During 1563, a great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter occurred. What made this conjunction different from the repetitive 20 year conjunctions that occur when Jupiter catches up with and passes Saturn in the sky, was its effect on two people who have shaped our present day distorted view of reality.
Tycho Brahe, sixteen at the time and already versed in both the Ptolemaic and Copernican Tables listing planetary positions, used the conjunction to note how far from reality those table were. They were both off in their predictions as to the timing of the 1563 conjunction. As a result, Brahe devoted his life to making accurate measurements of the planets, measurements which, although unpublished for a quarter of a century after his death, held up until the telescope refined them even further.
Johannes Kepler, unborn at the time, used Brahe's publication of the event to mark his first step toward the much beloved fame he sought, hypothesizing that the distance between Jupiter and Saturn's orbits was controlled by the geometrical triangle. As a result, Kepler for a time believed that geometry was sacred and spent time attempting to relate the orbits of the planets to geometrical shapes. When this failed, he turned to solids, pyramids, cubes and so forth, nesting one within the other and claiming, in his first work, The Cosmic Mystery, The Secret of the Universe, that the solid geometric shapes controlled the spacing of the planets.
As noted in my last column, Brahe firmly believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Kepler, on the other hand, was raised as a Lutheran, a product of the reformation, and as Lutherans were in the forefront of spreading the Copernican System of a sun-centered solar system throughout Europe, a convinced Copernican. As there was no observational way to prove the validity of either the Ptolemaic, Earth centered or the Copernican sun-centered system, supporting the Copernican system in the face of almost two millennia of Ptolemaic "facts" was a leap of faith, a belief.
Thus, as the 16th Century came to a conclusion, the two most influential people at the basis of the 20th Century system of empirical belief had seemingly internal contradictory viewpoints. Brahe, the believer in the old system, demanded accurate observations of reality while Kepler, the believer in the new, and correct system, created theories out of thin air and then attempted to discover facts that supported the theory.
While Brahe was a Ptolemaic advocate, he recognized that the Copernican Tables produced more accurate predictions than the Ptolemaic tables. He felt that this resulted from the Copernican Tables being fresher, and he focused his attention on producing even more accurate tables. Why were the tables produced?
Sailors use the lights in the sky to navigate the boundless seas. In order to successively navigate a course from one port to another port, they needed to know the positions of the lights in the sky. As the planets were constantly moving, and as the night sky constantly changed with the change in the position of the Earth as it orbited the sun, the more accurate the information the sailors had about these positions, the greater the chance they had of making an appropriate landfall.
A couple of millennia of basing the observation of the skies on the observation's ability to predict where the objects in the heavens will be at a certain time created a mind set of prediction as a test of theory. While Brahe was cool headed enough to recognize that the ability of the Copernican system to make better predictions than the Ptolemaic system had nothing to do with the validity of the theory, the fact that the Copernican system was the correct system and made more accurate predictions has not been lost on empirical science, which has made prediction the basis of its methodology.
This objective analysis is further complicated by the relationship of what, at the time, was becoming known as astronomy, and astrology. Other than navigation, the motion of the stars were catelogued in an effort to predict the outcome of human interactions. Kings and Emperors, the nobility of the world, demanded that astrologers cast their horoscopes before acting, the predictions produced by the horoscopes determining the course of action.
While Brahe was a practiced alchemist and astrologer, he preferred to draw the distinction between the uncontrollable predictions of astrology and the very real predictions of astronomy. While he professed a belief in the possibility of astrological predictions, he very wisely claimed that the variance in the Ptolemaic and Copernican Tables upon which the astrologers based their predictions, combined with the variance in the methods from which those predictions were derived made the resulting predictions untrustworthy. He even refused to cast the horoscope of his benefactor, the powerful Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, claiming that such predictions did not "promise the certainty which I need and which astronomy, which only examines carefully the motions of the stars, allows."
Looking at Brahe's predictions, what do we have? Brahe, with the belief that the motion of the heavens is orderly, felt that if he catelogued that motion in sufficient detail, could predict future motion. He wasn't making predictions, he was assuming that he could identify repetitive cycles. I can predict that the sun will come up in the morning, and my prediction will come true. I am not really predicting anything. I am just identifying repetitions.
