Ha! Caught again. I've been talking a lot about context recently, and now I stand accused, rightly, of producing a 9 book series that contains no context. Let me explain why before I get into putting the cover of the 1st book of The Copernican Series into context. I made my first attempt to organize the material in the mid-seventies in a manuscript entitled Thermionics. I sent the manuscript to a number of astronomers, only one of whom replied, and did so with the classic statement, why would anyone want to replace Newton's theory of gravity, we wouldn't be able to calculate what the planets are made up of. That, and a few other incidents, opened the door to the true nature of empirical science, a project that, I had been taught, was an open search for answers, but which I quickly found out was a closed defense of accepted dogma.
I quickly decided to find something else to do with my spare time and soon found myself up to my neck in the Credit Union Movement. As Vice President of the Board of a growing credit union, I modernized its computer system, and, in the wake of the deregulation that followed the savings and loan roll up, brought in a wide range of consumer services, from checking accounts to home equity to actual mortgages. At the time, there was a split in the Credit Union Movement, with the majority of its movers and shakers wanting to cling to the old notion that credit unions merely took in deposits, made member loans, and used the interest on the loans to pay the interest on the deposits.
However, as the 80s matured, it became evident to me, and to a number of other directors, that credit unions couldn't survive without becoming competitive with other financial institutions. I therefore, at the end of the decade, wrote The Credit Union: Its Position in the Consumer Financial Marketplace. When I wrote the book, approximately 10% of Credit Unions were full service. Within a year of the book's publication, I was kicked off my board and virtually out of the Credit Union Movement. Now, of course, 90% of Credit Unions are full service and those that aren't are private operations dependent on the health of their sponsors.
One of the reasons I had abandoned my efforts at convincing anyone that Newton was in error was, I didn't want to subject myself to ridicule. However, my credit union experience got rid of that fear altogether. The only thing the establishment could do to me was kick me out, and I wasn't, nor did I want to be, either a member or associated with a monolithic belief system that was not only bizarre, but delusional. Thus, I set out to rewrite Thermionics in a more reader friendly fashion. (I should also point out that, while I didn't realize it at the time, credit union finances, which I pretty much specialized in, were using up a vast amount of my mind, space that was freed up after I got the boot.)
I wrote the first book, Atoms, Stars and Minds, and it didn't work out. I rewrote it. It still didn't work out. I tossed it out and tried to approach the subject from a different direction. That didn't work out. I went back and tried ASM again. I was beginning to realize that I had too much material. Explaining what gravity was, and then explaining my concept of gravity was cumbersome. It was doubly cumbersome when gravity permeated every subject from methodology to evolution to how the planets move. It was just too much to pack into one book. The first decision I made was to separate out the subject matter. Methodology would be dealt with in one book, which became At the Gates of the Citadel, evolution with another book, which became The Cooling Continuum, and the operation of the solar system, including gravity, what I have come to call the 5-part cycle of the universe, in the final book, ASM.
But I still had too much to write without cluttering up the books. I therefore decided that anyone could find out about the current concepts simply by picking up one of the books, becoming popular at the time, that listed all the science topics and then gave empirical explanations for them. This left me to convey in 3 books what was an internally consistent explanation for all the topics listed in the books popularizing the empirical explanations. I had no choice but to eliminate the context. The result is, either readers buy one book, can't see the picture, and abandon the others, or they buy one book, see the picture, and buy the entire series, sometimes twice, many times as gifts to others. In response to some of the one-book readers' comments, I wrote Where Science Went Wrong, trying to put some context into the series. That book does provide a gateway and has gotten me a lot of readers, but I couldn't abandon the lack of context, continuing the series without context simply because the books would have been too long. The Cooling Continuum, the longest of all, is virtually unread unless sold as part of the series, while Light, which is popular, would have gone to 600+ pages if the material were put in context. Of course, the context of Light is rather simple, empirical science doesn't think it exists, it has the spectrum lined up wrong, and it makes no attempt to provide a consistent explanation for light, electricity and magnetism.
