When I was in high school, I received perfect scores in chemistry and physics because I used rote memory. I asked my teacher (in private, of course) questions behind the "why" of what I was memorizing, but he said that I would find out the why in college.
When I got to college, I found that the same things I learned in high school were being taught, only in tongues that had to be acquired by rote memory. I dropped out of the curriculum and became an English major.
My father, who was aware of my fixation on Newton's gravity, and thus empirical science's fixation on mass gravity, cautioned me that I had to have a graduate degree in science to work from the inside. I opted, instead, for law school, because it was only there, prior to the mid-sixties, that the curriculum was designed to teach students how to think, as opposed to today's law schools, which have switched over to teaching ideology as a means of stifling thinking, fertile ground for future empiricists.
The case of Halton Arp proved me right. Halton Arp jumped through all the hoops of big bang theory and discovered one of its major flaws, that objects from the same source have drastically different red shifts, and thus the big bang was a big bust. Instead of having the big bang community confirm and celebrate his discovery, it ostracized him, denying him telescope time, space in scientific journals and speaker time at conventions. When others within the big bang community started coming up with the same results, they were provided with similar treatment.
I had dealt with professors at college and had detected that it was either their way or the highway. D.L. Dotson shares a charming story that relates to mass gravity in Dirac's Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy in issue #43 of Infinite Energy Magazine. Dotson says he was questioning his professors on the fact that the conservation of mass and energy could never be violated. I had, of course, long since come to the conclusion that the real reason for the conservation of mass and energy law is that mathematical equations, the source of empirical science, have to be limited, and thus mass and energy have to be limited.
But Dotson didn't realize that empirical science has to ignore reality to exist, and pointed out to his professor that something called "pair production" where a proton creates an electron-positron pair with energy balanced didn't account for the spin of the electron that was needed to stabilize the result. Where, Dotson wanted to know, did the energy that produced the spin come from?
"We regard spin angular momentum as an inherent property of the electron and positron, not as a violation of conservation." his professor replied.
"But," Dotson insisted, "if it is real energy, where does it come from?"
"Inherent property means we don't talk about it," his professor replied, "and you won't either if you want to pass this course."
Dotson was later told his attitude was disrupting the class and there was no chance of his completing a graduate program in physics. He, like me, switched to a language major but became a professional land surveyor.
This is much the same reaction I received when questioning that gravity is a property of mass. When empirical science needs to limit the terms of its equations, it blocks off reality by saying the speed of light can't be exceeded, or that energy can neither be created nor destroyed or that the planets are moving in straight lines as a result of being born in a swirling mass of gas, the straight-line motion being altered by gravity and that the elusive gravity responsible for altering the straight-line motion of the planets, and for causing objects to drop is the property of the matter that makes up the condensing gas, the matter that is the planets.
Saying that a dynamic force results from being a static property is middle-age religious authoritarianism, not science, but because everything is learned by rote, and because everyone's living depends on that rote learning, no one can question the learning lest it endanger the income it produces. Anyone questioning the rote learning is ostracized if inside the scientific community living off the rote learning and then if they continue to get publicity, is demonized. Those questioning the rote learning from outside the community are simply ignored. Of the two, being outside the community, as I am, with my own income, makes me immensely more dangerous than if I had tried to work within the community, because I have been able to take apart current inconsistent scientific theory and create a replacement system that is not only consistent, but provides explanations for reality that are ignored by the current empirical scientific community operating on rote learning and blind consensus, flying under their radar in the process.
With respect as the baseless notion of gravity as a property of matter is concerned, a subject that the scientific community will not discuss in public, after all, when the Boeing Company starts to expend millions based on Russian Scientist Eugene Podkletnov's anti-gravity experiments, the scientific community can only mumble, Why would anyone spend money on something that has been proven impossible? I have been free to trace the mistake that led to our ignorance of gravity, and the mistake is one as simple as misapplying the universal time equals rate times distance formula.
