Friday, August 31, 2007

An Elementary Particle with Two Properties (continued)

Does science therefore conclude that the electron has a property of movement? Absolutely not. In the case of the orbiting electrons, the source of the motion is a taboo subject.
Given the property they then placed in the electron, one wonders what kind of fractured minds established, consensus science attracts.
Remember back in the 17the century, the argument about the nature of light revolved around whether it was a particle or a wave. Newton’s massive influence set the stage for it being a particle throughout the 18th century, but Young’s experiment, performed at the opening of the 19th century, convinced the consensus that it was a wave. The amazing thing about these centuries of musing, analyzing, arguing, and concluding is that no one, not a single mind, bothered to ask the basic question about light, how was it produced? After all, knowing, or coming up with concepts involved with how light was produced would seem to be the first step in determining what light was.
But not our blundering scientists. They stumbled on down the path of defining the nature of light until Einstein discovered that light could produce electricity, or to be more precise, light could activate the new particle now accepted as the electron.
Did our esteemed and thoughtful scientists scratch their heads and say, hey, we were wrong about light being a wave? Why would they? Light was already proven to be a wave, that was incontrovertible, therefore, it was now necessary to define it also as particle, and a particle was quickly created called a photon, Einstein’s effect named the photoelectric effect, and all in the universe was now back in an orderly, understandable, arrangement. Of course, no one could visualize light as a wave or a particle, but what the heck, why be able to explain something when we can use words and phrases to trick ourselves into thinking we understand something?
But now with light a particle affecting an atom and the material undergoing the photoelectric effect phenomena being made up of atoms, it dawned on these quick minds, about three centuries after it should have been raised, how does matter produce light?
Having assigned two different particles to one phenomenon, the photoelectric effect, science had to explain how the one particle, the photon, could affect the other particle, the electron. The conclusion agreed upon (and note, all this stuff is a consensus, an agreement to agree on a certain set of concepts by a small group of theorists that the millions of honest, practicing scientists have to swallow whole) was that the electrons were emitted as a result of the absorption of the light. That’s about as duh a statement as can be made after determining that light and electricity were made up of two different particles.
Of course, there was good observational reason to assume that light and electricity weren’t the result of the same particle because light didn’t require positive or negative poles to cause it to move, in fact, when electricity was discovered, light was considered to be ripples in a made-up aether. Electricity was clearly something because it could do work while light wasn’t able to do anything. Electricity had polarity while light didn’t, a fact that has latter been disproved by measuring the magnetic forces that occur on filaments, or on the sun for that matter.
Probably the biggest argument I get against a single particle concept is light and electricity because on the surface they are radically different phenomena. However, as we go along, it becomes apparent that on a working level, on the level at which we need to understand how things operate, they are different manifestations of the same particle.
Once science determined that electrons were emitted as a result of the absorption of light, it dug deeper, as only it can with its shallow concepts, to find out how matter produces light. The secret, it turns out, is to add a new property to the electron, one that no one suspected it had up until creative thinkers decided to create it. This property was the ability of the electron to absorb and release energy.
Think of that for a moment. Here we have a particle made up solely to explain a phenomenon, electricity, we have no idea as to its working, it’s source, its means of motion, its ultimate fate. As a matter of fact, the best we can do is call it a moving charge. We take that particle and remove it from its context of being capable of doing work and we place it in a concept we create to explain matter, we put it in orbit around the nuclei of the atoms that make up all matter. Then, after originally saying we require polarity to cause it to move, we allow it to move in its atomic orbit without polarity, and say, hey, here’s something else it can do. It can absorb and emit light!
Post a large sign on science’s door, Genius at Work, then sit back and try and figure out what a genius is. It’s someone who can say, to paraphrase the search for the Scarlet Pimpernel, they seek them here, they seek them there, they seek them everywhere. In short, the electrons circling the atom are probabilities whose location can never be fixed. However, one thing is known with certainty about an electrons location and that’s its energy level with respect to the nucleus, which translates to its distance from the nucleus. If undisturbed by incoming photons, the nucleus binds the electron tightly, as close to it as it can. That means that the electron is at its lowest energy level.
It’s when the photons start streaming in that the electrons exercise their new property of being energized. At their lowest energy level, they are at the ground state. When a photon arrives with enough energy to energize the electron, the electron, get this, the electron absorbs the photon and the electron jumps a further distance from the nucleus. Now the electron is in an excited (science’s word, not mine) state. As we all know, being in a excited state is not our normal state, so just like we settle down sooner or later, the electron settles down.
How does it do this? It gives up it photon and thus matter produces light. How simple is that? Worthy of simpletons.
Just like we have various levels of excitement, an electron can get more and more excited by absorbing more and more photons until it gets so excited, it jumps out of its skin, or shell, or atom. Thus, the photoelectric effect is explained, sort of, and also the fact that atoms ionize, become charged by losing electrons.
