Empirical Science defines its goal as uncovering the basic laws that underlie the operation of the universe. In doing so, it conveniently ignores the meaning of the word "operation." Operation, because it deals with motion, and motion, because it deals with force, are conveniently ignored, explained away as terms so that they can be applied as measurements in equations dealing with basic laws. Terms do not have meaning outside the measurements which they describe, but the word "operation" signifies motion, and motion signifies force, and force signifies something that is happening, not just a term to measure what is happening.
As a result, empirical science has no mechanical explanation for something as simple as fire, what is going on in the everyday household fireplace. You put a log in and it burns. It burns when it reaches a combustible measuring point. That's it. Ignorance, pure and simple, of the most basic operation in our existence. Of course, the more obvious pieces of ignorance that empirical science embeds us in are: The mechanical nature of the force that causes objects to drop, that causes us to stay stuck to the surface of the Earth; The mechanical nature of the force that causes the sun to rise in the morning, which is to say, the force that is causing the Earth to rotate on its axis; The mechanical nature of the force that causes the planets to orbit the sun; The mechanical nature of the electricity that drives our modern society; The mechanics of the light that allows us to see reality; and, not to put to fine an edge on it, even the nature of the oil, coal and gas that produces our energy. I won't even go into the morass of idiocy empirical science produces when it comes to explaining how we know, or should know, what we know, and how it is that we can know, be aware of our need to know.
Empirical science is a barren land indeed because it does not deal with the realities that we need to know, the nature of the hidden forces that produce the movements that define our existence.
As a Baconian, I have a different goal. That goal is simple. It is to come up with a consistent picture of physical reality. A consistent picture is not a picture that explains one thing one way, and another thing another way. A consistent picture of physical reality does, as the books of The Copernican Series do, explains all physical phenomena with a single elementary particle with two properties. The only way to produce a consistent picture of the operation of physical reality is to look at what is common about all of physical reality and then distill those commonalities into a particle that explains physical reality. The methodology of empirical science is to look at bits and pieces of physical reality, measure them, then create a particle to explain the measurement.
We end up with such a plethora of particles (and the fame that accrues to the particles' discoverers) that the international community has to put a governor on the creation of new particles, limit their creation to a specific number. Even when agreement is reached about a specific number of particles, characteristics are added, like charm and color, to multiply the search for additional particles, particles that have been accepted within the limited number, but which now have varied properties, to keep the money generating search going on for generations. Needless to say, the result is a proliferation of inconsistent theories, not only inconsistent with all other theories, but even internally inconsistent, inconsistent with themselves. Legal disputes about the priority of inventions bust out because the theories underlying the inventions are so tenuous as to show no clear path to the invention itself. There are no laboratory books clearly showing how the light bulb was invented, or how it morphed into the diode and then the radio tube. There is just a cloud of blather.
Because empirical science creates laws and formulas to describe physical reality, the physical reality that the empirical scientist sees is controlled by the laws and formulas that have already been created. It doesn't matter if the laws were created by men who knew nothing about the facts of reality. For instance, the laws dealing with the wave nature of light were created by people before the discovery of electricity. When later facts are found that disagree with the laws, those facts become anomalies, or more likely non facts, or even are simply ignored.
This has created a void as people grow up and find that physical reality is more and more removed from the reality that they actually see. For instance, the worldwide megaliths such as the pyramids, could not have been built under the present day constraints of empirical laws. As a result, empirical science simply passes them off as having been built by precocious farmers as the emerged from the stone age. In the process, empirical science ignores that both the herds of domesticated animals and cultivated crops could not have been bred by cavemen, and didn't appear overnight, but rather would have taken millennia to create. Having produced an ice age to explain the evidence for a worldwide flood because its laws prevented the existence of a worldwide flood, empirical science's time line begins at the end of the flood, and its rationale for ignoring a worldwide civilization is based on the lack of evidence washed away by the flood, the pottery shards that define empirical science. Empirical science ignores the evidence that does remain, the worldwide megaliths, assigning them to primitive civilizations who just happened to come upon the ability to crossbreed cattle and crops in a manner that we ourselves are now just only learning how to accomplish.
