I've been inadvertently guilty. I've been pounding away at Newton in column after column without actually devoting a column to Newton. As a reader pointed out, a column devoted to Newton should have been the second column. Well, at the risk of repeating myself, but with the benefit of bringing all the threads together, here is a column on Newton's errors. I should point out that some readers simply don't believe some of the stuff I've said about Newton's personal life (and I haven't even scratched to surface of that). When I cite Michael White's detailed and supported biography, Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer, Addison Wesley (1997), I get the response, that stuff doesn't appear in any other Newton biography, so it can't be true. Considering this might be the first actual biography of Newton, all the rest being hagiographies, the response is simply the response of the blindly faithful. Here I'll limit myself to Newton's rationale, which is sufficient to question his rationality, as well as his knowledge base.
Newton lived in an interesting time. The conversion of England from Catholicism, and the introduction of Protestantism from the continent, began tearing English society apart during the first half of the 17th Century. Newton was born into this maelstrom in 1642, and entered Cambridge in 1661, after Charles I lost his head to Cromwell. The next four decades in England were marked by religious strife, strife in those days being, when a Catholic became king, all the Protestants were slaughtered and when a Protestant became king, all the Catholics were slaughtered. Leading a scholarly life definitely had its benefits, and Newton became the 2nd Lucasian at Cambridge in 1669. Cambridge was some distance from London and the center of the recently established Royal Society at Gresham College. That society was designed to conduct experiments to further science and technology while Newton was a theoretical mathematician. His distrust and dislike for the society lasted up until the time he took it over in 1603 as a result of his influential mentor (and his niece's lover) Lord Montague. Newton had demonstrated his much acclaimed reflecting telescope to the Society, but when he proposed his theory of light, the Society was less than lukewarm, which led to Newton's attempt to set up a counter society at Cambridge.
Newton might have gone relatively unknown if three men, Halley, Hooke and Christopher Wren hadn't met to discuss one of Hooke's observations. Galileo had, by rolling balls down an inclined plane, determined that gravity diminished inversely with the square of its distance. Kepler's laws were starting to filter through the community. These laws, which said that planets swept out equal areas in equal times (they don't) dictated a law dealing with areas determined by the radius squared, which, looking at Galileo's inverse square law, made the two similar. Hooke wondered if the two could be mathematically combined to provide a connection between gravity and the motion of the planets. The men decided to offer a modest reward, and weeks later, when Wren was visiting Newton in Cambridge (the two were close, lifelong friends), he told Newton about Hooke's idea. Newton said he'd already noted the similarity and worked out the math. When Wren asked to see it, Newton dissembled, and several years later came up with the Principia, the work that is claimed to have uncovered the secrets of the universe.
Newton, having suffered some disdain in presenting his theory of colors, set out to prove a proposition. His proposition was that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. Newton can be excused if he set out to prove a dynamic force was a property like color or hardness. He was totally ignorant of the nature of matter, he answered the question, what makes the planets move, in advance simply by reference to his religious beliefs, the planets moved because God put them in motion and came back periodically to keep them in motion, and he knew little or nothing about density (or he conveniently ignored it altogether, I don't know which). Of course, properties are things that are self-evident. All we have to do is look at gold and see it's gold. All we have to do is feel iron to know it's hard. Gravity as a property of matter is not only not self-evident, it can't be a property because it can't be physically connected to the matter. It couldn't be in Newton's time, and it can't be today, no matter how many proponents delude themselves that it can.
Because there is no physical connection of gravity with matter, Newton set out to create one. This is where the proportionality part of the statement comes in. Newton claimed that if he could prove that gravity was proportional to matter, then it was self-evident that it was a property of the matter. It is important to remember this point. If Newton failed to prove that gravity was proportional to matter, then he failed to demonstrate it was a property of matter. It's as simple as that.
