When Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth," he was referring to leverage. It's a well-established principle that with a level and a fulcrum, strength can be multiplied. A rock we couldn't budge ourselves, we could move with the use of a lever. When Archimedes said he needed a place of purchase to place his lever in order to move the Earth, he was under a strong misapprehension, one that is as prevalent as mass/gravity is today. He was under the impression that the Earth weighed anything at all, and indeed, some of our more mathematically inclined empirical spiritualists enjoy sitting down and calculating the weight of the Earth.
This subject arises because, against my better judgment, I watched the 2 part History Channel series on the engineering of UFOs. I say against my better judgment because the History Channel probably gets as much income from the government for the continuous running of their absurd UFO series than they get from viewers. These programs are designed to do what ABC's recent 2 hour travesty Peter Jennings Reporting: Seeing is Believing (February of 2005) where the ever-so-reasonable beginning dissolves into a one-sided diatribe against the subject, in other words, seeing is being insane, and then progresses into the absurd, in Jennings' case, a boring, overly long encomium of the SETI program, the farce designed to underline the message, UFOs can't possible exist and empirical science is doing everything in its power to overcome the vast distances that prevent it from occurring. See column 10-05. Jennings must not have had much control over the program's contents because, after his death, it was revealed he was convinced in the reality of UFOs. But that's how it goes with public figures.
The program on engineering started off with a discussion of what features UFOs would need to be able to behave the way they are reported to behave. The first item was a super strong propulsion system. I'll pass this absurdity over, but for those interested in reality, see column 05-05 on reverse engineering gravity drives. The next little item necessary for the UFO's operation is something called an inertia canceller, something that would make the occupants of the UFO impervious to the laws of motion that would seem to scramble occupants into jelly as a result of the right angle turns at high speeds. The program uses one, and only one example of UFO motion, a radar screens picking up the right turn of UFOs sighted from an aircraft.
Well, that stopped me because, while it is a subject I have danced around, I've never faced it directly, and that's what I'll try to do in this column. Specifically, to what extent would the occupants of a UFO be affected by inertia, the tendency of an object at rest to stay at rest, when applied to momentum, the tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion?
Momentum takes a little explaining, but let's get down to basics, the supposed two laws of motion inertia and momentum are based on, first. It's been known since time immemorial that moving a rock sitting on the face of the Earth takes work. The rock will stay where it is unless something happens to cause it to move. This is inertia, but what is inertia, which is to say, what is keeping the rock in place? Obviously, it's gravity that's keeping the rock in place. So what is gravity? In the surprising words of one of the scientists on the UFO technology program, no one knows. Of course, he then went on to say that it was the effect of mass on the space-time continuum, but he might as well have related Aristotle's version, the Earth is the center of the universe and everything falls to the center, or Newton's gravity is a property like color or hardness, or even the equivalence Einstein got his mass distorting space-time business from, that gravity is similar to a rising elevator. They're all meaningless.
The rock is stationary because it is embedded in the Earth's gravitational field, but it is far from stationary. It's moving at maybe eight hundred mph as the Earth rotates, and about 67,000 mph as it orbits the sun, and by my calculations, see column 08-06, about 312 mph as the sun moves around the galactic rim. We determine how much the rock is affected by gravity by creating scales that provide us with comparative measurements of different materials. When we put the rock on the scale, the scale gives under the force of gravity pulling the rock down, and we calibrate the scale to tell us how much force is being exerted. However, we don't think in those terms, we think the rock has weight, which is probably why we think gravity is a property of the rock. Monkey see, monkey conclude empiricism. But in the real world, the rock has no weight. If gravity didn't exist, then the scale would register nothing. Matter does not have a property called weight, it is made up of atoms that are affected by gravity to move it toward the source of that gravity, and when an intervening force interferes with gravity, in the rock's case, the ground or the scale bed, then it simply comes to rest. Archimedes was confusing gravity with weight when he said he needed a lever to move the Earth. In fact, the Earth weighs nothing, and, but for its momentum, all it would take would be the touch of a feather to get it moving.
Obviously, having some sort of proposition dealing with the working of gravity would help to understand this (see column 02-05), but with no working proposition at all, empirical science just continues stumbling forward in the dark, mumbling nonsensical memes.
With respect to the Earth, it has gravity that holds things to its surface, but the only other gravity affecting it to any extent is the sun's gravity, and that's extremely weak, pulling it slowly with it through space. There are no scales on the sun to measure the "weight" of the Earth, not only because the notion is ludicrous, but, just like the rock, the Earth has no weight. It is embedded in the sun's emission field, however, and as a result, it orbits the sun at 67,000 mph, giving it quite a bit of momentum which could be translated into force should it encounter anything, and the interaction of its inductances with the inductances of the sun's emission field result in rotation, which also is translatable into force, specifically on its atmosphere. See columns 20-05 as to the inductances and 37-05 for the atmospheric friction. Newton attempted to prove gravity was proportional to matter and therefore a property of matter by setting up a formula that would use the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon to predict the moon's orbit. When this didn't work out for the moon, and totally failed for planetary orbits, the empirical misfits merely accepted Newton had proved gravity was proportional to matter and turned the formula around, using the orbits of the planets to compute the amount of matter in the planets. Because no one knows how much matter is in a planet, astronomers renamed the matter they calculated as mass, and then by implication, computed the amount of mass in the rock. Once they computed the amount of mass in a rock, or at least claimed to have done so, they used a formula to use the rock's weight to compute the weight of the Earth, whose mass was now known by using planetary orbits to compute it.
If there was ever a more cockamamie system of thought process, it will be found deep in the liturgical conundrums of some obscure Antarctic religion.
