Astronomers recently announced a new discovery, a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet, which is called 2003 UB313. Planet 2003 UB313 has temporarily been named Xena after the television character and its satellite is temporarily named Gabrielle, Xena's sidekick. I wasn't particularly aware there was a 10th planet, although I am aware of the arguments over whether Pluto is a planet. Pluto was discovered in 1930, and it's claimed orbit is 250 years, so we can readily see nothing that can be said about Pluto's orbit can be said as a result of observation. We've only seen 30% of its orbit.
Looking a little deeper into this, we discover that we have two other maybe planets out there, one temporarily named Santa, the other Easterbunny. Got to hand it to these astronomers, they're creative, but then their whole enterprise is based on fantasy, so why wouldn't they be. These four objects inhabit the Kuiper belt. Because some comets are recurring and some aren't, astronomers had to create two different sources for the two different types of comets. Remember, astronomers believe that the solar system has been the way it is for some 5 billion years, so it couldn't possibly be picking up new matter. All the matter that exists in or around the solar system has existed the same way all these many years. Gravity occasionally knocks some of the matter askew. If the matter is in the Kuiper belt, which begins on the other side of Neptune's orbit, then the result is a recurring comet. If something gets knocked out of the ice field, the Ort cloud that stretches beyond the Kuiper belt, then it becomes a single passage comet. See how simple astronomy can be? All astronomers have to do is make stuff up and it becomes reality.
Now let's get down to the discovery of Gabrielle itself. If we look up discovery, we find that it is the act of something being discovered. The definition of discover is to become aware of something. So assuming astronomers are actually seeing something, they really have discovered something. The reason we honor people who discover something is that it adds to our knowledge. Finding a bunch of rocks in irregular orbits beyond the orbit of Neptune should certainly tell us something. It should tell us we got the operation of the solar system wrong, that it wasn't formed out of a swirling mass of gas, that it isn't operated by historical forces, that it has to be operated by current forces. Once the discovery tells us that, we then roll up our sleeves and get to work figuring out what those current forces might be.
Is this what the astronomers are doing?
Not on your life. The punch line for poor little Gabrielle is that she will allow astronomers to determine the precise mass and density of Xena.
Now let's see. What in the world is the use of this information and, in fact, is it information at all? First off, there is no way that the density of a planet can be verified. The basic rule of any science, which means anything dealing with reality, is, if it's not verifiable, then it simply isn't worth pursuing. It's fantasy, made up stuff. No one can take a planet apart to determine its actually density, and who cares in the first place? We know planets are made up of different mixtures of different elements. That's knowledge enough.
So why the pursuit of density? Well, I'll go over it again, because it can't be said in enough different ways using enough diverse examples. Newton set out to demonstrate that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter by saying he could use the amount of matter in the Earth to predict the orbit of the moon. To do this, and this is enshrined in the Principia, he said the Earth and the moon were made up of uniform particles uniformly distributed. This, of course, is simply tripe, not the case, pure idiocy if you will, under anybody's definition, the rantings of a madman. But in the late 17th Century when Newton was passing off this tripe on a small clique of men, no one knew much of anything about reality. No one knew anything about light, about electricity, about the galaxies or even this galaxy, let alone the sun. Today's highschoolers know more about reality than these guys could even imagine.
So when Newton proposed this little piece of idiocy, it flew. Of course, Newton's assumption didn't end up predicting the orbit of the moon, there being too much moon, and as the 18th Century wore on, it failed big time to predict the orbits of the planets, so what were astronomers expected to do, disavow the Celestial Mechanics, Newton's baby, that was putting food on their tables and say were wrong, and start over? Give me a break. They had to come up with some way to save Newton. How did they do it? They said, well, Newton had it right, he uncovered the basic law of the universe, that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter, he just didn't use it right. Now that we know the basic law (the law Newton was trying to prove but failed to prove), now that we have that law on the books, we can use the orbits of the planets to determine the amount of matter in the planets, the planet's density.
And that, folks, is what these nutcases are doing. They are going through the entirely useless process of determining how much density is in Xena using a theory that attempted to prove what gravity was, but failed, was reversed and became the revered Celestial Mechanics, for the same reason Madonna, Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera publicly kiss, to get their names in the paper, enhance their reputations and put more money in their pockets.
Now, on to mass. What's the difference between density and mass, you might ask. Better yet, ask, what is mass? Well, mass is what produces gravity. That might lead you to ask, what is gravity? Why, wouldn't you know, gravity is what's produced by mass.
This is empirical science's explanation for the dynamic force that holds us to the surface of the Earth, a circular piece on self-referential nonsense.
