The Copernican Series – A New Attempt

When I was about four, I asked my Father what made objects drop. He gave the standard explanation, gravity is a property of matter, the objects are small, the Earth is big, so the objects drop. “I don’t think so,” was my response. He shrugged and walked off, not realizing that a lifelong obsession had just been born.
Just about everything I’ve done since then has revolved around trying to come up with a coherent picture of gravity. I didn’t go to law school to learn how to practice law, I went to law school because the historical figure I thought the most impressive when it came to science, Sir Francis Bacon, said an education in law was as education in how to think.
It wasn’t until I was several years out of law school, working in the financing arena, that my ideas about gravity started to congeal. By concluding that, although clearly associated with matter, gravity was dynamic, I had to look to something dynamic matter was doing to get gravity out of hiding. It was another year or two before I eliminated everything but cooling.
Then I was faced with what it could be about cooling that would produce a force that would cause objects to move back toward the source of the cooling. It probably took another year or two staring into the fireplace to realize that I didn’t even know what was causing the fire, let alone what it might be about what the fire was emitting that would produce gravity.
Looking back over the history of light, I realized this basic question had never been addressed, at least not until all the other questions about light had been answered. The historical review, however, led me back over Young’s experiment that was supposed to prove light was a wave. Even in high school, I hadn’t understood how interference patterns could be analogized to water waves, so I started to search for a different explanation for the result.
During this period, I was also conducting some rather foolish experiments with electricity and magnets because I had concluded that everything that is recorded about electricity is merely a measurement and that the concepts underlying the field are pretty barren. I, of course, was raised, and had, as a part of my basic thinking, the concept of positive and negative, the early explanation for the motion of electricity based on the fact that it could be produced by inductive fields magnetically induced.
With Young’s puzzle in mind, and how electricity might move in the background, I was leaning against a doorframe drinking a beer one Thanksgiving afternoon. My wife had just put the turkey out on the kitchen table and asked me to watch it. As I stood there thinking, the dog took a bounding leap and ended up skidding toward the turkey. I yelled at him before he got it in his jaws and, startled, he jumped, missing it and flying onto one of the chairs.
An elementary particle with two opposing properties, one of attraction and one of repulsion, would explain everything, I thought. The idea just popped into my mind, maybe from the dog’s attraction to food (and if he’d gotten the turkey, my wife would have turned him into a turkey). I was stunned at the magnitude of the thought as my mind ran it over the Young problem and then leaped to how the emissions from a combusting Earth might operate to capture objects in their grasp (which is described in the What is Gravity entries that started this blog).
The next problem was, what to do with the concept, a concept that explained, but not in a mathematical fashion?
I decided to write a book using diagrams to explain. The diagrams worked pretty well in opening up whole new areas of thought. Diagramming the right hand rule of inductance gave a clear indication how planetary emissions would result in orbiting, rotation of the planets, as well as why they find themselves in the same plane. Further, figuring out how matter came apart in combustion forced me to face the question, how does it come together, which in turn led me to construct a new picture of the atom, one that would account for the stars and galaxies that we see. This started to become a pretty massive undertaking, running to some 700 pages. The concepts were novel, and led to pictures of reality that directly conflicted with the totality of science.
While I was writing the book, I was also attempting to contact astronomers. One I met in person told me if I wanted to know what gravity is, jump out the window. The only one that answered by mail asked the rhetorical question, why would we want to give up a theory that allowed us to measure what a planet is made of? Several well-known physicists, family friends, recognized the totality of the theory but were frank when it came to mass gravity, it couldn’t be contradicted under any circumstances.
Fat chance of ever getting the book published. I undertook other projects, one of them called, Who’s Fault is My Fault? This was a venture into how the mind produces emotions, also with diagrams, and also ending up with nowhere to go. Then, in the early 80s, I took a trip to Hungary, and, with my new computer, started banging out the original book without diagrams. By that time I had realized the fact that a cooling planet with lessening gravity would have a profound effect on concepts of evolution. I also realized that the scientific method wasn’t all it was cut out to be, wasn’t even followed in most cases, and didn’t prove anything, piling one bad concept on top of another to create the confused picture of reality we have, a reality that is claimed to be not understandable and stranger than fiction.
This time, there was simply too much for one book, so I decided to break it down. The first book would deal with theory, the second evolution and the third planetary motion and galaxies. I started the third first because that was the one I had attempted to write so many times before. All through the book I struggled with the notion of how to prove theories or concepts when theories and concepts were just that, made up stuff that was not capable of proof. Somewhere in the course of writing the book, the book on how the mind generated emotions crept into my thinking and I began to realize that the single particle with opposing properties could explain the mind, how it worked, and how it could affect the body both to act and emotionally.
I named the third volume Atoms, Stars and Minds because its basic proposition, in addition to explaining the items addressed consistently using the particle with opposing properties, was that, if the particle could explain everything that we observed and measured, and in addition could explain how the mind that could do the observing and measuring operated, I would have come as close to demonstrating the validity of the particle as possible.
In researching the second volume, I found that there was no explanation for how life got its start, so that became the central theme of The Cooling Continuum, a rather simple result of what are known as Telluric currents that course beneath the surface of the Earth. That volume, covering evolution in a cooling environment where the gravity was lessening, did become the longest book in the series. While I was writing one segment of it, I was, for some reason, driven to research the formation of the Bank of England. (I have a substantial library on banking, its history and performance). I had books all over the room opened here and there, correlating dates and participants when I came upon a very interesting set of facts. While its too long to discuss here, I had always wondered how Newton ended up as Master of the Mint, and here I found the answer in black and white.
I put off writing the first volume on theory because I wanted to finish up my thoughts on how the mind worked, which basically became the title of the unplanned 4th volume in the series. I then started with the first, seeing something that had escaped me in the third, why we see the planets moving with respect to one another when they are clearly at rest with respect to the forces acting upon them. This volume introduced the concept model.
While proofing this volume, I realized that meteorologists had been totally led astray by the restriction that the surface of the Earth could not be causing friction with the atmosphere, causing it to move. I set out to write the second most popular volume of the series, How the Weather Really Works! in which I stumbled on two other interesting concepts, one conflicting with the basic notion of what produces rain, the second not conflicting with anything, how heat moves in the atmosphere, because science doesn’t have the foggiest how it moves. Writing this volume while proofing the first, I was vacationing at the beach with my family. Both of my sons in law are mathematicians, so I had easy access to formulas. This came in handy when I got a Farmer’s Almanac to compute the seasons.
Checking the length of each season, I thought my addition was crazy. According to Kepler’s law, spring and winter should equal, as should summer and fall. Both fall and winter are longer. I was familiar with Brahe’s computation of the moon speeding up in the summer and realized it wasn’t speeding up, it was just traveling a shorter distance. Mulling this over, I realized that an elliptical orbit would be produced by a moving sun, that the orbit would travel with the sun and therefore a planet would travel a shorter distance in spring and summer because the tail of the orbit was catching up with it and longer in the fall and winter because the planet had to catch up with the moving sun. From my math classes, I knew there was a differential equation for this and asked one of my son in laws, giving him a pad. He immediately wrote it down. I realized that with this information, which disproved Kepler, I could compute the direction and speed of the sun, both of which amazed me, but which ended up being the cover diagram of the first volume.
That out of the way, I decided to face my biggest fear, light, the unification of heat, light, electricity and magnetism, no easy task, I knew. In doing so, I found out that science even messed the spectrum up, not to mention its absolutely absurd concept that white light contains all colors. That took a lot out of me. By this time I had realized I had to answer the complaint that I didn’t explain science’s position in the books before explaining my own. The reason for this was, the books were too long as it was. So I decided to write a seventh volume Where Science When Wrong, which became the most popular of the series. Then I faced another subject I knew I had to but one I didn’t want to. If I knew how the mind worked and affected the body, then I had to address how it generates behavior, which I did in the eighth volume, Human Nature. After that I took a hiatus. I had been, since the early 90s, writing weekly letters to my grandchildren, not that they could understand them, but for the record and for future interest (one actually took to them). After awhile, I decided to start writing books a bit at a time. A couple of years ago, I actually wrote the ninth volume, How the Body Works, this way.
My problem is that there are a lot of pages in the series. I have many readers that buy and read the whole set, but that’s the exception, certainly not the rule. My hope is that someday, I can get all of this stuff into a single, readable volume. I’ve been looking around for a challenge lately, and decided to try that here, so the next entries will be my attempt to put nine volumes of heresy into one.

