It's fairly clear that the scientific method, the mathematical deductive methodology, has produced a body of knowledge whose claim to accuracy rests on untestable and untested concepts and mathematical conclusions that have little or nothing to do with reality.
These concepts and conclusions are then welded into an impenetrable filter which excludes knowledge of the reality it purports to describe. We see only what we agree must be there, and are blind to the reality in which we exist, and in which we have to survive.
This situation occurred once before, with the rigid belief in the Ptolemaic system, the system Copernicus replaced. Calculations, mathematics, forced the Copernican change, forced the correct picture of the relationship of the Earth and the sun into our recall. Cargoes had to be delivered not only on time, but at their correct destinations.
With the secularization of printing, observations became widespread. Ship captains now had something with which to compare their lonely calculations. The calculations that came into widespread use were navigational charts which, because they were capable of being printed, were capable of being verified.
It doesn't take much to measure!
Conceptualizations, on the other hand, are not measurements, but beliefs as to what the measurements mean.
When Copernicus was struggling with the problem of whether the Earth moved around the sun, or whether the sun moved around the Earth, mathematics provided no help in determining which was correct. Mathematics merely measures reality, and does not itself create the concepts we use to comprehend that reality.
As a result, the application of mathematics to the problem of the Earth's relationship to the sun just translated observations into increasingly complex sets of concentric circles around the conceptualization that produced pictures of the sun traveling around the Earth. When Copernicus reconceptualized the relationship, he didn't succeed in doing away with the concentric circles. He just reduced them.
What kind of science is it that can ignore reality in the name of measuring reality?
What is it that we expect from science?
To determine what we should expect from science, we should first define what we can't expect from science.
We can't expect science to answer our philosophical questions. There are certain questions that are not only not answerable, answering them would not provide any information.
First and foremost among these questions that don't produce answers are questions of origin, when the universe began. This question can be more carefully rephrased as, when did matter first occupy nonexistence? This is a historical question which can only generate speculation.
Another set of questions that don't produce answers are questions of size, how big the universe is. When we carefully rephrase this question, we eliminate it altogether: How big is nonexistence pretty much provides its own answer!
Questions about time present another group of questions which don't produce answers. Time is the interval between changing relationships. As a result, questions of time only apply to the changing relationships that create it. That means that time began just after the second particle of matter came into existence and moved with respect to the first particle of matter, but that presents a question of origin, a historical question that can only generate speculation. Questions of origin are philosophical and can only be pushed back by science, never answered.
The same applies to questions of size, with distances pushed out but never answered.
But these questions still produce blanks in the picture of reality. We still want to know answers, and when answers are not obtainable, we fill in the blanks.
And this is the crux of the matter.
What we expect from science, what we really want is an accurate picture of the reality we perceive and an understanding of our relationship to that reality.
The only way we can ensure an accurate picture of reality is if the answers we create deal with reality and are capable of mechanical answers, answers that allow reality to push back against our answers so that we can make continuous judgments about the answers' validity.
When we are trying to answer questions about what the universe is, and how we fit into it, we are asking questions the answers to which do not involve mechanical answers..
We are instead contemplating reality.
We are not bumping into physical reality.
As such, most of the answers cannot be tested in reality. There is nothing in reality to oppose the picture of reality the mind forms.
This is why we want to measure reality. We can't trust our minds. But when nonmeasurable reality presents questions for which we have no answers, our minds provide them.
We are confronted with the sun moving across the sky every day of our lives, and we constantly live with either falling objects, or our increasing inability for ourselves to move against what is making the objects fall. Without answers to explain these realities, we would be in a constant state of anxiety. With no answers to the questions, nothing to fill in the blanks, any answer will do!
Aristotle's geocentric universe is great. When I see the sun moving across the sky, I am not disturbed, I am comforted by the thought that its exactly where it is doing exactly what it should be doing. When I see an object drop, I am not disturbed by being unable to recall why it is dropping, I am comforted that it is dropping because the center of the universe is beneath my feet (Aristotle) or because there's a lot of mass under by feet attracting it (Newton).