The Real Skeptic format allows me to cherry pick individual topics from the books, or from current happenings, and put them in context. As I look back over the columns, however, I do notice that I describe things in relation to other topics, instead of devoting the entire column to the topic and putting it in the context of empirical science. That has been the case with the speed and direction of the sun. I wouldn't have figured this out if I weren't sitting at the beach reading the galleys of Citadel while I was writing How the Weather Really Works. Because I had to break the subjects up into three books, Citadel was the last volume of the first three to be published, and both it and Weather were published in the same year.
While I was going over the galleys, I was reading a book that dealt with a revision to the so-called laws of motion. Of course, as we'll see, the motion of the sun is simply an unknown to empirical science, and therefore of utmost importance to me. In writing the Weather book, I had all sorts of reference books. In some, the math was clearly wrong, in others, merely incomprehensible. But I like to be as accurate as possible and as the seasons are a major part of weather, I wanted to get the seasons down right. However, not being able to fix them in time using astronomical sources, I decided to use the old fashioned way, not in reality, but obtain the results of those that did it in reality. The old fashioned way? Stick a stick in the ground and watch the shadow over a period of a year. As the sun moves south, the shadow moves north and as the sun moves north, the shadow moves south. The tables obtained from this method, an actual measurement in the real world, were not in any astronomical textbook. However, they are readily available at the local grocery store in a tome aptly titled The Farmer's Almanac. You wouldn't believe the number of scholarly requests I get wanting to know where a copy of this obscure tome can be found.
So here I am correcting a book dealing with motion, and writing a book dealing with weather, and I get out a pad and list the days between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, then the spring equinox and summer solstice, then the summer solstice and autumnal equinox, and finally the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice and I find them all different, not the picture of a solar system I'd been led to believe existed in reality, but a picture of a solar system that was vastly different. When I added the first two figures, which resulted in the time between the winter and summer solstices, and the second two, which resulted in the time between the summer and winter solstices, I found a difference of almost 2 days. The time it took for the Earth to move between the summer and winter solstices was almost 2 days longer than the time it took for the Earth to move between the winter and summer solstices.
Kepler's laws state that the Earth carves out equal areas in equal times, and here the Earth was carving out something else in unequal times. I never thought to question Kepler's laws before this, and now I could see that Kepler's laws were simply bunk. I wondered why? A little research led me to the source of Kepler's laws, and that source was the meticulous tables of the moon's orbit maintained by Brahe, with Kepler, as I later discovered, murdering Brahe for those very tables. (The Kepler/Brahe relationship is described in detail in Column 02-04, as is this fatal mistake by Brahe.)
The problem with Brahe's observations of the moon was that he believed the Earth was the center of the universe, that the sun went around the Earth. When he observed the moon making transits in the summer in a shorter time than it made in the winter, he couldn't relate it to the movement of the Earth because the Earth wasn't moving. Thus, in the classic formula, rate times time equals distance, where a change in distance is either due to a change in time or a change in rate, Brahe could not credit the change with a change in time because the Earth did not move. The change in the moon's time of passage by a process of elimination therefore had to be a change in rate.
This absolutely absurd notion, that something the size of the moon could speed up and slow down, was carried over by Kepler into his laws, with the Earth moving slower the closer it is to the sun, and faster the further it is away from the sun. This is even inconsistent with the notion that the gravity of the sun is supposed to cause the Earth to speed up as it falls toward the sun and slow down as it moves away, but empirical science is riddled with these internally conflicting pictures because it doesn't pay attention to actual reality. The fact that the difference in distance is minimal, and the fact that it takes a shorter time to move in the summer cycle than it does in the winter cycle, simply demonstrates that Kepler's laws are dead wrong.
Both of my sons-in-law are empiricists of the highest order, one a practical researcher, the other a computer engineer. They are steeped in the art of mathematics. I knew from my high school days that there is a specific formula that can be used to compute the speed of an object if something moving around that object moved the same distance at different times as a result of the speed of the object. In other words, if I knew the distances between the solstices, and I knew the time it took the Earth to travel in each direction between the solstices, and the time was different, there was an equation that would compute the rate the object, the sun, was traveling. They were vacationing doors away, and the first one I got to scribbled out the formula for me in a flash. This resulted in the actual calculation of the speed of the sun.