Dinosaurs and Whales

My basic proposition is that gravity is not a property of matter but rather the dynamic result of what matter is doing, cooling, and as it cools, it emits an electromagnetic emission field that produces the effect on the components of the nuclei of atoms that cause those atoms to move back toward the source of emissions.
My other basic proposition is that the Earth is cooling. As planets seemed to be formed hot and as they occupy the zero temperature of space, and as heat flows to cold, I find it ludicrous to believe the planet is not getting colder. Under my scheme of things all planets, and that includes moons, started out as emitters, miniature suns, and as they crusted over and cooled, their elements began to break down, with the lighter elements becoming the gas held to the cooling planet by the emission field. At some point in the cooling process, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms begin to combine and precipitate out to become the waters that cover the crust.
The moon is an example of a small planet that has run its course, barely emitting any heat and captured in the Earth’s emission field with one side forever facing it. Mars is a good way along in the evolution of a planet toward death, while Jupiter, with its immense size, is just starting to precipitate out its water. Just as the occupants of Mars are long gone, or perhaps even gone here, we are well on our way to having an uninhabitable planet as a result of cooling. Perhaps we will end up colonizing Jupiter. After all, under this set of conditions, Jupiter will eventually cool, and as it does so, its gravity will lessen, making it more accommodating to our form.
Of course, to science, gravity is fixed and unchangeable. To get rid of gravity, we have to get rid of matter. There’s no two ways about it.
However, many rational people, even practicing scientists, are coming to realize that since the dinosaurs couldn’t have fed or supported themselves, it’s a physical impossibility given their supposed bulk, heart size, mouth and throat size and so forth, that gravity must have somehow changed from the time of the dinosaurs until now.
Reviewing briefly the history of the discovery of dinosaurs, when the first bones were brought to scientists in the 19th century, the unfortunate discoverers were labeled what science always labels something it doesn’t understand, frauds. However, the sheer volume of the discovery of the bones led science to recognize the existence of these huge creatures. Then, of course, as soon as science took over, the fun really began, fun meaning obfuscation to the point of absurdity.
The first task was to determine what the creatures looked like. This, to science, was a fairly simple task. All that need be done is to measure the amount of meat the bones would hold and then to place that amount of meat on the bones. Unfortunately, the amount of meat these massive bones could hold, in today’s weight, was too much for the creatures to carry. Therefore, science hypothesized that the creatures spent their lives primarily submerged in water. Artists' conceptions of dinosaurs, before the necessity of movies required them to move about, were simply vast steamy swamps filled with huge dinosaurs.
With the advent of motion pictures, dinosaurs were pared down so that they were at least in some sort of fighting trim. However, this didn’t jibe with the calculations for the amount of flesh that the bones could hold. The divergence between the public vision and the scientific view prevailed until the early 60s when the cold v. hot-blooded dispute broke out among dinosaur scientists. This led to a melding of the public and scientific perception in Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are presented as a mixture of the slow, oversized behemoths, and the smaller, more agile, meat eaters, with the former being cold-blooded and the later hot-blooded.
None of this really answered anything about the dinosaur’s size because, as the years have gone by, finds of larger and larger bones able to hold more and more meat produced dinosaurs so large that they were physically incapable of existing. This is when the accretion theories began to pop up, theories that said over the eons, the Earth collects meteorites and space dust that add to its mass increasing its gravity. There are several other maverick theories around which, while wilder, result in the same thing, an increase in the Earth’s mass and a resulting increase in its gravity.
The whole notion involved with this line of thinking is that, when the Earth had less mass and less gravity, the bones could support the greater amount of meat, which was lighter then than it is now.
I first ran into this backward thinking decades ago when I ventured to posit in a letter to an alternate science magazine that the reason the dinosaurs could grow so large was because the gravity was greater than it is now. The Editor very kindly published my letter and followed it up with a two-page letter railing against the absurdity of my claim and positing that the only way the dinosaurs could have existed was if there had been a black hole circling the Earth that lessened the Earth’s gravity. (I really like that one!)
Before getting into my reasoning, let’s just take a look at reality. What’s the biggest creating on Earth today? That’s simple, the whale. One reason the whale grows so large is that its displacement in water lessens the effect of gravity on its structure. We don’t have the saying for helplessness, beached whale, for nothing. Here we actually have a huge creature that evolved in a lessened gravitational environment. If the people who claim that gravity had to be less for the dinosaurs to grow so large are correct, then the whale’s bones should be just as massive as the dinosaurs.
But they aren’t. While substantial, they are nowhere near as massive, as pictures of whale skeletons illustrate.
In fact, using the logic of how much meat the bones would hold today, if we had nothing but whale skeletons littering dry land to go on, we’d have to conclude that whales couldn’t hold enough meat on their bones to survive.
There are certain commonsense rules in any field of science that are often overlooked. In the case of dinosaurs, the basic rule of life on Earth applies. That rule is, life that is not sustainable does not evolve. It’s as simple as that. The dinosaurs had to be normal life forms or they wouldn’t have evolved in the first place. That means that a healthy dinosaur would in all likelihood be as sleek and capable of both movement and obtaining ample food supply, as well as getting it down its throat, as you or I. I realize that elephants still roam around, so long as there isn’t a crack they have to jump, but while I believe they are a hangover from a prior era, they have evolved that marvelous trunk to take care of all of their needs. Hippos, seemingly large and ungainly, speak for themselves by being the largest killers of humans in the world.
So our starting assumption has to be, the dinosaurs had only so much meat on their bones. They were not these behemoths that could barely move, their neck substituting for an elephant trunk, and they weren’t creatures with hearts that could sustain normal weight but somehow beat for five times that weight. They were normal animals, although oversized.
Why would they be oversized?
Because in a field where the gravity is stronger, they would need stronger bones to move around. Not only would the bones have to be stronger and bigger, they would be heavier, which means, the substance necessary to carry the bones and any flesh they carried against the greater gravitational field would have to be much sturdier. This is exactly what we find when we look at dinosaur bones, large sturdy structures designed to hold a lot of weight.
But what weight?
Their own weight and the weight of the flesh that was the animate dinosaur. I have no idea what the strength of gravity was when the dinosaurs evolved, although it would be an interesting problem, probably solvable, for any scientist with an open enough mind. But for the sake of example (and going by the amount of flesh artists put on the bones), let’s say it was today’s gravity times three, three times as great as it is today. That means that when the normal amount of flesh was added to the bones, the bones would end up being designed to hold themselves and about four times their weight. (Our skeletons support 80% of our weight, elephants’ skeletons support about 84% while cattle skeletons support 90%).
Let’s then say that if we took all the meat off a dinosaur and put it in a package, it would amount to two cubic yards (I have no idea, but this is just for purposes of comparison from the dinosaurs time till our time).
Present day arrives, and we find the dinosaur bones (or bits and pieces, whole dinosaur skeletons are rare). We don’t, of course, find the two cubic yards of meat and muscle. Gravity is one third what it was in the dinosaur’s time, but being the captive of Newton’s gravity as a property of matter, we know that because gravity is constant, the weight of the dinosaur then is the same as its weight today.
So we weigh the bones. We then put them under a stress test to see how much they’d hold. We conclude that the bones would hold, not two cubic yards of meat, but six cubic yards of meat. While the bones weigh less today than they did when formed, their strength is the same as when they formed, and they formed to hold six cubic yards of meat at today’s gravity, although they would only hold two cubic yards of meat in the gravitational field in which they evolved.
Our scientists, knowing all their facts are absolutely correct (and not even thinking that gravity might be variable and therefore a factor in their calculations) proceed to put three times as much meat on the dinosaurs as they carried when the dinosaur was alive and moving easily though its environment, consuming enough to feed itself and generally having a ball.
The dinosaurs were cold-blooded simply because they lived in a hotter environment, the heat coming predominantly from the Earth. There was no need for animate matter to regulate its body temperature under these conditions. Characteristics don’t evolve that aren’t necessary.
However, as the Earth cooled, mammals evolved and dinosaurs slowly died out, unable to survive the alternating cycles of hot and cold as the environment because more dependent on the sun for its heat. The mammals, with the ability to regulate internal body temperature, fell heir to the Earth in a process that hopefully would lead to the development of sentience and the ability to develop tools that would allow animate matter to manipulate the environment in order to extend its own survival, build house as protection against the cold, and then, in the ultimate extension of itself, build space vehicles that would allow it to escape the ever cooling Earth as it spiraled into first the condition of Mars and then the moon.