It doesn't matter what we fill in the blanks with because we are only attempting to get rid of our anxiety at having no answer at all to the questions of reality we encounter every day.
We don't have to come up with the correct picture to stop the anxiety. We just have to come up with a picture, an answer to the question, What makes it drop? Gravity? Oh, thanks. That fills in the picture for me. I don't need any more information.
Once we have something to answer the question, that can be used to match the hole in our picture of reality, every time we see an object fall a big sign saying "gravity" goes on in our mind, what about all the other questions that the answer raises?
What is it about matter that makes it fall, how does it act over a distance without being there, how does it diminish by not acting, but doesn't diminish when it does act, little things like that.
These aren't such obvious holes as an object falling. After all, if we have a hole in our picture of reality that we don't know exists, why would we want to create one? If gravity answers our questions, then we don't want any more questions raised, because once we notice a hole in the picture, the hole will never go away.
Why create more questions for which our recall has no answer? Because we can't stop. As soon as we ask what is making the rock fall, we cannot stop asking questions until we have a consistent picture of physical reality.
How do we know we have a consistent picture? How do we know we are not creating a religious or philosophical answer in place of God? How do we know that there is more to the explanation than gravity is the property of the mass that makes the rock fall?
We can confront reality, demand an explanation that will produce a mechanical explanation that will require us to create technology.
This process would require our answer to approximate reality.
Or we can create an answer that merely makes us feel good.
This process would allow our answers to dictate reality.
Challenging reality, standing tall in front of the "secret motions of things," demanding that the secrets come forth from the facts regardless of the shocks, that is science!
Sitting back, satisfied with ourselves, nodding our head in approval at the elegance of each other's nonanswers, that is not science.
Because contemplating reality does not involve challenging physical reality, the product of our contemplation has to itself challenge physical reality. If a rock falls in reality, we have no answer what made the rock fall. We can make up inane answers that make us feel good without having an answer, or we can attempt to find explanations that match reality.
We know we are making up inane answers that make us feel good when the resulting answers don't explain reality in a mechanical way that would make it amenable to our technology, but rather merely provides an explanation with no basis in reality.
When we ask, where did we come from, when did it all begin, what happens when we die, we are just noticing the more obvious holes in our picture of reality, and when we answer, God made the universe, He did so at the creation, and when we die we go to heaven, we are providing our recall with something that will fill the holes in our picture of reality.
No answer we can come up with will produce changes in physical reality and therefore any answer will do.
The questions are not related to how we move in physical reality.
However, when we are dealing with our movement through physical reality, when there is a chasm in the path, when our ship docks in Cyprus instead of Crete, then no matter how much agony it takes to adjust the picture of ourselves in reality to accommodate the fact, we will make the adjustment, because facts are the hard edges of reality. If we don't overcome them, we will be destroyed by them.
With mass/gravity, there will never be a "fact" to which we have to accommodate ourselves, and thus alter our misapprehension of mass/gravity. The mass/gravity, itself, is the fact. Our beliefs will therefore just continue along, because to form opposing concepts is simply too painful.
However, the accuracy of the belief determines how we deal with reality. Gravity, remember, is a hard edge in reality regardless of our need for a concept, a non fact, to explain it. Gravity is what is holding us to the surface of the planet, and if it is not subject to technology, then it will keep us here until the planet dies, and we die with it.
If our concept of gravity is a concept that it is something, a current force caused by a current physical process, then we will use our minds, confront our discomfort, to find a way to manipulate it.
If we think of the force as a property of something, matter, that matter was created, whether by God or a Big Bang makes little difference, and that the force was created when the matter was created, then we have placed it firmly on the side of belief, and will, in effect, ignore this hard edge of reality until it destroys us.
