When I took science in high school, I asked the teacher when we would get to the how of things, rather than the simple measurement of things and then the manufacture of theories to explain the measurement, theories that didn't have anything to do with the why of things. For instance, I had, since the age of about five, been looking for the how of gravity and all I ever got was its measurement and then some inane theory about it being a property that didn't explain anything, didn't describe how it worked, its mechanical nature.
His reply was, I would learn all that when I got to college.
In college, my first science class was much different from my high school class. My high school class had about twenty-five people in it, the college class about two hundred and fifty. The content, however, was identical, and as I sat in the tiered seats listening to the same pedantic crap I had memorized in high school to get an A, I leafed through the text to find it was filled with the same crap. No how, only hypothesis piled on top of hypothesis piled on top of hypothesis.
I dropped the curriculum and registered as an English major. One of the first courses in English involved the life of Shakespeare. The textbook was about 500 pages long. As I read through it, I felt pangs similar to the pangs I felt in science and physics courses. There were a whole lot of words that ended up saying nothing. If I distilled the actual "facts" of Shakespeare's life out of the 500 pages, I ended up with about half a notebook page filled with, well, not facts, but things that looked like facts but had no cohesive reality.
I ended up creating my own curriculum based loosely on comparative literature, philosophy, religion and of course English. One of my courses brought me into contact with Nabakov, and Lolita, his first popular work in the United States. While I never did get through Lolita, I did get a jolt around the tenth page. I realized that I didn't understand half the words the guy was using. Since he was a native Russian writing in English, I thought this a pretty unpleasant reality. I had taken four years of English and two years of Latin in high school, and a native Russian had a better vocabulary than I did.
I began to jot the words I didn't know down in the 3x5 spiral pad I always carried with me and started to look them up. There were so many, however, that it was overwhelming just looking them up. I therefore got a pack of 3x5 cards and sat down and wrote out the definitions of each word, carrying between 30 to 50 with me at all times so I could leaf through them when I was stuck with nothing else to do, which in college was pretty much in any class.
This is background stuff that is included in Transparent Realities, the 10th Volume of The Copernican Series, which should be out in three years. However, it is necessary background to understanding The Snowflake Syndrome. A number of years after graduating college and law school, an institution at the time devoted to teaching the art of thinking rather than social theory, I refocused my thoughts on the how of gravity. In listing all of the possibilities, I came to the basic conclusion that a dynamic force needed a dynamic source. Once I decided on that connection, I started looking around for what was happening with matter that was dynamic. I had learned that when the correct questions are not asked, answers are impossible to come by, but as soon as someone stumbles on the correct question, the answer is almost inescapable.
The only answer was that matter had once been hot, was cooling and because cooling was the only dynamic thing that matter did, or indeed, could do on its own simply because it existed hot in zero temperature nothingness, that gravity was somehow related to cooling. I hadn't yet worked out that the emission fields emitted by a combusting object diminished in identical fashion to the way gravity diminishes, with the square of distance and I certainly had yet to evolve the single elementary particle, with its two opposing properties which can be used to explain how an expanding emission field can draw matter back to the source of emissions (see column 01/08/05), but I knew if I was going to develop the connection, I needed a lot more information.
I went out and bought The Harper Encyclopedia of Science and started in on gravity. My idea was to keep following cross-references until I started to obtain some answers. It didn't take me long to discover that all the cross-references carried me in a gigantic circle right back to the point at which I had started. Everything was defined by everything else and nothing was defined on its own merits.
I went out and bought the more technical Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. More convoluted, and deploying a much more deceptive vocabulary, it produced the same results as The Harper, it carried me around in circles. Still having faith in the scientific establishment, that it was an open and interested operation, I decided I must be missing something, so I adopted my old vocabulary building trick of writing out information on 3x5 cards and going over that information when I was at loose ends.
While the cards simply confirmed that science was the practice of circular reasoning, one very simple fact began to emerge from the circular reasoning. Just like we can make a factual statement about a dog chasing its tail, that it isn't going anywhere, I discovered from my 3x5 cards that the only statements science, and I had yet to distinguish it as empirical science, science was comfortable with were statements that could never be disproved.
While I had yet to discover the reason for this, that scientific statements needed to be reduced to terms for use in equations and therefore had to be givens, and givens, accepted on the basis of faith, had to be unassailable, I found its practice embodied in the simple statement that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, in its modern form, the so-called Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, that the quantity of matter and energy available in the universe is fixed and can never increase or decrease.
The question I most hear asked about this proposition, when any question is asked at all, is, what the heck does it mean? Well, the answer to that question is pretty obvious. If matter or energy could increase or decrease, then matter and energy could not be used as fixed terms in an equation.
However, that is not the real question. The real question concerning empirical science, and here I am falling into my present mindset of separating the fantasy world of empirical science from the real world of observation, the most basic question of all about empirical science is, how does it know?
