In the world of monkey see, monkey say science, the empirical science that rules the pulpits of our consensus with respect to reality, fire is fire, combustion is combustion, and what stars do is not combustion, but nuclear in nature. Empirical science can not explain, it can only look and name, and as a result, we have no idea what is going on with one of the most common experiences we have, the process involved when we put a stick of wood on the fire, the process that is the fire itself.
One of the earliest objections to the consistent explanations I produce for what is occurring in physical reality was my use of the word combustion. When science first examined the nature of fire, its principle discovery was that fire did not occur when oxygen was removed from the fire. As a result, the definition of fire, the naming function empirical science utilizes in its quest to understand without understanding, was to define combustion, the thing we see when we look into a fireplace, the phenomena that burned down most of London during these investigations of the early years of the Royal Society, as oxidation, a process of combining with oxygen. This is translated into a rapid chemical process, as in oxidation, that produces heat and light. It also means to burn, but when we look up the meaning of burn, we find that it involves consuming fuel, the thing that burns, and in the process of burning gives off heat, light and gases. Burn also means to undergo combustion and also to undergo nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.
By the time the average inquisitive nature has gone through this wringer, the inquisitive head is filled with so many terms and contradictions that the question of what the heck is actually going on when something undergoes the process of combustion, is lost in a daze. Those that take the jumbles of meanings and form their own concept of combustion, burn, star bright, walks away thinking that they know something they didn't know when in fact they know absolutely nothing.
Of course, once our esteemed 17th Century Elders discovered that fire needed oxygen, where did that leave the sun and stars burning in the firmament, the definition of which was the black stuff out there that enveloped the Earth in night. The sun and the stars needed oxygen to burn. That set off an underground problem that lasted through the centuries until the discovery of nuclear fission which didn't need oxygen. This has resulted in the latest crop of empirical nonthinkers forming two pictures that explain nothing, one picture of the process going on in the fireplace and another picture of the sun burning in oxygenless space.
Because empirical science does not demand understanding, but merely requires that we describe in order to have the feeling that we understand, it never attempts to explain exactly what is going on in either situation. Worse, because empirical science simply names the phenomena it measures, it doesn't even bother to ask the question, is the same process producing both?
But that's small potatoes when it comes to the biggest objection to my synthesis of physical observation, an objection that for the most part is beyond even empirical science to make because it is so ingrained into the empirical mentality of ignorance that it escapes rational analysis. This little piece of ignorance stems from the centuries old debate as to the nature of light, with empirical science naturally looking at all sides of the issue, which boiled down to light being a wave or light being a particle. Prior to Newton's capture of the empirical universe, the trend was generally toward the notion that light was a wave, a ripple in some imaginary fluid, aptly named aether, that permeated the universe. No one claims these guys knew anything. Empirical science merely enshrines them as the Saints that discovered the immutable secrets of the universe which now rule the pews of our minds.
Newton eventually proclaimed light to be a particle because his Theory of Universal Gravitation required that all matter be made up uniformly of the same particle, and thus light must also be made up of that particle. Note here, Newton, who was never right about anything, was the only one who came close to stating a reality, that what produced light must be made up of the same thing light is made up. But Newton never perfected the argument, and it sank beneath the last three quarters of the 18th Century, a period in which Newton's mind ruled although his hand, his mace and his ability to have people drawn and quartered went with him to his grave. Everyone was trying to make their bones by proving that light was a wave, and when Young crafted what is commonly known as his two-slit experiment to demonstrate that light was a wave, the empirical empire of monkeys was more than happy to adopt the conclusion mindlessly.
This meant that light was totally divorced from what produced it. This was not uncommon because no one had the foggiest notion what matter was anyway, so why bother taxing the mind with questions about the nature of matter when the nature of light could be determined with absolute accuracy. When, in the 20th Century, light was discovered to behave like a particle, an atom had already been conceptualized as a result of chemical interactions, an atom with a bunch of electrons orbiting a nucleus. As a result, the empirical community of clowns, totally confused about the naming features of light, decided that a new name would clarify the situation, and produced one of the truly stunning idiocies in the annals of science, the wave/particle.
