I opened the year in column 01-06 by describing empirical science as a religion. It is, however, a religion with no churches, so there's no place to tack up objections to its basic preachings. In the first column last year, column 01-05, I drew the battle lines between alternate science and my viewpoint. My point in that column is, if alternate scientists continue to use the conclusions of empirical science to argue against empirical science, they are going to be whistling in the dark for a pretty long time, in fact until it actually gets dark and we're all dead.
In the intervening year, I've come to the conclusion that the strategy of alternate scientists is to speak in terms their audience is familiar with in the hopes of obtaining an audience they can persuade to buy into whatever point of view they're promoting.
This is not a dumb strategy, but rather a strategy for survival. For instance, a writer cannot sell many books if his subject matter isn't something the reader can readily grasp, and for the reader to readily grasp the content, the content must be phrased in terms that are familiar to the reader. In like manner, there is little sense in publishing a magazine if the magazine doesn't attract a growing readership. It can only attract a growing readership if it remains in reasonably familiar territory.
In short, with all the funding moving into the hands of the empirical church of the accepted truth, alternate science has to make it on its own, and to make it on its own, it has to cater to an audience that will be willing to pay for its product.
There is an old principle any moviegoer learns early, and that is actors tend to get typecast. Actors with a large enough fan base to make them bankable pretty much have to cater to the fans picture of the actor. It's difficult for singers to change their image. What would their fans say if the Stones put on a concert imitating Abba? In the book world, the same thing happens to successful writers. When a writer becomes successful, it is virtually impossible to step out of the mold that made them successful.
It's all about the money.
There's another principle at play here, too. I learned very early in life, before I was a teenager, that my actions made up the picture of how people saw me, primarily because I usually got blamed for everything that happened within a mile of me. As a result, I learned not to care about what others thought. When I became a teenager and started to hang around with groups of people, I found that I was expected to conform my actions to the group's actions. As I went to a local private school with people coming from all over the country, I didn't have a problem with this in school because we all pretty much acted the same way. However, with respect to the several groups I hung around with out of school, groups vastly different from one another, I pretty much adapted by mimicking rather than originating. The pressure is pretty severe, however, and you become the people you hang with, so I never really became solid with any particle group at all.
The point is that when we start to obtain an audience, when we are successful, we become the captive of our success. Graham Hancock is the most spectacular example of this phenomenon. Starting with the truly ground breaking Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilizations, he moved on to slightly murky Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, to the just published Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. I'd say, what's that all about, except we already know the progression. Actors, singers and writers, as well as publishers, are really the product of their audiences rather than influencers of their audiences, and when this enters the field of alternate science, it is deadly. It is an unsolvable conundrum: How do you influence your readers when to keep working or stay in business, you have to let your readers influence you.
Some people would call this selling out. That term, however, was made up by failed artists to degrade successful artists. It doesn't apply here. There is nothing wrong with anybody selling their marketable talents for money. I do it all the time. However, uncovering the nature of reality is not a marketable talent, its an obligation. When we talk about alternate science altering its reality for the audience to keep in business, we are talking about compromising with reality, and there can be no compromise with reality.
As a result, I choose, in the books I write and in these columns, not to compromise. On the contrary, I think there are millions of practicing scientists out there with absolutely no comprehension that empirical science is based on a bunch of unfounded, unproven, and quite honestly, absurd propositions that have been drummed into them from childhood to such an extent, they simply take them for granted, invisible, but controlling, to their thought processes. In addition, I think that, were these honest scientists aware of the defects at the basis of their practices, they would start to question the controlled scientific societies in their respective fields, which is the only way the religion of empiricism can be opened up and the important questions of our reality explored in an effort to bring our technology into line with that reality.
What do I think of the chances I'll succeed? About as high as I think the compromises of alternate science will succeed, which is exactly zero. However, I'm still going to make an attempt, and in furtherance of that attempt, and because the church of empirical science has no cathedrals with doors upon which I can tack the questions I believe every practitioner in any field of science or technology need to have answers to, I will tack up onto the door of the Internet, which I guarantee, wouldn't exist if the absurd theories of empirical science had actually been able to limit the trail and error tinkering of the inventors.
The questions follow, in no particular order. I should add, there are a hundred more I could ask, but I've limited them to those that have a wide affect on our way of thinking.
1. Newton set out to prove that gravity was proportional to, and therefore a property of matter, by using the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon to predict the orbit of the moon. When it didn't, and when later it failed to predict the orbits of the planets, on what basis did the religion of empirical science (RES) justify assuming that gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter and then using the orbits of the planets to compute how much matter planets contained?
2. Since the basic tenet of science is verification, how does RES justify spending a great deal of resources computing the content of the planets, when those computations can never be verified?
3. How can any serious science, which is the search for the answers to reality, have as its founding principle Newton's mass/gravity and Celestial Mechanics, which are based on a theory whose starting premise is, the planets are made up of identical particles uniformly distributed throughout the spheres?