As the 20th century went along, the creation of particles became the way to fame and fortune. With the invention of cloud chambers and cyclotrons, particles became so numerous, no one could keep track. As a result, an international conference was held to limit the number of particles, and the result was the standard model, which we won’t spend time going into because it is just a complex way to explain atomic decay, which I will explain in a very simple way). However, it’s interesting to note that with the limitation of particles, the allowed particles had to be expanded somehow. With the ever-inventive scientific mind at work, certain particles were imbued with human characteristics, charm, flavor, even color and, of course, the electron with its ability to absorb photons like we absorb food then give them off like we burn calories.
One might think that the conceptualization of a single particle that could be used to explain not only the phenomena that are now explained inconsistently by the invention of multiple particles, but also phenomena that remain unexplainable, would be welcome, but there are too many reputations invested in the myriad particle mess. One would think that conceptualizing a mere two properties for the particle might also be welcomed, but science, once its course is set, and science’s course was set centuries ago by dead men who knew nothing, will never change its course. If light is found to be a particle instead of a wave, it’s still a wave, a wave particle, a probability, anything that appears to provide an answer to the great unwashed (and that’s anything that defies reason).
When Rutherford modeled the atom with orbital electrons, he ignored the source of the motion of the electrons. He also made another little mistake. He put a bunch of protons in the nucleus of the atom to hold the electrons in orbit. Opposites attract, remember. Well, he forgot that likes repel. Of course, this whole business of moving magnetic description first into the operation of a battery, then induced electricity and finally into a model of an atom is absurd, having no basis in reality other than shabby thinking. However, there we were with an atom stuffed with like charges that should be repelling but weren’t. What to do? What to do?
Well, science, if nothing else, is inventive. If we have like forces repelling these protons, protons that, by the way, we made up and imbued with the like forces, then there must be a greater force holding those electrons together. We know the force is there because otherwise the protons wouldn’t be together. So we’ll make up this force and call it what it is, the strong force (as opposed to the weak force that allows the nucleus to decay). The strong force holds the nucleus of the atom together and as atoms combined to produce matter, the strong force is at the basis of matter.
Sounds good, doesn’t it. We make up a neutron to account for weight, we make up a proton to account for maintaining another particle we made up, the electron, in orbit. We have that electron whizzing around with no apparent force interacting with electrons of other atoms to produce molecules that form into matter. We also have that electron bouncing up and down in its orbit absorbing and emitting the wave particles that are photons, light to us, and that’s how the universe operates.
So let’s see what a single particle with two properties will look like. First I’ll cover the properties, then in the next chapter we’ll use it to build a workable atom. Then we’ll cover field replacement, the simple principle that replaces the myriad particles of the atom with their color and charm and, well, total confusion, completely beyond reason.
To be continued

Saturday, August 25, 2007

An Elementary Particle with Two Properties

I suspect that the habit of naming particles for effects and then thinking that the name described the effect began with the discovery of electricity. The development of electrical theory is probably one of the more perverted areas of science. It reaches back into the mysterious effects of magnetism, where the well-known principle of likes repel and opposites attract became seated in the human mind for all eternity. Take two magnets, determine which side is which by allowing one of the sides to point to the north, mark that side on each magnet. The marked sides will repel while the unmarked sides will attract the marked sides.
Magnets were beyond understanding, so studies were devoted to merely describing their effects, a habit that has carried over into all areas of science, and especially electricity. This is a deadly process. It destroys understanding. People think that being able to describe what’s happening, they understand what’s happening. Description replaces understanding, but because we have a complex description, we think we understand. Saying monkey-like that likes repel and opposites attract doesn’t tell us anything about how magnets work, and when we don’t know how something works, we shouldn't analogize it to other things.
But that’s what happened when the first batteries generated a steady current. The battery needed two metals with what is now known as potential differences (a very important reality to the development of our understanding of how the universe operates). With two poles attached to each metal, connecting a conductor between the two produced an electric flow. With something flowing, science wanted an answer, what is causing that something to move? It’s an obvious question, and it’s a simple fact of reality that things don’t move without something causing them to move (unless we’re talking about the planets). There had to be something causing the current to move from one pole to the other.
Unfortunately, it was quickly discovered that the electrical current would deflect a magnet in the form of a compass. This meant that there was something about magnets and electricity that was similar. In casting about for an explanation for the movement of the current, it occurred to science that opposites attract. It therefore concluded, without any evidence, that the two poles of the battery were like the opposite ends of a magnet, and that when they were connected, electricity flowed from the positive to the negative (nowadays it is understood to flow from negative to positive).
The notion that electricity needs a positive pole in order to move, that whatever causes it can’t move on its own, was set in science’s thought process when the next advance in electricity occurred some three decades later. With batteries providing a constant source of electricity, scientists were able to conduct repeatable experiments and build on the results. It was finally discovered that moving a wire that had been formed into a circuit perpendicular to the electrical flow itself produced an electrical flow.
It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that science became obsessed with particles so no one knew what the electricity was, but here was a distinct phenomenon, the flow of electricity itself creating a flow, a fact that was to become the basis of our modern technological society in the form of generators and electric motors. Needing names to describe what was happening, science named the area around the electric flow that could produce electricity in a circuit moving perpendicular to it the inductive field, something that will become of the utmost importance in our subsequent discussions as it is the force generated by electromagnetic emissions that produces gravity and planetary rotation and orbiting.
