When it comes to reality, empirical science generally closes its eyes. It ignores questions dealing with the mechanical nature of the current forces that produce the motion in our existence, the reality of falling objects, rotating and orbiting planets and the structure of the electromagnetic spectrum. It reduces these forces to terms that can be used in equations that take the empirical mind on travels deep into the fantasy worlds it has created for itself, worlds populated by uncertainty except where certainty can never be known and by the positive assertions about what is in the center of planets and stars, what can't be seen, black holes and dark matter, what doesn't exist, space and time, and what is out of reach of measurement, swirling masses of gas producing planets and big bangs producing universes.
There are some areas where blindness doesn't describe the ignorance. Astronomers ignore the fact that light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it travels. To recognize this fact would be to severely limit astronomical claims. Physicists ignore the fact that light must be made up of what gives it off because it crippled itself by making laws dealing with light before it knew the nature of matter, atomic theory. The entire profession diverts our attention away from the fact that radio waves are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which like light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance traveled and thus diminishes out of existence because claiming to actively search for radio waves emitted by civilizations in other star systems validates their unsubstantiated claims that no life from other star systems could ever visit the Earth.
One area where total ignorance prevails involves the nature of the Earth and its position in space. The Earth, like the sun, is matter. Both occupy space which, with little activity, is close to having no temperature at all. We can experiment with matter on Earth to see what happens when it comes into contact with lower temperatures, and in fact physics has a meme for what happens. Empirical science states that heat flows downhill, which is to say when hot matter occupies something cold, the heat from matter flows to the surrounding cold.
This makes the Earth an emitter. Today, geologists will admit that at one time the Earth was molten and has now crusted over, with its core still in a molten state. This was not an accepted notion until the last half of the 20th Century. For a century, the history of the Earth was considered to be stable, unchanging, because Darwinism required billions of years for species evolution to occur. However, the development of plate tectonics trumped the Darwinian fantasy. To integrate the two, radioactive material in the Earth, which exists in stable form, for instance uranium in pitchblende, is said to maintain the Earth's warmth (but don't try to bury the result of nuclear plants or claim that the uranium-filled Earth affects health) and for added security, meteorology developed the notion of thermal balance, the absurd, but unmeasurable fantasy that all the sunlight, starlight, and light from passing comets is radiated in the precise amount received, thus keeping the Earth in thermal balance.
All of this flimflam is nothing but explanation piled on top of explanation, with none of it making any sense in a reality in which hot things become cold. The entire dispute over Venus, which led to the Greenhouse Effect and the myth of global warming (see column 04/16/05), was actually a fight over Newton's Celestial Mechanics. The claim that Venus was hot and therefore a recent addition to the solar system violated Celestial Mechanics and thus the holy of holies, mass/gravity, and could not be allowed to stand. Thus empirical science put itself into the position of defending the notion that the moon was always cold, Mercury was always hot, Jupiter was always stormy, Mars was always rusty, that everything has always been the way it was when it condensed out of a swirling mass of gas. Venus stays hot because its atmosphere developed greenhouse gases, the moon is cold because it never developed an atmosphere and Jupiter's red spot is not the glow from an area of the largest planet yet to crust over, but rather a giant storm that results from the fact it congealed into gas instead of solid matter.
The history of the Earth, as pieced together by empirical science, is a hodge podge that generally attempts to satisfy the demands of multiple disciplines whose basic tenets are all scientific facts, concepts, notions, ideas which have been accepted as law because they were predicted by mathematical models. The reality of the history of the Earth is that it ignited just as the sun ignited but being smaller than the sun, was captured in the sun's dominant field, as were the other planets. The entire system began cooling at the same time with the planets crusting over as it did so, producing atmospheres out of the light elements broken down by the combustion process. Newton's Celestial Mechanics failed at its inception and thus historical observations that Venus is a recent addition to the solar system do not violate any physical laws. The sun is an engine that produces the field that results in rotation and orbiting as it interacts with the matter it controls, and the addition of another planet would merely serve to readjust the positions of the existing planets (see column 05/14/05). One of the most controversial assertions in astronomy is the claimed measurement that the sun is losing volume. This claim surfaces periodically and is immediately and viciously challenged by the astronomical community. The source manufactured for its energy is the newly discovered hydrogen bomb, a typical explanation for a discipline that cannot describe the mechanics of fire.
The Earth formed hot, crusted over and has been cooling ever since. When, at the end of the last century, Lord Kelvin used simple reasoning to conclude that the Earth was millions of years old, he was experimenting in the real world of science and was probably accurate. His vilification by empirical science, that millions of years wasn't long enough for species evolution, ended only with the discovery of radioactive elements and the specious claim they were keeping the Earth warm and thus Kelvin's millions of years was actually billions of years.
One way to determine the rate of the Earth's cooling process, and therefore the length of time it will provide us with a place to exist, is to measure the rate at which the oceans are rising. Empirical science, stuck in their mass gravity fantasy, treats gravity as a static property of matter and thus all of the gravity the Earth ever had it still has and will always have. However, just as empirical science ignores that fact that the Earth is cooling, it ignores the fact that gravity is a dynamic force that requires a dynamic source. The only source of gravity, the only dynamic thing that is happening to the matter that makes up the Earth, is that it is cooling. As it cools, it emits an electromagnetic emission field that is identical in measurement to gravity, it diminishes inversely with the square of its distance from the source.