We are all familiar with the story of Copernicus, and how his sun-centered solar system led to a century of controversy. Before Copernicus, everyone thought the Earth was the center of the universe, much like today, everyone thinks gravity is a property of matter. Tycho Brahe was one of the most famous supporters of the Earth as the center of the universe. Brahe spent his lifetime plotting the courses of the moon and the planets and he had this data recorded carefully in journals for anyone who could make sense out of it.
But, of course, making sense out of what we see is what we do as human beings, and Brahe had no intention of failing to interpret his data. Among the data he collected was a very interesting fact. The moon, and the planets, especially Mars, appeared to speed up in the summer and slow down in the winter.
Now, this is accepted as rote learning today, but think about it. The Earth is a pretty good size, as is the moon and, say Jupiter or Saturn. According to Brahe's measurements, which are just as valid today as they were the day he made them, the moon and the planets were speeding up and slowing down. But it's a pretty ridiculous notion that something the size of the moon or the planets could speed up or slow down.
What would make them do so?
Well, that wasn't important. The important thing was, and is, that's what they do, so who's to question our measurable reality?
Brahe spent most of his life carrying out his measurements and then along came Johan Kepler, a person who liked to create order out of chaos. He wormed his way into becoming Brahe's assistant, but he had one real big disagreement with his boss. Kepler was not a preCopernican believer in the Earth centered universe but rather believed that the planets orbited a stationary sun in the center of the solar system.
No on knows what bitter arguments this led to between boss and employee, but Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gildar give more than a hint of the friction that must have existed in their book Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries, published by Doubleday in 2004. The Gildars show, through the exhumation of Brahe and the testing of his mustache hairs, how he was poisoned twice, and how that poisoning was carried out by Kepler to get control of Brahe's 40 years of observations for his own use.
Kepler used Brahe's data to create his famous law, that the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times. This law meant that as the planets speed up, they move closer to the sun, and as they move away from the sun, they slow down. This gives us a sort of rubber band picture of planetary motion in which the planets are attracted to the sun, pass around it and then, as they travel away from the sun, slow down until the sun starts to pull them in again.
This is another rote learned law that is immutable and as ridiculous as the idea that the planets speed up and slow down in the first place. The sun is only .025 off center, which means nothing but comets fall toward it, and in any event, the planets would be falling toward the sun during each half of their orbits and away from the sun during the other half, so if the sun did have the effect of causing the planets to speed up and slow down, it would be equal on both sides of the orbit and wouldn't result in the uniform speeding up and slowing down that the rubber band effect implies.
I would take more time to explain this with a diagram, but because the idea that the planets speed up and slow down is so obviously ridiculous, and Brahe's mistake so obvious, it won't be necessary. Readers that wish to delve more deeply into the topic can see my discussion at Precession. To make the story complete here, however, Newton was able to use Brahe's orbital velocity observations which showed a different constant that applied to orbits around each planet and the sun to produce a theoretical property of matter he called gravity. He then made the absurd assertion that planets were uniformly made up of identical particles of matter so that he could compute a planet's gravity by volume.
Using the resulting gravity, he created a formula that showed that the moon would be going in a straight line but for the force of the Earth and moon's gravity. The equation didn't balance, but because it produced an explanation for planetary motion and a reason why we, on a planet that was rotating at a thousand miles an hour, weren't hurtled off into the darkness of space, was accepted as the gospel truth, Newton was deified, his pronouncements made dogma, and the fantasy of Celestial Mechanics was born.
The result has been a lock on gravity, removing it from the table of rational consideration, effectively crippling our technology. Newton had ascribed the straight-line motion to God, but 18th rationalist Laplace produced the swirling mass of gas, and the stupidity of computing gravity by volume was reversed so that the motion of the planets was used to compute the unprovable nature of the volume, whether it was iron or gas, using the assumption of proportional gravity.
In short, Brahe's simple observation that the moon and the planets speed up and slow down is the basis for our present day belief, similar to the belief that the Earth was at the center of the universe, that gravity is a property of something, and if you question it, leave the room, preferably by the window.
Brahe was a true believer in the Earth being the center of the universe. With the Earth at the center of the universe, it was stationary. The sun went around it, the moon went around it, and the planets went around it. But no matter what motion occurred around the Earth, the Earth didn't move one iota in any direction.