Edison, using simply the facts of electricity rather than the hazy theories about what electricity was, produced thousands of inventions that eventually lit up the world. He was a direct current advocate, which is the process of using a generator to induce an electrical flow in one direction. Tesla, another inventor, realized that by manipulating the way the rotors moved though the magnetic fields of the generator, he could produce alternating current, current that at one instant flows in one direction, and in the next, in the opposite direction. Tesla was responsible for our modern electrical system because alternating current could be manipulated better than direct current and travel longer distances.
The point of both, however, is that they were working with what they conceived to be flows of electricity and these flows needed something to make them move. Just like the concept that electricity moved from negative to positive became embedded in the universal mind, the concept of flows of electricity became inherent in electrical concepts without much reference to flows of what. However, J. J. Thomson altered that view by proposing that electricity was made up of flows of electrons, and interestingly enough, he thought that all matter was ultimately made up of electrons, a novel idea that, if it had been followed, would have probably made this book unnecessary (and my life not as exciting as it has been figuring all this out).
Here we end up with two assumptions. The first is that electricity needs a current force to cause it to move. The second is that a particle can be created to explain physical effects.
The idea that electricity needs a current force to cause it to move seems logical when we look at a battery, but seems illogical when we look at currents induced by inductive fields. In the battery, we have two potential differences that, when connected, produce an electrical flow. The normal question is to ask, what is causing the flow, now we can say electrons, to flow? However, when we move a conductor in an inductive field, electrons begin to flow if the conductor is formed into a circuit.
The idea for positive negative, plus minus came from a magnet. Did anyone bother to ask what is causing the magnetic fields around the magnet? No, because they were considered this mysterious force that was associated with magnetic material. But moving a conducting circuit in a magnetic field produces a flow of electricity too. More to the point, the circuit is a circuit with no negative or positive poles like the magnet, so where’s the explanation for the current movement of the electrons?
When Thomson hypothesized the electron, he was setting up the second assumption, one that has overpowered science. This assumption is that we can simply explain effects by calling them a particle and assigning a name to them. Rutherford was the first to do this in his very useful concept of an atom. Taking Thomson’s electron as a starting point, he hypothesized that these electrons were orbiting the nuclei of atoms in shells, depending on the type of atom involved. Atoms became heavier according to the periodic table set out by Dmitry Mendeleyev in the 1870s. Rutherford accounted for weight by creating a particle he called a neutron and putting it in the nucleus of the atom. He then had to explain what was keeping the electrons in orbit. True to his ingrained teaching about negative and positive, he created a proton, a positive particle, and also placed it in the nucleus of the atom. The neutrons provided weight, the protons provided an attraction for the electrons, and the electrons, nestled in neat little orbits, provided the way atoms were put together into matter.
Rutherford, however, overlooked one small aspect of his model. The electrons were moving. They didn’t have batteries for polarity, they didn’t have a circuit in which lazy minds could overlook the lack of polarity, they were just, well, moving.
To be continued

Friday, August 17, 2007

Introduction (continued)

The basic reason my books aren’t that popular with the alternate scientific community is, they stick to the subject matter. Nothing here about magical dates where humanity will be transformed, star children, extra-dimensional interchanges, visits to exotic worlds, saucer crashes, ancient mysticism, spiritual uplift, nothing in the line of philosophy. That’s not because I don’t mentally play with such subjects, it’s because the purpose of The Copernican Series is to relate the mechanical nature of the universe and the life that occupies it.
However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn quite a bit along the way, or let’s say, came to view the universe in a unique philosophical way. The glimmerings of this philosophy emerged vaguely writing the last four chapters of Atoms, Stars and Minds, chapters that outlined the structure of the mind, why we couldn’t physical identify it, but still allowed us to perceive reality. Parallel with writing the volumes of the series, I had been writing very long volumes of fiction in which I would test out some of the inevitable places that the single EP (I’m going to call the elementary particle with two properties the EP from now on) and field replacement took me. In those overly long books, I kept having the characters and situations explore the question of whether this mind, this structure created so that we could navigate reality, survived the physical entity that it occupied. After all, as we will see, it is just as durable as an atom.
While I finally put that discussion to rest for the simple reason that it belongs in the sphere of religious belief, working on the 2nd volume of the series, The Cooling Continuum, dealing with evolution, how life forms (a subject, not surprisingly, for which science has no answer but a lot of verbosity pretending it does), my entire viewpoint about the universe changed, and changed drastically.
I had already faced the problem about where the EPs came from without success, another parallel to science, which has no scientific explanation for the source of atoms so uses billions of incomprehensible images to cover its ignorance. But when it came down to the question of how matter formed, the EP and field replacement explained precisely how matter could form. This then showed the picture of a cycled universe. Matter forms, it combusts as in stars burn, planets ignite and then start to cool in space, all of this produces expanding electromagnetic emission fields made up of the same stuff that is combusting, those fields expand until they begin to break down into their individual EPs, and those EPs in turn recombine into matter.
