I've mentioned in many columns the absurdity of the notion that the universe is based on specific laws which need but be uncovered by the scientific method. The scientific method is an amorphous process that means pretty much whatever the person using the term means. Under ideal conditions, the scientific method is a system that allows a user to propose a hypothesis dealing with some part of reality and then use that hypothesis to predict a fact.
The idea is, when the fact is discovered, it will confirm the hypothesis. The hypothesis then becomes a scientific fact and, if it applies to a large slice of reality, a law. Once a scientific fact becomes a law, all subsequent hypotheses have to either use the original hypothesis as a fact in the hypothesis or ensure that the hypothesis doesn't disagree with the scientific fact.
The scientific method is modeled after the process empirical science assumes Newton used to uncover the basic law of the universe, mass/gravity. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can contradict mass/gravity and in fact mass/gravity is a fact that is unconsciously used in the creation of all hypotheses. The one exception is Einstein, who is thought to have contradicted mass/gravity, but who in actuality merely gave it a new dimension.
The actual scientific method is exemplified by one of The Royal Society's early projects, to produce a better spring for the horse-drawn coaches of the time. This was one of Hooke's many project and it involved what the production of any technology involves, creating a picture in the mind of something that will work, then building it in reality to see if it does work. It is the trail and error method used to create new technology.
Fooling around with springs is dealing with actual physical reality. As I have noted before, the mind operates by comparing recall with reality. It was designed to obtain recall from the physical information it collected from reality and because its principle function is to allow animate matter to move safely through reality and its basic operation is to store and recall pictures of reality for comparison with the pictures of actual reality the animate matter is in.
However, when animate matter becomes sentient, as we are, it can hold a picture of reality in mind when reality doesn't exist. When it does this, it will start to notice things in realty for which it has no recall. There are certain things in reality that do not produce recall. One of them is the realization that if an object is falling, something must be making it fall. Simple animate matter does require this information. It simply needs to know that objects fall and that falling objects can injure or kill. But when we, as sentient beings, observe falling objects, we have a hole in our recall. We can't see what is making them fall and therefore we have nothing from reality to put in our recall.
Because the mind evolved to warn us of changes in physical reality by making us uncomfortable when reality and recall don't agree, and because the mind is an objective operation that can't distinguish reality from recall, when we have a hole in our recall, we have a mismatch of recall with reality and we feel discomfort. We therefore have to fill that hole with something. Aristotle said objects fell because the Earth was the center of the universe and for several thousand years, this bit of fancy served the purpose of filling the hole for falling objects.
Newton replaced Aristotle's inane explanation with the equally inane mass/gravity mantra, gravity is a property of and proportional to mass. However, making that statement, just like making the statement white light is made up of all colors, the colors of light are ordered the way they come out of the prism, and God comes back periodically to keep the planets in motion (Newton's explanation, not mine), just fills a hole in our recall. It doesn't tell us anything about the reality we are dealing with. Making these statements had no relationship to Hooke's actually physical experiments with the springs, and indeed, that is why Hooke took issue with Newton (see columns 05-05).
As the 18th Century progressed, however, it became increasingly important to an emerging science that was challenging religion to claim a methodology. The scientific method that emerged is an imperfect copy of the way we physically test actual reality. The basic problem with the attempt to try and copy the trial and error method and apply it to questions where reality has nothing to put in our recall is that there is no way to test what you can't see. The scientific method therefore had to come up with some other way to claim validity. Instead of building a spring in reality and then seeing if it works, it said, if our hypotheses predict facts, then those facts can be tested in reality. If the facts turn out to be actual facts, then the hypothesis is correct.
The problem with this statement of course is that facts are what produce hypotheses. Hypotheses cannot produce facts. In addition, predicting facts excludes existing facts, which means that hypotheses that need predicted facts have to be dealing in the area of unreality. Further, predicting facts does not protect our conclusions from the way our minds operate. For instance, Newton's math didn't work, but he concluded it didn't work because there was something wrong with the size of the moon that he couldn't see or he thought Halley's computation of the orbit of the moon was wrong. In short, he didn't think anything was wrong with his hypothesis, he thought something was wrong with reality.
When, later on in the century, it became apparent that Newton's math didn't work for any of the planets, let alone the moon, learned minds did not say, well, let's go back to the drawing board and start over to find out what makes objects drop. The minds said, the universe is operated by laws, Newton discovered the basic law of the universe, we are just not applying it correctly. This led to the conclusion that Newton's law couldn't predict the courses of the planets, but Newton's law could be used to compute the amount of matter in the planets from the orbits of the planets leading to Whewell's rationalizations about the scientific method and the creation of the hypotheses it proved, that they were actually uncovered laws (see column 06-05).
