Probably the most scorn I get from emailers is directed at the last chapter of Where Science Went Wrong. That chapter is titled, The Nonexistent Neutron. Everything I say gets dismissed when someone reads that chapter title. How can something so well known be nonexistent? It's a fact of reality and therefore everything I say must be bull. I've described the construction of the atom in columns 18 and 19-05, and I describe the "neutron" as a unit of matter with the most number of electrons that can come together. But that's not the real point of this column.
The basic problem with empirical science is, it doesn't explain the causes of the hidden forces that cause the motion in our existence, something that Sir Francis Bacon noted over four hundred years ago, well before empirical science was created to instill its ignorance in the world. It assumes motion in everything that isn't on the surface of the Earth, straight-line motion that is altered by gravity, but it doesn't deal with the cause of motion.
I look at reality and see that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. When light enters a medium, it slows down. When it reemerges from the medium, it speeds back up. Electricity also travels at 186,000 mile per second, minus the medium through which it has to travel, the pathways we build to harness it. There's no better example of at rest motion.
At rest motion is a property of the electron. There's nothing wrong with putting properties into particles that reflect what the particle does. That's the way empirical science operates. The problem with empirical science is, it takes discreet properties and creates particles to represent them instead of looking at the properties that exist in our reality and creating a single particle that embodies them. Thus, empirical science looks at light and creates a photon, looks at electricity and creates an electron, looks at gravity and creates a graviton (which it can't find), looks at heat and creates a thermion.
My approach is to look at what is in reality, matter in nothingness that in unraveling as a result of field replacement emitting electromagnetic emissions, and conclude, something is holding the matter together and something is moving the result of the matter coming apart, the emissions, so there must be one particle with two properties, one property a property of attraction, the other a property of motion. I name these two properties in accordance with what they do. One, the property of attraction, is an affinity propensity, the affinity of all particles to occupy the same space, and the other, the property of motion, at rest motion, when a particle is at rest, it is moving at approximately 186,000 miles per second.
When the affinity propensity has the upper hand, the particles form matter and the at rest motion is potential energy. When the particles come apart in the process of field replacement (column 08-05), energy is produced. The energy, the electromagnetic emissions, is a field, and the strength of the field controls the existence of the number of units that can stay together in the nuclei of the atoms within that field.
The purpose of closing Where Science Went Wrong with a chapter called the nonexistent neutron was to underscore the fact that empirical science, even though it assumes straight-line motion for everything in the universe, makes the opposite assumption, dictating that matter on the Earth, and specifically in its absurd particle accelerators, needs force to move. The unit of matter I hypothesize makes up the nuclei of atoms is obviously neutral, at least as neutral as any particle can get. It is made up of electrons that are held together by their affinity propensity overcoming their at rest motion. When something is overcoming something else, it is being used up so that each of the units contains the identical number of electrons, and when there is excess affinity propensity that cannot attract and hold another electron into the unit, it attracts other units that form the nucleus of the atom. The number of units that come together depends on the field, and the number of units that can combine depends upon their proximity when the field is manipulated. When we cook chemicals, we are increasing the field, breaking atoms apart, mixing new atoms with them and removing the field to create a new configuration.
These units do not have any motion associated with them, which makes empirical science's monkey see, monkey say process conclude that they have to be accelerated. They can be accelerated by electromagnetic means simply because they have an excess affinity propensity that can be manipulated by a field. So what would we expect to happen when they are smashed into other units? Some of the electrons that make up the units would be knocked out of the units. How many? Who knows? It depends on how they hit, where they hit, what was around them when they hit, it depends on simple pool table logic.
Except for one fact. The electrons are not knocked off individually. They are knocked off in clusters, some bigger than others. That's why the physics community had to create the standard model which limited, by international agreement, the number of particles that could be named and that's why, once the agreement was made, empirical nitwits started to take the limited number of particles they could deal with and give them characteristics, charm, color, you name it.
If these guys could just step back and look at themselves, they would see how foolish they are. But then, they already know. I can't help but repeat Harvard's current Darwinist guru, Richard Lewontin's comment, "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism." (See column 43-05 for the context of this statement.)
Who the heck is talking about the supernatural? We're talking about reality.
What would we expect to happen when the particle accelerator broke up the units in one way or another? First of all, there would be a lot of units that had a deficit of electrons. Second, there would be a lot of fragments with a deficit of electrons. The result is a mad scramble for the units to get the electrons they need to make themselves whole once again. The result, of course, is what we see on film, a massive movement of fragments trying to reattach themselves in a way that will make them whole. There's no rhyme or reason to it. The paths, the curlicues, the streaks, the disappearances, don't mean anything.
However, empirical science, with its obsessive drive to name things, has to put names to the streaks, create particles or variations of existing particles to embody the streaks, and then assign properties to them, creating things that don't exist in reality. But that's not the biggest problem.
Empirical science detects. There is nothing wrong with detecting. Building detectors to see what we can't see is great. But empirical science does the same thing with its detectors it does with its created facts. It assigns the detector to what it's detecting and then programs the detector to provide information on what it is designed to detect on the basis of trial and error, experience.
This is difficult, so let me approach it from a different angle.