Not only did the EP and field replacement show how matter formed, it showed how matter formed into galaxies that contained solar systems. Further, an examination of the expanding fields revealed how planets rotate and orbit as they move into the approximate plane of a star’s equator, all of which we will be covering in this book. When I was working on the book on evolution, I realized that life formed as a result of a planet's rotation in front of the sun. The Cooling Continuum turned out to be the longest book in the series simply because I was so amazed at how this worked and described it in excruciating detail.
But that wasn’t the revelation. Up until then, I viewed the universe darkly, the stretches of space deadly, I still thought science wasn’t totally wrong, and therefore life was a chance happening, although not so chancy that it didn’t fill the universe. But overall, I looked at things as running down, heading in one direction and one direction only, death and darkness.
Now I saw the universe as a continuous cycle. Not only was it a continuous cycle, it had produced an EP that was precisely designed to move the matter, once it was formed, in such a way that life was the inevitable result.
The universe wasn’t designed for darkness and death, it was designed to produce light and life!
In fact, because the cycle of the universe involved matter formation, and then matter ignition, producing electromagnetic emissions that both controlled the movement of the matter and, through its ability to move matter back toward the source of emissions so that all matter would eventually participate in the cycle, and because the movement of matter inevitably produced life, it seemed that the entire purpose of the universe is to produce life.
But to what end?
Life, like matter, comes into existence, it exists for a period of time (the definition of life developed by the EP and field replacement is the organization of atoms and molecules of atoms around electrical flows), and then the life dissipates (the electrical flows stop, and the atoms and molecules of atoms go somewhere else in the environment). What was the purpose of the cycle of matter formation and destruction if it just led to the formation of life that dissipated?
One of the early questions I faced, and to be sure, we all face this question at one time or another, was, where is the end of space? We can think until we get to the end of space and then there’s always something outside that. Most of us give up on the question for religious or philosophical beliefs, or even for absurd scientific conclusions, the universe is curved and therefore endless. But I have a philosophy that if I can’t find an answer to a question, I’m asking the wrong question, and here I was clearly asking the wrong question. I was asking what was outside of the universe instead of defining what the universe was. The universe was clearly matter in nothing. When it comes down to it, matter is all there really is, and that matter exists in the absence of matter, in space, in nothingness.
When I figured out how the mind worked, that in order for us to be able to navigate reality, we have to have a picture of reality in our recall in order to compare reality with recall, I started to review all the instances for which we have recall. When we see a falling object, we can’t see what is making it fall, so we have to make up something to put in our recall to compare with reality. Our religious systems are basically a shared recall of all those things for which we don’t have answer, where did we come from, where are we going, why is there evil in the world? In order to understand something, our minds need something in recall with which to compare with reality.
What can our minds compare, what can we put in our recall, to understand nothing, because that the absence of matter is and that’s what contains the matter we see as the universe? We can’t put “nothing” in our recall because nothing is just that, nothing, it doesn’t exist. We can't understand something for which we have no recall. Thus, we have to understand it as the opposite of something. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the only thing that defines the nothing that is all around us is matter. If there were no matter, there would be simply nothing, and nothing is simply that, nothing.
This means that at some point, there must have been no matter and therefore nothing. With nothing, there’s no time and therefore all the time in the world for something to come into existence. We can never know how that something came into existence, reference the great religions of the world, but the fact is, it did, and it was the EP with the precise properties to produce field replacement and the universe as we measure it, going through apparently useless cycles producing apparently useless life.
But if there was, at one time, nothing, and now there one heck of a lot of particles making up matter that fills that nothing, then there must be two things that are obvious: First, there must be a way that the cycle of the universe, formation, ignition, dissipation back to formation, produces EPs and second, there must be an edge, an area where there starts to be no matter, and therefore an area that simply doesn’t exist, that is nothing. As the EPs increase, the area of nothingness defined by matter increases, and because nothing is just that, nothing, the process of the cycle creating EPs to increase the area of nothingness defined by matter can continue forever, and because, with nothing being nothing, there’s no end to the ability to define it with newly created particles.
A second thread developed in The Cooling Continuum as a result of my approach to the subject matter. Unlike Darwinists, and indeed, everyone else dealing with evolution, I didn’t approach evolution as a species process, but as a process of evolving characteristics. The first question I asked is, what characteristics do humans have and why do they have them?
Having worked with the mind’s operation, I realized that our main characteristic is that we are ambulatory, able to move from one place to another. This requires some sort of process by which we can form pictures of reality, store those pictures for later recall, then when we are confronted with reality, recalling those pictures for comparison. Why? So we can move safely in reality, not bump into trees or fall off cliffs. (It also required the mind operate in a way that can warn us when recall doesn’t agree with reality, but we’ll get into that later in the book.)
It didn’t take long for me to realize that evolution was actually a progressive process. We start out with non-ambulatory matter, matter that exists in existing electrical flows and can only survive within those existing electrical flows. The obvious example of non-ambulatory matter are trees. If a fire comes along, the trees are stuck in place, helpless to flee the inferno. They are also dependent on the food sources available at the location.
