In the last column, we saw Newton's attitude toward creativity, the production of concepts to explain facts, contrasted with his opinion of his own profession as a mathematician. He held up mathematicians as the ones that find out, settle and do all the business. He defined those that produce concepts, or, in the simple mindedness of today's empirical theoreticians, hypotheses, as doing nothing more than pretending and grasping.
Newton clearly states that mathematicians are not dry calculators and drudges but the wielders of a discipline that uncovers the underlying laws that operate the universe. Newton, it would seem, was equating the manmade system of mathematics with the human mind. As he grew older and more powerful, and more in need of justifying the hodgepodge of conjectures that is the Principia, he became quite adamant about his position. He was fond of saying, for all and sundry to comprehend, hypotheses non fingo or hypotheses no sequor, which meant he did not base anything on hypotheses.
The English language contains a word, delusion, and I have used that word frequently to describe the state in which the practitioners of empirical science perpetually exist. But the word is not enough. It does not explain how a Newton can create a hypothesis, that gravity is a property of matter, create another hypothesis, that matter is uniformly made up of uniform particles, create still another hypothesis, that objects travel in straight lines unless acted upon by another object, and add onto that still another hypothesis, that space is a vacuum through which objects can travel unimpeded, manufacture a still further hypothesis, that a force that causes objects to move is a property of something, like color and hardness are a property, pile on another assumption, that a force can act over a distance without existing between the source and the object upon which it acts, produce still another hypothesis, that a force can act without being used up, but will diminish when it isn't used, and burble forth with still another hypothesis, that a force can diminish and still exist to infinity, and top the whole hypothetical edifice off with still another hypothesis, that God comes back periodically to give the moons and planets a little push to keep them moving in a straight line, the word delusion does not describe how Newton can create hypothesis on top of hypothesis on top of hypothesis and then claim that he doesn't base any of his conclusions on hypotheses.
I have, in my books, many times marveled at the ability of empirical science to look at reality and see only what empirical science describes as reality, rather than the reality that actually exists. Under Newton's notion, and I have to use the word justification, because as Newton became older, it became more and more apparent that his Theory, and note the word "theory," that his Theory of Universal Gravitation did not describe reality. He constantly visited his friend Halley, who had been made Royal Astronomer, asking him to please recompute the measurements of the orbit of the moon in order to bring those measurements to bring them into accord with his musings. And of course, making rough calculations using the orbit of Mars would have clearly shown how far Newton was off. He had to have played around with the figures Kepler had purloined from Brahe and published and he must have found out that his volume fantasy didn't work with respect to Mars, was in fact, way wide of the mark. Newton couldn't claim that the orbits of a planet could be used to compute the mass, the amount of matter by volume, of the planet because the entire purpose of his house of hypotheses was to demonstrate on a mathematical basis that gravity was a property of matter. If he had turned the equation around, as our empiricists do today, without a visible thought in their collective mind, then his prediction that the orbits would conform to the amount of gravity computed by volume would fail.
He would have proved nothing!
I call delusion that is structurally based in the mind mirrormensis, the mirror because the delusion usually produces a picture that is 180ºs away from reality, a negative of the universe. It is a picture in which the light from the stars and our sun doesn't exist, in which objects travel without force, and then only alter that travel as a result of force, a picture where life is the exception rather than the goal, a matter of chance rather than the entire purpose of the universe.
Mathematics don't think, they measure, and contrary to Newton, the universe was not created by a maker who built into it defined laws and he certainly didn't create mathematicians whose job it was (and is) to uncover the formula that describes those laws. We need to measure the hard edges of physical reality, but once we make the measurements, mathematics tells us nothing about how those hard edges move with respect to one another, or what the nature of the forces are that are causing the movement. All mathematics can do is assume the force out of existence because forces are dynamic, changeable, and thus, not subject to quantification in mathematical terms.
What mathematicians can't deal with, they ignore, and as a result, we have no explanation for the forces that operate our existence. Newton's mirrormensis, that he didn't deal with hypotheses, concepts, ideas, became the law of the empirical universe, the empirical universe rather than the real universe, as a result of Newton's power. But Newton's view wasn't the view of the men that founded the Royal Society, whose reasoning Newton so rapidly corrupted. We can see this in Hooke's early experiences with the experimentation that was the basic purpose of the Society's formation. Hooke, remember, was a master at designing and building the lab equipment that scientists needed to conduct their measurements of reality, and as such, he had come under the patronage of the very wealthy scientific experimenter Robert Boyle, most famous as the author of the observational relationship between volume and pressure in gas.
