces, Organizational Behavior, Power, Information, Leadership, Organizational Dynamics
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