When a stable electric current was established with batteries in the 19th century, experimenters soon discovered that placing a compass, a magnetic needle next to the current, affected the position of the compass needle. When the current is on, the needle is deflected. When the current is off, the needle is not deflected. This resulted in the insane analogy of electricity to the positive and negative aspects of magnetism. But that's not my point here. The point is, the magnetic needle of the compass is a detector. The experimenters didn't know what it was detecting, and they still don't. Empiricists simply assigned what was being detected a word, induction. What is being detected is no longer an operating thing, it is now a word. The empiricists simply put a name to what was being detected, imbued what was being detected with the properties of the detector, and then went to lunch. Today, empiricists create detectors to detect the things they have created and to which they have put a name, and then they simply go out to lunch, satisfied they have done their job.
Now, let's move forward in time.
Rutherford, the creator of the picture of the atom that ruled the 20th century, invented an electromagnetic wave detector. Note, there is no such thing as electromagnetic waves. They are frequencies. But he had a device that detected something that had a name. He had devised a way to detect radio signals using steel needles. As a kid, I used a crystal, but Rutherford was working in the ending years of the 19th century.
At the same time, Roentgen had been fooling around with Edison's electric light and had discovered a way to produce rays, which he called X rays. Here we go again. We find something and instead of understanding it, we simply name it. Meanwhile, J. J. Thomson was investigating these "cathode" rays and he invited Rutherford to join him. Rutherford used his detector to measure the effect of the X rays on gas. Of course, any flow of electrons is going to remove electrons from the gas atoms, and this is another name, ionization. I'm sorry this gets so involved, but a guy named Bacquerel discovered radiation, another word, at the same time, and Rutherford wondered if uranium rays would ionize gas.
Rutherford separated metal plates, one on top of the other, placed them in a gas, spread uranium powder on the bottom plate and connected them with an electric current. Measuring the current, again a detector situation, he found that the current was ionizing the gas. The logic was, the current ionizing the gas was less than the current not ionizing the gas. There's nothing wrong with all of this. He's experimenting with reality. The problem is, he's assigning names to results instead of attempting to produce viable concepts that mechanically explain the results.
Next, and here comes the leap of faith, Rutherford covered the uranium with various layers of gold foil. He found that the foils stopped some of the uranium rays. Not having performed the experiment, the only thing I can say about this is, the measured electric flow diminished. Why wouldn't it? Electrons, like light, slow down in mediums and speed back up when they emerge from the medium. See columns 18 & 19-05. But Rutherford, ever the empirical monkey see, monkey say name maker, said, well, there were two types of rays, those that could penetrate the foil and those that couldn't. He didn't stop to think his detector was simply detecting less, he had to create two types of "rays." The ones that penetrated the foil were beta rays and those that didn't do so well were alpha rays.
And that's only the start of things. Because the alpha rays couldn't penetrate the foil, they were obviously positively charged and the beta rays were obviously negatively charged, the idiotic analogy of magnetism to electricity being mindlessly imported into the picture of the atom. I have to admit, I have never been able to wrap my mind around this. Alpha rays are positively charged particles with a mass equal to an atom (for heavens sake, mass is a construct to save Newton's gravity), beta rays are really electrons, probably the only sensible part of the picture, and to top the whole thing off, a guy named Villard discovered a third type of radiation (note the word radiation is meaningless) and named it gamma, having no electric charge.
Enough of this nonsense.
Well, I guess not, because we have to get back to the main topic, cold fusion, tabletop fusion, whatever. Now let's contemplate how you detect something with no electric charge. You detect it by the damage it does, pure and simple. Gamma rays are said to be what cures cancer and I can tell you from personal experience, they kill half of you while they are killing the cancer (which come to think of it is also a name for something empirical science knows nothing about).
Gamma rays are said to have the smallest wavelength (another idiotic empirical assumption) and the most energy, whatever that means, of any particle. They are the stuff atom explosions produce that shrivels up life and causes it to die. Does that clarify it for you? We're just talking effects here, not specifics about these mysterious things called gamma rays. Gamma rays cross vast distances of the universe (another empty statement) and are produced by exploding stars, well, I won't put it in parenthesis, another interesting notion. Given the ever expanding, money seeking astronomical profession, we would expect to see a field of gamma ray astronomy, and in fact it exists, with the idiotic rationale that we can see gamma rays because they strike an electron and lose their energy. Is there nothing these people can't make up?
But the point is, gamma rays are an indication of fusion and detectors have been created to detect whatever the heck they are. When, in 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann produced an experiment that activated detectors designed to detect gamma rays, whatever they are, and the detector actually detected them, the grant driven empirical community went berserk. They were bleeding the public trough for billions to support useless superconducting and tokamak programs designed to produce hot fusion, and here these two were detecting gamma rays from a simple process.
That was 1989 and now is 2005 and guess what. Their experiment has been altered so that sound waves vibrate atoms that produce detectable gamma rays.
Readers of these columns know that I believe we have reached the limit of our energy producing capabilities, that there is no hidden energy sitting out there in the whatever that will save the Earth (see column 08-05). We need to work on gravity, find out what it is, how it works, and gain control of it.
We create effects, then we create detectors to detect those effects. The reality of our detectors is, we have no idea what they are detecting, and that's a simple fact of reality.
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