Hooke designed Boyle's lab equipment, and as such, was more or less an invisible factor in Boyle's lab experiments, even though he was standing there operating the equipment. Hooke also read and contributed to Boyle's publications. At one point in the process, Hooke came up with an idea for rarefying gas and the idea led to a successful experiment on the part of Hooke and Boyle that was later incorporated into Boyle's publications. However, quite by mistake, the printer left off Boyle's acknowledgement to Hooke for the experiment. Boyle eventually tired of having to respond to correspondence on the point by interested researchers and wrote to Sir Robert Moray, the man who had obtained the Royal Charter from King Charles II, in response to continued requests by the famed Danish Astronomer, Christiaan Huygens, that "As to what [Huygens] says touching the hypothesis assumed to make out the phaenomena of Rarefaction, it will not be requisite for me to inlarge upon it, The Proposer of the Hypothesis [Hooke] being himself ready to give you and account of it."
Here, Boyle is stepping aside in favor of the person who thought up the idea, much as Newton should have in favor of the same person who first spied the mathematical connection between Kepler's Laws and Galileo's measurement of the rate at which objects fall to the surface of the Earth.
Hypotheses, before Newton, did mean something. It was only after Newton created hypotheses that he wanted those hypotheses to be considered something other they hypotheses, he wanted his hypotheses treated as fact, because Newton wanted no opposition to his fantasies. In accordance with mirrormensis, his fantasies became fact simply because they couldn't be hypotheses.
By the end of the 17th Century, empiricists, wishing to remove God from the universe altogether, created the swirling mass of gas to replace (by Laplace) God as the cause of force in the solar system. In addition, as the measurement of the planets came in showing that Newton's "Universal Law" was not so universal after all, the new secular empiricists decided that it wasn't volume that could predict orbits, it was the orbits that could be used to compute volume. Of course, this begged the question, because if volume couldn't predict orbits, then there was no basis to maintain that gravity was proportional to matter, or as the new predictive matter was called, mass.
As the 19th Century dawned, we had a theory that predicted facts that didn't exist accepted as fact in order to predict that which couldn't be verified, the make-up of the interior of the planets.
This caused quite a bit of consternation to observers who wanted to make sense out of the scientific process, and one of the most interested observers was William Whewell. He wrote reams and reams on scientific discovery, but his greatest contribution to empirical science was his Theory of Scientific Method. Whewell was an unabashed religionist, something that can be forgiven in a man who totally supports the empirical delusion. He, like Newton, believed that God had woven the laws of the universe into its fabric, and that the only way that those laws could be uncovered were by mathematical Gods such as Newton. In fact, he assumed that, because Newton uncovered the basic law of the universe, Universal Gravitation, that Newton's process must be the process that forms the basis of the scientific method.
Thus, Whewell, following Newton's own pronouncements as to the nature of his work, claimed that Newton's basic hypothesis, that gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter, was not a hypothesis at all, but rather was a natural law of the universe. It didn't need proof, it only needed discovery. Newton's mathematical process demonstrated how the law operated so that the proof of the law was found in its discovery and demonstration. To Whewell, 1+1=2 is a demonstration of a natural intuition of basic universal law.
Thus, the predictor in science is not a predictor, but rather a connection between what we know to be true and what we can demonstrate to be true. The problem, of course, is that the double of anything always measures out to be the double of the thing being doubled. We can measure this on a repeated basis. We can't measure the nature of gravity, we can't measure its connection to matter, we can't measure its proportionality because we don't know how much matter exists in a planet and therefore we don't know how much gravity that matter is producing if the matter is producing gravity, and we therefore can't make the connection.
Empirical science therefore falls back on how useful a theory is. With respect to Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, empirical science is not limited to making up what the planets are made out of, it can make up whole new forms of matter that can't be seen, black holes and the dark matter that has to exist to hold the galaxies together under the mass/gravity concept. Wherever there is motion, there is matter, whether it is there or not, and we sink into mirrormensis, creating a universe that exists only in our minds.
Today, the only scientific ideas that are acceptable are ideas that can be mathematically demonstrated. The first requirement for mathematical demonstration is that they agree with existing demonstrations of fact, facts which in turn have been demonstrated mathematically. We live in an imaginary world created without reference to reality, in which motion exists without force, an impossibility. Back when Copernicus was proposing his notion of a heliocentric solar system, the facts he used to demonstrate his notion were the same facts the Ptolemaic practitioners used to demonstrate that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
Thus, under the Newtonianistas, and their belief that their fantasies are fact, Copernicus's idea would not have been considered a valid scientific thought. We would still be missing our rocket shots to places like the moon and Mars, and our satellites would still be falling out of orbit, but they wouldn't have been doing so in a heliocentric solar system.
But then without Copernicus, there would have been no Newton and maybe we would have explored the nature of the forces that cause the motion in our existence, maybe we wouldn't be shooting rockets at all, and maybe we would even be actually measuring the heliocentric nature of the solar system using our knowledge of the actual forces that make objects drop and cause the planets to rotate on their axes and orbit the sun.
Perhaps we wouldn't be lost in the mirrormensis of our minds.
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