And, I suspect we were well on our way until an unfortunate physical occurrence turned us into a bunch of mystical, mindless, blatherers. That occurrence was the result of the simple fact that all planets, including the Earth’s moon, evolve the same way. That means the Earth’s moon was once also warm and also precipitated out water, in short had oceans. As the moon cooled and its gravity lessened, it lost the ability to keep those oceans, and they were eventually lost to its closest companion, the Earth, resulting in the destruction of what was up till then a normally evolving civilization. The water damped the Earth, cooling it fast, leaving the survivor with little arable land on which to live, land that, as the population recovered, could only be fought over for food.
But none of this actually happened or could happen because gravity is a property of matter and therefore unchangeable.

Why Doesn’t Science Recognize Friction?

Friction would seem to be a fairly simple fact of everyday life. Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about it (I avoid using this source unless it is totally objective, in which case there isn’t a bunch of backdoor sniping putting in negative information).
Friction is the force that opposes the relative motion or tendency toward such motion of two surfaces in contact. Friction between solid objects and fluids (gases or liquids) is called drag. In fluid dynamics, drag (sometimes called resistance) is the force that resists the movement of a solid object through a fluid (a liquid or gas). Drag is made up of friction forces, which act in a direction parallel to the object's surface, plus pressure forces, which act in a direction perpendicular to the object's surface.
In short, when we’re dealing with a solid with respect to a liquid or gas, friction slows the solid down. If we want to propel a ship through water, a plane through the atmosphere, we’re going to have to use energy, a current force, to overcome the drag caused by the friction between the sold and the liquid or gas.
Pretty simple, pretty straight forward, and not too much question about the outcome of friction. So, we’d think science would deal with friction when it came to the Earth and the oceans that cover it and the atmosphere that encases it.
You think?
Newton knew what friction was. After all, he had his planets moving in straight lines except for gravity. But Newton’s planets needed a source for their motion and Newton, one of the most devout collectors of different versions of the Bible, knew the source of the force that moved the planets in a straight line but for gravity. The source of the force was God, pure and simple, no questions need be asked.
Because God was the source of the fundamental forces, forces such as gravity, then God was also the source of the force that kept the planets in their orbits once gravity had caused their straight-line motion to be curved into circular orbits. Newton didn’t have to face the very obvious question, did gravity produce friction, cause drag, tend to make the planets slow down, simply because Newton’s planets were kept in constant motion. As to the rotation of the planets, Newton wasn’t much concerned with that little detail. A God that could cause the planets to careen around in the solar system was a God that could easily set the planets a spinning.
In reality, though, anything that could cause the planets to move from a straight-line path to a circular path did so by producing friction by definition simply because the only thing that could affect the motion of the solid through whatever it was moving through is drag.
In fact, the only person who was really concerned about friction was Galileo. Galileo was obsessed with proving that Copernicus was correct. To do so, he sought ways to show that the Earth was rotating on its axis. If he could demonstrate this, then it would show that the vision of the sun going around the Earth we see every day would be the result of the Earth rotating rather than the sun moving.
He spent a lot of time showing that the tides were the result of the Earth’s rotation. This, it would seem, is fairly obvious. While Galileo didn’t have the knowledge we have today of ocean currents, those currents are certainly caused by the action of the rotating Earth. For Galileo, the tides were caused by the water building up away from the direction in which the Earth was turning until they reached a height that could not be supported against the gravitational pull of the Earth (yes, Galileo was familiar with gravity before Newton, so familiar, he measured it).
When the building up of the tides reached its highest point, the weight of the water then pushed the ocean down on that side, causing the water level to rise at the other side of the ocean. Because the tides were repetitive, Galileo instinctively knew that some sort of force had to be driving the process. Back before Newton, people actually believed physical phenomena controlled these sorts of things, not magical mathematical formulas. Because the only force that could continuously keep the tides in motion was the rotation of the Earth, it was the rotation of the Earth that was causing the tides.
Because The Church was the source of all authority in Italy, Galileo’s “proof” of Copernicus using the tides didn’t gain much traction. The much more open England was attempting the same end using parallax, the measurement of a star at the opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit, if it had an orbit, so England wasn’t very interested in Galileo’s tidal theories either.
Thus, they sort of languished. When Newton’s gravity as a property of came along, he used the tides as an example of the effect of the moon’s gravity on the Earth and it was bought hook line and sinker. Later in the 18th century, when Laplace was replacing God as the mover of the solar system with his equally mystical swirling mass of gas, he set about demonstrating mathematically the effect of the moon’s gravity on various volumes of water. After all, if it’s mathematical, then it’s got to be right.
What would be right, of course, would be for scientists to sit down and produce a table that shows the movements of the moon predicting the tides. This they cannot do, so science makes such silly statements as "the long-known correlation of the tides with the movement of the moon." The heck with long-known correlations. Let’s see tables showing the motion of the moon predicting the tides. I have a two volume set on my bookshelf written by a scientist named Newton (no relation to Sir Isaac) in which he attempts to use Einstein’s laws of relativity to do just that. Alas, after hundreds of pages of incomprehensible equations, he admits failure, but holds out hope that further perfection of the theory will result in success – sounds like Sir Isaac saying, my math didn’t work, but more exact measurements of the moon will bring reality into accord with my theory.
The idea that the oceans or the atmosphere for that matter produced friction with the surface of the Earth was fried with Laplace’s swirling mass of gas fantasy. This picture of the past had a universe, in which the only force was gravity, taking the condensing gas that had to have been the source of the matter that made up the solar system, and starting that gas to swirl. Last time I checked, gravity is a straight-line force while swirling results from a circular force, but no matter, a straight-line force somehow got this gas that had to have been there a swirling and once it was swirling, the sun and all the planets and the moons and some other junk to be named later condensed.
What was the proof for this ad hoc explanation for the solar system? Primarily, the solar system was in motion, there was no God to put it or keep it in motion, therefore, the only logical explanation was condensation out of a swirling mass of gas. To keep the solar system moving, science reached back to Galileo, who had rolled balls down inclined planes and measured their motion as they arced into space. He concluded that what was moving the balls was something called momentum gained from the trip down the inclined plane. He decided that, but for the friction of the air through which they passed, they would travel forever. What about gravity? Galileo said, gravity does not produce friction. How did he know that? Because, if he removed the air, the balls would travel forever.
Tell that one to course correction teams or anyone attempting to keep a satellite in orbit. Oh, they’ll tell you that the satellites lose altitude because of stray molecules of atmosphere they encounter in their orbits. Let me repeat that loud and clear. SATELLITES LOSE SPEED BECAUSE THEY BUMP INTO MOLECULES OF ATMOSPHERE.
Laplace used Newton’s Celestial Mechanics and Galileo’s frictionless space to come up with an ever-moving solar system propelled by momentum, a sort of perpetual motion machine that science is always telling us can’t exist. This was all well and good so long as everyone’s attention was focused on the orbiting billiard balls called planets. However, when attention started to focus, as it did in the 20th century, on the rotation of the planets, primarily the rotation of the Earth, it produced some big trouble.
As an aside, by this time science had determined how much momentum the solar system obtained from the swirling mass of gas. Did it measure swirling masses of gas and determine the force they impart to their parts? No, that’s a little too inexact. Science determined the age of the Earth first, using the time estimated for Darwin’s species evolution as a guide, and then once it knew the age of the Earth, it could take it’s mass, produced by Newton’s unproven theory of gravity, and compute the amount of force it would take to propel that mass through frictionless space for the required period of time. Any way to check the math? Why check something that’s absolutely correct? Like determining the amount of mass in a planet, which can never be checked, science has computed the amount of momentum which has to be present to experience the conditions we are experiencing today. It’s the scientific way!
I think it’s pretty clear today that space isn’t frictionless, but since we don’t experience frictionless space as a part of our lives, science can maintain the fantasy. However, when it comes to the surface of the Earth, it’s hard to swallow that the oceans and the atmosphere operate as science says they operate, with no friction between the surface of the Earth.
All that we, the great unwashed, have to do is point out that air at the equator is moving at about 1,000 mph, air at the poles is moving at about 0 mph (theoretically, there’s so much weather from the clashing of the upper polar bound masses with the lower equatorial bound masses that it’s a maelstrom). At ground level, the air is moving at the speed of the ground, otherwise, we’d be blown over. The speed of the ground between the equator and the poles varies between 1,000mph and 0 mph. Now that’s math that can’t be denied because it’s not based on any assumptions.