The result is, as people grow up in an empirical world that doesn't explain the real world, they attempt to come up with alternate explanations, explanations that will explain what they see. This produces an alternative science that seeks to explain reality in terms that make sense to them. The problem with the alternate science seekers is that they yearn to be accepted by empirical science. If they come up with alternatives to empirical science, they risk isolation from the general community that they are trying to reach, they risk being labeled hacks, quacks and charlatans by the foppish writers that act as the gatekeepers of the empirical truth, the organized skeptics whose only skepticism runs to challenges to the orthodoxy, the science fiction writers such as Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury and Heinlein who sold out for an appropriate piece of the pie and the ever-ignorant newspaper science writers who yearn to trade their pauperish salaries in for book contracts.
This produces an alternate science that works within the context of empirical science, accepting its laws, laws like gravity, empty notions like swirling masses of gas to explain solar system motion, idiocies like the Big Bang to explain the rest of the motion in the universe, the ice ages, as well as lesser stupidities, a precession that is both stable on the Earth's orbit and moves around it, a light that is both a wave and a particle, an electricity that moves in a circuit, around a circle mind you, between positive and negative points in the circuit, and even an atom which has positive particles packed into its nucleus, made-up particles which are supposed to repel, but because they can't, require another made-up force to hold them together, positive particles which attract electrons into orbit around them, electrons which need a positive and negative force to move, but in an atom need nothing to just keep on moving along forever.
Faced with the inconsistencies of empirical science, and a reality that needs explaining, alternate science starts to become as fanciful as empirical science. It draws on the fringes of empirical science, the impossible speculations made to titillate the public, black holes, dark matter, worm holes and nonexistent dimensions, empirical, defined as measurable, concepts that are simply not measurable, and begins to use them to explain the alternate scientific theories. Thus, in the realm of alternate science, time travel, invisibility, group consciousness and inter-dimensional travel become commonplace. It'ss as if empirical science is feeding alternate science absurdities so that it can later use those absurdities to discredit alternate science, and alternate science, being eager to please, laps them up and spits them out to its own destruction.
One other feature has complicated the field of alternate science. When radio was invented in the 19th century, people immediately leaped to the notion that if people could build mechanisms that sent invisible communications through the atmosphere, then they were only doing what the human mind could do. Up until this time, history shows religious explanations for the unexplainable, angels from heaven or shades, the incorporeal forms of the dead that walked the Earth, and the emissaries of the devil come to tempt. Now, the area of the paranormal was born, the explanation of the unexplained in non-religious terminology. I have no idea whether things like telekinesis, remote viewing, ghosts, mental telepathy, and the myriad other nonrepeatable phenomena that make up the paranormal world exist in reality or not. In my view, they have no bearing on producing a consistent picture of physical reality because a consistent picture of physical reality requires an examination of physical reality and paranormal phenomena by definition are not physical.
However, alternate science seems determined to embrace the paranormal along with the cheesier parts of the empirical explanation in its effort to explain the blanks left in physical reality by an empirical science that has blinded itself to actual reality by its laws. And while I don't know about the validity of the paranormal, and don't have need of it in my objective analysis of physical reality, I can say without question that as soon as anyone, anyone at all, either mainstream or alternate, or the pencil salesman on the corner, starts talking about interdimensional travel, time travel, invisibility or coherent communications through mental telepathy, I run, not walk, the other way.
This leaves some very real contrasts in the search for explanations about physical reality between myself, and my search for a consistent picture of that reality, and empirical science.
I look at motion. When I see motion, I know that there is force at work. When I know that there is force at work, I want to know the mechanical nature of that force, how it works. Why? Because it is only by knowing the nature of reality that we can produce the technology that can extend our range of survivability within that reality. A science that ignores the mechanical nature of gravity is going to produce technology designed to overcome that existing force of gravity, fire spewing rockets and airplanes, instead of technology that simply eliminates the gravity. We cannot produce technology that reflects reality if we don't have a consistent picture of reality, and if we can't produce a technology that reflects reality, we will not survive in that reality.
Empirical science on the other hand expends its effort in answering questions the answers to which would have no effect on our technology. Like the religions before it, it explores questions that have no answers, questions of origin, how the universe began, or questions of distance, how big the universe is, none of which we can use in perfecting the technology we need to extend our range of survivability in the universe. Empirical science, in attempting to answer the unanswerable, and in any event, the unuseful, spends its time manufacturing the reality its bogus answers produce, black holes, dark matter and energy, particles ad infinitum, light as a wave particle, electricity as a moving charge, chaos theories which produce multidimensional absurdities, anything but on the actual reality we need to define in order to survive.
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