Quote:
Keith Larman wrote:
It's when people start talking about the "ki" as a literally existing physical force that I get uncomfortable. I see it as more a useful heuristic device.
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That caused me heartache as well, because force is such a poor fit. Things of great power and control may be occurring and yet seemingly there are very low gross accelerations occurring -- until they suddenly do occur and becom very large. The presence of a force requires an acceleration, ergo -- ki ain't a force. The presence of ki does not require acceleration, necessarily. It also may more typically involve constantly changing or oscillating accelerations where the dynamic itself is storing energy in a conservation sense without much effort of any maintaining force, making force particularly inapt and complex to use.
So I looked for a physical quantity with a closer mapping. The "potential" aspect was also difficult in force terms because the energy storage of potential was difficult to place in force terms. There is no obvious "Ki battery" in the body, unless of course it simply IS the body.
So much of what we do is positional vice "energetic" in purely acceleration terms. "Potential" thus also had to depend primarily on realtive position. It could not merely depend on height potential from gravity (although that clearly also plays a part in the dynamic), if, for no other reason, than short people have no disdvantage in aiki. In that sense gravitational potential not something you use as much as have used on you, a collateral hazard to be both offset by and exploited by the means of the use of ki, ki being something else or at least something more general in this sense.
Position itself defines a moment from a center -- which is a potential for rotation about that center -- which when realized -- is angular momentum.
That's what took me to angular momentum. It is synthetic, like force, but of a lower order, using velocity or angular velocity, the first derivative of location (position) vice the second derivative (acceleration). It meets all the other things I have yet thrown at it for comparison with the traditional understanding of ki at all sorts of scales. "Potential" is then understood in terms of purely relative position, the root of the derivative -- that is to say -- maai, both internally and externally considered.
My understanding of it is not merely an attempt to be heuristic, approximate or analogous but an attempt to establish it as an applied concept of actual relationship between the two systems of knowledge at all levels to which the concepts pertain.