As he began his timing measurements, he was steeped in ignorance about the real nature of the solar system. He had a picture of the solar system that was about as backward as you can get, although our present day view of solar system motion adds ridiculous to backward. He was creating an explanation for an observation out of total ignorance, and that observation has been translated into the rote learning we teach in our most advanced lecture halls today, punishing anyone that disagrees.
With the Earth motionless, Brahe measured the passage of the moon in the summer time and measured the time it takes to make that passage across the sky. He then did the same in the winter and he found that it was a longer period than it was in the summer.
He then did the same thing for the known planets and he found out that the same thing was happening. The planets move faster in the summer than they do in the winter. In technical terms, winter is the point the Earth is closest to the sun, the Winter Solstice, and summer is the point the sun is furthest from the sun, the Summer Solstice. So the moon and planets were moving faster between the Winter and Summer Solstices than they were moving between the Summer and Winter Solstices.
What could be the the reason for this?
Brahe went back to his basic education, time is a factor of distance or rate. For the time to vary, the formula required that either the distance varied or the rate varied. Being under the mistaken impression that the Earth was stationary at the center of the universe, Brahe concluded that it couldn't possibly be distance that was causing the change.
That left rate. The rate was changing causing the change in time.
The moon and the planets were speeding up in the summer and slowing down in the winter.
When Kepler "inherited" Brahe's figures, putting the sun stationary in the center of the solar system with the Earth moving around it didn't lead him to question Brahe's throwing out of distance as a possible reason for the change in time. He was capable of ordering the chaos of Brahe's figures, but he wasn't about to question Brahe's unfounded and ignorant conclusion made on the basis of his Earth centered beliefs.
Let's pretend we are Brahe, and instead of being ignorant of the movement of the Earth, or even today, ignorant of the movement of the sun, we go to our time equal rate times distance formula and say, well, it's pretty far fetched to believe that something as big as the moon is slowing down and speeding up, so how could it be distance that is affecting the change in time?
Well, we would answer, if the Earth is moving, then when it is moving forward in its orbit, and the moon is moving in the direction opposite that movement, the moon would travel a shorter distance than it would when the moon was moving in the same direction as the Earth. Then, the moon would have to travel not only the half the distance of its orbit, it would have to travel the distance the Earth had traveled to make up that distance too, so the distance the moon travels away from the direction of the Earth's motion is shorter than when it traveled in the direction of the Earth's motion.
But this is not the motion that Brahe measured. His measurements were made over successive months in both the winter and the summer and the measurements applied to the planets as well. The change in the moons distance, which occurs each month, is too short to measure unless you are looking for it. But successive monthly measurements and planetary measurements that produce the same result suggest that the sun is the culprit, that it is moving forward in its orbit, and thus, when its components are moving from the Winter to the Summer Solstice, they have a shorter distance to go than when they move between the Summer and Winter Solstice because those solstices are moving as the sun moves.
As enlightened observers rather than ignorant concluders, we could then say, so the sun is moving and in doing so it's dragging the planets along with it. It's direction of movement is toward the Winter Solstice so that's why the planets pass closest to the sun in the winter and reach their furthest point from the sun in the summer. The time variance is the result of the components traveling a shorter distance in the summer than they do when they are playing catch-up in the winter.
Unfortunately, rote learning today does not even consider this a possibility because, with Celestial Mechanics resting on Kepler's Laws, if the sun is moving, then Newton's mass gravity is what it really is, a fantasy.
Empirical Science has no way to control the concepts it attaches to the terms of its mathematical equations. It uses those equations to predict possible facts, which are, of course, always found, and then it says the facts turn its concepts into facts. Facts that disagree with the concepts, which are now facts, are ignored.
No wonder we live in ignorance about the forces that move the objects around us, assigning the motion of the galaxies to an historical big bang, the motion of the planets to a swirling mass of gas, and the most dynamic force in our existence, gravity, as a property, which in the words of Dotson's professor, "Inherent property means we don't talk about it and you won't either if you want to pass this course."
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