There are two empirical errors that have crippled Western technology. While I do count the Michelson Morley fiasco as an empirical error of the first order, the theories that it produced, relativity and quantum mechanics have merely served to perpetuate the basic two.
Nor do I count Newton's theory of gravitation because the theory, unoriginal in every aspect, merely popularized one of the basic errors and I don't count Newton's theory of colors simply because it isn't a theory. The notion that white light is made up of all colored light and that colored light is lined up the way it comes out of the spectrum is merely monkey see, monkey say science, a fact recognized by Newton's nemesis, Robert Hooke, and apparently recognized as valid by Newton, who waited out Hooke's death before pursuing vigorously his by then thirty year old notions.
The first empirical mistake, a mistake of the first order, was made by Tycho Brahe, who, when he measured the rates of the moon and the planets as changing, ascribed that change to the planets speeding up and slowing down rather than the planets covering different distances as a result of the motion of the sun. This error, natural for a man whose primarily belief system was preCopernican and therefore for whom a stationary Earth eliminated the possibility of a changed distance, leaving changing speed as the only option, was picked up by Kepler when he stole Brahe's observational notebooks to produce his laws of planetary motion whose square root basis allowed Newton to produce his theory of universal gravitation.
The second empirical mistake was produced by the interpretation by Thomas Young of his light experiment which is now popularized as the two-slit experiment. Young's interpretation is based on Newton's proof of gravitation. For Newton to produce his "proof' of the theory of gravitation, he had to come up with some way to compute the amount of gravity the Earth and the moon produced. He "accomplished" this impossible feat by assuming that all matter was made up uniformly of the same particle, and he could therefore compute the gravity matter produced simply by computing the volume of the matter claimed to be producing the gravity. The fact that matter is not made up uniformly of the same particle, a fact now well known, and thus a fact that renders baseless any of Newton's mathematical proofs for his theory, is ignored today, where an empirical science merely assumes that gravity is proportional to matter and then uses the resulting equation to compute the unknowable, and thus uncheckable, the amount of matter that makes up the volume of a planet or moon.
The only sensible conclusion Newton made in his lifetime, that light was made up of the same thing that produced it was made up of, was driven by his concept of these uniform particles. Another way to state the proposition is that matter gives off what makes it up when it is reduced by the process of burning, that light is made up of the same thing that makes up matter. Following this logic, Newton concluded that light was made up of the same particles that made up the matter that was giving off the light.
Christiaan Huygens was Newton's main theoretical opponent in this argument, demonstrating a basic flaw in an empirical science that seems to produce two opposing theories and ignores all shades in between, empiricism allowing the eventual adoption of one or the other of those theories to the exclusion of all else. Huygens believed that light was a wave. As such, it was not made up of what gave it off, but merely a disturbance of a medium. Because water waves do not exist independent of the water, and are merely the product of a disturbance in the water, where the effect of gravity on the water is momentarily overcome and the waves are produced as gravity levels out the effect of the disturbance, water is the medium for water waves which have no independent existence.
If light was a wave, then it too needed a medium, and one was quickly manufactured, the aether that permeated the darkness of space and the air around us, a medium that was disturbed by the production of light and through which the resulting light waves traveled.
With the death of Hooke in 1703, Newton, as a result of the royal connections obtained through his niece's powerful lover Charles Montagu, elevated himself to the position of President of the Royal Society and, because he yielded the power of life and death in his position as Master of the Mint, quickly became its dictator and the most influential theorist in the world, although he himself considered his theories to be fact. Wielding his power unmercifully, Newton dictated his position of light as a particle as reality, bludgeoning his wave theorist opponents into silence where they remained for much of the resulting 18th Century.
However, the nature of light is one of those things that we will never be able to know with factual certainty, and because Newton's proof, as noted by Hooke, was not "empirical," the silenced underground kept searching for the empirical proof that would demonstrate that light was in fact a wave rather than a particle.
Young's two-slit experiment basically divided the same beam of light and then allowed the resulting divided light to intermingle. The intermingled light, when collected on a viewing screen, showed areas in which there was no light. This absence of light was taken to be analogous to the intermingling of two water waves. When water waves are produced, there is a crest and a trough, and there is a neutral point in between the two in which the water is level with the surface of the water in which there is no wave produced. When two water waves intersect, the level point is produced when the crest of one wave cancels out the trough of another wave.
Young reasoned that the light that was being collected on the screen demonstrated its wave nature because the dark lines represented the point at which the troughs of one wave were canceling out the crests of another wave.
The defects in this sort of analogy are fairly easy to spot, unless of course, you are so concerned with proving a point that you ignore the reality that makes up the point. Water waves are the result of the interaction of gravity and a disturbance of gravity's hold on water. The water exists first, and the disturbance of the water comes second. In light, aether was made up to explain the possible wave nature of light the theorist wished to prove. More to the point, water is a two dimensional surface. The battle between the disturbance and the gravity holding the water in place expands the effect into three dimensions, the waves, but once the effects of the disturbance are overcome by gravity, the water returns to its two dimensional nature.
