There are certain rules dealing with science, at least the science I define as the science of reality rather than the science of make believe. I have mentioned these rules scattered throughout the columns and hope to bring them together in this column. In the process, I will contrast them to the methodology of empirical science, and describe the outcome of that methodology. I'll then move forward into the real world and see what the empirical methodology has done to the field of science.
The rules I speak of are not the laws of empirical science. The laws of empirical science are the gospel according to a number of prophets, the most prominent being Newton, but many lesser prophets, Young, light is like a water wave, Lyell, the father of uniformitarianism, the doctrine that the Earth formed over vast periods of time, Agassiz, the notion that the evidence for the worldwide flood was not actually evidence of a flood, but evidence for an ice age, Darwin, the idea that species rather than characteristics, evolved, Maxwell, that there is an electromagnetic continuum, but its waves aren't frequencies, Rutherford for the atom, with its repelling protons in the center and its electrons whizzing around the nucleus with no apparent source of motion, Einstein for the notion that space and time are not only something, they are interchangeable, and many, many prophets for quantum mechanics, the idea that these electrons with no source of motion bounce up and down in their orbits to produce and absorb light.
There's no actual support in reality for any of these statements, so they have to be taken on faith.
Faith, as I have pointed out, is not science. Science deals with reality, and by reality, I mean it deals with things that can actually be tested in reality, things that go into producing our technology. The reason we need to limit the definition of science to those things that go into improving and developing our technology is obvious. Science, which is another way of saying reality, can only concern itself with things that make physical changes in reality. We all may wonder where the universe came from, but that has nothing to do with our technology. We can believe anything we want. Not only is knowing where the universe came from impossible, answering the question, even if it were possible, would provide nothing we could test in reality, nothing that we could fool around with the improve our technology.
There is, then, a clear distinction. There are things that belong in the realm of science, and there are things that belong in the realm of belief. Creating theories about how to develop and improve our technology belong in the field of science, and creating theories that involve everything else belong in the field of religion. Newton, of course, belongs in the field of science, but his conclusions, unproven and unprovable, do not deal with reality and therefore are not science.
Although I've been through this half a dozen times before, let me elaborate, if only because the more times I write it, the better I get at expressing it. The nature of gravity is of absolute importance to technology. If we actually delved into the reality of gravity, hypothesized how it was produced, how it moved, and how it acted on matter to move it, we could then go into reality and test those hypotheses. If they didn't work, we could try something else. We would, in my estimation, soon come up with a description of this dynamic force that would allow us to incorporate it into our technology. Instead of trying to overcome it, we could eliminate it (see column 08-04). What do we have with a religious answer to a scientific question? We have jet planes.
Why is Newton a religious answer to a scientific question? Newton set out to prove that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. Copernicus had dethroned Aristotle's view of gravity, that things fell because the Earth was at the center of the universe, so someone had to come up with a reason why we didn't fly off the surface of the Earth as it spun in space and whizzed around the sun.
Newton needed the proportionality portion of the statement to justify his intended proof. The property part, well, he's saying a dynamic force is a property like color or hardness, and there's not much that can be said one way or the other about that statement.
As to the proportionality part, proving it, at least in Newton's mind, would prove the property part, although I can't figure out why. To prove the proportionality part, Newton set out to show that the amount of gravity in the Earth, as measured by the size of the Earth, and the moon, as measured by the size of the moon, was equal to the amount of force it would take to move the moon from a straight line course into the curved course it has around the Earth.
To accomplish this, Newton had to make two gigantic assumptions. First, he had to assume the Earth and moon were both made up of the same particle uniformly distributed throughout the spheres. Without this assumption, he couldn't calculate the amount of gravity each was producing.
We can see right from the start then, Newton was operating on a false assumption. He didn't know anything about atoms, he ignored density, in fact, he pretty much deluded himself on the basic measurement of his proof.
The next assumption is even greater. He said the moon would be going in a straight line but for the force of gravity curving it into circular motion.
