As background to the title, the consensual scientific community uses the word skeptic to defend existing theory and calls anything new every name in the book starting with crank and ending in attempting to have the person proposing the new thing put in a psychiatric ward or even jail.
I'm a Baconian.
I'm sure that many of you have heard of Sir Francis Bacon but have no idea what a Baconian is.
That's probably because I am the only Baconian, and I'll tell you why in this first column, The Real Skeptic. I am the author of the eight volumes of The Copernican Series (soon to be nine) which presents a consistent picture of how the universe operates and more importantly, what our position in the universe is. The problem with the picture is that it opposes every nonmeasurable conclusion science has fed us about reality, a reality that is not measurable, black holes and the density of planets for instance, and it misinterprets what is measurable, light and the attractive force, or it simply doesn't bother to explain the obvious, why, for instance, planets rotate and orbit, assigning the greatest forces in the universe to historical forces out of our reach or to properties, which aren't forces but characteristics.
In other words, everything you think you know is not knowledge but just conclusions based on a faulty empirical process that tells us that mathematics can do out thinking for us, that all we have to do is come up with a theory that predicts a fact, find the fact, and the theory then becomes fact.
The most prominent fact we have is that gravity is a product of mass, a property of matter like yellow is a property of gold. When you make the statement that gravity is not a property of mass, you will be greeted with all sorts of insults, the most prevalent being, I'll give you the address a building you can jump off, and you'll know exactly what gravity is. In fact, the first professor I approached with the suggestion that gravity was not a property of matter, but rather the result of what matter was doing, cooling, didn't bother to let me explain further that cooling produces emissions that diminish inversely with the square of their distance from the source just like gravity does, but rather suggested I take the door out of his office immediately, or better even, just take the window.
Of course, everyone knows things drop and go splat, but that tells us nothing about the nature of what is making them drop. In fact, put any scientist's back against the wall, assuming they don't disappear like last week's astounding scientific discovery, and they will admit that science has no explanation for why objects fall.
I will get into mass/gravity in future articles, its source and its defects, its lack of proof, and how it was still accepted as the Holy Trinity of empirical science, which is a religion, but this maiden voyage deals with Baconism, and its destruction by the empirical process thought to be the basis of Newtonian Mechanics, the inadequate explanation of why planets orbit and rotate.
Bacon knew one thing that our so-called scientists (science means reality, and scientists are supposed to deal with reality) don't know and, with their empirical fantasies, never will.
Bacon knew that there are some things that we can never know!
That seems like a horrible thing to say, but it is true. We will, no matter what we do, only be able to theorize about the nature of the forces that causes the objects to move in our universe, the gravity that makes objects drop and the current, and note I said current, forces that cause the planets and moons to spin on their axes and orbit the planets and the sun.
Most of us run into Bacon when we find him collecting facts. As a matter of fact, Bacon is rumored to have died by demanding his coachman to stop on a snowy English afternoon so he could collect facts about a fowl in a snowbank.
Given the complexity of Bacon's life, and the many claims that create sensational reactions, the probability that he wrote the Shakespeare plays, the possible involvement with the Rosicruscians, the overwhelming coincidences that place him as one of two illegitimate children of Queen Elizabeth and her lifelong lover Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, hey, talk about heresy, the quackery that Kepler had something to do with Brahe's death has been shattered completely by the Gilders in their new book Heavenly Intrigue where they show when and how Kepler used an arsenic potion to get Brahe's coveted planetary tables and go onto fame and fortune with his mistaken laws of planetary motion, a subject that will be covered in a future column, the story of Bacon dying from being an fanatic knowledge gatherer (read stupid) is probably the false one.
The Shakespeare and illegitimacy claims bolster Bacon's statement that there are certain things about reality we will never know. We will never be able to go to a museum and see an electron in a plastic case because an electron is a theoretical structure. We will never see the mechanism that causes objects to drop, gravity, operating in a plastic case because no matter what we say about gravity, whether it's just a mindless statement like it being a property of matter, or whether it can be described mechanically as the result of a dynamic process, they will just be theoretical constructs.
There are just certain things we can never know.
But to Bacon, there was a way to get closer and closer to what we can't know and that was to collect facts. Bacon theorized if we had all the facts about something, then we would know the hidden facts, the cause of the motion we couldn't see. He said we can induce from facts, and notice induce is not deduction which is what empirical science uses to create the facts it sees as the universe and ourselves. Induction is taking ideas out of thin air that agree with a set of facts.
Bacon said, this is all we can do, we can do nothing further until we increase the facts. When we increase the facts, we will be able to go back and make another induction, and because we have more facts with which the induction has to agree, we will be closer to knowing, although we won't really know because we won't have all the facts.
Thus, Baconism is a process of looking at the facts that exist and coming up with concepts, which aren't real, which aren't facts, but which can be used to agree with the facts. We induce concepts from facts.
Why do we want to induce concepts from facts?
The clearer picture we have of reality, the better we can use reality to our benefit, which, after all, is the purpose of the whole process of science.
If we say, gravity is a property of matter and thus can never be used in our technology, can never be overcome, eliminated or neutralized because we can't change the fact that gold is yellow, then we won't try and we will build a distorted technology based on the existence of gravity when it might be possible to build a technology that incorporated gravity into it.