To start this process, Newton took the easily observed inertia of the rock and turned it on its head, saying, an object in motion will stay in motion unless another force acts to counter this motion. This most reasonable of statements is simply nonsense. Nothing remains in motion unless there is a force acting on it to keep it in motion. Newton couldn't explain why the planets orbited and rotated, so he simply eliminated the question of the current force causing orbiting and rotation by manufacturing a silly law, grafting it onto an obvious reality, and basically making ignorant fools out of us all. Getting back to the inertia of objects in motion, then, we have to add the proviso if we are going to make any sense out of the UFO question, that the force keeping the object in motion remains unchanged before the effects of inertia set in, because obviously, if the force causing the motion is removed, resistance will start to slow the object down creating an affect, if it is a vehicle, on the occupants.
So we have a UFO that is traveling 8,000 mph and its occupants are traveling at 8,000 mph, and it suddenly takes a 90º turn. What happens to the occupants?
To answer this question, let's go in a roundabout way and ask, if the Earth has no weight, how much force is required to push it around the sun in its orbit? How much force, in fact, is needed to keep it rotating? The answer is, not much. If a feather is capable of moving the Earth if it is not subject to any other forces, then it doesn't take a lot of force to get it moving and keep it moving. It's clear, however, that once it is moving, it has one heck of a lot of nuclei tied together into a single object. We know that objects fall regardless of weight because gravity acts on each individual unit of the matter uniformly. It is only when it comes together and has to be moved against the force of gravity that all of the units have to be moved at the same time, creating the weight of the object, the force it takes to move the object in order for it to overcome gravity.
In like manner, if a single atom is traveling at the same speed as a structure made up of a million atoms is traveling, it is going to take a million times the force to stop the motion of the million atom object than the single atom object. In like manner, objects of different composition of atoms traveling in straight lines that execute 90º turns will require different applications of force to accomplish the turn. But force in the case of the objects is not the question, it is the affect on the objects of the application of the force that we are dealing with because we are concerned first with the make-up of the matter that could survive the application of force and second, what happens to organic structures within, but not an integral part of the object.
We can only speculate at the make-up of the object, but the occupants of the object are small in comparison to the object. We envisage them hurtling forward as the object turns, crashing into its hull or, strapped into seats, we envision them being torn apart by the straps, or their internal organs splashing against their ribcages. Or we could hypothesize they're somehow encased in a fluid that absorbs the force and eliminates the effect of the force.
Or, and this is the really big question, we could ask the million dollar question, what channel am I watching this program on? Oh, that's right, the History Channel, that objective reporter of UFO phenomena. As I remember the countless programs they have broadcast, those programs are filled with stately moving cigar shapes, drifting triangle formations of some sort, all sorts of different phenomena that fall into the classification of UFOs. Since the widespread use of the camcorder, we are treated to the spectacle of having many people record the same configuration slowly drifting from town to town. None of these things are making 90º turns at high speeds, and to my knowledge, there are very few instances of this occurring compared to the overall instance of sightings.
So why is this the only sighting the objective two-part History Channel farce on the mechanics of UFO operation chooses to use to build its flying saucer on? Inertia canceller indeed. There's no need for an inertia canceller because UFOs generally do not make moves that require one, and those that look like they do, don't, because they are drones. Heard of those, History Channel pseudoscientists, the things we already build in abundance?
It's just another case of misdirection, laying out false groundwork so that a reasonable argument can be turned against the reality of UFOs. I remember one of my favorite science fiction writers who was insanely popular in the thirties and forties, Dr. E. E. Smith, the author of the Skylark and Lensmen series (he wrote at a time we were fighting for our very existence, but he went out of style in the fifties because he wasn't socially aware). He was faced with the problem of his spaceships traveling at great speeds and coming to an almost complete stop at their destination. He strapped his characters into nets that canceled out the effects of inertia. It was a hoot then, and it's a hoot now.
I should mention, once the program got the inertia canceller solved, it simply said one was created by reverse engineering the UFO it had just made up, it then went on to point out that antigravity drives would be impossible. They used some really cool technology showing a supercooled diamagnetic object skipping back and forth an inch or so above a magnet with the explanation that the object was attempting to rid itself of the magnetic field. Have to think about that one for a while. However, they pointed out, since the UFO doesn't have a giant magnet under it, it couldn't be antigravity. However, with the Earth being a gigantic magnet, the aliens might have discovered, get this, a superstring propulsion system. Isn't that cool. Using a subject no one can mathematize, let alone understand, the aliens create, well, no way around it, an antigravity drive.
From these low points, the program goes down hill. Not being able to take along the fuel needed for the long trips across the galaxy, the aliens learned how to manufacture wormholes. Wormholes are those theoretical realities created by the implications of the general theory of relativity, and were originally called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge until that eminent scientist, creator of the Venusian greenhouse gas, and Velikovsky slayer Carl Sagan, picked it up and popularized it as the best way to travel long distances in space.
The reason for this misdirection is quite simple. While I used about a hundred thousand words to develop the argument in Let's Talk Flying Saucers: How Crackpot Ideas are Blinding Us to Reality and Leading Us to Extinction, it can be summarized very simply: If UFOs exist, then all the blather empirical science uses to feather its nest, buck up its ego, and control our picture of the world, is total bunk. These selfish people would rather see us all go down the tube to keep their precious perks rather than take an objective look at anything in reality that opposes their precious laws, and especially when those things in reality would simply negate their three hundred years of constructing an edifice based on an unexamined assumption, mass/gravity, an edifice that is the result of total fantasy with no relationship to reality whatsoever.
It's not sad, it's not tragic, it's catastrophic, at least for the species that evolved on this little planet.
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