Newton set out to prove gravity was proportional to matter by mathematically computing its effect on the motion of the moon. He was already ignoring the force that moved the moon. He said that force was God. He therefore assumed away the basic question facing anyone dealing with the solar system, what makes the planets move, what makes them rotate and orbit in the same direction and what makes them do so basically in the plane of the sun's equator. These questions were simply swept under the rug, where they remain to this day, covered over by the fantasy of Laplace's swirling mass of gas, created to do away with Newton's explanation of God as the cause of motion.
While Newton could assume away the cause of motion, he couldn't assume away the moon's orbit, which was circular. If he were to compute the effect of the Earth and the moon's gravity on the orbit of the moon, he had to assume what the orbit would be if there were no gravity. He did this simply by making another unfounded assumption, that the moon would be traveling in a straight line but for the force of gravity. The only way he could compute the affect of gravity was to assume it was affecting the moon without gravity, and that moon, without gravity, would be traveling in a straight line.
Of course, nothing in the universe travels in a straight line, and the only thing on Earth that travels in a straight line, without the application of force and sophisticated telemetry, is a dropped object, which makes a beeline to the nearest surface beneath it. But Newton needed the moon to be traveling in a straight line, or he had nothing to compute. To accomplish this feat, he jiggled with a known law, the law of inertia. He knew that objects at rest will stay at rest unless a force acts to change its position. He turned this around and created a new law, the law of momentum, an object will remain in motion unless a force acts on it to change that motion. The fallacy with this law is, objects don't remain in motion unless there is a force maintaining that motion. The real (and only) law of motion is that objects come to rest with respect to the forces acting upon them. But Newton had already assumed away force, so by grafting this eminently reasonable proposition on to the law of inertia, he was able to make people believe the moon would actually be going in a straight line but for the force of gravity.
So, now Newton had his goal in sight. He was going to mathematically compute the amount of force it would take to move the moon from a straight-line course into the orbit we find it. How was he going to compute the amount of gravity? After all, gravity is not evident in matter. That's what he was trying to prove, that gravity was a property of matter. If gravity is not evident in matter, how can he know how much gravity the matter is producing?
Newton knew of Galileo's inverse square law (and if the reader hasn't realized, Kepler's laws have gone by the wayside in all this hocus pocus), so he could compute how the gravity diminished over the distance between the Earth and the moon, but how much gravity was each producing to start with so he could compute how much was diminishing?
Newton resorted to a little bit of legerdemain to compute the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon. He didn't know how much gravity was in either unless he used proportionality. To use proportionality, he had to resort to volume. To use volume, he had to assume that the Earth and the moon were both made up of identical particles evenly spaced throughout each. Of course, this is not the case, but Newton knew nothing about the nature of matter, and no one at the time even suspected something like the sophisticated picture of the atom, forming the table of elements, that we routinely reference today. No, Newton simply said, the Earth and the moon were made up of the same particles evenly distributed throughout and therefore he could use proportionality to compute the amount of gravity between the Earth and the moon.
Then came his proof. Newton said, I can compute the amount of gravity between the Earth and the moon, (and please note, he couldn't because his assumption of uniformity was not only wrong, it was fatally wrong), and he said I can compute the amount of force that it would take to pull the moon from its straight-line path into its current orbital path (and note, nothing in the universe moves in a straight line, making this assertion not only wrong, but fatally wrong), so if the amount of gravity I compute equals the amount of force it takes to pull the moon into orbit from its straight-line path, then I've proved gravity is proportional to matter and therefore is a property of matter.
Newton carried out his computations and lo and behold, there was too much matter in the moon to make the two equations agree. Not to worry. The orbit of the moon had either been miscalculated, or there were caves in the moon, or its backside was concave. The law is correct, there's just something wrong with reality that doesn't conform to the law. (This, by the way, is pretty much the universal excuse for empirical failure today. The cover of the first volume of the Copernican Series contains a graphic disproving Kepler's law. The most common comment, after the comment that I didn't use Kepler's laws to compute the orbital times for the Earth, is that there are forces at work that change the actual measurements, forces that we are unaware of.) Newton hounded his friend Halley to his deathbed to make more accurate computations of the moon's orbit, but they never made Newton's equations balance.