The only way the lower moving masses of atmosphere traveling back toward the equator could continually increase speed is if they were interacting with the surface of the Earth. If they were interacting with the surface of the Earth, then the drag of the Earth was imparting motion to the atmosphere. By definition, the atmosphere is causing friction with the surface of the Earth.
If the atmosphere is causing friction, then it is slowing the Earth down. However, it isn’t slowing the Earth down. Therefore, the Earth has a current force causing it to rotate. Five billion year old momentum isn’t going to cut the mustard.
Science openly admits that five billion year old momentum isn’t going to cut the mustard. So what does it conclude?
Since the Earth is still rotating, there is no friction between the Earth and it’s atmosphere (or its oceans).
With one stroke, the entire field of meteorology is rendered dumb, spouting things like high and low pressure areas to explain the movement of the atmosphere. When the movement of the atmosphere causes enough friction to destroy a city such as New Orleans, it wasn’t the movement of the atmosphere, it was a hurricane, which, I guess, is something else.
Go outside on a windy day and see how much friction the atmosphere is causing with your body. Then wonder how science can profess such ignorance when all it has to do is face the real questions of reality, what is the current force that is causing the planets to orbit and rotate?
Afterthought: I just finished watching a special on the 54th Sidney to Hobart yacht race that ended in catastrophe when weather got out of control. It seems the polar winds switched direction to match the waves, causing them to increase from a normal 50' to an astounding 100'. Now here's an example of the frictionless atmosphere whipping water into a frenzy.
Frictionless?
Don't think so.

What’s the Use?

I don’t normally get into discussions of my various theories with others. I learned a long time ago that just mentioning the possibility that Newton was incorrect in his conclusion that gravity is proportional to and therefore a property of mass gets me instant recognition as someone who not only doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but is also probably unstable.
Forget the fact that absolutely no one understands the importance of first saying “gravity is proportional to” before saying “it a property of,” in short, what the qualifier "therefore" means, and absolutely no one understands what the meaning of mass is, using it as shorthand for matter.
Both the qualifier and the word “mass” give the lie to Newton. The only way that Newton could prove that gravity was a property of matter (not mass) was to prove it was proportional to matter. To prove it was proportional to matter, he had to compute the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon, assuming that each were uniformly made up of the same particle, and then he used that computation to predict the orbit of the moon. Although he was off quite a bit, everyone accepted his theory and assumed that the orbit of the moon wasn’t, in the early 18th century, exactly computable. Royal Astronomer and lifelong Newton supporter Sir Edmund Halley took the fall for that one.
However, when Newton’s process was used on the other planets, it was clear that it didn’t work. This meant that Newton didn’t prove that gravity was proportional to matter, pure and simply. Of this there can be no dispute. Newton’s proof failed.
What is the early 18th century scientist do about this? Did they say, well, Newton is in the crapper, we better start over figuring out what gravity is? No. Scientists said Newton had to be right, after all he was Newton and universally thought of as the greatest genius of all time. It’s not our place to criticize Newton, especially with universal belief in his theory that gravity is a property of matter. What should we do?
What they did is to reverse Newton. Scientists concluded Newton, while wrong in his proof, was right in his conclusion. What science should do is use the orbit of the planet to compute the amount of matter in it. As the computations reflected the same error that computing the orbits by the amount of matter, science simply said we don’t know the amount of matter in a planet, so whatever Newton’s math computes it to be from a planet’s orbit is how much matter is in the planet. This matter is now called mass because some very big planets don’t have as much matter as their size would indicate (the origin of the gas planets).
It was foolproof because, while Newton’s computation of orbits could be verified, the amount of matter in a planet couldn’t, so there was no way to disprove the new mass gravity computations. This leads to two salient facts about the practice of science, at least on a theoretical level: First, science will never correct itself and second science does not follow its basic tenant that it never accepts as fact that which can’t be verified.
I have, of course, talked about this with some very famous physicists who I knew on a personal level, and while they all readily admitted that gravity was a mystery, none would accept it wasn’t a property of gravity (or was the result of what gravity was doing) simply because their lifework was based on the assumption. But as to talking to anyone without intimate knowledge of the subject matter, I kept my peace.
An opportunity, however, arose recently to get into another of my pet peeves, the handling of light. I was having lunch with several people, one a nonscientist who is very opinionated about the science he knows, textbook science, the other a preeminent practicing, as opposed to theoretical, scientist, the ultimate authority in his particular field. For some reason one of them brought up the subject of aether, and the scientist said, no one believes in aether anymore. That opened the door for me to discuss the Michelson Morley experiment, perhaps a bit too wide.
Reviewing the history of light, I pointed out that before Newton, the argument was whether light was a wave or a particle, and the knowledgeable community was leaning towards Huygens’ position of light as a wave. However, when Newton took over The Royal Society and had it publish his Theory of Colors, the view switched to the particle side where it stayed throughout the 18th century. Then, with Young’s two-slit experiment, which was taken to show wave patterns, light became a wave for the 19th century (hmmm, must be wrong about science being self-correcting).
Now, here’s where my scientific friend’s comment about the aether came in. Young was analogizing light to water waves. Water waves are a disturbance on the surface of water. They do not have an independent existence. Thus, the water is the medium though which the waves travel. If water waves have a medium and light waves are being analogized to water waves, then it only stands to reason that light waves must also have a medium.
Ever ready to create something that isn’t there, scientists made up aether, said everything was permeated with the stuff, and this was the medium through which light waves traveled.
Pretty heady stuff, no? Not one thinker has bothered to ask the basic question about light, how does matter produce it, but all the thinkers have gotten together and given a minute description of light as a water wave traveling through a medium no one knew existed, but which, because everyone now knew light was a wave, had to exist.
As science mulled this over in its collective mind for, oh, perhaps seventy years, a new question started puzzling these geniuses of rational observation: What is the absolute direction of the Earth as it travels in space? We know it travels around the sun, but we don’t know the precise direction it is traveling in, there being no east, west, north or south “out there.”
Now here is a really important question to answer. What better piece of knowledge to have than to know in what direction everyone is traveling? Michelson and Morley, one a theoretician, the other an experimental apparatus designer, sat down and attempted to answer this question. They concluded that because the Earth was traveling through the medium aether, the aether itself could be used to compute the direction of the Earth in space. Because light used the aether as a medium, it could be used for this purpose.
The point of the experiment was to build on Young’s two-slit experiment to produce, or not produce, interference patterns. Light would be collected and sent down a course of a circular platform to the center, where it would be divided by mirrors. One path of light would go in one direction 90º, the other path the other direction, 90º. The light would be reflected when it reached the edge of the platform and sent back to the center, where it would be recombined and sent to an interferometer, a device that could compute interference patterns. As each path of light had traveled through the aether in different directions, and as the platform was moving through the aether, one path would take longer to reach the end than the other and there would be no interference pattern.
Because these enterprising men didn’t know which way the Earth was traveling in the aether, they place the entire apparatus on a bed of mercury so it could be rotated in any direction. As the apparatus rotated, the light would travel different distances in the aether, and the direction of travel could be determined by when there was and when there wasn’t interference patterns.
Everybody agreed that the scientific logic was foolproof, that the experiment would produce the desired results. However, no matter which way the platform was turned, the interference patterns always appeared. Thus, a foolproof experiment didn’t produce the expected result. In fact, it produced no results at all.
Oh my! Our open-minded, stalwart inquirers into the nature of reality would certainly sit down, like they should have done when Newton was found to be a failure, and said, wow, guess there’s no aether, light isn’t a wave, we’d better rethink our whole concept about what light is.
You think?
Actually, since the entire scientific community already knew what light was, it started looking around for an explanation that would explain the non-results of the experiment. And the answer was so simple, it just startled the world (and enthralls us to this day). The answer was reflected in something called the Lorentz Fitzgerald equations. You see, since there was an aether, and since the experiment was foolproof and since the experiment didn’t produce the expected results, there must be something about the physical equipment that was changing. Because it was known the light in the two paths was traveling different distances, there must be something that was counteracting that change in distance.
The only thing that could be counteracting the difference in distances was if the physical dimensions of the apparatus were changing in precise proportion to the change in distances caused by the apparatus’ movement through the aether. Thus, speed was causing the physical dimensions of the equipment to contract.