"Aether" is a three dimensional realm. Further, light is a three dimensional product of something matter is doing. There is no analogy between the expansion of light in all directions and the spread of waves over a two dimensional surface. The two dimensional surface, combined with gravity, is what produces the cancellation of the waves. No such cancellation can be envisioned for the three dimensional expansion of light.
But more to the point, when the troughs and crests of intersecting water waves cancel one another out, there is still water at the neutral point of intersection. When the light hits the collection screen, there is no light present. There is a big difference between something being there and something not being there and making an analogy between the two is evidence that there is not something there in the person making the analogy.
So what is going on in Young's experiment? Young's experiment was performed at the dawn of the 19th Century, some three decades before the discovery of induction. Newton's particle theory of light, had it been extant at the time of the discovery of induction, might have allowed the analogy of the electrical flows that produce electricity to the light flows associated with something that matter is doing. It's another example of what happens when explanations are encoded into law. Our view of reality is controlled by the order in which we discover facts in reality, with laws, made before the facts are discovered, excluding explanations for facts subsequently discovered.
As Young's experiment is performed today, light from a single source, a single source necessary because the divided light has to have the same frequency when it is recombined, is passed through two slits in a barrier. The light is then allowed to intermingled, collected on a screen, and the classic "interference" patterns of light and no light appear on the collecting screen. We can see what is happening only if we understand the factual nature of light, that light moves out away from its source in all directions unless blocked from doing so, that as it does so, it expands, it expands in a precise way, inversely with the square of the distance from its source, and most importantly, a fact that empirical science consistently ignores, it expands uniformly and therefore diminishes uniformly.
The clue to Young's experiment is to ask the appropriate question, why doesn't light expand non uniformly, or to put it the other way around, what makes light expand uniformly?
The answer is found in the nature of induction. When electricity flows, it produces an inductance around the flows. It is this inductance that allows us to produce electricity because when we move a conductor through inductances, it picks up the electrons in the inductive flows and causes those electrons to flow through the conductor, the electric wire. But inductances do other things, and the most important of those other things is that they combine electrical flows. The extent to which inductances can combine electrical flows is proportional to the strength of the electrical flows. This is easily demonstrated by bringing two conductors into close proximity. Their inductances will cause the conductors to move together.
The light in Young's experiment expands in a uniform expansion before it reaches the barrier containing the slits. When the light passes through the slits, only a portion of the expanding light is allowed to pass through the slits, but the area on the other side of the slits is totally open to the light's expansion. As a result, the light overexpands. There is less light after it passes through each slit than there would have been at that point if the barrier hadn't divided the light. The light's point of expansion has been altered, and it is expanding from two new points.
But, if both of the slits are an identical distance from the source of the original light, the light that passes through the two slits will be overexpanding at the same rate and thus will have identical frequencies. When the light intermingles, and the frequencies are compatible, the inductances associated with the expanding light recombine the light to the point that the light flows allow so that once the light falls on the collecting screen, there are areas of recombined light and areas of no light, areas out of which the light has been recombined.
Instead of light as a wave traveling through a created aether, or the modern version in which it is an electromagnetic phenomena propagated in empty space, light is made up of the electrons that make up matter, and the flows of electrons produce the easily measured inductances which regulate its expansion. When the light is divided in a way that produces uniform frequencies and those frequencies are intermingled, the inductances recombine the light.
What does this mean for gravity?
Well, light expands uniformly. Without inductances, it would expand non uniformly. Thus, the expansion of light must be a process in which light at any point is attempting to overexpand but is being recombined by its associated inductances. As overexpanding flows would be combined at their point of intersection, the recombination would result in a collapsing cone back in the direction of the expanding light. This collapsing cone would have a strength proportional to the inductances which would have a strength in proportion to the expanding flows. As the flows are diminishing inversely with the square of their distance from the source, the force of these collapsing cones would equal the flows, and thus, the force contained in the mechanism that regulates the uniform expansion of light is inversely proportional to distance, the same measurement we get for the force of gravity.
If the elements that make up the atoms that make up the matter that exists in expanding electromagnetic fields, of which light is just a part, are allowed to move freely in those fields, the mechanism that regulates the expansion of the fields will act on all the units of the atom at the same time, allowing all matter, no matter how complex the atoms that make it up, to fall at the same rate. However, if matter is attempted to move against the mechanisms that regulate the uniform expansion of electromagnetic fields, then it has to act against the force holding the elements of the atom together. All elements of the matter have to move at the same time, meaning that different elements will take different forces to move against the force of the mechanisms that regulate the uniform expansion of light.
Rather than demonstrating that light is a wave, Young's experiment demonstrates the nature of gravity.
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