Bacon, of course, had realized the problem almost two centuries before, and Occam made his observations dealing with simplicity in the 14th Century. Bacon felt, as I do, that the basic question that has to be puzzled out is the hidden causes of motion. He realized that we could never actually know what the hidden causes of motion were, but he said we could make suggestions as to the cause, conceptualize answers. However, he continued, because we don't know everything and probably never will, the process we have to use to come up with the answers to those things we can never know is to get as many facts as we can, and then induce, not deduce, but induce answers from the facts.
Deduction is the process of reasoning where the premises dictate the conclusion. It is how empirical science creates dark matter. The premise is, gravity is a product of mass and as there are no other current forces in the universe, gravity bends straight-line motion into orbital motion. All the stars in a galaxy are orbiting, therefore they must be orbiting as a result of gravity. Returning to the original premise, as gravity is a product of mass, there must be enough mass to cause all the stars in the galaxy to rotate. There isn't enough visible mass to keep all the stars in the galaxy rotating, therefore there must be mass we can't see, dark matter, that accounts for the rotation.
Inductive reasoning reverses the process. Applying it to the solar system, an inductive reasoner would say, all planets either orbit the sun or orbit other planets. Therefore, there must be a force in the solar system that is causing the planets to orbit. Bacon went on to say, while we probably will never actually know the nature of these hidden forces, we can use inductive reasoning to derive answers. Inductive reasoning depends on the number of available facts rather than on predetermined premises. Thus, Bacon reasoned, the more facts we have, the closer our answer will be to reality but because we don't know all the facts, we have to get answers anyway. Those answers, however, are only temporary and will have to be continuously updated as new facts come to light.
Empirical science claims that this is exactly what it does. However, when it creates a scientific fact using premises, it is merely creating additional premises that dictate outcomes like the dark matter that is not a fact in reality because it cannot be seen, but is a fact for every empirical scientist because the made-up premise of mass/gravity dictates it.
Bacon, of course, ascribed to Ocaam's razor, that one shouldn't increase the number of explanations to explain the unknowable beyond the number required, or in simpler terms, that which explains the most with the least is the best. This premise is also based on the fact that there are things that we can never know. Applied to Bacon's process, where explanations are induced from existing facts, Occam dictates that the many inductive conclusions be weeded out by selecting the one that explains the most facts with the least amount of made-up premises. As more facts come to light, the inductive conclusions continually have to be updated and razored so the one that explains the most with the least will be the one we test in reality.
And test in reality is what science is all about. Empirical science confines itself to absurd notions that, if testable at all, are only testable by the few and with the big bucks governments and universities can provide and even when the big equipment is tinkered to confirm the notion, so what? We can't floss our teeth with string theory.
Empirical science does not test conclusions dealing with reality because it has already determined the conclusions by the scientific method. To empirical science, gravity is a property of matter and that's the end of it, no testing allowed. The purpose of science is to produce an understanding of reality so that we can construct technology that will better accommodate our existence in reality. Under Bacon's process, we wouldn't have said gravity is a property of matter and then set out to prove it. We would have asked, what makes objects fall? We would have then come up with some sort of answer that would indicate how we could overcome it.
When that answer didn't work out in reality, we would come up with another answer and devise a way to test it in reality. We would continue to repeat the process until we stumbled on something that did work, maybe only a little. Then we would continue to increase the number of facts we know and continue to come up with testable ideas and sooner or later we would have come up with an idea that worked.
That wouldn't mean the idea was a fact, it would only provide us with an explanation for our new technology. Just because an idea leads to a change in reality doesn't mean the idea reflects reality because ideas are always just that, ideas. They are never reality. Even when something works, why it works will forever be a mystery so long as it involves the hidden forces that move things, or the actual nature of things too small to deal with, light or electricity or magnetism, or they are simply out of reach, what makes up the center of planets or stars.
But empirical science doesn't even bother testing reality when it comes to its scientific facts because why test something that is a fact? Although I would bet there are governments in the world that are spending big bucks on gravity research, and going about it bassakward (see column 03-05), using both the premise of mass/gravity and the premise it has to be overcome rather than neutralized, any empirical scientist who conducts such research publicly will be drummed out of the corps with malice aforethought.
In At the Gates of the Citadel, I outline the Bacon/Occam process as the concept model, a method of getting at the answers we will never know. However, because empirical science has to claim to know what it can't know, just as any religion claims to know what it can't know, it isn't concerned with reality, with our wellbeing, or even with our future. It is only concerned with maintaining its grip on the public mind so it can feed at the public trough in exchange for making up stuff the public can put in mind, stuff that reality does not put into recall. Without something to put in recall, people feel uncomfortable when confronted by the reality. We need answers to the questions reality does not provide us recall for.
Empirical science has replaced religion in providing those answers, but at great expense, not in gold and silver, but in our very survival, because unless we can figure out how to neutralize gravity, we are dead, and the observation by the famous English economist John Maynard Keynes that we are all dead in the long run will apply to us as the unique species that evolved on this planet as it grows cold, loses its atmosphere and oxygen, looks first like Mars, then like the moon, and eventually is drawn into a star to become a part of that star's combustion process.
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