It'd be nice to write about the type of models that get up on the runway to show off themselves and the clothes they wear, or in many cases don't wear, but it would be a short column. I doubt all models are vacuous, but from what I've seen, many are. They have a single talent, they make the clothes they wear look good. To do this, they have to have a face, and they have to make that face extremely attractive. If you've had any experience with models or actresses at all, you know you probably wouldn't recognize them without their "faces." It has always fascinated me the tremendous gulf between a public persona and the private reality. It extends further than just looks, too. The public persona of most, if not all, public figures is grossly different from the private persona. They can have million dollar contracts and be flat busted because of their private behavior.
In short, the models we see on the runway are no different than the models we see coming out of the halls of empirical science. On the face, they appear to be flawless, but underneath, they are something else entirely.
The scientific method is claimed to be a process in which hypotheses are tested against reality to see if they can stand up to reality. This is the Baconian way of approaching things. Bacon recognized that there were certain things in reality that we can't know with absolute certainty. The primary thing in reality we can't know is the source of the force that causes objects such as planets to move. We also can't see the force that causes objects to drop to the Earth. We know the forces exist, he reasoned, we just can't see them, touch them, feel them, other than indirectly, in short we can't use our senses to probe them.
Therefore, he said, we have to create ideas, concepts, about what they might be. These concepts have to be based on everything we know about the phenomena we are attempting to understand. This led Bacon on his short-lived writing (but lifetime) project of listing the things we know about things. He assumed if we could know everything there was about something we couldn't know directly, we could, from indirect evidence, know it as well as we know the things we can sense directly. A corollary of this approach is, we can never, never, ever, assume our ideas and concepts are facts. They are never more than ideas and concepts based on the facts at hand when we produce the idea or concept. They can't be accepted as facts because if they are, then the disclosure of new facts will not allow them to be modified. We always have to modify our ideas and concepts as new facts are discovered.
This is obvious when we are dealing with things we can only know indirectly and therefore can't know conclusively. It stands to reason that if we start with a proposition that we don't know all the facts, then we can't claim our ideas and concepts are facts. However, Newton did just that. When the Royal Society was set up in England, its goal was to carry out Bacon's scientific process of producing ideas, testing them in reality, modifying them when reality intruded, and altering or throwing them away when new facts, or overlooked existing facts, showed they were erroneous. It's motto was (and is) nullus in verba, nothing in word. This translates to no theories without physical tests. The best example of this process is in the Society's decade long search for a better coach spring. Many members brought ideas to the problem of a spring that would allow coaches to ride smoother, they did, after all, have to produce something for the royalty that was supporting their efforts, and they gradually did.
But the process they were using was a process that allowed them to continually test their ideas against reality, and while the process is not particularly applicable in the Baconian sense, where we can have no direct knowledge of what we are testing, the spirit of Bacon poured over into the more theoretical musings of society members. Robert Hooke, the head experimenter of the Society, was a fervent believer in the Baconian process. Thus when Newton came along with his theory of colors, Hooke pointed out that it didn't have much foundation in reality, and certainly wasn't what it was presented to be, factual.
It's taken me a long time to figure out the dispute between Newton and Hooke, Newton's persistence in carrying it out and Hooke's obliviousness about it, and, most of all, Newton's pathological fear of Hooke, the fact that while he had the power to take over the Royal Society for a decade, he didn't dare do so until Hooke died. I had more or less written it off as a dispute over whether light was a wave or a particle, but that didn't seem to me to be a sufficient basis for Newton's lifelong animosity. I'm just now starting to realize that the dispute was not intellectual, but ideological. Newton had presented his reflecting telescope to the Society through Halley, and received wide acclaim for it. When he presented his theory of colors, that white light is made up of all colors and the spectrum is lined up the way it comes out of the prism, he expected to receive similar acclaim. Instead, he got skepticism, and I use that word carefully, primarily from Hooke. Hooke wasn't skeptical of the conclusions, he was skeptical of the methodology used to arrive at those conclusions, and above all, the apparent conclusiveness of the conclusions, that Newton simply assumed he was correct.
This is not the Baconian process, and Newton, isolated in Cambridge away from the current swirl of scientific opinion, was a mathematician, a field in which conclusions are absolute. There was no reason for Newton to familiarize himself with the Baconian uncertainty of the things we can't directly know when everything in Newton's world was a certainty. Thus, my use of the word skepticism, because it was the entire methodology that Hooke was complaining about, and not the theory, which, to Hooke, was merely a set of ideas or concepts. Newton isolated himself at Cambridge for many years as a result of this encounter. It wasn't until Halley came along with Hooke's idea that it might be possible to mathematically equate Kepler's inverse square law of planetary motion with Galileo's inverse square measurement of falling objects that he embarked on his attempt to mathematically prove an idea, that gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter.