So Newton was a failure in both his equations, the one resting on the assumption that matter was uniformly distributed through the Earth and the moon, the other that the moon would be traveling in a straight line but for gravity, and his equations didn't equate.
Newton never proved that gravity was proportional to, and therefore a property of, matter.
Did that make Newton a failure? Heavens no. Everyone knew he'd uncovered the secret of the universe, so why quibble about a small margin of error.
As the 18th Century advanced, however, with Newton long gone, it became evident in applying the equations to the other planets, that Newton's math not only didn't work, it didn't work big time. Did these proto-empiricists sit down and take a look at Newton's basic assumptions? Why should they? Newton was absolutely right. Gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. There was no question about that. The only question was, why didn't the equations work?
Well, let's see, the reasoning went, we know that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter, there's absolutely no question about that (except for the fact that Newton failed to prove it and his assumptions were faulty), so we must not be using his equations right. Let's see what would happen if we used the orbit of the planets to compute how much matter was in the planets?
This, of course, borders on delusional insanity. Newton set out to prove gravity was a property of and proportional to matter by using the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon to compute the orbit of the moon. Now these goofballs were saying, we're going to forget about the amount of gravity in the matter, we are going to simply assume that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter, and then we'll use the orbits of the moon to compute how much matter is in the Earth and once we know how much matter is in the Earth we'll know its gravity. Because there is no measurable connection between the matter and the gravity, we'll say an X amount of gravity, but because we don't know what X is and therefore don't know how much matter is in the Earth, we'll refer to the matter as mass, and then move onto the other objects in the solar system, computing their masses on a relative basis by reference to their orbits. This will keep us busy until hell freezes over, we'll never want for jobs, and no one, but no one will ever be able to disprove our blather because no one will ever be able to measure the actual amount of matter in the Earth or any other object in the solar system.
But that's Newton's spawn. Newton didn't prove anything about gravity, and nothing to this day has been proven about gravity. In my view, the most dynamic force in our existence could only result from the most dynamic physical process in our existence, matter coming apart in field replacement, the molten subsurface of the Earth emitting an electromagnetic emission field that, wouldn't you know it, diminishes inversely with the square of its distance just as gravity does. However, up until the seventies, empirical science refused to admit planets might be hot and astronomers, of course, don't like to talk about the fact the emissions diminish inversely with distance. It would detract from their absurd claims that they can see the light from the end of universe and the beginning of time.
The problem with Newton's errors, and their blind adoption by ignorant people, is that declaring gravity a property of something produces a dead-end proposition, what I call a concept of the impossible. Our concepts need to produce technology, and if we don't produce concepts of the possible, we will never explore the possible technology that might result. Because we believe that gravity is out of our reach, we don't experiment with ways to overcome it and we end up with a crippled technology.
Newton's other follies are slowly being overcome on a trial and error basis. His notion that white light is made up of all colors is patently absurd, with the understanding of the continuous nature of the electromagnetic emission field. It is simply arrogant to assume that the field travels from long frequencies to short frequencies, but the frequencies our eyes evolved to see as colors are special, they are all bundled up in a single frequency that has to be burst apart with a prism. Only ignorant idiots would believe this fairy tale. White light is not made up of all colors. Believing it is leads to the opposite of reality, a world in which matter absorbs all colors but the color we see, rather than matter reflecting white light with the properties of the surface altering the frequency.
The other Newtonian absurdity is that the colors are organized the way they come out of a prism. This has pretty much been discredited on a technological basis, the blue laser just now being introduced in new DVD equipment and LEDs, which made their debut in the US on billboards this year, and the new simplified digital color cameras (see column 11-05).
The irony of Isaac Newton is, the one thing he was right about, that light is a particle, a conclusion he made as a result of his notion that all matter was uniformly made up of identical particles, was the only thing the empirical community rejected, coming to the conclusion that light is a wave, but then the easiest way to find out about reality is to understand what empirical science says, and then say the opposite.
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