Thus, as the Earth cools, its field of gravity lessens. As its field of gravity lessens, it decompresses the water it is holding to its surface. On a cooling planet, the ice caps form because water is being transported from the equator to the poles where it is precipitated out as snow and ice. The ice caps of a cooling planet don't melt, they increase in size. Thus, the fantasy about global warming melting the ice caps and therefore being responsible for the rise in the ocean levels hides two areas of ignorance, the inability of empirical science to deal with the mechanical nature of gravity and the inability of empirical science to recognize its own measurable principle that when something hot is surrounded by something cold, the thing that is hot grows cold.
The Cooling Continuum, the 2nd volume of the Copernican Series is the least selling volume although I find it to be crucial to what is becoming my basic argument, that if we don't wake up to the reality of the world, if we don't address the basic questions of force and motion that control our existence, we will be selected out of the evolutionary process, an evolutionary process that produces life that can increasingly become independent of its environment and thus survive past the environment in which it evolved. Empirical science looks at the evolutionary process as one without a goal, but when the end result of the process is the ability to alter the environment to our benefit, ignoring the goal means that we will be selected out of the process. If we don't have as accurate a picture of reality as possible, the technology that we produce will be distorted and it will not serve us in our evolutionary pursuit of survival.
In The Cooling Continuum I address the question of evolution on a planet that is cooling and while it is cooling, its gravity is growing weaker. The static picture empirical science provides, in which everything has remained unchanged for a billion years, leaves so many questions that the picture of evolution we get, life starting by chance from a spark of lighting in some primordial ooze and then evolving into species which, as a result of the chance influx of cosmic rays, evolve into other species could be expected. It makes as much sense as picturing the dinosaurs as carrying more weight on their giant bones than would permit them to move.
By putting the fact the planet is cooling together with the fact that the same matter that is cooling is producing the gravitational field that is therefore lessening into the mix to describe the geological record, we can make more sense out of the geological record and evolution.
The first thing we have to make sense out of is the massive extinctions that occurred periodically throughout the Earth's history. Georges Curvier was the first person to note extinctions in the historical record and subsequent investigation, while only confounding empirical science, start to make sense when looked at in the context of a cooling continuum in which gravity is lessening.
Keeping it simple, as I did in The Cooling Continuum, ambulatory animate matter that would evolve in a high gravitational field would be one with an external skeleton because the strength of the gravity would be too great for it to move with an internal skeleton. In addition, we would expect the first ambulatory animate matter to evolve in water for two reasons, first the displacement of the water would counter the stronger gravity and second, the water would serve as a cooling agent. As the geological record shows, crustaceans, having evolved in massive numbers, became the first group to undergo extinction.
The reason for the extinction of the crustaceans is a lack of mobility. As the planet cooled, and its gravity lessened, ambulatory animate matter with no external skeleton and the beginnings of an internal skeleton could better survive. The more ambulatory, the easier it is for animate matter to move and the greater its chance of survival becomes. With the evolution of fish, the crustaceans became a relatively clumsy source of food and fell before the superior mobility of the newly evolved animate matter.
A giant meteor carrying a germ inimical to the crustacean's existence didn't plow into the Earth. As the planet cooled and its gravity lessened, it evolved superior animate matter that could better survive the environment. The evolution of the dinosaurs presents the best example of temperature working with gravity to evolve species. As the planet cooled, life could evolve on its surface. In a tropical climate, the vegetation would be thick and lush, a source of food for mobile creatures. Because the planet's heat was maintained by its internal fires, the creatures that evolved did not need to regulate their temperature. Because the gravity was stronger than it is today, the creatures would have to develop huge skeletons, which supported the dinosaurs. When dinosaur bones were first found, the dinosaurs were reconstructed using the strength of the bones and then placing as much meat as that strength would hold in today's gravity, which being lesser, meant a massive amount of meat, producing a creature too big to walk. However, when the dinosaurs existed, the meat they held was heavier than it would be today and the bones were heavier, and thus the amount of meat placed on the bones was overestimated, the dinosaurs actually being huge lizards with internal skeletons.
When the temperature of the planet cooled further, mammals evolved that could regulate their internal temperature, leaving the dinosaurs, which couldn't, to the fate of the changing temperatures. Without the ability to adapt, they went extinct. It didn't take a meteor, it just took the progression of time on a cooling planet.
That left the mammals, which evolved into us, ambulatory animate matter that can form pictures of reality that don't exist in reality, and then change reality to match those pictures. We can test reality, and change it to our benefit. As we do so, we extend our range of survivability in reality.
At each of the first two stages, the crustaceans and the dinosaurs, animate matter was selected out of the evolutionary process by the cooling continuum, the basic nature of the planet to cool off and eventually become a larger copy of the moon.
The question is, will the cooling continuum select us out? The only way we can escape being selected out of the evolutionary process is if we fail to produce pictures of reality that actually reflect that reality so that the technology we produce also reflects reality. The failure to recognize that gravity is not a static property of matter or that the planets orbit and rotate as a result of a current force produces a grossly distorted picture of reality. If we have a grossly distorted picture of reality, the technology we create to ensure our survivability will be grossly distorted, and we will join the crustaceans and the dinosaurs, we will be selected out.
And we're not talking millions of years, either.
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