Television programs are fertile areas to study bad writing and profile audience dynamics. Some are simply interesting to watch. Veronica Mars is a little watched program that was well written and acted. Veronica is a high school student in the fictional town of Neptune. As the story opens, she and her father, the former sheriff, have been ostracized by the community after Veronica's best friend, the sister of her boyfriend and the daughter of the richest man in Neptune, is bludgeoned to death on their estate pool.
A drifter confessed to the murder. However, Sheriff Mars didn't buy the confession and insisted on pursuing the matter, which resulted in him losing his job, in his wife leaving him, and in a nebulous situation in which Veronica was fed a ruffie and raped at a subsequent pool party. The arc of the series recounts Veronica's ceaseless efforts to uncover the real murderer, reclaim her mother and discover her rapist. Along the way, it appears she might be the illegitimate daughter of the murdered girl's father, making her boyfriend her brother.
Juggling all of these plot points, however, isn't the best feature of the program. Along the way, each week Veronica is confronted with a problem involving her classmates, her school, and her former friends, problems that are pretty thorny. Veronica sets out to solve the problem each week, doing so cleverly in a way that pretty much leaves the source of the problem exposed to ridicule. Thus, along with her relentless pursuit of the bigger answers, she is exercising intelligence, a vast array of skills, and an innate cleverness addressing each week's specific problem. Quite a writing feat.
The problem came with the final episode. I don't know whether it was the threat of cancellation, but the final workaround reversed Veronica's character entirely. While all of the plot threads were neatly brought to a conclusion, Veronica wasn't the one who solved the case. In fact, in the final episode, she kept missing obvious clues, added nothing but confusion to the solution, and ended up helpless, a sniveling daddy's girl locked in a refrigerator while the actual murderer poured gasoline on it, taunted her over a microphone, and then lit the thing up. Veronica, helpless throughout, had to be rescued by her father who pretty much attempted the thwart her efforts at finding the murderer throughout the entire season.
Pretty frustrated with this outcome, I was driven to the bulletin boards to see what viewers thought. Viewers were pretty upset, too, but not about the complete change in character written in for Veronica. Instead they were concerned about whether Veronica's new boyfriend had carried out his threat to commit suicide and who it was that greeted Veronica at the end of the show, along with a slew of comments dealing with costume and scenery. A major issue was who owned the camera that ensnared the murdered.
In short, the viewers, who were probably too young to remember Brittany Spears, were totally unconcerned about the major structural problems in the program, merely caviling about the surface features. That's not unusual considering the age and school grade of the people involved. We couldn't expect uneducated youngsters to have minds yet that could probe beneath the surface like our educated empirical scientists are able to probe the depths of issues to come up with the essence of the questions dealing with reality.
As can be seen from the last column, there is much interest in evolution as a result of very clever attacks by the intelligent design folks. The Washington Post, whose ombudsman had suggested adding a paragraph or two to news stories to fully explain evolution, apparently got tired of the continuous controversy and sent a reporter, Michael Powell, out to interview Phillip Johnson, the creator of intelligent design. Powell came back with what I would classify as a balanced article on the subject. In giving voice to the evolutionists' side of the argument, he points out that evolutionists insist that the evidence is all around. We then get the standard blather: fruit flies branch into new species (characteristic evolution); bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics (characteristic evolution); studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans (never have figured out what this is evidence of, but it certainly supports characteristic evolution). There are fossilized remains of a dinosaur "birds," (long ago shown to be bogus) and DNA tests suggest that whales descended from ancient hippos and antelopes (also unclear how DNA demonstrates species, rather than characteristic evolution).
Then Powell comes up with this observation, which puts the practitioners of empirical science a little behind the pre-teenyboppers who watch Veronica Mars. He asks rhetorically on behalf of evolutionists, "Does it make any more sense to challenge Darwin than to contest Newton's theory of gravity? You haven't seen Phillip Johnson floating into the stratosphere recently, have you?"
This is, of course, the mirror of what I have received on a consistent basis since about 1968 when I first proposed that gravity, being dynamic, might be a product of what matter does rather than merely a non-dynamic property of matter itself, a property like color or hardness. In the Physics Department of a major university I was invited to leave, not by the door, but by the window where I could prove to myself first hand that gravity was a property of matter. Since then, I have been told uncountable times that I will be given the address of a building I can jump off to prove to myself that gravity is a property of matter.
I've known some pretty heavy hitters in the physics community and while they never budged from the Newtonian concept of gravity as a property of and proportional to mass, the configuration of matter that produces gravity, each, when pressed, has admitted that no one knows what gravity is. However, outside of a very small core of physicists, the universal belief is that gravity is proven simply because things fall.
What we have here is rote ignorance. There is no connection between a fact and an explanation for that fact. However, empirical science names facts and then claims it understands all there is to know about that fact. Stating that gravity is a property of mass does not tell us anything about gravity. Saying that it is proportional to mass is setting forth an unproven and unproveable connection.
When empirical science says gravity is a property of mass, it is basically saying that because an object falls to the surface of the Earth, there is a property of the Earth that is making it fall. This is no different than Aristotle saying that an object falls to the Earth because the center of the Earth is the center of the universe and all objects fall to the center of the universe.
It's simply meaningless.
When empirical science says that gravity is proportional to mass, it is setting forth a proposition that can never be checked. There is no way to determine how much matter there is in the Earth, the moon, any planet or the sun. It is just not something that is knowable. Thus, computing how much gravity each produces is delusional. Of course, empirical science claims it can tell us how much matter there is in a planet, although it can't tell us what the make-up of that matter is. Because it can't tell us the make-up of the matter, it calls the matter it computes to be in a planet mass. It computes the amount of matter by making a number of assumptions, assumptions that have no basis, and actually no counterpart in reality.
