One of empirical science's strongest, and I mean strongest in the sense of, this is truth, so don't argue, one of its strongest claims is it's built on a set of principles that have grown over the centuries, been tested by the greatest minds available and have survived the "test of time." This is followed closely by, look at the modern technological world we live in if you doubt the veracity of empirical science.
Let's see, now, Aristotle stood the test of time for several thousand years and was tested by the greatest minds available, who simply killed dissenters, so this must be a pretty good argument. Let's look at the empirical story in all its glory.
It starts when a Polish canon, who was also a doctor and a lawyer, decided to practice a little of Occam's razoring with all of the circles within circles that had been built up to explain the motion in the sky with Aristotle's Earth centered universe. The primary reason anyone needed to know the position of the planets and the stars was navigation. With the Earth and the sun out of place, the picture of the solar system involved almost a hundred circular orbits with some planets orbiting other planets to explain reality. Copernicus, by putting the sun in the center of the solar system, drew a picture of the solar system that needed half as many circles as were then depicted. However, by removing the Earth as the center of the universe, he violated about umpteen million church dicta, and being a canon, he waited until he was on his deathbed to release his work. The year was 1543, less than 500 years ago.
This date, however, was the beginning of a science that felt we had to explain actual reality no matter where the chips fell. It can be said to be the dawn of modern science, although not the dawn of empirical science. Empirical science is the doctrine that says the only way we can know reality is through mathematical description. It is not a pursuit of reality, it is a pursuit of a mathematical description of reality and because the most important aspects of reality cannot be mathematized, but must be conceptualized, empirical science is the exact opposite of the Copernican attempt to draw an accurate picture of reality.
I should note that the art of creating technology was practiced very adeptly with the Earth as the center of the universe misconception. Technology is the process of conceiving a picture that doesn't exist in reality and then testing reality in order to see if that picture works. The incessant warfare over the ages provides a perfect example of how this works. Forts were built with walls. Ladders were designed to allow the walls to be scaled. Walls were designed on a slant to prevent the ladders from being used. Giant wheeled ladders were rolled into place in front of the sloping walls. Flaming tar balls were flung to burn down the rolling ladders. Cannons were built to crumble the walls. Spears killed troops. Bows and arrows killed spear men. Armor protected the spear men. Long bows were developed to pierce the armor. It's going on to this very day, with one improvement being countered by another development, and the heavens are still up there doing their thing, regardless of the idiocy we make up to explain what that thing is. The explanations for reality do not have anything to do with reality so long as they don't prevent the development of technology in reality. There was no lack of people crying impossible when the Wright brothers were inventing the airplane, but there was no vision of reality that prevented them from thinking the possible.
This is all relevant, because as we wade through the shallow waters of empirical history, it's important to keep asking, how does a bunch of stuff, justified on the basis that reality is stranger than the human mind can comprehend, connect with reality?
Until Copernicus, the question of gravity wasn't important. Objects fell because it was reasonable for them to fall to the center of the universe. After Copernicus, gravity became a problem because, with the Earth whizzing around the sun, and around its axis, people wanted to know not only why objects fell, but what was holding them to the surface of the Earth, why didn't they just fly off into space. A man named Tartaglia, more interested in cannons than gravity, was the first to come up with a specific measurement of gravity. Born in about 1500, he wanted to know the optimum angle a cannonball could travel. He simply took a cannon out into a field and started shooting off cannonballs at different elevations until he came up with 45%, an angle that fifty years later would become significant in Galileo's computation of the force of gravity by rolling balls down an inclined plane and letting them roll off the end of a table to see how far they would travel. Galileo wasn't interested in cannons, he was interested in gravity, and he was able to compute its inverse square nature as a result of these experiments.