First these nitwits make up aether, then they use it as the basis of an experiment, and when the experiment doesn’t work, instead of rethinking aether, they make up something that is impossible to measure, measurements change with speed, the size of physical matter depends on its motion.
Although it gets very unclear at this point, Einstein’s theories employed much the same logic. However, Einstein disavowed the Lorentz Fitzgerald equations, and except for possible two times in his life, never mentioned aether, which is totally unnecessary in Einstein’s universe. This led to the gradual death of aether, at least until today, where zero point energy theorists like to trot it out, claiming its frictionless (that’s really confusing, a frictionless medium).
Einstein’s contribution to the light story wasn’t the death of aether, however, it was in his one solid discovery, the photoelectric effect. Now here’s science once again operating as science always operates. The photoelectric effect demonstrated once and for all that light was a particle. So, of course, science would now, after going back and forth between wave and particle to wave would now return to particle. Self-correcting, right?
Not on your life. Our stalwart thinkers said, well, isn’t that interesting, light is a particle. But we know it’s a wave. Therefore, isn’t it amazing, light has dual properties, it is a wave and a particle, a wave particle.
This stuff, delivered by a stand-up comic, would bring the house down.
So, I finally got off my high horse after delivering my peace. Was there discussion about all the untaken chances honest scientists had to revise concepts created in the light of newly discovered facts?
No, through dessert I had to enjoy a lively discussion between my two friends about how space travelers would stay young when compared to those remaining behind unless, of course, they used the newly discovered (read made up) worm holes to move from one end of space to another.
Ain’t science fiction wonderful?
What's the use in trying? The consequences of not trying!

Do We Expect Too Much From Science?

A traumatic even occurred in Milwaukee in the mid-90s. People started to get sick, with some of them dying. Before it was over, about 400,000 people took ill, with about a hundred of them dying. The dead were inevitably people with compromised immune systems. With such a widespread problem, many suspected the water supply. Because Milwaukee’s water supply is used to make a good portion of the beer produced in the United States, something had to be done fast to prevent this sickness from spreading beyond Milwaukee.
I like these medical detective stories because they show science at its best, with its nose to the grindstone dealing with real facts in the real world. The root of the word science is reality, and science should first, deal with reality, and second, leave questions that don’t have anything to do with reality alone. However, we tend to think that because science deals with reality, it should be able to solve all the problem of realty, and in the Milwaukee case, even solve them before they arise.
The first thing scientists did in the Milwaukee case was to plot the locations where people became ill. It turned out that the vast majority of victims was clustered around an area served by one water processing plant. The water was immediately tested for any impurities, and found to meet the EPA’s clean water guidelines. I should point out that having a national standard setting for safety levels is important. Some of the standard setters are associations of scientists, others government scientists such as those employed by EPA. It’s only by having one location where all the technical information can be funneled, evaluated and promulgated that we can expect the process of science, which is to gather and compare observations, to be accomplished.
The next step was to start to examine the material from the patients' intestines. Again, nothing showed up on the slides. The scientists were almost certain by this time that they were dealing with a parasite because of the nature of people’s illnesses, but parasites from sick patients normally show up as active on slides. After a period of frustration, one scientist remembered an axiom she had learned in school, that it wasn’t always what was obvious that was important, but sometimes what wasn’t obvious. She began to study the slices carefully, looking for something that might seem normal background, but which, if contained in all the slides, would be a clue.
She finally found some inert dots that fit this bill and she went about seeing if she could activate them. This part of science I find the most fascinating. I don’t remember much of my high school chemistry, in which I got a perfect grade, but my, at least until this month, high school grandson can reel off bases and alkaline and acidic, what activates what, all the tools of a good chemist (which might be because his father is a chemist). Knowing what reacts with what and then being able to use the knowledge creatively to get real results in the real world is a trait I most admire about the practice of science.
After a number of failed attempts, she was finally able to activate (I’m not sure that’s the right word, might be identify) the parasite and it turned out to be called cryptosporidium or crypto for short because it was so rare and illusive. At the time, its only presence was known to occur as a result of runoff on cattle grazing land. Scientists reasoned that the heavy rains that had occurred around Milwaukee the prior spring had caused the runoff to be washed away in the tributary creeks of Lake Michigan where the intakes of the water purification plant were placed. The Milwaukee mayor had ordered water boiling early in the game, before this was all discovered, and has now undertaken a modernization of the Milwaukee water system that will kill the crypto. But the scientists hadn’t finished with their process yet. Something about the crypto mystified them because it didn’t seem to behave like any crypto that was on record so far. After doing extensive tests, they determined that the crypto wasn’t from animal feces, but rather from human feces, and they began to explore the sources of the intakes of the water purification plant. They found that a waste disposal plant had been located about two miles from the water purification plant. The waste disposal plant was dumping processed refuse into Lake Michigan just two miles away from the water plant’s intakes. Testing the refuse from the waste treatment plant disclosed the source of the crypto.
At that point, someone started in with, well, science should have known better!
Now this probably belongs under the heading, no good deed goes unpunished, but for the fact that here the good deed, finding out what was causing the sickness, was the job of the scientists doing the digging. However, there’s a difference between good science and sloppy science, and this definitely wasn’t sloppy science. Why would an attitude that science should have known in advance and prevented the sickness arise in the first place?
To answer that question, we have to focus on another area of science, probably the area that gets the most press, the area that deals with the things we can never know. When we get into areas concerning light, gravity, subatomic particles and the like, we have nothing that we can put under glass in the local museum to display. Everything we think we know about the subjects we can only know about indirectly is hypothetical, theory, made-up stuff if you will.
When a rational approach to the physical universe began to emerge from the dark ages, people wanted to experiment directly with reality in order to learn what that reality was. All the myths, primarily created by church authorities over the centuries, about how the way things were, were in the process of being challenged. Even Aristotle, whose worldview had been pretty much incorporated into church thinking, came under fire. Everything old was up for questioning, anything new and novel up for discussion.
The people doing the discussing at this time came from many areas of life. The only qualification to participate in the discussion was an active mind, the willingness to accept what was found in reality, and pretty much, a disdain for the unexamined thoughts that had been around for centuries. There were not many people that fit into this select group, and the educational backgrounds were many and diverse. William Smith, the man who mapped the stratiography of England and is therefore indirectly responsible for much of modern day geological thinking, was a surveyor. Others were explorers, or wealthy hobbyists who amassed large collections of artifacts and fossils. The atmosphere was open and honest.
Francis Bacon was the first to set out what should be the scientific method. He was the first to observe that there were physical phenomena that our senses did not have direct access to. His most famous quest was for the hidden source of the force that caused movement, objects to fall, planets to orbit and rotate. While he realized that the cause of some physical phenomena are not accessible to our senses, he said there is a way that we can reveal them. He said the more facts we had about a phenomenon, the more accurate our hypothesis of the phenomenon’s cause would be. Sooner or later, he ventured, we would collect enough facts to get a clear picture of the hidden cause.
The most important feature of Bacon’s process was that any picture we proposed from the facts be just that, a proposal, a theory, a hypothesis. He stressed that no theory, no hypothesis, no proposal to explain a set of fact surrounding a phenomena could itself be taken as fact. We always had to ensure that our theories remained theories and never became facts because if our theories became facts, then subsequent explanations for phenomena would incorporate among the facts things that weren’t a fact, things we actually made up.
Bacon was taken very seriously and in the early 1760s, when The Royal Society was formed in England to organize the exploration into reality, it’s motto, translated into English, was (and is) “nothing in word.” This underscored the thinking at the time that scientific exploration must be based on physical results and facts rather than theory. Theories were just words. Facts were facts. Facts should always trump theory.
The Royal Society was founded on royal patronage, and when, over the years, this dried up, it attempted to limp along on its inventions to no avail. In the meantime, the great battle between secular scientific thought and age old religious conclusions was starting to heat up, with the vast wealth of the pie that fed those that controlled society’s worldview, controlled by the church, starting to be nibbled at by science. Practically all of the questions addressed by religion had nothing to do with science. Even church authorities agreed that it didn’t make much difference whether the sun went around the Earth or the Earth around the sun when it came to religious questions, yet to call into question this belief was to call into question the faith. To call into question the age of the Earth as dictated by begats, the flood, or any aspect of the bible, was to call into question the faith, and this the church could not continence.