The first assumption it makes is that everything in the universe, the planets, the moons, the sun, the stars, would all be going in straight lines but for the force of gravity which is assumed, with no basis, to be a property of and proportional to the matter. There is nothing in our reality that moves, without force, in a straight line, but that's what empirical science assumes happens everywhere in the universe but here on Earth. It then assumes that gravity bends the straight-line motion. The extent to which the straight-line motion is affected by gravity allows empirical science to calculate the amount of gravity that would cause the straight-line motion to be bent, and once this is done, it can then compute the amount of mass in the object doing the bending.
There isn't a fact in the entire process other than the fact that an object falls toward the surface of the Earth. The only other fact we know about gravity is that it diminishes inversely with the square of its distance from the Earth (which, incidentally, is the same measurement we get for the electromagnetic emissions given off by cooling bodies). Empirical science, once it fools itself into believing that it has actually created a fact, that gravity is a property of and proportional to mass, then goes on the describe gravity. It claims that gravity is used up when it does nothing, a result of it diminishing inversely with the square of its distance, and isn't used up when it does something, bends the straight-line motion of the planets or other heavenly objects. Since neither of these effects is actually present in reality, empirical science is once again setting forth unfounded principles.
We, of course, like little kids, take all this blather and reduce it to one simple belief, that because something falls, gravity has been proven. The reality is, all of the blather does not tell us the one thing we really need to know about gravity, how that gravity is generated, how it travels, and how it acts on the atoms of matter to cause those atoms to move back toward the source of the gravity.
The empirical blather tells us everything about things that are meaningless and nothing about the things that we really need to know. Much like the viewers and bulletin board contributors to Veronica Mars, emirical scientists do not see past the surface of things, they never get down to asking the real questions and when we don't ask the real questions, we will never get the real answers.
Empirical science does not limit its rote ignorance to questions of gravity. Rote ignorance is at the basis of the empirical project. Empirical science has no answers, it holds itself out to have all the answers, after all, it is always just a day away to discovering the grand TOE, or theory of everything, and because it holds itself out to have all the answers when in fact it has none, it promotes rote ignorance in the populace its supposed to inform. It's the only way the empirical community can maintain its standard of living and its prestige.
When asked why the Earth rotates, empirical science does not go into a discussion about the force that causes the Earth to rotate, it simply states that the Earth's rotation is a result of angular momentum imparted to the Earth when it condensed out of a swirling mass of gas. What kind of answer is that? Blather, pure and simple. Ask it what is making the Earth orbit the sun, or the moon orbit the Earth, and you'll get much the same answer, blather about force being sourced in a swirling mass of gas. If someone tried to sell us that crap wearing a pointy hat and brandishing a crystal ball, we'd run them out of town on a rail. But presented to us by men in suits holding degrees conferred upon them by other men holding degrees and wearing ribbons of merit conferred upon them by other men wearing ribbons conferred upon them by, and so forth, why we fall down on our knees and succumb to dumb. Could be one reason there are so few women in science. They might just be too intelligent to fall for all the blather.
Empirical science claims that it is not interested in the why of things because the why of things is a philosophical question and empirical science is only interested in reality, or in its suggested definition of science to the Kansas Board of Education in the intelligent design imbroglio, the natural explanation, the explanation of nature or reality. However, there is very little in empirical science that doesn't deal with the why of things. It tells us why objects fall, they fall because of gravity, and then it simply defines the terms of why, gravity is a property of and proportional to mass. Why do planets rotate and orbit? Angular momentum. Define angular momentum? The force imparted to the planets by the swirling mass of gas. Why do galaxies move? The big bang. Define big bang? The force imparted from the explosion of the universe at the beginning of time. And, of course, time is space and space is time, a neat little package in which empirical science wraps up the two obvious things in our reality that don't exist and then presents them to us in a single incomprehensible package.
The reason empirical science always deals in the why of things even though it claims not to is found in its process. It simply names things. Naming things does not tell us anything about those things. But after something is named, any meaning empirical science wants to provide it is fine so long as the meaning doesn't disagree with other established meanings, the first established meaning being gravity is a property of matter.
What science should do, and I say science here because it is hopeless ever to get an answer about reality with any degree of validity as a result of the empirical process, what science needs to do is explain to us the how. How is gravity generated, how does it travel, how does it act on matter. It needs to explain the source of force, what the current force is, and we all know that things don't move without current force even if we have been rendered ignorant by empirical science, what is the current force that causes the planets to rotate and orbit, how is that force generated, how does it move, and how does it act on the matter that makes up the planets to make them move as they do.
These are the questions we need answers to if we want to produce a technology that matches the reality in which we find ourselves. The fact that empirical science refuses to address the real questions of our reality leaves it open for clever attack by someone like Stephen Meyers who pastes stickers on textbooks saying evolution is a theory, not a fact. By failing to address the question of how, in evolution, how does life evolve from its simplest form to its most complex form, by failing to concentrate on the hows, it addresses only the whys, why are there no transitional species in the geologic record, why are their explosions and extinctions of life, or it spends its time negating the philosophical whys, life is a chance happening, evolution has no direction, blather, blather, blather.
Our understanding of the reality around us is the equivalent of the understanding of pre-teeny-bobbers watching Veronica Mars who fail to understand that clever teenage girls don't just get up one morning and turn into blithering idiots who end up stuck in a freezer while all round them is burning.
The difference is, the pre-teenyboppers will grow up one day and become accomplished professionals.
I doubt that is going to happen to the human race enslaved as it is in empirical blather. It's mired in ignorance and has no apparent way of getting out.
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