Kepler was uninterested in the massive calculations that were needed to discover the possible repetitive nature of the heavens, much preferring to create theories and then attempt to find the facts that supported those theories. Brahe, with his forty years of tables, published in 1627 as the Rudolfine Tables, had a wealth of information, especially concerning the orbit of Mars, which Kepler needed to "prove" his theory of nested solids. Kepler set out to obtain those tables, and, by worming his way into a position as assistant in charge of preparing them for publication, poisoned Brahe with a Mercury solution and secreted the tables from Brahe's rightful heirs (see the Gildar's scientific analysis in Heavenly Intrigue).
Examining the orbit of Mars, Kepler was able to concoct his laws of planetary motion which basically asserted that planets sweep out equal areas in equal times, with the orbits forming ellipses rather than perfect circles. The rest is history, with the inverse square nature of the elliptical hypothesis that the planets sped up and slowed down, allowing them to sweep out equal areas in equal times, leading to Newton's attempt to show that the planet's were falling at a rate that increased with the square of their distance but for the fact that they were traveling in a straight line as a result of their momentum.
Missing from both Brahe's search for repetitive cycles and Kepler's Laws (and Newton's Theory of Gravitation) was an explanation of what was causing the motion. Kepler, being the mystic, felt that something was emanating from the sun that grew weaker with distance causing the planets to move. However, with no way to explain how this caused the moons to move, this fairly accurate hypothesis was abandoned for the fame of creating inflexible laws of universal application.
We've seen that the timing of laws dictates the explanation for facts discovered subsequent to the discovery of the law. Bacon, sitting observing the Copernican clash, and the creation of Brahe's tables and Kepler's hypotheses, had his own views about the effort to get at the root of reality. He was the first to recognize that there were certain things that we could not know. Primary among the things we couldn't know, but which we had to deal with, were the hidden forces of nature, the forces that made objects drop and planets and moons rotate and orbit.
We couldn't ignore the nature of these forces because they were central to our very existence. However, because the forces could only be viewed from their effects, we could never get closer than unprovable explanations. He did feel, however, that the more facts we had, the more accurate our picture of these forces could be. He therefore advocated that we make no laws, but instead, like Ockham, create concepts based on the facts at hand, accept the concept that explains the most with the least, and then continually change those concepts as new facts are uncovered.
However, Newton, seeking to make his theories the law of the land, claimed that his theories were fact and his methodology, which was based on his theories predicting a specific fact, that the moon's orbit was computable by computing the gravity in the Earth and the moon by volume, was adopted as the universal empirical method. Even though Newton's prediction failed, and was based on faulty reasoning, the empirical belief system recognizes only those theories that predict facts and then turns those theories into fact once the predicted fact is found, requiring that all subsequent theories take into account the created facts produced by the successful empirical predictions. Today, when predictions don't conform to theory, later discovered factors are substituted for the predictions. The discovery of the background radiation that radio telescopes experience is such an ex post facto prediction.
The result is an ignorance of reality that is greater than the ignorance Brahe discovered when he observed the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 1563. The first volume of The Copernican Series, At the Gates of the Citadel, contains a cover graphic that mathematically demonstrates that Kepler's Laws do not reflect reality. Showing the times between the summer and winter solstices, the graphic shows that these equal areas are swept out in unequal times, with the time differential being almost two days. This cover, together with the calculations, was attacked on two bases. The first, and probably the most absurd, was that because we didn't know all the forces in the universe, we didn't know what forces were affecting the outcome. Although reality didn't conform to Kepler's Laws, it was our ignorance of reality that was wrong rather than Kepler's Laws.
The second point critics made was even more telling. Grabbing the latest edition of the Astronomical Tables, these critics pointed out that the difference was closer to a day rather than two days, a day's difference being less than a percent and thus presumably being within the margin of error allowed all theories. However, the tables used incorporate Kepler's Laws into a determination where the summer and winter solstices are, and because the computations do not accord with reality, the point at which the Earth is closest and furthest from the sun is moved from the winter and summer solstices.
How does anyone determine when the Earth is closest and furthest from the sun? Simply by sticking a stick in the earth and watching the shadow the sun produces. When the shadow reverses course in the winter, the Earth has passed its closest point, and when the shadow reverses in the summer, the Earth has passed its furthest point. No amount of created laws and manufactured facts can change simple reality. The tilt of the Earth determines the closest point and the furthest points, not some Astronomer making computations on the basis of manufactured laws and facts.
Empirical science is a process of using predictions to turn mysticism into reality, resulting in universal ignorance about the actual reality in which we exist.
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