Other name sayers were busy at work trying to connect the light to the particle that produced it. Under any rational system of inquiry, the process would be to ask the appropriate question, how could a particle be constructed that would produce solid matter which, when it underwent the process of breaking apart, call it combustion, burning or blibodeshob, would produce what we measure as light? But no, empirical science had a name for light, a wave/particle, and it had a concept for the atom that included orbiting electrons, and although I can't go into it here (See 12/11/04 Column), when Michelson and Morley did away with the aether, and Maxwell hypothesized light as an electromagnetic wave, the electron was etymologically similar to electromagnetic, it became obvious to all that light was produced by those little whizzing electrons jumping up and down in their orbits, producing a whole new naming field, quantum mechanics.
Is anything more understandable? Does anything explain more than something that explains nothing? Not when you are an empirical scientist, the empirical part removing the reality from the science part.
Actually, to describe what is going on when something burns, when it combusts, for each of these things describe the same thing, we need to understand that light is made up of what gives it off, that when matter undergoes combustion, it is giving up some of itself in the particles that produce the heat and the light. Empirical science claims, without being able to measure, that all of the byproducts of combustion remain after the combustion, that the gas and the cinders, the smoke and any number of invisibles and unmeasurables all add up in weight to what was burned before it was burned, that in essence, the heat and the light don't weigh anything because they are in essence nothing, mere quantums produced by agitated electrons jumping up and down in orbit (with the cause of the motion in orbit, of course, left unmentioned).
In order to describe combustion, we have to produce a particle that would not only produce light, but would produce the matter that produced the combustion and the particle that produces both must be able to interact to produce the process we name as combustion or burning or nuclear in nature. Instead of looking at an effect and creating a particle to account for the effect, naming the particle and then naming the effect after it, we have to come up with a particle with properties that describe reality. Thus, we don't want to measure an effect of attraction, create a particle for the effect, name it an electron, then produce the empirical field of electricity. We need to look at reality, see what the properties of reality are, then incorporate them into a single elementary particle which we can then use to describe reality.
When we look at reality, we find only two things that we know are true. The first is that the particles form into solid matter. This is beyond obvious. We are solid matter, we exist with solid matter all around us, and if we aren't careful, if we get in the way of solid matter, we might be eliminated. The second feature of our reality is that we can see the solid matter. The reason we can see the solid matter is because of light. We know that light comes from the sun, we can produce light from fires, and as technologically proficient people, we can produce it using electricity. We know that light moves from one place to another and we can measure how fast it moves. As a result, we have a source for our energy in the movement of light.
Any particle we produce, then, must have two properties, a property of attraction that causes the particles to come together to form matter and a property of motion that causes the particles to move at the speed of light. When the property of attraction is dominant, then the particles form together into solid matter. When the property of motion is dominant, the particles move at the speed of light. Energy occurs when the particles are transitioning from the situation in which the property of attraction is dominant to the situation in which the property of motion is dominant or when, as in electricity, we can harness the property of motion.
It's as simple as that.
While the atoms produced to explain chemical interactions can be constructed using this single particle, for purposes of discussing field replacement, we can stick with the classical chemical atom which substitutes positively charged protons in the nucleus to attract the negatively charged electrons, even though in doing so, a strong force has to be created to hold the positively charged protons, which are supposed to repel, together. With particles that all have an attractive force, we don't need to force the opposites attract concept created by empirical science to describe the nature of magnets without having the foggiest notion of what is occurring when magnets attract and repel. However, in describing field replacement, we only have to look at what is happening to the orbiting electrons.
The orbiting electrons have the property of motion. They are the same thing that makes up light. If we strip the orbiting electrons from the nucleus of an atom, the first thing the atom is going to do is attempt to recapture electrons out of the environment. Even under classical concepts of positive and negative, positive attracts negative so that if any nucleus has an excess of positive charge, it will attempt to attract electrons into orbit around it. If there are two nuclei close by, they will share electrons and combine into molecules.
The question we ask when we ask what is going on mechanically at the atomic level when something undergoes combustion or burning is, how do we go about stripping an atom of its orbiting electrons? We know that if we apply heat, a field, to a chemical element or molecule, and then we mix the result with another chemical element or molecule, we will end up with a new molecule once we remove the heat. We have, using heat, stripped the atoms of their orbiting electrons, let the nuclei form into a different arrangements, and then, when we remove the heat, allowed the new arrangements to attract electrons into shared orbits which hold the new molecules together into a different substance.