What is the source of mass might be a better question, and here we run back into Newton's failed attempt to prove that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. Notice, his proposition wasn't mass, it was matter because, as noted, he assumed all matter was uniformly made up of the same particle. When Newton was proposing that gravity was a property of and proportional to the matter that made up the planet, he was making a real proposition about a real force. He was trying to physically connect the force to the matter that made up the planet. However, when it didn't work out, and his formula was turned around, using the unproven statement that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter to show how much matter was in the planets, that left the connection of gravity to matter up in the air. Accepting Newton's unproven assumption as the basic law of the universe, but using it to measure Jupiter's very real physical surface as gas, the new empirical science had to connect gravity with something, so it did what it always does when it is totally ignorant of what it is dealing with, it made up a word, mass, and said that word, describing how much matter was in a planet computed by the planet's orbit, was the source of gravity.
Doesn't say anything, but that's empirical science's way. Senseless statements, just as idiotic undertakings like measuring the unmeasurable composition of the planets, can't be challenged. Gabrielle in the TV series Xena has more weight than Gabrielle the satellite, which is occupying millions of dollars of time and telescope computer usage to determine useless information.
But there is a better question. Gabrielle in the Xena program was fictional. Is Gabrielle the satellite also fictional?
Let's look at the process used to discover her. Gabrielle was discovered using the Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics system, LGS AO. Readers of these columns know that the fundamental rule of light that astronomers ignore is that light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance traveled. Astronomers, who like to claim they can see the light from the beginning of time at the end of the universe, simply ignore this fact of reality because this fact of reality tells us clearly that light expands out of existence. Astronomers like to promote the notion that the stronger the telescope they have, the further into space they can see. The reality is, telescopes do not see any further than the lens they contain. They can only collect the light that exists when it strikes the surface of the lens. Sending Hubble up removed the atmosphere that would otherwise distort the light, but it only sees what light exists where it's at. It does not have some magical power to extend its lens deep into the universe and see light that has yet to arrive on its lens.
Because light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance it travels, it does not travel forever. It diminishes because it expands and it expands out of existence. If it expands out of existence, then there is simply no light to see. Another known reality about light is that when it bounces off an object, it begins to reexpand. The light bouncing off Gabrielle is reflected sunlight. Now Xena is some 9 billion miles from the sun (the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, so we are dealing with reflected light that has traveled and expanded over a distance of some 18 billion miles, knocking off some distance because we are supposedly seeing it from the Earth). While Xena is slightly larger than Pluto, Pluto is smaller than the moon, and, of course, Gabrielle is much smaller, with the claim of being 60 times fainter than Xena. As an aside, it's only been months since Xena was discovered, but astronomers already know its orbit is 560 years. Try and disprove that one. Then again, why bother?
In any event, Adaptive Optics is an attempt to use the better Earth bound facilities to duplicate the Hubble's ability to see without atmospheric distortion. A computer uses atmospheric models to determine the distortion on a bright guide star and then applies those distortions to a fainter object, creating the image of the object as if the object were not being seen through the atmosphere. Given empirical science's inability to even understand lightning, I wonder about the atmospheric mathematical model's ability to do anything, but let's give it to them. The problem with Adaptive Optics is that there are only enough guide stars to cover a measly 1% of the sky. What's an astronomer to do?
That's where the Laser Guide Star comes in. Here there is something very real, a layer in the atmosphere that can reflect a laser beam. A laser is hooked up to the telescope, in the case of Gabrielle, the powerful Keck telescope, and shot into the atmosphere. It hits the layer with the same frequency, and bounces back to the telescope, creating an artificial guide star. Neat technology, but talk about expensive!
It's so neat and so expensive, guess who gets to use it. First you file a plan of what you are going to use it for, then you get approval, and then you use it under the supervision of an approving astronomer. Let me see. Here we have a piece of equipment that cost goodness knows how much, the money coming from the public trough or from tax deductible and tax free university endowments, and then, folks, justification has to occur. The neat, expensive technology has to show that it was worth it. Therefore, boom, new planets are found, new moons are found and announcements are made about how important it is to be able to compute the densities and masses of these new discoveries.
In the meantime, our ignorance remains. We don't know what gravity is, Science magazine's 34th question, and its explanation, "[Gravity] clashes with quantum theory. It doesn't fit in the Standard Model. Nobody has spotted the particle that is responsible for it. Newton's apple contained a whole can of worms" being a demonstration of this. We don't know what causes the planets to orbit. We don't know what causes the Earth and the other planets to rotate. We don't know what heat is, we don't know what light is, we don't know what electricity is, we don't know what magnetism is.
And no one, virtually no one, is attempting to find 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