Bacon said we have to take the facts, induce concepts, and use those concepts to create technology if we can, but we also have to continually increase our storehouse of facts and as we do so, we have to revisit our concepts, inducing new concepts. If the new concepts disagree with the old concepts, then we throw out the old concepts. How do we judge concepts induced from the same set of facts? We use Ockham's Razor. Ockham's Razor simply states that whatever explains the most with the least inductions is probably the correct induction.
It says, keep it simple.
So Bacon collected facts to produce inductions which reflected reality the more facts those inductions explained. He had such a tumultuous life and he is known for so many innovations (not the least of which was unifying the English language which could only be done after the invention of the printing press a little over a century before his birth and in creating codes) that he never codified a scientific process as we view it today. He had a scientific process, but he did not claim to have discovered anything with it, and in fact abandoned his fact collecting project rather early in the game, leaving us with only a slim volume of categories containing facts, probably realizing that the project was one for the centuries rather than for one man alone.
Newton, born several decades after Bacon's death, did not have Bacon's open mind, unless the mind was open to Newton's conclusions. Some of Newton's catastrophic contributions to science were: the idea that matter was uniform by volume and thus he could mathematically show that the cause of gravity, what made objects fall, was proportional to volume, necessarily reduced to mass/gravity as a result of the fact that it not only didn't match the facts Newton used, the more facts we collected, the less it agreed with anything; the notion that the colors were lined up the way they came out of the prism; the absurd notion that white light is made up of all the light colors; the ignorant assumption that all matter was made up of uniform particles, the source of his volume errors; the unfounded idea that the moon produces the tides, an idea that not even today's brilliant fantasists can demonstrate; the stupidity of momentum, that an object will keep in motion unless something causes it to change that motion, made up to justify his mathematical computations of the moon's motion without having to produce any explanation for the source of the motion other than God put the moon in motion in a straight line that was being bent by the Earth's gravity; and the knowledge crippling definition of precession as wobble.
But all of these unfounded assertions are nothing compared to Newton's belief that he was uncovering the basic laws that God had put in place for the universe to operate, and the conclusions Newton's heirs drew from this belief, that once someone uncovered a law of nature, it was immutable and had to be considered as a fact in all other considerations.
What this does is create a view of the universe that is dependent on the time of discovery. If laws are created and made immutable before all the facts are known, then the sequence of the discovery of facts determines the science, or rather the fantasies that result.
Newton's Law of Motion that says that objects will stay in place or motion so long as a force doesn't act to change that place or motion is misleading because it ignores the fact that motion requires current force. The real law, that objects come to rest with respect to the forces acting upon them, is outrageous because that would mean that the planets, which seem in perpetual motion, are really at rest with respect to current forces. It's like looking at the billiard table and seeing the stationary balls. We believe the balls are stationary, but in fact, they are moving, first with the speed of the surface of the Earth as it rotates, then with the speed of the Earth as it orbits the sun, and then with the speed of the sun as it orbits the center of the galaxy and then with whatever motion the galaxy is in. To say the planets and moons are at rest with current forces and change with those current forces is anathema to laws made up before we even knew we were part of a galaxy.
And speaking of galaxies, Newton's immutable law that white light is made up of all colored light and that colored light is busted out in the prism in order of wavelength, rather than the factual reality, that white light's frequency is lengthened the more glass it passes through, reversing the spectrum, led to the dictate that red was the long wave and blue the short. With this dictate in place, the entire field of astronomy rests its case on the red shift, which says that a red shift in the light of the spectrum of galaxies is the result of their motion away from us and each other, that we live in an expanding universe.
However, the dictate is wrong, as has been shown by the invention of the laser, where the stronger energy reds were invented easily but the blue laser escaped technology because its frequency is so much weaker. The Kodak X3 technology, which stacks the red, green and blue receptors one on top of the other, only works when the blue faces the light because the blue is too weak to penetrate the red filter. It is only when the blue is facing the light that the blue is filtered, then the green, and then red, the stronger frequency, or in today's misguided language, wavelength, reaches the last filter. We build a universe on immutable laws that restrict us from seeing reality when we follow Newtonian Empiricism rather than Baconian induction, re-induction, and re-induction as new facts are introduced.
Perhaps the least understood fantasies that resulted from time of discovery law making the empirical process produces is light as a wave particle. Newton ruled light during the 18th century. It was a particle. Then Young's two slit experiment, where light was separated, then intermingled, causing it to recombine, turned light into a wave at the beginning of the 19th century. This explanation was made immutable law before the discovery of induction, which recombines flows, 39 years later so there could be no possibility that electricity was made up of the same thing that light was made up of, with light arranged to neutralize the charge. Instead, light went on as a wave and electricity a particle until the photoelectric effect indicated that light could be a particle. The time of discovery prevented an interpretation of Young's experiment that could actually have led to discoveries about light that were far more reaching than the photoelectric effect.
The time of discovery of Newtonian Empiricism turns us all into ignorant fantasists with no knowledge of the universe at all. Until we go back to Bacon's dictate, that there are some things we can't know, and stop putting those things we can't know boxed in by laws and dictates, we will continue in our ignorance.
That's why this column will deal with things we believe we know to be fact, but which are in actuality, just fantasy, and that's why I'm the real skeptic. I will question the status quo in future columns, whereas today's skeptics simply affirm it.
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