Where did he get the support for this? He took an old law of motion, objects at rest will stay at rest until a force acts to move them, an obvious fact in a field of gravity, and turned it around to say, an object in motion would stay in motion until a force acted on it. No reasonable person could gainsay this, but the fact is, nothing in our existence travels in a straight line, unless it is the straight line an object takes when it is dropped, so what would make Newton think that the moon, whizzing around the Earth, would be traveling in a straight line but for gravity. There's nothing in space that travels in a straight line, not even a comet.
Moving on, and without going into the hoked up mathematics that supposedly stand for proof, even under Newton's so-called "proof," the moon was bigger, and therefore produced too much gravity, for it to stay in orbit. It would crash right down to the surface of the Earth under his math. Newton claimed he didn't have accurate orbital information on the moon, and later, other excuses developed, the moon was hollow on the back side, it was filled with caves, the sort of ad hoc nonsense that keeps empirical science rolling along.
But we don't have to rely on Newton's failed proof with respect to the moon to discard the property of and proportional to gospel, all we have to do is apply the math to any other planet in the solar system. It not only doesn't work, it doesn't work spectacularly, as astronomers discovered later in the 18th Century.
So what did these astronomers do about Newton's failed proof? Did they say, well, Newton was wrong, and because Newton was wrong, we don't know what produces gravity, we'd better get off our butts and come up with a better explanation for the most common force in our existence.
Why would they, when they already knew that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter?
You say, what?
It made no difference that Newton's hypothesis was not proven, the fact was, everyone already knew Newton was right, that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. He just made a little mistake, is all.
What was that mistake?
After due consideration, the empirical community realized that Newton was using his math bassakward. He was using the amount of matter in a planet to predict the planet's orbit. He should be using the planet's orbit to determine the amount of matter in a planet.
Say what?
The whole intent of Newton's effort was to prove gravity was a property of and proportional to matter by using the amount of gravity in the matter to predict the orbit of the moon. How did these empirical blind men turn it around so that, while Newton's proof didn't work, his conclusion was accepted and then used to measure something that could never be verified, the amount of matter in a planet?
So let's see. What do the following statements have in common? The Earth is flat. Gravity is a property of and proportional to matter. Both statements are made in ignorance of reality. What don't the two statements have in common? The Earth is flat was never uttered by anybody except Darwinists who were trying to trash the intellectual skills of their opponents, claiming they also believed the Earth was flat (today the same Darwinists defending the same beliefs claim their opponents believe the Earth doesn't go around the sun).
The proposition that gravity is a property of and proportional to mass is the rock upon which the religion of empirical science is founded, and all of empirical science is suffused with that rock, a bald statement that has never been proven and never can be proven.
The rules dealing with science have to produce a science that is devoid of belief. Science deals with reality, and reality does not require beliefs. It does, however, require the creation of concepts to explain those things that are not obvious in reality. We don't know, and never will know, the precise mechanism of gravity because that mechanism is hidden from us by its size. We will never know with absolute certainty the mechanical nature of the force that causes the planets and moons to orbit in the same direction in the plane of the sun's equator. We will never know precisely what light is, what electricity is, what magnetism is, or how matter is constructed. We can only make guesses.
Our guesses take the form of concepts. We conceptualize how we think light might be constructed, how the mechanism of gravity might work, how the force that causes the atoms operates, how matter is constructed. But the concepts we create to organize these phenomena in our minds can never be more than just that, concepts. There is no way we can take a concept and turn it into a fact. It simply isn't possible. Concepts are nothing more than concepts.
However, because we have a mind that operates by comparing reality with our recall, what we make up in our minds, and because the topics we are dealing with have no counterpart in reality, we tend to make up concepts and then we begin to believe those concepts are reality. There is nothing in reality to oppose the concept that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter because the concept doesn't really tell us anything about reality and it does not provide us with the connection with reality we need to experiment with gravity. To the contrary, our belief in the reality that gravity is a property, like color or hardness, prevents us from attempting to tinker with it in reality because changing the color of gold is stupid, and claiming that iron isn't hard is really stupid.