Ambulatory matter, the next state of evolution, involved the evolution of a mechanism that could sense the environment, in its simplest form the heat an amoeba senses to move away from, and then actually form a picture of the environment, allowing the animate matter to which the mechanism is attached to move purposively within the environment. Ambulatory matter can flee the forest fire and roam the environment looking for food sources.
The final phase of evolution is the development of sentience, which is the ability to produce a picture of reality when reality isn’t present, or even combines disparate elements of reality to produce an entirely new reality. Instead of digging holes in the ground for shelter, we, with our sentience, can create shelters, build houses against the elements, control our food supply and, if necessary, put out the forest fire.
Having this progression in mind for several years, it began to dawn on me that each stage of evolution increased the survivability of the animate matter involved, which is the animate matter that came into existence on this particular planet. That gave evolution a purpose, to increase the survivability of life, to extend its chances of existence. When put up against the cycle of the universe, where within each individual cycle (there are untold numbers of cycles occurring simultaneously), the development of life was as inevitable as the eventual destruction of the planet on which it evolved, I started to rethink where the EPs came from.
The result of sentience is technology and the result of technology is to allow us to extend our survivability. The result of evolution is animate matter that, if it has an accurate picture of reality, can produce technology that will allow the animate matter to survive the demise of the planet that produced it. Life formed and evolved to extend life beyond the life of the cycle in which it had evolved.
But why? For many years I contemplated the answer to this question, and when it finally occurred to me, it was so simple that it was, and is, an embarrassment to even put words to, although I have and I will with the strict understanding that it has nothing to do with the rationality of the explanation for reality contained in this book, but merely puts the operation of reality in some sort of context.
The purpose of the cycle is to produce life, the purpose of life is the evolve sentience, the purpose of sentience is to create, and the purpose of creating is to bring into existence the EPs that make up the universe.
The purpose of life is to survive so that it can produce more EPs that produce more cycles that in turn produce more life, the entire process encroaching on nothingness, defining that nothingness with the existence of matter.
I’m not so sure we have to have an accurate picture of reality in order to contribute to the expansion of the universe. However, I know that we have to be alive and kicking to do so. If we want to outlive this planet, we have to have as accurate a picture of reality as the facts and objective testing will allow us.
Right now, our picture of reality is a mess, incapable of producing a technology that approximates reality.
It doesn’t bode well for our ultimate future. I don't hold out much hope that science will open its eyes and start to see its memes explain nothing.
Fortunately, the universe will go on. It probably has as many successes as it does failures like us.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Introduction (continued)

When the scientific community agreed to accept theory as fact, it took the first step toward the fantasy world that makes up our scientific worldview today. Here’s why.
Using light as an example, Newton’s particle view of light held sway throughout the 18th century. However, the wave features, or what were thought to be wave features, that were measurable allowed a strong minority view to thrive, and that minority view finally took over with the explanation for Young’s experiment at the beginning of the 19th century. By splitting passing light through a pinhole, then with a vertical barrier, and then recombining the light on a collecting screen, the light had dark patterns through it.
When water waves' crests and troughs intersect, eliminating the wave, there is still water. On the collecting screen there was an absence of light, clearly not an analogous situation to the presence of water. In one case, there's something there, in the other, nothing. However, the scientific community jumped at the conclusion that light was like a water wave. No one thought to explore alternate explanations, the obvious one being that the light, once it had intermingled, had recombined. With almost two centuries of toying with the wave feature of light, Young’s experiment was blindly accepted as proof that light was a wave, as it is to this day.
The structure of light, like the physical workings of gravity, are not things we can readily know, are a part of Bacon’s hidden physical reality. As such, we can do no more than create concepts that might explain the facts that we see, and light being a wave would be one concept, although because in addition to light and water waves not being analogous as to the presence of water and the absence of light, light is a three dimensional phenomena while waves occur on a two-dimensional surface, making it a pretty poor concept to explain the facts.
Light as water waves, therefore, could never be more than a concept. However, it became a simple fact!
As soon as something is a fact, then science starts to manufacture other facts that have to exist as a condition of the first created fact. In the case of light waves' analogy to water waves, water waves needed a medium through which to travel, as they did not themselves have an independent existence. Thus, light waves needed a medium to travel though and science concluded that this medium was the aether, which filled space. As a subsequent fact becomes reality, it becomes the background for additional facts, and even testing.
Seventy years after Young’s created fact and the related creation of aether, the question arose in what direction the Earth was traveling and by direction, it wasn’t the direction around the sun, but the absolute direction in space. Michelson and Morley attempted to answer this question by devising a very clever experiment. A rotating platform was placed on a bed of mercury. On the platform, a series of mirrors was laid out so that light could enter an aperture, travel to the center of the platform, be split, each split traveling 90º in opposite direction, bouncing off mirrors and being reflected back to the center where they were recombined and sent to an interferometer, essentially Young’s collection screen able to discern degrees of interference patterns. (When Young’s experiment was performed by splitting the light through two pinholes in separate cards, it was discovered that moving a card would eventually cause the interference patterns to disappear.)
The notion of the experiment was that the light traveling in opposite directions of 180º would only produce interference patterns when the incoming light was directly aligned with the direction the Earth was traveling. This was because it was only in this condition that the two 90º paths would equal. If the paths were unequal, then the light would take different times to travel each path because one would be moving with the aether, the other against it. If the later happened, the light would recombine and wouldn’t produce interference patters.
