Okay. Gould had this wacky nack for finding the unbelievable and turning it into something interesting by analyzing it into ... I am not sure what.
I sort of get it. Kicher took on magetism. Magetism is profoundly strange. The laws of Newtonian physics are turned into an inverted 90 degree world of the utterly strange. Think about it. A force directed at a point, does not accelerate it in proportion, but into a right turn in a near instant. Put another way, magnetic force applied at a 90 degree angle propells the object in a horizontal direction. How is that possible? Gravity is as unknown as it was in Newton's time, except we have a better math to cover over its profound strangeness.
I think I see where this Kicher business is headed, which is the search for a single unifying principle which he identified as God.
But, playing Gould, if I can, it is the thought that there is a unifying principle to the universe that is the foundational thought of God. If you can abandon God, you can accept the idea there is no such thing as a unifying principle. The universe does not have either a unity, or a principle. It is an utterly different phenomenon, an unfolding process in time. It has its forces which may not be united: gravity, magnetism-electricity, and some strange probably unrelated micro-bonding forces.
The material of atomic mass which also contains some of these forces, intrinsic to it, are play to their constitutent bodies and relations. And from these very simple elements the unbelievable diversity of phenomenon is made manifest. I mean existance is a fucking miracle. I am not even sure that Hegel's Nothing guaranteed it And yet, I will not posit God on a basic principle. I do not allow God. I allow only the givens, the discoverable. It's an intellectual game.
Human bodies seem almost completely immune to magnetic force. The magetic forces pass through flesh as if it didn't exist. What I think I am saying is that because we can not feel it, we can not understand it. And yet we feel gravity everyday and don't understand it either. We do understand motion, probably because our bodies are made to produce and react to motion.
There is a deep limit to human knowledge, that I am not sure most people understand. We are profoundly limited by our sense organs which are constructed to perceive the universal forces or at least much of them. We can extend that knowledge through mathematics, but eventually even math-physics begins to lose or escape our understanding. We artifically extend its range through a mere method.
Kicher illustrates the limits of human imagination of his time. I bet this is why Gould selected him...