Science, then, is the use of concepts to come up with physical explanations of how reality operates the way it does, as opposed to coming up with concepts that merely allow us to avoid the physical consequences of questioning our beliefs.
Science is proposing mechanical concepts that are tied to specific aspects of the physical reality that exists, as opposed to proposing general concepts that apply to the physical reality we believe exists, concepts that can never be tested with real world consequences.
Constructing an attractive mechanism out of the expanding flows of an electromagnetic spectrum where inductive forces are constantly regulating the rate of expansion by recombining the overexpanding flows and in the process producing a force back toward the source of the expanding flows is amenable to technology.
Concluding that gravity is a property of matter is amenable to prayers, being itself an incantation.
Science, then, is the creation of concepts of the possible!
Why?
Because we never know whether or not our concepts are true, and therefore, adopting concepts of the impossible excludes us from dealing with physical reality, and it is dealing with physical reality, using our concepts to challenge physical reality, that brings them closer to the physical reality we want them to describe.
If concepts of the possible expand the possibility of our being able to act in reality, and concepts of the impossible preclude our acting in reality, then there must be something involved with acting that is itself an extension of, but integral to science. We can think all we want to about acting in reality, produce all of the concepts producible to deal with reality, but if those concepts aren't converted to mechanical ways of dealing with reality, then we might as well have concepts of the impossible.
The need for concepts to be converted to mechanical ways to deal with reality is reflected in the need for concepts to explain reality in a mechanical way. This is because to act in reality, we must act through the mechanisms we can create to deal with reality.
Science is the creation of mechanical concepts of the possible in order to construct a picture of physical reality that is amenable to the application of technology that will conduce to our survival within that environment.
In short, science is the creation of a consistent picture of physical reality using concepts that can be tested in that reality in a manner that we can incorporate the test results to overcome our limitations in that reality.
What does this definition of science exclude?
Just about everything that science is concerned with today. things like calculating the amount of radiation that can escape a spinning black hole, determining the atomic structure at the center of stars, slamming bits and pieces of atoms together in increasingly strong accelerators with increasingly expensive equipment, setting up complex experiments in the bowels of the Earth to confirm the universe began in a Big Bang, examining the far reaches of space in search of the elusive dark matter that makes up ninety percent of the universe, the list is legion.
What does such a definition include?
Concepts that attempt to explain what we should have been trying to explain all along, what makes an object move when it is released, what keeps the moon moving around the Earth and the Earth and other planets moving around the sun, what makes the matter in the solar system rotate, and do so in the same direction, why the matter in the solar system moves in the equatorial plane of the sun, what is the structure of light, how can it expand and retain its coherency, what is going on in chemical reactions, what is electricity and magnetism, and how are they related to light, heat, and chemical reactions, what is the mind and why does it need to know the answers to these questions in the first place.
Our detectors, our eyes evolved to take advantage of the electromagnetic spectrum. As we haven't got the foggiest idea what light is, the primary tool we use to measure reality is a mystery to us. As a result, we don't even have a palette to paint with.
And when we go ahead with our painting regardless of our basic ignorance, when we frame our subject, we view it through a lens that is clouded with concepts such as mass and atomic polarity. No matter what we look at, whether it be the wind, how the mind works, how the tip of a cigarette burns, we do so with the same conceptual blindness that we summon when dealing with falling objects.
And, when we start seeing a picture that looks like a modern artist's nightmare, with colors splashed across the nonexistent canvas as if applied by a collapsing black hole expanding, we are told by the elegantsia that our fallible human perception has to fall before the elegance of the self-evident conclusions that are fouling our effort to paint a picture that reflects reality in the first place.
If we abdicate our authority to determine what the nature of the inquiry is to voodoo purveyors of the tenets of incomprehensibility, we have entered the world of the crystal ball, where the distant visage sees what we can't see, but assures us that the contents are clear to those who have mastered the arcane, toiled their lives on behalf of understanding the obscure, and are willing to share with us the vision if we just dig deeper in our pocket to support their quest.
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