The scientific community agreed in unison that the facts underlying the experiment were foolproof. There was no possibility of error. The results would be conclusive. So the experiment was performed to the utter astonishment of the entire scientific community. No matter which way the platform was rotated, the interference patterns always appeared. What a shock!
Did the scientific community then go back and check its underlying assumptions, light as a wave and the existence of the aether? Why should it? Facts are facts, nothing can change that, so the results of the experiment had to be explained some other way, in a way that would account for light being a wave dependent on the aether. How?
A couple of scientific geniuses came up with the answer commonly known as the Lorentz Fitzgerald contraction. This simply stated that the distance between the two 90º paths shortened or lengthened along the direction of their motion. How neat is that? Here we have a concept, light as a wave, producing a second concept, the aether through which light traveled, producing an experiment that used both the light and the aether, and when the experiment didn’t produced the desired results, it wasn’t the concepts that needed reevaluation, but a new fact to explain the discrepancy. And that new fact wasn’t something that was measurable in nature nor could it be, it wasn’t even intuitive, it was a fact that physical reality changed with motion.
Although Einstein disavowed both the aether and any connection to the Lorentz Fitzgerald contraction, his theories, which have all become facts, basically involve the alteration of matter and time with speed, and those facts in turn have begun to generate new facts, the most absurd of all being the new fact of worm holes. I could talk about all the facts the mass gravity concept has created, but it would take a book itself. To name just two of the more ridiculous, try black holes and dark matter. Here science is creating something it can’t even observe and calling it a reality, the black holes being the produce of gravity overcoming the physical structure of the matter that produces it, the dark matter being the extra mass that has to exist in the galaxy for the galaxy to behave in accordance with Celestial Mechanics, which, if you recall, turned Newton’s efforts to predict orbits around by now claiming orbits predict gravity. With the stars not having enough mass to hold the galaxy together, it must be held together by missing matter we can’t see (but like the aether of old, we apparently plow through with immunity).
So the question arises, if we can’t know certain things like the cause of gravity, the cause of orbiting and rotation, the nature of light, electricity and magnetism, how do we deal with them? We are hopefully past the time when scientists get burned at the stake for ideas and the battle for a secular worldview of physical reality has long been abandoned by the church, although there are still many that scoff at any idea that opposes the Bible.
How do we deal with ideas, make sure they stay ideas, flexible, changeable ideas, and therefore do not themselves start to produce facts? Nothing wrong with ideas producing more ideas, but how do we handle the myriad questions for which we have to say, we just don’t know because we can never know?
We can apply several principles when evaluating concepts. We have to rate the concepts we consider because we have to test our concepts in reality and we don’t want to spend a lot of money testing concepts that will never go anywhere. The first principle is obvious, Ockham’s (or Occam’s) razor. Although there are thousands of interpretations, it’s basically translated from the Latin as "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” This is another way of saying that the concept that explains the most facts with the least assumptions is the best concept. A lot of scientists state that it really means the theory that predicts best is the best theory. They use the example of the Ptolemaic, Earth based solar system compared to the Copernican sun centered solar system. Copernicus’ prediction was correct, therefore better. However, that’s not Ockham’s razor. The reason Ockham’s razor favors Copernicus is that he reduced the Ptolemaic number of orbits by half, making it a much simpler explanation for the same facts.
As an aside, the use of prediction in science to prove concepts is the cause of our fantasy world of science. A concept predicting a fact doesn’t prove the concept, it just makes the concept better because it explains one more fact. One of the biggest mistakes of science is the belief that finding a predictive fact proves a concept because it places science at the mercy of when facts are discovered. If a concept becomes a fact because it predicts another fact, then the chance finding of a predictive fact cements our thinking, forcing us to view the concept as fact and other facts that disagree with the concept anomalies, or simply non facts.
Add to the principle of evaluating concepts by selecting the one that can explain the most facts with the least assumptions the overriding rule of consistency. Science Magazine’s view of gravity demonstrates how inconsistent science is: It clashes with quantum theory, it doesn’t fit in the Standard Model, nobody has spotted the particle that is responsible for it and, in fact, Newton’s apple contained a whole can of worms.
Focus on the statement the particle responsible for it has never been spotted. How can science hope to be consistent if its practice is to make up a particle for every effect? With the advent of atom smashers, the particle creation situation got so bad, there had to be an international sit-down to limit the number of particles (in what’s called the Standard Model in the reference) and even then, with the particles limited, they multiplied by adding human perceptions to them, charm and color the most prominent. As a result, we end up with a mishmash of concepts about physical reality, none of which are consistent with one another, and many of which are internally inconsistent, for instance, the electron orbiting the atom, where does it get its motion from? This question in college will lose you a science major.
Consistency and simplicity are the rulers to apply in evaluating concepts, knowing all the time that the selected concepts could be wrong, even though they work to produce real products in reality. We have all sorts of technology, lasers and transistors come to mind, that work in reality but for which we have absolutely no coherent concepts to explain.