Secular science was given a great gift at the beginning of the battle for control of society’s worldview. Newton had delivered his reflecting telescope to The Society in the 1760s to deserved acclaim. When he honored the society with his Theory of Colors a few years later, it was pretty much considered nothing but words and ignored, much to Newton’s lifelong anger. He attempted to set up a parallel society, but that crashed. Over the next twenty years, he built a core of powerful political allies and when he published his theory of gravity in an incomprehensible format using a form of math he invented, the description of what he had done, rather than the method that he used, was what sold the theory. After all, he was claiming that he described how the planets moved and how objects fell. Of course, at the base of his entire house of cards was a simple fact: God was what caused objects to fall and the planets to move. However, God was so far removed from his theory, that His presence in the theory didn’t have to be addressed until later in the next century, when Laplace replaced Him with the rotating mass of gas and theorists finished the job by pointing out that Newton’s math didn’t work anywhere in the solar system so, instead of using the math to have the “mass” of the planets predict motion, which was the only way Newton could give color of proof to mass gravity, his math could be used to predict “mass” from the motion of the planets.
In short, Newton’s proof was wrong, his conclusion correct!
At the beginning of the 18th century, Newton used his political connections to take over The Royal Society and for the next three decades used it to promulgate his view that theories could be demonstrated to be fact, turning Bacon and the society’s founding principle on its ear. It also allowed secular science to make pronouncements about all sorts of things that have no basis in reality, leading to today’s all seeing eye that can tell us when and how the universe began, how big it is, how long it will last and when it will end. Its latest fad is to come up with the TOE, the theory of everything, all of existence contained in a simple equation.
Because when it comes to this type of science, science that is not based in reality, science knows so little and is, in fact, totally ignorant, after all, it admits it doesn’t know what gravity is, and even goes so far as to put it low on its list of priorities, it has to constantly present a picture of itself knowing everything, one fact away from the TOE, the epiphany where we’ll all know everything in a flash and the world will become paradise on, well, this and other planets that happen to benefit from our knowledge.
Theoretical science with its quantum musings, its string theory, its dark matter and black holes, has been driven to present itself to the public as all powerful, all seeing, the Wizard of Oz.
Thus, when the poor scientists working on the ground dealing with actual reality uncover the cause for massive sickness and save countless lives, they’re accused of not knowing something in advance, something they, of course, couldn’t have known because there was as yet no science dealing with the illness.
But, hey, to the theoretical fantasists, that’s bull. Science is all-powerful, all seeing, all knowing, it can tell us everything there is to know about the universe.
Seems to me the millions of practicing scientists would want to get serious about doing some house clearing.

How Can Science Deny the Earth is Cooling?

One of the more technical questions I received over the years, or at least before I started The Real Skeptic Columns, was, why do I capitalize Earth? Before the Real Skeptic presence on the Internet, scientific bulldogs liked to email what appeared to be legitimate questions, and then proceed to attempt to entrap me. It didn’t take me long to determine which were the legitimate questions and which were the entrapments. For one thing, the legitimate questions usually were intelligent, while the entrapment questions soon led to a clear path of stupidity, ending usually in the use of the very definitions I was criticizing to prove that I was ignorant of the definitions of science.
But the Earth capitalization criticism seems to have some validity to it. Having been an English major in college, I am very familiar with the rules of whatever. However, I’m also an avid proponent of the living language because I know for a certainty that the language is what the majority of speakers say it is. Just like species, words and phrases are born and die, with the panoply of variety constantly changing. At the rate we’re going, “nuclear” will become “necular” in my lifetime (which pretty much means, it already has).
If I go out into the backyard to work on my garden (like I had one), I would be dealing with plants that were rooted in the soil, which is called earth. However, if I were coming to visit the solar system from some far-off system, one of the places I’d certainly want to visit would be the Earth. When the Earth is capitalized, we’re dealing with the planet, when it’s not capitalized, we’re dealing with the stuff that covers the planet. I imagine the Martians would have faced the same problem if their word for soil happened to be mars. Our commonsense ancestors simply named our planet after what produced their food.
One of our commonsense ancestors, a guy named William Thomson, found himself in a heap of hot water as a result of, well, using his commonsense. William Thomson was not one of, he was the most renowned all-around physicist of the 19th century, one whose name is probably repeated, everywhere but in the United States, billions of times a day. Otherwise known as Lord Kelvin, he set forth the heat scale that is universally used in scientific circles, and pretty much everywhere else, but in the good old English offshoots which still use the more practical mishmash of, let’s see, pulling up my conversion dashboard, fluid ounces to liters, miles to kilometers, pounds to kilograms, and yes, Fahrenheit to Kelvin. (I remember I was collaterally involved with the great, I think it was 80s, goal off converting the U.S. to standardized measurements. After all, if you think of the money lost in international trade, you’d croak. Every one I met doing serious work in the field, which I wasn’t, said, this is a waste of time, it’ll never happen. And it didn’t, with the current intermediate phase where both are printed on labels and boxes, serving hopefully for the arrival of a new generation.)
Kelvin had a small obsession. He thought that he could take the size of the Earth, the assumed temperature of space (it hadn’t at that time been demonstrated that space approaches zero Kelvin, and, by assuming the Earth was as hot as the sun at one time, compute the amount of time that passed between the time it was molten hot and now, when balmy breezes across the oceans are broken by the occasional calved iceberg.
Could anything be more logical? After all, what is one of the basic facts, not, mind you laws, but facts about physical reality. Heat flows spontaneously from hot to cold. I’m not a cook, but I can cook eggs and I know that if I put the freshly cooked eggs on a plate and forget them, I’m going to have cold eggs. Hot objects seek out the temperature of the environment they occupy. It’s not rocket science (which by the way is engineering), it’s a simple fact of reality, physics if your will.
Although Kelvin could only assume the space around the Earth was close to zero, we now know that it is. Thus Kelvin’s notion that the Earth was hot and it was sitting in cold space was pretty reasonable given what we know about heat. I should mention that Comte du Buffon used heated balls to estimate the age of the Earth a century before. Kelvin came up with just under 100 million years to Buffon’s 75,000.
Now, bowing to science’s claim to using the best method available in order to compute difficult dates, we would all expect the scientific community to celebrate Kelvin, roll out the magic carpet, give him honors and awards, perhaps even attempt to fine tune the calculations or even find a more accurate way of computation.
Well, not if we actually knew how science operates. The scientific community demanded that Kelvin renounce his heresy or face public humiliation for being an ignorant, deluded, perhaps even insane, wannabe.
To make such a claim, the scientific community must have had an ironclad method to compute the age of the Earth, a method far better, far more accurate than Kelvin’s rantings, right?
And it certainly did. You see, a guy named Charles Darwin, a man who spent his life studying heat flows (I joke) published his theory of evolution. This theory was based on a theory of geologist Charles Lyell, uniformitarianism, that was simply a popularization of an idea expressed by Scottish natural philosopher James Hutton. (You can see the disciplined scientific thinking that went into all this, at least if you're blind.) That notion was that events on Earth only happened over extremely long periods of time. This allowed Darwin to propose his species evolution, which meant that fish turned into dinosaurs that became dogs, apes, and Lord Kelvin (never can get the sequence of wings to arms, fins to arms, legs to arms right).
You can see the strict scientific calculations clashing here. A philosophical notion against a reasoned computation. It took the nonscientific bluster of Thomas H. Huxley to defend Darwin. Who was Huxley defending Darwin against? Why, anybody that opposed Darwin was a religious bigot. When it came to Kelvin’s calculations, they simply weren’t correct because they didn’t provide enough time for Darwin’s beaks to become teeth.
So we have a scientific community balancing two proposals, one a philosophical idea that allowed for an explanation other than creationism, the second, a soundly reasoned scientific calculation. Which one were they going to accept? The one that opposed creationism, of course.
Before the 19th century, the religious authorities dictated everyone’s view of the world. The 19the century was witness to the great battle between so-called science and religion. Which one would dictate how everyone viewed the world?
To see how bitter the battle was, we have only to ask what was (is?) at stake in the battle. The answer is quite simple. Whoever or whatever dictates our view of reality reaps a substantial portion of society’s riches. Whether it’s the church selling indulgences for people who enjoy wine, women, and more women, indulgences that automatically freed the purchaser from guilt, or we have pseudoscientists selling carbon credits to people living in twenty-million dollar mansions and flying all over the world in jet planes preaching about how we have to give up our cars and bicycle to work so these hypocrites won’t have guilt feelings, controlling our worldview leads to lined pockets.
