We broke off the last column on the issue of light. This is interesting in the history of empirical ignorance simply because it's a foolish argument that embroiled empirical science as it was being created by Newton. Newton, remember, needed the Earth and the moon to be made up of identical particles uniformly distributed throughout in order to use relative volume as a method to compute the amount of gravity that would be pulling the moon out of its orbit. In his experimentation with light, Newton had to adopt the same notion for light, that it was made out of particles. It was probably more of an assumption than anything else.
Remember, the Royal Society was centered at Gresham College in London and Cambridge was a long carriage drive up the road. Newton was out of touch with the day-to-day discussions going on. One of those discussions was about light, and the Gresham crowd tended to agree with Huygens' conclusion that light was a wave. Therefore, after the success of Newton's reflecting telescope with the Society, Newton was emboldened to share with the Society his thoughts on the nature of light, the litany that white light is made up of all colors (this from a man who knew absolutely nothing about the electromagnetic continuum) and the equally empty litany that the colors are lined by the way they come out of a prism much like the notes of music are lined up (or at least, that's the way he finally presented it when he grabbed hold the reigns of the Royal Society some three decades later).
Newton's theory of colors was reasonably accepted by the members of the Royal Society, but ran into criticism from Hooke, who, in agreement with the consensus that light was a wave, noted that Newton was describing light as a particle. This mild criticism set up a lifetime of enmity, on the part of Newton, for Hooke. Newton under no circumstances could abide criticism and, indeed, this character defect on the part of Newton, who virtually took over the world of science at the beginning of the 18th Century and ruled it with an iron fist for the next three decades of his life, is the basis for the mathematical model that has left empirical science floundering in ignorance ever since.
Reacting to Hooke's criticism, Newton, when provided the opportunity to connect Galileo's inverse square measurement of gravity with Kepler's hoked up inverse square law of planets measuring out equal areas in equal times, (see column 06-06), determined to create a mathematical proof that couldn't be challenged. Along those lines, he started by creating a new mathematics so no one could challenge his own math, then prosed (using the meaning, "to write in a dull, tiresome style") it out in Latin to remove it from the domain of wide critical examination. In doing this, Newton became the first of the empirical writers whose books are never read, but whose thoughts are popularized and spread among the masses, the same process the Roman Church used to spread its dogma to the common people without those people having the ability to comment on its source or validity. As noted in the above column, Newton didn't prove anything with his math, the concepts underlying the terms of his equations being patently erroneous, and even if his concepts had not been patently erroneous, his math didn't equate what he set out to prove.
Rather than being a deterrence to empirical science, Newton became its model, a model of ill-conceived concepts carrying a claim of mathematical proof bruited to the general public through a retinue of poorly educated teachers and professors, popular association journals, newspaper science columns and dumb TV programs.
Newton died in 1727, on his deathbed imploring Halley, the Royal Astronomer, to get better measurements of the orbit of the moon to prove his theory. As the 18th Century drifted along, it became increasingly apparent that Newton's equations not only failed to work for the moon, they failed to work big time for the rest of the objects of the solar system, and it was at this point that empirical science embarked on its methodology of outright deception and lies, bald statements with no basis or support in fact. Rather than discarding Newton and going back to the drawing board and asking, okay, what's making objects fall, what's making the planets move, empirical science simply said, although Newton's equations didn't work, he still discovered gravity. That was the line I was fed since I was a kid, Newton had an apple fall on his head and discovered gravity. I could never figure out how anyone could discover the most obvious force in our lives. It's like saying, someone woke up one morning, saw the sun, and discovered sunlight, or fell down and discovered the Earth, or looked up and discovered the sky.
It took over a hundred years after the death of Newton for empirical science to come up with some sort of explanation how Newton's attempt to prove gravity was a property of and therefore proportional to matter by using the amount of matter in planets to predict their orbits failed, but still could be accepted and used. It turned the unworkable formula around to measure a planet's orbit to compute how much matter was in the planet, ignoring the fact that the proposition had never been proven in the first place. Laplace, in 1775, replaced Newton's God as a source of motion for the planets, with the very empirical swirling mass of gas (now dust), a fantasy born of the empirical practice of saying, this is the way things are, so this is how they got that way. That did away with the need for any sort of current force moving the planets, and therefore the need to use actual mental work to come up with an explanation for their movement. It glossed over Newton's straight-line notion, but then, no one was using the amount of matter to compute how it affects orbits, so that was let fall by the wayside.