Consistency and simplicity.
I approach the problem by creating a single elementary particle. I assign that elementary particle two properties. I then apply those properties to scientific basics, the production of light, electricity and magnetism. From these applications emerge a principle called field replacement that explains much of the physical reality that we observe.
With this process, which opens the first chapters of the book, I set the stage for explaining the operation of the universe as we see it, not as we imagine it. When I was writing the first book explaining the particle (this book is a condensation of the 9 volumes of The Copernican Series into an easily understood concept application), I devised one final test to see how accurate my elementary particle might be. I said, if the particle I can describe reality with can also be used to describe the human organ that can discern and attempt to make sense out of that reality, in short if the particle could also describe how the mind worked, then I would be as close to having a correct concept as is humanly possible (although there’s no way to actually know).

Friday, August 3, 2007

Introduction (continued)

What happened next set in motion events that have crippled Western science, distorted our technology, and will probably lead to our demise on this planet.
Newton, in Cambridge, was totally out of touch with the scientific thinking of the age. For instance, while the battle whether light was a particle or a wave was being fought, the general trend of consensus opinion fell on Huygens’ wave view. However, it was generally felt that even though evidence tended to support the wave view, there was absolutely nothing, in Baconian terms, that would prove it one way or the other, so it was, for all practical purposes, considered a point of view, a concept that might or might not be right.
In addition, Newton was totally insensitive to the Baconian philosophy underlying the scientific quest, that concepts were not facts and never could be accepted as fact. He proceeded to contradict both the prevailing view of light and the Baconian philosophy that dictated the scientific approach by submitting, some months after he became a member of The Royal Society as a result of his reflecting telescope, a paper that came to be known as his Theory of Light and Colors.
Nowhere is the Baconian injunction against accepting theory as fact more evident than in Newton’s paper. He had conducted experiments involving using prisms to fracture white light into the spectrum and then recombine the spectrum into white light. This convinced him that white light is made up of all the colors of the spectrum, and indeed, that is also the widespread view held today.
Here’s a man who is making pronouncements of fact on a subject he knows nothing about. For instance, it wasn’t until several centuries later that the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum was suspected, and decades longer before light was placed in its proper position within that spectrum of frequencies. Nowhere in the entire range of frequencies is there any hint that a single frequency bundles together a number of frequencies. In fact, the continuity of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum dictates that this phenomena could not happen, yet we are expected to believe that not only is one frequency, white light, a bundle of millions of frequencies that make up the colors, we are expected to believe, in a world in which life is merely a chance happening, that such a unique phenomena happens to occur at the exact frequency that our eyes evolved to see the myriad color frequencies.
This one fact gives an idea how the blind worship of a defective thinker has crippled our technology. But the fact that Newton attempted to create facts with his paper on light wouldn’t have been significant but for the events that followed and his reaction to those events, a reaction that would forever change science from a process of verifying facts to a process of creating facts.
Newton submitted his paper to the Society and sat back waiting for the accolades he had received for his reflecting telescope to come. Like his reflecting telescope, the task of review fell on Hooke. After reviewing the paper for three hours, Hooke rejected it, noting that the experiments Newton performed supported both his theory and opposing theories of light. Newton had attempted to argue that he had demonstrated his view of light to be fact when, in Hooke’s view, and indeed, in the Baconian view of science, it was nothing but words.
Newton reacted with extreme bitterness, writing the Society acidic letters justifying his position and demanding a point-by-point refutation that he could answer point-by-point. His few friends in the Society took his position, claiming that the three hours Hooke had spent with the paper wasn’t sufficient time to grasp the complex nature of the argument. Hooke, who scarcely had time for it, was caught up in a firestorm kept burning by a bitter Cambridge mathematics professor, and quite frankly, didn’t put much credence in Newton’s blustering. After several years went by and Newton’s arguments, not about light, but about what was or was not acceptable as fact, became more widely known, many famous men of the era began to take issue with Newton’s position.
While the general thinking of the day was Baconian, that theories were just theories and not facts, Newton took the novel position that his hypothesis had been tested and proven by experiment. He was blind to Hooke’s original comment that the experiments he claimed as proof for his hypothesis could also be used to claim proof for opposing hypotheses. Nothing would dissuade the cantankerous Newton, who had grown intellectually in the vacuum of the plague years and then Cambridge, depopulated by the plague years, the vain man who had, in less than a decade gone from nobody to the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the highest mathematical post in the land, the proud man who had invented the reflecting telescope, no one could dissuade him that his thoughts, his ideas, his theories, his hypotheses, his concepts, the products of his mind, could in any way be wrong. No one could persuade him that his claims of proof were wrong. (A half century later, when he couldn’t get his mathematics dealing with Celestial Mechanics to predict the orbit of the moon, it was not his math that was in error, but rather the measurement of the orbit of the moon, the precursor of our own science where if reality doesn’t agree with theory, then it’s the reality we don’t understand, not the theory.)