But the flow of money goes deeper, from glorious hundred million dollar churches to glorious billion dollar atom smashers and ten million dollar sculptures to many billion-dollar space elevators.
When that much money is on the line, people line up and when it looks like one authority is going to replace the other, they jump on board.
Thus, Kelvin was told in no uncertain terms that his name would be blackened in the history books if he didn’t come around, jump on board the gravy train. After much soul searching and prayer, Kelvin raised his estimate to between two and four hundred million years.
Not enough, his detractors yelled. We need more, much, much more (They were talking about time, not money). Huxley claimed Kelvin’s computation was based on unfounded assumptions To Darwin and his supporters, anything that disagreed with any part of the theory of evolution had to be based on unfounded assumptions. Much the same argument is used today to defend species evolution.
While Kelvin wouldn’t go further than four hundred million years, his reputation was saved by the discovery of French chemist A. Henri Becquerel, of radioactivity. To listen to mindless scientists today, one would think that Becquerel and Curie came upon this molten field of pitchblende. Puzzled by what was causing this massive amount of heat, they discovered radioactivity and the reason why Kelvin’s computations were off. Kelvin hadn’t added into the equation the massive heating effect of all these massive pitchblende fields that, to keep the Earth hot, had to be covering the Earth’s surface.
Or so the Darwinists, and every other dater that spirals off into the billions of years for the Earth, then jumps to precise dating for the universe, would have us believe.
The simple fact is pitchblende had been around for years, the pitch being its dark color, and the blende being the mixture of metals that scientists of the time had no way of analyzing. Miners didn’t have to use potholders to pick up a nugget of pitchblende. It was the same temperature as everything around it. It wasn’t heating up anything.
If the pitchblende, and for that matter, any material from which radioactive material could be isolated, wasn’t hot, how did these scientists come to the conclusion that they were heating up the Earth.
Well, here’s a source of energy, and energy heats things. Evolution had to take billions of years, so the Earth has been here billions of years, The Earth would have cooled off long ago, but because it has been here long enough for species evolution to occur, something must be heating it. Therefore, we have conclusive proof that radiation is heating the Earth.
Calculations? Don’t need them, the facts speak for themselves. The mechanism by which the radiation heats the Earth? Why bother to examine something that’s self-evident, after all, gravity is a property of matter isn’t it, and heating up the Earth is the result of the Earth having radioactive materials.
One of the more amusing aspects of science’s abysmal ignorance, its refusal to face answering simple questions, involves the explanation for gravity I posted in earlier entries. Without going into the details, my view is that gravity is not a static property of matter, it is the dynamic result of what matter is doing, cooling.
What would be one way to demonstrate the planet is cooling?
Well, if the planet were cooling, the gravity would be lessening, something that would not necessarily be measurable because everything is calibrated on a relative basis. However, one thing that would certainly happen would be that the water on the surface of the Earth would decompress. The water pressure at ocean level is the result of gravity, and if there were less gravity holding the water down, the water would decompress and its level would rise.
What do we find when we measure ocean levels?
We find that they are slowly rising.
What does this mean?
Well, because we know gravity is a property of matter, we know that gravity can’t change, so lessening gravity isn’t causing the ocean levels to rise.
Could only be one thing.
The water is rising because the ice caps are melting, and thus, our problem is our planet, sitting in the zero temperature of space, is getting warmer.
And we’ll gaily skip along, delusional, as the heat slowly escapes us and, as the life that evolved on this planet (by characteristic, not species evolution), freeze to death in the belief that we are roasting.
We may not be getting much of value from the people we pay to provide us with our worldview, but if we’re looking for humor content, we’re underpaying.

Do Honest Scientists Deserve Blame?

Talk about mad! My parents moved to the Washington D.C. area when I was 7 and it didn’t take me long to discover the historic Little Tavern hamburger chain (since bought by a Congressman who immediately closed the stores and sold the real estate they were on). I had never had a hamburger before and my Father used to joke about the dollar dinner, 19 LT hamburgers and a coke. They were about 4 bites, although you could get a larger size for a dime. Cheese was an extra penny or two, depending on the size.
I’d never had either a hamburger or a cheeseburger and when I got my first taste of what were widely call death balls, I fell in love. As the years went by, my tastes turned to big, juicy, rare cheeseburgers, a heavenly treat, and I spent a lot of time finding the restaurants that knew how to cook them. Then a catastrophe occurred. A dozen or so kids fell ill, one of them dying. A background check for commonalities led to the conclusion that all the kids had eaten at a Jack-In-The-Box fast food restaurant. It was speculated and widely reported as fact that undercooked hamburgers were the culprit because they had a high incidence of e coli, which is what the kids were sick from.
All of a sudden, finding anyone that would serve a cheeseburger less than medium was next to impossible. While there are still a few restaurants that buy their own cuts of meat and grind them up into hamburger, and therefore have no danger of e coli, these establishments are few and far between. As far as getting a rare cheeseburger anywhere but at home became too much of a chore, so one of my greatest enjoyments bit the dust.
That was then, and now I find out the real story of the kids' sickness. It wasn’t hamburger at all, and therefore, I had been deprived simply because of speculations that were reported as fact. The real story is one that demonstrates how real science works and how intelligent, inquisitive, painstaking and challenging its practice can be. It also shows that there are certain aspects of our life here on Earth that science can’t, and for that matter, shouldn’t deal with.
The first clue came when a person that should have been in the population of hamburger eaters wasn’t, and it turned out that person was not only the sickest, she was the only one that died. That person was a baby, and she had never had a hamburger nor eaten at the suspected restaurant. However, while she lived several states away, her parents had just moved, and they had moved from the affected area.
This meant that something else caused the e coli, and because it was something else, its source had to be identified quickly or others would become infected. The public, of course, never heard a word of this and newspapers aren’t in the habit of making their mistakes of haste front-page news, so I’ll forever be out my rare cheeseburgers. Researchers went to the parents of the sick girl and started the exhaustive process of retracing their every step before they left Washington State, where the incident was occurring. Eventually, the mother remembered an incident in a grocery store where the girl had wanted a drink, and she’d taken a small carton of apple juice. She remembered the design on the carton because it was so unusual and the researchers quickly identified the apple juice’s maker. Although all apple juice was pasteurized, companies weren’t required to do so by law, and this brand was marketed to the new market for health foods by stating that it was natural, that it wasn’t pasteurized. When notified the company immediately emptied the shelves of the product. It was quickly established that the juice was the source of the e coli.
Next, the scientist in charge had to determine where the e coli originated. They reviewed all the contracts the company had with apple producers, and all the contracts required that only apples picked from trees be included in any purchase. This was because it didn’t want to take a chance on apples lying on the ground subject to the environment polluting the purity of its juice. The scientists then visited the apple providers and found that they were using unregulated and unsupervised help to fill the apple orders. As the orders were for the bushel of apples, workers were picking up apples from the ground to more quickly fill the baskets.
The next step was for the scientists to determine how the e coli got into the apples on the ground. Like most western states, and many others, impeding the movement of wild animals was strictly forbidden. I remember visiting some friend in 70s California. They were spending vast amounts of time trying to landscape in a way that would keep deer from eating the product of their work, but they were about to give up because everything that was effective had been prohibited and everything that was not prohibited was not effective. It turns out that deer are a major carrier of e coli, and upon examining deer droppings in one of the apple orchards, the scientists found what they were looking for, the source of the e coli.
I think this is absolutely remarkable and certainly the practice of science in all its glory. Both my son-in-laws do the same sort of work, and over the years, I’ve had many friends who practiced science. They have to have unique knowledge in their fields, and when it comes down to it, they become the only source of that unique knowledge. One group of scientists might spend their days performing trial and error work on possible drug cures while others spend years testing different artificial threads to determine quality in order to produce better products. As each scientist in each field does so, the store of knowledge related to the area of expertise is collected, processed, and added to. It’s a great system. I wasn’t surprised one day when I found out that there are men and women who devote their entire lives to the nature of rope. It sounds silly, but the body of knowledge that has grown up over the centuries dealing with this common product has produced all sorts of improvements. Technology marches forward on the shoulders of unsung scientists working in isolated fields on practical problems.
And with the technology, our prosperity increases, our lives grow easier, and we have a lot to thank them for.