This has been up on the net for a little over ten years, and the few challenges I've gotten from it, after initial discussion, has evolved into declarations of my arrogance in believing I knew all the laws of the universe, which means I didn't take into account unknown forces that were obviously influencing a basic law of the universe (Kepler's idealistic pronouncements based on Brahe's blind belief that the sun went around the Earth) or I was lambasted for not using proper descriptive terms for the Earth's orbit, to whit, the Earth's orbit is elliptical and ellipses all have fixed mathematical qualities.
Where the absolute distance is 1/2 the Earth's orbit (¼x93,000,000), the time it takes for the Earth to move from the winter to the summer solstice is 4362.22 hours and the time it takes for the Earth to move from the summer to the winter solstice is 4403.35 hours, the speed of the sun V, is determined as follows:
The only other attempt to measure the direction of the sun, and, although its obscure, its speed, occurred in the closing decades of the 19th Century when Michelson and Morley attempted the famous and, for our understanding of reality, ultimately fatal experiment that was supposed to use the aether, made up to give light, misconceived as a wave, a medium through which to be generated. The experiment simply produced no results, which led to the idea that, because everyone believed it should have produced results, meant the dimensions of the measuring equipment were being altered by speed, leading to our fairy tale physics of today.
Google "speed of the sun" and see what you get. With no explanation as the how, and with very few entries, we find the speed of the sun is anywhere from half a million miles an hour to 550,000 miles per hour. Now isn't that something? Here the Earth is poking around the sun at some 67,000 miles per hour, but we're actually traveling in a different direction at half a million miles a second. Or to make it more ridiculous, some of the time, the Earth is traveling at 500,000 minus 67,000 miles per hour, and some of the time it is traveling at 500,000 plus 67,000 miles per hour, and its speed varies at all times in between, in fact varies by about 134,000 miles per hour. Know how empirical science eliminates this obvious impossibility? It makes up the rule of local systems, a system like the solar system is local in effect. It isn't actually moving anywhere, it's the space between the galaxies that is expanding, causing the distance between the galaxies to increase. Got that? In other words, distance no longer equals time times distance, it equals, well, the creation of distance (space) and time. Put that in your hat and try and make sense out of it.
This is obviously simple balderdash, empirical science's predilection for making up stuff to gloss over its ignorance. Let me provide a picture of the solar system's movement and then let me explain why this picture is anathema to empirical science. With the sun moving at a leisurely 312 miles per hour, the matter embedded in the sun's expanding emission field is also being dragged along at a leisurely 312 miles per hour. The fact that the sun is dragging its orbiting matter is what makes the orbits slightly elliptical, with the sun being slightly closer to the orbits as they pass in front of its direction of motion, the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. The reason the Earth takes a shorter time to move between the winter and summer solstices than it does between the summer and winter solstices is that the solstices are also moving with the sun. When the Earth is traveling against the direction of the sun's motion, the summer solstice is moving to meet it while when it is traveling toward the winter solstice, the solstice is moving away from it, the former shortening the travel time between the solstices, the latter increasing it.
Because we know that the winter solstice is the closest point the Earth passes the sun, we know that this is the direction the sun is traveling in. Wouldn't you know it, it's in the opposite direction empirical science claims the sun is moving, it is moving toward rather than away from Orion (which, I always find fascinating, is the destination of the souls of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, perhaps a holdover from some ancient science that knew where the Earth was actually headed and sent souls there to await its arrival). The precession of the equinoxes is merely the movement of the spring equinox along with the sun, making the background stars appear to move away from the direction of the sun (see column 11-04).
Why is this accurate picture, a mathematical reality that accords with observation, anathema to the religion of empirical science? If the sun is dragging the planets along with it, then the citadel of Celestial Mechanics would not account for whatever it's supposed to account for, basically a static solar system containing matter that would be moving in straight lines but for gravity which has curved the orbits into their present configuration some five billion years ago, and will continue to do so for another, what's the latest, ten billion years.
Empirical science, if it were to confront reality, would have to get off its gilded butt and actually use its minds, do some work to figure out what gravity is, what the force that causes the planets to orbit is, and what the force that causes planets to rotate is.
Don't bet your hard earned money on it. When you're fat, dumb and happy, and you've got the people feeding you completely bamboozled, you ain't going to do nothing but bask in your riches.
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