It was Newton's good fortune, and our bad, perhaps fatal, fortune, that Newton befriended Charles Montague while he was at Cambridge. Montague was romantically interested in Newton's niece. He was slated to be in the landing party that greeted William, the compromise King of England, when he arrived in 1893. William made him Exchequer, perhaps the most powerful post in England, at a time England's banking system was under stress. Montague revolutionized banking, single-handedly financing William, and thus became very influential indeed. (As an aside, I'm reading Simon Schama's Citizens, and discovered the interesting fact the root cause of the French Revolution was France's inability to have imitated England's banking system.) Montague had supported Newton through the publication of the Principia, Newton's flawed book purporting to prove his theory of gravity to be fact. Hooke noted it was only an idea, although, because Newton invented the math he used to prove the theory, no one could dispute his proof. Hooke retired to his rooms at Gresham College while Newton took the sinecure job of Master of the Mint, which was under Montague's control. The Royal Society also came under Montague's control and he let it languish until Hooke's death, at which point Newton took it over and proclaimed, within a year of his dominance, his unchallengeable theory of colors. He spent the next quarter of a century mathematizing ideas into certainty, which then became law.
Bacon was trod under Newton's absolutism. No longer did science take the approach that its purpose was to produce concepts and test those concepts in the real world. It bastardized the process to, first, get an idea that predicts a fact, find the fact, and the idea is proven, then next to create a model that explains reality, and that model will become reality. The Principia, of course, is the first example of the former. Newton's says, I will compute the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon, and then I will use that information to predict the orbit of the moon. Not only was his process flawed, he had no way to compute the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon, his prediction didn't work, the moon didn't move as he predicted. But that didn't stop him from claiming he had proven gravity was a property of and proportional to matter, and that unproven idea became an unchallengeable law. The first example of the latter, the production of ad hoc explanations for physical reality in models, occurred when the now entrenched empirical community needed to get rid of Newton's cause of motion in the solar system (no one knew about galaxies at the time). Newton had said, God made the planets move, and that was simply unacceptable to empirical science, which had to do away with God at any cost. Laplace produced the ad hoc explanation that the solar system formed from a swirling mass of gas, and that explanation became reality, along with everything it implied, frictionless space (filled with either so light could travel in waves) and perpetual motion, the motion in the solar system is produced by momentum gained from the five billion year old swirling mass of gas.
Because ad hoc explanations are models that attempt to explain reality in the term of laws that have been created by ideas predicting facts that are supposedly found, the models become polluted by facts that don't exist. Thus, the complex weather models we spend billions of dollars to produce have to account for the created fact that the Earth is unaffected by friction of any type. This means that its surface has no friction with either the water in its basins, or with the atmosphere that surrounds it. Empirical science claims that molecules of air are what slow our satellites down, causing them not to conform to their Newtonian orbital calculations, but claims that masses of air molecules hugging the surface of the Earth as a result of gravity do not affect its rotation. With no friction on the Earth's surface, meteorologists have to come up with tortured explanations for why atmospheric masses move, and it's not a pretty sight. Why should they care? We're footing the bill. They're fat, dumb and happy, and we're none the wiser. Of course, we are treated to the canard that their weather models make weather forecasting more accurate, but it's weather satellites that make weather forecasting more accurate, not their crippled models.
Meteorological models are not the only area corrupted by empirical science's refusal to address issues of current force, all of its model are corrupted. When it comes to the most dynamic force in the universe, energy, empirical science has defined it into oblivion. Instead of addressing the real questions of how energy is produced, how it travels, and how it acts on matter so that matter is changed in some way, it simply says, all energy is contained in precisely defined units called quanta. They are not defined, but are rather quantized. The quanta content is measured in electrovolts and depends on frequency, which means that a quantum of light is bigger than a quantum of microwaves. This tells us absolutely nothing about energy and is even self-contradictory to other empirical dictates involving the nature of electricity and light, that one is the result of a moving charge, the other a wave or photon.
Ignoring the question where the force comes from that moves the orbiting electrons in an atom, in fact, refusing to address that question at all, empirical science then says a quantum of energy pushes an electron of an atom into an electron excited state, but since it can't stay in that state, it returns to normal, releasing the quantum of energy. That gets us back to the bookends of physics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy just is, all it's doing is randomly bouncing around from one place to another.
This isn't a model for anything, just an ad hoc explanation for energy that doesn't explain what it is, where it comes from, or how it works. Nonetheless, it becomes the basic building block for all physical models. Then, to pull the wool over our eyes much they way they do with all technological advancements that are made in spite of, rather than a result of, theoretical mumbo jumbo, Edison didn't invent the light bulb, light as a water wave did, empirical science calls technological projects such as the Mars mission, models, to demonstrate how great their models are.
In spite of the fact that empirical science deals with ad hoc explanations for reality, it claims the Baconian process as its own, that it is an open pursuit of knowledge using a process where testable hypothesis that provide a predictive fact are either validated or invalidated by demonstrating the existence or nonexistence of the predictive fact. It claims it is open to changing its conclusions any time the facts disagree with those conclusions. However, it can't change its conclusions because its conclusions are laws all of its hypotheses have to conform to.
Empirical science is a quagmire from which we'll never be able to extract ourselves. Without an accurate picture of reality, our technology will not reflect reality, and with an inefficient technology, we won't survive.
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