It harkens back, in my mind, to one of the earliest assignments of The Royal Society, one that occupied Robert Hooke for many years. This assignment was to produce a spring for a horse drawn coach that would make riding in the coach comfortable. Much of the early work of the society was devoted to projects of this type because wealthy people were willing to subsidize the projects in the hope that the results would make their life, and everybody else’s who used horse drawn coaches, better (and in those days, horse drawn coaches were the means of transportation for everyone).
I guess the question I have to ask now is, why haven’t I heard of any of this before? Why do I have to still be subjected to restaurants serving my cheeseburgers ruined? It doesn’t have anything to do with science, or the practice of science, and I point it out to underline my point that there are certain subjects that can be approached on a scientific basis, and there are certain subjects which can’t, which, in fact, have no place in the scientific community.
The e coli outbreak, and the death, was the direct result of certain social movements. First, with prosperity, people were able to transcend the basic need we have for food. When we lived in feudal societies, we’d eat anything we could get our hands on, and risked limb, and even life, to obtain food for our family. With prosperity, we are removed from our food source and work for paychecks that in turn are traded for food and other necessities. When this situation arose, scientists added preservatives and color fixers to increase the time available to move the food from the ground to our tables. Some of us didn’t trust these additives and started a health food movement. While pasteurization is a proven method to make food safer, the pasteurization laws don’t encompass everything, and in this case, apple juice slipped through. However, the industry, due to the possibility of ground apples, knew the dangers of e coli and voluntarily pasteurized its product until one discovered a good market for “healthy” unpasteurized apple juice. How was the buyer to know? The buyer was focused on the “unpasteurized’ as a good thing because it was an intermediate process between production and consumption, and the health food movement objected to all intermediate processes (just listen to the fear of irradiated food as if it were going to explode in the stomach or cause radiation poisoning).
The health food social movement is relatively harmless and only affects its practitioners. The animal preservation movement is an entirely different story. When the number of deer killed by motorists approaches the number shot by hunters, not to mention the number of motorists killed by deer, something is wrong. However, the deer preservation (and now pretty much any wild animal preservation) has stretched from the West to the East coast. When I moved to Washington in ’46, we could swim in the Potomac and the tributary streams. By the early ‘50s, we couldn’t and later in the decade I would lifeguard Potomac cruises with specific instructions to only throw lifesavers to anyone who drunkenly fell overboard.
The environmental movement of the sixties changed all that and we spent hundreds of millions of dollars improving both the water and the air quality. By the late ‘70s, we could water ski on the Potomac and children could play in the tributaries. Then in the ‘90s water pollution warnings were once again posted, only this time there was no environmental movement to correct the situation. Why? Because the pollution was from wild animals that were using the tributaries, much as the deer were using the apple orchard, as toilets.
Any society that doesn’t take steps to protect its urban population from the diseases wild animals carry is not a society, but a shambles. However, the scientists that tracked down the e coli, while knowing the cause, could not take any scientific steps to correct the situation. If they felt the situation should be corrected, they could, on their nonscientific time, attempt to form social movements to pen deer out of places where food for human consumption was grown, but it wouldn’t have been successful because environmental groups would contact the association that provided the scientist with credentials and the association would bring pressure on the scientist to stick to science.
The third societal pressure that led to the e coli outbreak was the use of uneducated, migrant labor to harvest farm products. It doesn’t do much good to sign a contract saying all apples will be picked from the tree if the signer has no intention of supervising the work force to ensure that no apples will be picked up from the ground. I’d hate to be either the company that made the apple juice or the company signing the contract to pick only from trees because any jury is going to see that, under the situation, its foreseeable that the contract is going to be breached.
That's why all companies had been pasteurizing apple juice.
While the scientific process shone bright when it came to tracing the source of the e coli, it can do absolutely nothing about the social movements that brought the e coli into the marketplace. Some things are just beyond the realm of the scientific process.
Like what else?
Well, a lot of things science claims do fall under the scientific process.
Let’s start with the easiest one, gravity. Manipulating gravity is clearly a part of the scientific process. However, saying what causes gravity is not, simply because there is no scientific process that can tell us what precisely it is that causes gravity. The cause of gravity can only be theorized.
A better example is the age, size, origin and possible ending of the universe. Science has no process to tell us what the universe is, yet it claims to know how it started, how it evolved and how it will end, as well as where the physical end of the universe is (and what’s outside of that?).
None of use, least of all scientists, are in a position to say, adding preservatives to food is dangerous to our health, allowing wild animals to roam in our cities is more amusing than dangerous or that migrant labor can no longer harvest because it is a dangerous practice. Everybody is capable of disagreeing with just about everything but cold hard facts.
Gravity may be a cold hard fact, but what causes it isn’t. The origin of the universe is not even a cold hard fact, so it’s just not a fit subject for science.
I could go on. We can only speculate at what causes the planets to orbit and rotate, or what the nature of light is, or what makes it move, or what electricity is, or what magnetism is. We will never know.
But, and this is a big but, we need to speculate on the nature of these phenomena if we want to conform our technology to reality. We have no other choice.
However, we live in a world in which the scientific establishment has co-opted the explanation for things we can only speculate about. Explanations for gravity, planetary orbiting and rotation, light, electricity, magnetism, were all created before there was an organized science and definitely before there was the technological society in which we live today.
However, because all the answers to questions that need open speculation were set in stone, our technology had to conform, not to reality, but to the ancient answers to the questions. Mass gravity doesn’t just provide an explanation for why an object drops, it closes off technological inquiry into the possibility that gravity, like electricity, might be able to be manipulated. Celestial Mechanics provides an iron clad navigational system to guide our rockets in space, and when it doesn’t, when sunspots make satellites drop from orbit, we make up all sorts of frosting on it to ensure its failure is not recognized.
All of these laws and conclusions are learned early in a scientist’s educational process. There’s really no one responsible for altering or updating them. They just hang in history, passed down from mind to mind, mindlessly believed and mindlessly followed. Associations work to protect the knowledge in their field from encroachment, but at the same time, they are subject to the discipline of the overall scientific community, which enforces its collection of mindless laws and conclusions, and yes, assumptions, vigorously, because everything that has been done in every field of science has been done with these laws in mind. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can oppose the laws.
Thus, the brilliant scientists that traced the e coli have been taught these mindless laws and know them by rote, even though mass gravity has nothing to do with the scientific process in which they are engaged. Their association officials are the gatekeepers who ensure that no one in the field does anything that would oppose any of the mindless laws that might affect that field. Supra gatekeepers on a national and international level monitor associations to ensure that they don’t adopt any theory or attempt any process that violates the mindless laws.
Can an honest scientist, a category that pretty much makes up all scientists, do anything about these mindless memes?
I started writing The Real Skeptic columns in October of ’04. During the time I was writing them, I found out, through email correspondence, that there are at least 3 disciplines in which the rank and file members are trying to clear out the unproven assumptions that formed the basis of the field. This isn’t done without pain. There are meetings at which dissidents get ignored, or more often, booed. It’s just the nature of consensus thinking. But in each of these three fields, a significant minority position has been established that it is now given the respect all opposing factions to a mere idea deserve (to give you an idea without naming disciplines, one of the disciplines is finally throwing off uniformitarianism, that unfounded belief that the Earth formed over vast eons without any significant disruptions).
But these incremental advances won’t touch the heart of mindless scientific belief, the gravity is a property of matter, the light is a wave, solar system motion is not the result of current forces, simply because there are no disciplines that are in a position to challenge these ancient assumptions, and there is no one willing to face the catcalls and boos that actually challenging these core consensus beliefs produces.
In addition, even though we find daily that our technology doesn’t match our concepts, we simply move forward, stumbling all the while over the ancient, unfounded beliefs. Just as Edison’s direct conversion of electricity into light didn’t change the view that electricity and light were different things, just as Einstein’s discovery of the photoelectric effect didn’t change the view that electricity and light are different things, there is nothing that anyone can do that will change these useless beliefs.
But it wouldn’t be a problem if the beliefs were simply useless. They are harmful, because they block creative investigation into all sorts of technologies because the investigations are ruled impossible by the ancient beliefs.
We live better lives than out ancestors simply because the inventors among us ignored the ancient beliefs and forged into new territory. But other than isolated successes here and there, we're just as ignorant as our ancestors when it comes to viewing how the world we find ourselves in works.
So, do honest scientists deserve blame for the situation?
No, but they can open their minds to the mindless memes that were inculcated in their youth and start to recognize the limitations of science. Then perhaps the black and white of these gray subjects can start to enter the popular literature and textbooks.
Maybe, over the years, things will start to change.