We have used a field to change the atomic make up of the molecules that make up the matter so that they now have different properties. We have used a field, heat, to strip electrons off atoms, then combined the atoms and removed the heat so that the atoms can now recapture electrons out of the field and form into something entirely different. This is the chemical process.
So what is it about heat that strips the electrons off the atoms? If we consider heat and light to be the same thing, with the difference being in the frequency of the particles, the amount of particles packed into a stream, then we can look at heat as made up of flows of our particles, which I prefer to call electrons because electrons have the charge and they have the motion, whether empirical science gives them the property of motion or not. There is little difference in creating a positive charge toward which the electron moves and giving the electron the property of motion except the ability to do away with the sophistry of needing a positive charge every time we see the electron move. With the property of motion, we don't need to explain how electrons orbit the nucleus in the first place. They orbit because they have the property of motion. And when we understand that electrons have the property of motion, we don't have to manufacture a positive point in a circuit to cause the movement, we just need to produce a circuit with a deficit of electrons at some point in the circuit.
When we view the heat as a flow of electrons, we can then look at the flow to see what is happening at any point in the flow. Not surprisingly, we see at any point in the flow, an electron! This is because at any point in a flow of electrons, there is always the electron that has just left the point and the electron that has just arrived at the point. Because at any point in a flow of electrons there is an electron, the flow has a presence at any point in the flow.
Now look at the electron orbiting the nucleus. That electron has been attracted to the nucleus because of the excess charge of the nucleus. If the electron wasn't there, the excess charge would reappear. As long as the electron is there, the charge is balanced. However, the orbiting electron is still fifty percent controlled by its property of motion. The excess charge of the nucleus is great enough to attract the electron into orbit, but not great enough to overcome its property of motion. The flow of electrons, however, has an electron that always exists at any point in the flow. The property of motion of that electron is used up in maintaining the flow.
So the charge of the nucleus has two potential sources for electrons that would satisfy its charge, the first source, random electrons it can attract into orbit, whose property of motion it can balance, and electrons in a flow, electrons that pass the nucleus and, because there is a presence, an electron at any point in the flow, can satisfy the charge of the nucleus.
The nucleus doesn't care which source satisfies its charge, its simply going to attract one or the other. Is there a preference? The more stable the charge, the more likely it will be used to satisfy the charge of the nucleus because the less stable the electron, the more dominant the electron's property of motion is and the more likely it is to depart. The more permanent the electron is, the more likely it is to satisfy the charge of the nucleus and thus, more stable electrons will replace less stable electrons.
When the flow of electrons is directed toward the nucleus of the atom, the presence of the electrons in the flow replace the orbiting electrons, substituting their more permanent charge in proximity to the nucleus. With a more permanent source of satisfaction for its charge, the charge is now replaced by the flow and the orbiting electron takes off. When there are trillions of atoms involved, and trillions of flows, when we light the burner under our chemical mix, the more permanent electrons in the flow replace the less permanent orbiting electrons, and those electrons leave the area in the form of heat. When the burner is removed, the nuclei are left with a charge that reattracts electrons out of the ambient field, and those electrons orbit the nuclei in accordance with the new mixture of atoms.
When we start a fire, we have a similar process. We need a source of heat that is great enough that the field it produces also produces light. The field replaces the electrons holding the physical matter together, only we are not providing any way for them to get back together into something else. We are just producing enough heat and enough atoms, in the case of the fireplace, oxygen, to keep the process going. Empirical science says we produce a combustion point and the stuff then oxidizes. We can now see that the field produced by the combustion is replacing the electrons holding the logs together, those electrons, fighting to leave the area, produce another field which in turn replaces even more electrons, the process continuing until the atoms providing the electrons are exhausted.
And, if we put the atom together with the same elementary particle, we have units in the nuclei of the atoms that can replace the charge holding the units of other atoms together. If we artificially move the nuclei closer together, say on an atomic level when we pump air into a tire, the nuclei are field replacing one another, producing the heat we produce when we compress air or coolants. When we let the atoms move apart, they recapture electrons out of the environment producing the cooling we get when we let the air out or expand the coolant.
And when we force the nuclei together on a nuclear basis, we get what empirical science names fission or fusion, field replacement on the nuclear level.
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