Galileo also attempted to prove Copernicus correct. All of his arguments were for naught, including the quite reasonable argument that the rotation of the Earth was what caused the tides, until his invention of a telescope that could see the moons of Jupiter orbiting Jupiter. Sometimes science is that simple. While it didn't prove Copernicus, it went a long way convincing people of his correctness. An unintended result of Henry VIII's withdrawal form the Catholic Church several years before Galileo was born did the same thing for England, shedding Papal dogma about reality in favor of actual reality and creating an educated class in England that grew up with the Copernican picture as reality. Not so the Danish, where Tycho Brahe ruled the astronomical profession to the exclusion of Galileo. Brahe's meticulous measurements of the moon's orbit led to the incredible error that is at the foundation of empirical science.
Brahe believed that while using the Copernican picture resulted in better navigational charts, it didn't mean Copernican was correct. He adhered to the belief that the Earth was stationary, with everything revolving around it. Thus, when he measured the moon speeding up in the summer and slowing down in the winter, it was beyond his ability to think that it was an illusion, that the moon just appeared to be speeding up because the halves of its orbit that occurred in the summer were shorter than the halves that occurred in the winter. With a stationary Earth, those halves had to be identical and therefore the only explanation for the difference in timing had to be that the moon was speeding up and slowing down.See column 02-02, recently published in Atlantis Rising This introduced the notion that planets have variable speeds, something that, had we not grown up with it, would be simply absurd. However, Kepler, the glory seeker who deviously inserted himself into Brahe's life disagreed with Brahe on Copernicus as he was a Lutheran and Lutherans, as a matter of policy, disagreed with Rome and its anti-Copernican dogma. Kepler stole Brahe's meticulous astronomical tables and concluded that the description of the moon speeding up and slowing down explained the orbit of Mars. One of the battles that had been raging over Copernicus was whether the orbits were perfect circles, and even those who believed the Copernican picture, also believed the perfect circle notion.
So when Kepler, who had spent his life attempting to fit the solar system first into solid geometry, then into plane geometry, came up with a true picture of the orbits as ellipses, he couldn't let it go at that. He had to account for Brahe's mistake because, just as Brahe thought the Earth was unmoving, Kepler thought the sun was unmoving (see column 08-06). He therefore made up the law, and here we see the birth of empirical ignorance, that a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. Although the law has no basis in fact, it carries with it the inherent measurement of an inverse square law because the areas swept out are determined by the square of their radii. Kepler had unwittingly made up a law dealing with planetary motion that connected with Galileo's actual measurement of gravity, confusing the two, as things look today, forever, and sinking any attempt to form a consistent picture of reality into the darkness of oblivion.
Let's stop and think about this for a minute. The basic tenet of empirical science is that mathematics can do our thinking for us. It scorns concepts although it claims that it can mathematically prove concepts to be facts. We all know that the simple formula for computing the time it takes for something to move is to divide the distance by the rate. That's pure mathematics. It doesn't take much thinking at all. If we're traveling down the interstate and we see the next rest stop is 180 mile away and we are traveling at 60 mph, we just divide 60 into 180, and we find it'll take us three hours to get there. Brahe knew the distance the moon was traveling, and he knew the time it took to travel that distance in the summer and the time it took to travel that distance in the winter. All he needed to do to find the rate is to divide the distance by the time. In our example, if we didn't have a speedometer, but only a clock, we could measure the time it took to get to the next rest stop, divide the distance, 180, by the time, 3 hours, and get our rate, 60 mph.
If we didn't know the distance, but we had a speedometer and a watch, we could simply multiply the time, 3 hours, by the speed, 60 mph, and when we got to the next rest stop we would know it was 180 miles from the last. It's all mindless mathematics. Plug the figures in, out comes the answer. Brahe plugged the figures in for the summer and the winter, and he came up with a different rate. Therefore, the moon was speeding up in the summer and slowing down in the winter.