4. Young's so-called two-slit experiment split a beam of light, commingled the result and let it fall on a collecting screen where it displayed bands of light and no light. The experiment was immediately used to "prove" light was analogous to a water wave, where the intersecting troughs and crests canceled out each other. Water waves occur on a two-dimensional surface, light in a three dimensional environment. When the water troughs and crests cancel each other out, there is still water. When the intermingled light falls on the collection screen, there is light and no light. Where is the analogy?
5. The fact that light is produced by something occurring with matter has been obvious for as long as the fact that objects drop to the Earth when not restrained. When the argument about the nature of light raged throughout the 18th century was finally settled by Young's experiment at the beginning of the 19th century, the RES never asked the question, how is light produced, it just concluded it knew what light was, a conclusion that became as fixed as Newton's explanation for gravity. When Einstein demonstrated with the photoelectric effect in the 20th century that light was a particle, why did the RES refuse to revisit its conclusion about Young's experiment that light is a wave, and instead made up a particle, the photon, for light, and then concluded that light manifested itself as both a wave and a particle?
6. One of the oldest measurable facts about light is, it diminishes inversely with the square of the distance it travels, which means, it diminishes until it no longer exists. How does the RES justify its claim that it can see light from the end of the universe that was emitted at the beginning of time?
7. The RES does not understand the force that attracts and repels magnets. It labels the ends of the magnets north and south because one end always points north. It's explanation for electricity is, it's a moving charge, which is not an explanation for how it moves. On what basis does the RES then relabel the north and south poles positive and negative and then claim that, in a circuit, polarity moves the electricity?
8. The RES is fond of creating iron clad laws such as energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It would be nice if the RES would provide a mechanical explanation for all of its laws, for instance, how does gravity work or how does light travel as a wave, but I would be interested if it could answer the simple question, what is the proof for the conservation of energy and matter?
9. Mindless mathematical computations, the basis of the RES, create unchangeable conclusions which are then taken as fact in making further computations. The RES claims that its process replaces fallible human thinking. Fallible human reasoning, however, can be altered in the light of additional evidence while mindless mathematical computations produce unalterable laws. How does a system that claims to be self-correcting correct itself when it relies, not on fallible human reasoning, but on mindless mathematical computations that produce infallible laws?
10. Electrons orbit the nuclei of atoms. What is the source of the force that causes the electrons to orbit?
11. Assuming that the only difference between Aristotle's explanation for why objects fall, the Earth is at the center of the universe, and Newton's objects fall because it is a property of them to fall, is that Newton's explains how planets orbit, how does Newton's explanation that objects fall because it's a property of them to fall explain how the planets orbit?
12. What is the difference between Newton's explanation for motion in the solar system, God keeps the planets in motion, and the RES's explanation, motion results from a five billion year old swirling mass of gas?
13. The RES claims that the only force acting on the planets and stars is gravity. How can a force of attraction produce a swirling mass of gas?
14. How can a nondynamic property, things like color and hardness, produce a dynamic force like gravity?
15. Parallax is the attempt to measure the distance to a star by its displacement against background stars from opposite sides of the Earth's orbit. How does the RES justify relying on a measurement whose margin of error due to the influences of temperature, refraction, precession, nutation, aberration, and by the proper motion of the star itself in space is greater than the resulting measurement?
16. What precisely is the difference between the biblical story of creation and the RES creation story, the Big Bang?
17. The RES claims the moon and the sun produce the tides primarily because its swirling mass of gas explanation for motion being historical prohibits the tides from producing friction on the surface of the Earth that would slow its 5 billion year old momentum down. Tides occur all over the world on a regular, measurable basis. Where are the RES tables demonstrating that the moon and the sun cause the tides?
18. Precession produces a movement along the equator. How does the RES justify its explanation for precession, which produces a movement back and forth across the equator, 90ºs away from its actual movement?
19. Friction is the resistance to the movement of one body in relation to another body with which it is in contact. According to the RES explanation for motion, the swirling mass of gas that eliminates the need to explain current force, friction would slow the momentum of the Earth's rotation and in 5 billion years, there would be no rotation. Why doesn't the friction between the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth slow it down?
20. The RES claims that white light is made up of all colors. White light is a frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum of frequencies, as is each of the colors. The spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies moves uniformly from low to high. The only part of the spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies the human eye can see is light. How can the small section of the spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies we see be bundled into a single frequency when none of the other frequencies in the spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies are?
21. When the radio telescope was invented, it immediately picked up background static that was taken for cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang and therefore proof of the Big Bang. Radio telescope receivers are nondirectional. They have to be pointed at something to "see" it, but everything else is background radiation that come from all directions. Where is the RES's proof that, because the radio telescope is pointed toward the sky, the background radiation is coming from the sky rather than from the Earth?
22. What science, other than religion pretending to be science, would claim to have created a valid process that turns ideas into facts?
Okay, I lied, its 22 questions, but I couldn't resist the last one.
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