After all, when someone asks how we know the dog chasing its tail is not going anywhere, all we have to do is point at the dog going around in circles and we can see the dog is not going anywhere. Galileo put the quits to the objections to Copernicus's conclusion that the planets went around the sun simply by developing a telescope that collected enough light to show the moons of Jupiter going around Jupiter.
Seeing something provides its own validity, demonstrates its factual nature.
Empirical science has no idea what energy is and it has a mishmash of concepts dealing with what matter is, none of which adequately explain what matter is, what it is doing and how it does it. And it certainly has no way of knowing how much matter exists in the universe, it has no way of knowing how much energy exists in the universe, and it has no way to determine if it can be increased or decreased.
What, then, is the purpose of the statement if it isn't just a silly statement designed to fix mathematical boundaries? More accurately, it is a statement that, because it is incapable of proof, is also incapable of disproof. When your daily bread is dependent on not being made a fool of for making false statements, making statements that can never be falsified is the thing of golden opportunity. No one who is paying you for answers will ever stop paying you if your answers can never be proven false.
The first question to direct at any empirical scientific statement, then, is, how do you know?
I distilled this simple fact from my 3x5 cards as The Snowflake Syndrome. Empirical science, for some reason, likes to assert that there are no two snowflakes alike. As this is a proposition that can never be proven, it is incapable of disproof and thus represents the primary nature of empirical science. How does it know there are no two snowflakes that aren't alike? It can't know, and therefore, no one can claim that it isn't a fact.
I started ruminating on uncovering The Snowflake Syndrome, of empirical science after mulling over the final except from Where Science Went Wrong in last week's column, the excerpt about reversing reality. The scientific assertion that objects travel in a straight line unless a force acts to alter that motion is a very deceptive form of The Snowflake Syndrome. After all, empirical science can not measure all of the motion in the universe and it cannot measure all of the forces acting on that straight-line motion. When we ask, how does empirical science know that all objects travel in a straight line unless a force acts to change that motion, we are asking a question that provides its own answer. It is only common sense that the statement is true. Empirical science merely has to ask the question, what would happen to the motion if a force influenced it, and all we could answer was the obvious, that force moves objects and thus the application of force to straight-line motion would cause the straight-line motion to change.
But by applying The Snowflake Syndrome to the question and asking how does empirical science know, we are not asking the right question. If we don't ask the right question, then we will always be confused by the answers that we get and we will live in a confusing world that makes no sense to our senses.
The real question involving straight-line motion is, where in the universe has anyone ever, under any circumstances, witnessed it? Sure, if we drop something, it takes a straight line down to the floor, and if we apply force to that straight-line motion, we can deflect it. But empirical science is not talking about the straight-line motion of falling objects. It is talking about a hypothetical straight-line motion that is diverted by the gravity that makes objects fall.
Newton needed the moon to be traveling in a straight line because it was the only way he could measure the force of the gravity he hypothesized was changing that straight-line motion. He had no evidence the moon would be moving in a straight line but for gravity, and empirical science has no evidence that the moon would be moving in a straight line but for the force of gravity. Thus, The Snowflake Syndrome question to ask about this proposition is, where in the universe do we find straight-line motion? The question, how does empirical science know, does not apply to the proposition that applying force to straight-line motion would cause that motion to alter its course. The question is, how does empirical science know that objects travel in a straight line unless that straight-line motion is altered by the force of gravity, the only force empirical science recognizes as affecting the motion of planets?
The answer is, empirical science doesn't know, can't know and will never know and therefore is basing its conclusion on something it can never measure. It goes further than The Snowflake Syndrome, which merely presents a statement that can never be disproved. With straight-line motion, empirical science is making a statement that can never be proven.
The statement is at the very foundation of the empirical project and therefore the entire empirical project rests on a foundation that has no basis in reality. It claims that it proves the statement daily in its space program, but the space program, which involves satellites straying from orbit, unmanned missions missing or crashing into their targets and course correction teams constantly correctly for the proposition's mistakes, disproves the proposition.
Nor is the result trivial when it comes to our picture of the universe. Because there is no straight-line motion in the universe and because the only force that can result in non-straight-line motion is gravity, empirical science spends its time and our dollars making up gravity that doesn't exist in the universe, distorting our pictures of reality with black holes and dark matter, both of which meet the criteria for The Snowflake Syndrome precisely. How does empirical science know there are black holes and dark matter?
There's no straight-line motion in the universe, and no matter to explain the motion we do see. Therefore, the motion we see, caused by the matter we don't see, is caused by dark matter and black holes.
In reality, we are required to look for the mechanical nature of the current forces that cause the motions in our existence rather than assuming force away as properties or historical in nature. If we don't, we will have a distorted picture of reality and a distorted technology and we will die as our distorted technology rusts on a dying planet.
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