But wait. Brahe believed the Earth was the center of the universe. That belief involved the concept that the Earth was motionless is space. That concept, a belief, a nothingness, an ephemeral, a will-o-the-wisp, dictated Brahe's mathematical conclusion because it prohibited him from measuring reality. If he thought the Earth was stationary, then the distance the moon traveled in the summer cycles had to equal the distance the moon traveled in the winter cycles. But the distance is not the same because the moon's orbit travels with the Earth, and the Earth travels with the sun. The distance the moon travels in its summer orbits is shorter. The distance it travels in its winter orbits is longer. Thus, the math isn't measuring reality because it's assuming, as a result of a conceptual limitation, that the distance is a known quantity. Instead of measuring rate, which Brahe in any event knew, he should have taken the known rate and known time, and computed the distance differential. In fact, Galileo, in his relentless search for proof of the Copernican picture, could have well used Brahe's measurements to prove Copernicus correct, had he been aware of them.
So all of empirical science, which claims it's validity based on its mathematical accuracy, is constructed on a series of assumptions, almost always, as in the case of Brahe, hidden, that control the computations that end up measuring a reality that is stranger than the human mind can contemplate.
Fancy that!
Kepler, who enshrined Brahe's mistake into the very fabric of empirical science, was a contemporary of both Bacon and Descartes, most famous for his statement which, popularly translated, is "I think, therefore I am." Bacon had a lot to say about scientific process, how we should go about finding out the nature of reality. He recognized that there were things we could never know with complete certainty, primarily the hidden causes of the movement in our reality, the movement of dropped objects and the planets. He concluded we needed to collect facts meticulously, and as we did so, draw conclusions from those facts, in other words, create concepts. Concepts, he said, could never be a substitute for reality and therefore should be continually revised as new facts became available. When there was more than one concept to choose from, he added, we should use Occam's Razor, selecting the one that explained the most with the fewest assumptions. The British Royal Society was, in fact, started as a study group to explore Bacon's thinking, and was actually attempting to follow Bacon until it was hijacked by Newton and turned in to a law generating machine.
Descartes was an embodiment of Baconian procedure. He set out to try and explain why the planets orbited. He concluded that the solar system is like a water vortex, only in space, and the planets were caught up in the swirling vortices. Now, while this sounds a little out there, at least he was trying to explain the motion of the planets, something no one had done before or since (unless you take Laplace's silly historical swirling mass of gas as an attempt to explain a current force). Who knows where we would be today had this line of thought been openly pursued as a buildable concept. Heck, who knows how far along we would be understanding reality if someone, anyone, had said, hey, Brahe's observation that the Galilean measurement of gravity as diminishing inversely with the square of its distance was precisely the same as the long known measurement of light, which also diminishes inversely with the square of its distance. Now there was a real mathematical relationship, but no one thought it of sufficient importance to bother following up on. No one at the time was even bothering to figure out what the nature of light is, and when they started a half century after Brahe's murder (again, column 02-04), no one remembered the observation, or would, for that matter, have seen any significance in it.
The point is, the Baconian process would dictate that facts such as these be preserved, and then incorporated into conceptualizations such as Descartes'.
It was not to be, primarily because of one man, Isaac Newton, who couldn't, under any circumstances, stand having his concepts, presented as facts, challenged. However, between the time of Bacon and Newton, another conceptual discussion arose, the question of what light is. Notice the question wasn't, how is light produced, but what it was. The argument was over whether it was a particle or a wave. Instead of starting with the facts, how is it produced, how does it travel, what happens to it when it travels, and building concepts of what light might be, the drift toward empiricism turned this argument into what has become an empirical farce, turning an argument whether light was a wave or a particle into a conclusion that it's both, throwing the whole world into the darkness we remain in today. This is the more notable because at the time, there was probably no phenomena that was more measurable than light. Where it came from was evident. How it expanded was evident. The fact that it expanded uniformly was evident. All these facts, and note they are measurable facts, were, and are, ignored by the godly measurer, empirical science, today.
Well, I thought the last few columns were so taxing, I'd take this week off and just do a quick knock-off of a subject I was steeped in. Instead, I find myself seeing relationships and perspectives that had escaped me, so looks like it's going to take more than one column to finish the history.
Says something empirical ignorance, though. It, to be polite, has a history.
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