In the mid-nineteenth century, William Whewell established himself as the master of the scientific method. Like Newton, he believed in God. He sort of had to because he was talking about the laws of the universe and without a God, there was no lawmaker (unlike empiricists today, who illogically claim unauthored laws control everything). Whewell came up with the ingenious argument that even though Newton's equations didn't work, he still uncovered a law of the universe in positing his hypothesis, that gravity is a property of and proportional to mass (the new matter computed by the orbits of the planets which basically means density). Newton's inspiration led him to a correct conclusion even though his process was human, ergo faulty. Whewell is considered the father of the scientific method, but considering there is no scientific method when it comes to proving ideas to be facts, there's only a scientific method that can show whether ideas work in reality, wading through Whewell's voluminous pages render us true believers in anything. In fact, Whewell went Newton one better in obfuscation. Instead of inventing a language and couching it in pedantic Latin, he simply wrote enough words to discourage anyone from being capable of disagreeing with him. It would take a lifetime just resolving one dispute raised by Whewell's, well, logic, sort of like arguing from the Bible where all points of view can be supported.
Meanwhile, toward the end of the 18th Century, the water wars were once again beginning to heat up. Newton's dogma that light was a particle not a wave had gone relatively unchallenged throughout the century, but the switch over from God as the driving force of the solar system to the much more concrete swirling mass of gas started to put cracks in the acceptance of light as a particle and a reexamination of Huygens. Young came up with an experiment, popularly known today as the two-slit experiment, that showed conclusively that light was a water wave (see columns 09-04 and 02-06). At about the same time, Henry Cavendish dummied up an experiment that proved conclusively that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. In this little experiment, also the darling of high school classes the world over, a small mass is attached to a coil and brought close to another mass, where the inverse nature of gravity is conveniently measured. Cavendish is one reason why Whewell could glibly claim Newton, while wrong, was right about the law of gravity.
I mention these two experiments together, Cavendish at the close of the 18th Century and Young at the opening of the 19th Century to demonstrate the absolute idiocy of a empirical science that proves its fantasies to be facts and then has to account for them forever more as facts, never to be revised, never to be questioned, heck, why question the landscape? As soon as ideas are accepted as fact, the revision to ideas that is absolutely necessary when new facts are discovered never takes place. At the same time these two guys were creating fact out of fantasy, an Italian, Alessandro Volta, invented the first battery, allowing for laboratory experimentation with electricity. It took another 30 years for either Joseph Henry or Michael Faraday, take your pick, to discover induction, and believe it or not, another 50 years for empirical science to hoke up some sort of verbal statement that would pass for the public as an explanation for the intelligently generated force that operates our modern world. Electricity is driven by the electromotive force (see how clear and explanatory that is) and a unit of that electromotive force (empirical science always quantifies, and here, it really has something to quantify, and in fact, that's all it does) is a volt and a volt measures, here comes the punch line, the potential difference between two elements, in Volta's case, after extensive experimentation, zinc and silver.
So how do we get from Cavendish and Young to inductance and potential difference? The "fact" of light as a wave and the "fact" that the Cavendish experiment actually measured the effects of the mass on the torsion spring were well in place before anyone knew what was going on in the far more measurable field of electricity. When electricity was discovered, it certainly couldn't be equated with light because electricity needed a conductor to connect two elements. When Cavendish did his little experiment, he knew nothing about potential differences and the inverse nature of their effect on the space around them. To this day, empirical science brushes off attempts to demonstrate Cavendish as a result of the potential difference of the "masses" used just as it brushes off any request for an explanation for the motion of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. As for electricity needing a wire, Franklin, with his kite, had long since demonstrated that light was electricity. Even when empirical science started to catch up with reality with the conceptual expression of light as electricity in Maxwell's incomprehensible mathematics describing the very real continuum of electromagnetic emissions which included light, heck, even when Einstein demonstrated that the particles that made up light were the same particles that make up electricity, empirical science balked, never wavering from its wave theory of light, just adding to it by saying light has a dual nature as a particle and a wave. Can't get any clearer than that. If it weren't for Thomas Edison, we'd all be walking around in the dark. Instead, we're just encased in a mental darkness that is locked into the mind by the belief that ideas can become facts which can then be used to create other ideas that can then become facts, each successive stage driving us deeper into a fantasy land far removed from reality, our inventors floundering around in the darkness, coming up with breakthroughs in spite of empirical science's shroud of ignorance (see column 11-05).
The 18th Century had much more to offer us in the nature of ignorance to cloud our view of reality. The 18th Century was the century empirical science started to chip away at the biblical version of reality that ruled the world. While this chipping came mostly from the continent, Laplace, Kant, Buffon, Curvier, the process was picked up in earnest by the 19th Century English empiricists. Buffon had attempted to counter the biblical begats that put the timeframe of the Earth in thousands of years, but was beaten down by the Church. Curvier pointed out that whole species had gone extinct. Acknowledging Buffon's treatment by the Church, he was quick to add, the extinction must have been the result of the biblical flood. The Swiss born Louis Agassiz, under no such restrictions, stepped up to the plate and invented something quite unique in the history of empirical science, no, I got that wrong, followed empirical processes and made up, out of whole cloth, the explanation for the extinctions that rules the minds of the entire world to this day.
But it looks like I'll have to wait for Part III, hopefully the final segment of this history of empirical ignorance, to discuss that.
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