Finally, under the chorus of disagreement, Newton, in 1573, sent a letter of resignation to the Society, a letter that was discreetly misdirected until Newton could be talked out of the rash action. He had never attended any of the regular meetings of the Society, and even though he grudgingly remained a member, he spent his time with his books, his vast collection of Bibles and alchemical texts, trying to find the philosophers stone and compute the exact day the Earth would end. However, political events were afoot that would provide Newton with the opportunity he needed to impose his own view of scientific process on first the Society, then the Western world.
Charles II had continued his Father’s anti Catholic practices to maintain the religious peace. However, in 1685, he died without an heir and the throne fell to his brother, James, who immediately began to return the country to Catholicism. This led to the Glorious Revolution, where James was removed in favor of his protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange. Newton, who was apolitical up until this point, decided to come out of seclusion and ran for, and secured the Cambridge seat in Parliament. How did the bitter, vain, contemptuous mathematics professor pull this off?
At Cambridge Newton made the acquaintance of Charles Montagu, who was not only a close friend of the Master of Trinity College, but also a closer friend of Newton’s attractive niece, who ran her uncle’s house. The two began a lifelong friendship based primarily on a mutual interest in alchemy. But Montagu himself was somewhat of a mathematical whiz, not so much Newton’s math, but the math of national finance, and when William of Orange set foot on British soil, Montagu was part of his greeting party, the most important part many thought, because he was destined, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to finance William’s regency. He was also in charge of the mint, and this was the source of Newton’s patronage to become the Master of the Mint, a lifetime sinecure, if properly used, of extraordinary power.
Newton had published through The Royal Society, with the astronomer Edmund Halley’s help, the Principia, which set forth his theory of gravity. That book was an incomprehensible mishmash of ill-conceived assumptions, one of which was that the Earth and the moon were made up of the same particle uniformly distributed throughout each (the only way he could compute the relative gravity of each). This theory collapsed in the 18th century. Newton claimed he proved his theory that gravity was a property of matter by showing it was proportional to the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon. He then set out to predict the orbit of the moon using the gravity of the Earth and the moon. While it never worked out, Newton claiming it was reality that was being inaccurately measured, Newton had moved to London and set about in the drawing rooms of the influential to sell his theory lock, stock and barrel.
In the 18th century, astronomers tried to apply the theory to the planets with catastrophic results. However, instead of going back to the drawing board to try and figure out what gravity really was, astronomers, invested in Newton, simply said even though Newton didn’t demonstrate proportionality, his conclusion was correct. They then proceeded to do what they do today with Newton’s Celestial Mechanics, compute the amount of matter in a planet using its orbit. Science, which claims that it only accepts verifiable facts, here accepts a claim that can never be verified, the computation of the contents of a planet.
As a result of this deception, and it can be called nothing less, we universally believe that we not only know what gravity is, we voluntarily limit out technology on the basis of that supposed knowledge, instead of spending resources attempting to find out what gravity is so that we can manipulate it, building huge, jet driven aircraft that are limited to our air space, and gigantic rockets that go nowhere very slowly.
You don’t have to take my word for it, take AAAS’s house organ, Science magazine’s word for it. On its 125th anniversary, it listed 125 “big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century.” Gravity wasn’t even in the top 25, but when it got around to the question, what is gravity, this is all they answered: Newton’s mass/gravity clashes with quantum theory, it doesn’t fit in the Standard Model, nobody has spotted the particle that is responsible for it and, in fact, Newton’s apple contained a whole can of worms. While we’ll be discussing science’s obsession for creating particles for effects in the first chapter, note that quantum theory and the Standard Model are recent scientific constructs, which is to say, the products of the mind, so Science magazine is saying, hey, we have a reality here that we can’t explain, but it disagrees with everything we know, so we’ll just carry on business as usual, that is, pretend we know what it is.
In London, Newton was not only interested in pushing his bogus theory, and thus his notion that his ideas could be proven to be fact, he never lost sight of his main objective, the destruction and then complete subjugation of The Royal Society in revenge for Hooke’s dismissal of his theory of light and colors. For purposes of this, his friend Montagu, financially influential, was his tool. Hooke was still running the practical affairs of the Society out of his rooms in Gresham College, but Newton had other ideas about the funding of the Society itself, and thus its viability. Dependent on patronage, when Montagu took over as Exchequer in 1692, he was able to pull all patronage away from the Society, With the Society nothing but a shell, Sir Robert Southwell left the presidency in 1995, leaving it open for none other than Montagu, who sat on it for three years before turning it over to his proxy, Sir Hans Sloane. The reason Newton didn’t assume the office was Hooke. Newton knew that Hooke was sickly and didn’t have long to live. He had no intention of forcing any kind of confrontation with the man that had kept him into a bitter rage for decades.
When Hooke finally died in 1703, Newton immediately assumed control of the Society and didn’t loosen his reigns for a quarter century, and then only by death. His first acts as President were to remove any likeness of Hooke and to have the Society publish his theory of light and colors. The reason why science today recognizes Bacon as the author of the scientific method, but doesn’t recognize Bacon’s thinking on the subject, is because Newton, in his quarter century at the helm of the Society obliterated that thinking in favor of his own.
Instead of nothing in words, science’s motto has become everything in words, damn the facts.
(To be continued next entry)