The concepts we create to understand the reality, the science of nature, can never be more than concepts and therefore should never be treated as anything but concepts. Thus, the first rule of science is, hypotheses and theories can never be more than hypotheses and theories. There is no way to prove a concept. We make use of a concept to probe reality, and our probing, our trial and error might produce what we are trying to produce (and many times something we weren't trying to produce) but that doesn't make the concept a fact. It just makes the concept useful in explaining what we are accomplishing.
And accomplish is what we want to do, so the next rule about concepts is they must connect with reality. A concept that doesn't allow us to connect with reality is not a valid scientific concept. Thus matter is neither created nor destroyed is not a scientific concept because it has no connection with reality. It's simply a statement made with no basis, no possibility of proof, and provides no direction with how to deal with reality. The only concepts that concern us are those concepts that can be used in our trial and error efforts to improve reality. All other concepts are religious.
The next rule deals with concepts in general. How do we organize the concepts we create? We have to create concepts of what makes a planet rotate if we want to understand its weather. We have to create concepts of light, electricity and magnetism because we deal with them every day of our lives, and we should be creating concepts of gravity, because gravity is the most dynamic and limiting force in our existence. How do we judge the concepts we create?
All of this presupposes the overriding rule of science, that the concepts we create to explain the phenomena beyond our direct experience must be concepts of the possible. Why, oh why, would anyone want to take a phenomena as important as gravity, and turn it into a concept of the impossible, it's a property and properties just are, they are unchangeable.
First, we create concepts that actually explain, in a mechanical way, something about reality. Any other concept is religious in nature because it won't provide us with direction to actually explore reality. Next, we have to select the best concept to test. Here Ocaam's razor comes into play. The concept that explains the most with the least assumptions is the best. Next we have to select consistent concepts. It is useless to create a concept of how the planets move that is not consistent with a concept of how the planets rotate, and we can't create a concept of the mechanical nature of gravity that is inconsistent with the concepts dealing with planetary movement. We can't create a concept of light that is inconsistent with our concept of matter and we can't create a concept of light unless it explains how matter generates it. We can't create one concept for light, another for heat, and still another for electricity, all of which disagree. I love Science magazine's belated inclusion of gravity in its 125th anniversary 125 questions. "Newton's mass/gravity clashes with quantum theory, it doesn't fit in the Standard Model, nobody has spotted the particle that is responsible for it and, in fact, Newton's apple contained a whole can of worms." The empirical response? Oh well.
By not following these simple rules, we end up with an empirical science that turns theory into fact by claiming the theory has been proven when it hasn't. Newton's mass/gravity fantasy fuels a whole industry of salaries, awards, grants and basically useless research. Because it is a fact, we scan the skies for dark matter that has to be there because Newton's theory says it does, and we probe nothingness for black holes that Newton's theory says should be there. We have produced a fantasyland of science, where virtually any statement, no matter how wild eyed and absurd, becomes reality so long as it doesn't disagree with scientific fact, other wild ideas accepted as fact, and when we question it, we're told, the universe is stranger than even the human mind can comprehend.
The human mind doesn't have to comprehend, it simply has to have something to use to improve the technology that is the basis of our existence. But empirical science is wandering so far off in the fields of fantasy, it has lost all touch with reality. In the process, it has evoked the law of unintended consequences. While empirical science is searching its naval for the string that will produce the Theory of Everything, science education has been free to roam where it will. Alec Mouhibian wrote an article for FrontPageMag.com on 11/03/05 about his high school science education. "The "integrated science" curriculum, for the two years prior to chemistry and biology course offerings, was one massive serving of mixed Green salad: global warming, overpopulation, ecological disaster, the evils of DDT, pollution, Alaskan oil drilling, species 'endangerment,' and American consumption were all served up as scientific fact. Never was it mentioned that these are subjects of profound debate within the scientific community. Academically dishonest versions of political events, such as the woeful effects of George Bush's 'withdrawal' from the sacred Kyoto Treaty, were taught instead."
All of these subjects, of course, are items that need to be debated, but none of them have anything at all to do with science. However, the definition of science has been so degraded by the fantasyland facts of empirical science, that the public can no longer tell the difference what is and isn't science and as a result, we will never roll up our sleeves and get down to the arduous work of coming up with the consistent picture of physical reality we need to produce the technology we have to create to ensure our survival.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com