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.

Are Scientists Crazy?

There’s a pretty vile scam going around. It thrives during periods of college vacations, like spring break, but it goes on constantly. It’s done by cold calls, people sitting in a boiler room picking numbers out of a directory. The call goes out, it’s answered, and the caller says, your son has just been in a horrible accident and he needs immediate medical help.
A lot of people don’t have sons, and the call is terminated as a mistake. However, many do, and some of those that do don’t live with their sons. The caller, like a psychic, gets clues from the ensuing conversation that can be used to entrap the mark, the person being scammed. As the scam continues, it turns out immediate evacuation is needed, and the caller gives the mark the name of a police dispatcher. The police dispatcher, another person in the boiler room, tells the frantic parent there are no helicopters available, and commiserates with the mark. After awhile, the “dispatcher” says, “I shouldn’t be doing this, but I have the name of a private helicopter firm that can do the job for you.” The mark is then given another number to call, someone else in the boiler room. The phone is answered and the mark is told there’s a helicopter available, but it will take a $3,000 deposit in cash to get it off the ground. Western Union is fine.
As the scam plays itself out, the mark wires the money to an address given on the phone, and the money is never seen again. Of course, there’s no accident.
Now let’s play this out a little differently. The mark calls the supposed helicopter company, is told the amount and where to mail the money, and as the mark is about to leave for the Western Union office, the phone rings and it turns out to be the son, who says, hey, I’m fine, I’m sitting on the beach enjoying a drink. The mark then says, well, you go ahead and enjoy yourself, I’ve got to wire some money to a helicopter company so you can be flown to the nearest hospital.
I think we’d all agree, the mark in this case would be certifiable, plumb crazy. When it is known that we have been operating on the basis of incomplete information, in this case, information about the well-being of the son, we are acting recklessly, to say the least, and definitely stupidly.
The ancients identified the four things that made up the world: Earth, water, air and fire. You’d think that they would have included light, but why include something that’s already included. Light obviously was produced by fire, so it was a secondary feature to the four primary features.
Then, during the great period of questioning, the post Copernican scientific world of Baconian quest, the great debate about the nature of light arose: Was light a particle or a wave?
Up until Newton seized the reigns of The Royal Society, Huygens’ view of light as a wave took sway. It’s rather humorous that the ancients had considered light secondary to fire, and here these great thinkers were considering it an artifact of water. Fire is produced by matter, which is akin to earth, while water extinguishes fire, and therefore the light it produces. That’s just wild and crazy, guys, worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit.
Moving right along, though, Newton’s authority prevailed throughout the 18th century until Young’s two-slit experiment, described in earlier entries. After that experiment, light officially became a wave, and “science” set about to demonstrate the existence of the substance whose disturbance produced the wave. After all, a wave doesn’t exist, it's just a distortion of a medium, like water. Science quickly made up aether and called it the medium of light. (During all this, these disconnected thinkers were claiming that, according to Laplace, the Earth had been circling the sun in frictionless space since the beginning of time, the same space they were claiming was filled with this light medium, aether, but, hey, what’s a little inconsistency when you’re wild and crazy.)
When Michelson and Morley attempted to demonstrate the speed and direction of the Earth using its movement through the aether, the experiment failed, fantasy prevailed, but aether sort of disappeared. Fortunately for the deep thinkers about light, Maxwell published his equations on the electromagnetic “spectrum,” which pretty much did away with the need to explain how light could be a wave without a medium. After all, no one basically could understand Maxwell’s equations, so this was enough to keep everyone in awe.
Now, at this point, the scientific community is in the position of the mark who’s gotten information where to send the money to get his son to the hospital, but hasn’t gotten the wakeup call from the son who is sipping drinks on a beach. Science had been led down a primrose path. It had spent the better part of 3 centuries arguing about whether light was a wave or a particle, how the mark should get the son to the hospital, and hadn’t even given a thought to how light was produced, in the mark’s case, whether his son was injured in the first place.
Nobody in their right mind would continue to accept the fruits of an argument that was based on a glaring omission. How could anyone discuss anything about what light is until they discussed how it is produced?
Unfortunately, as the deep thinkers about light mulled over Maxwell’s equations, which is about the same as getting the money for the Western Union transfer, others, primarily Rutherford, were experimenting with those mysterious non-light particles called electrons. By modifying light bulb technology, cathode ray tubes were invented that could shoot the electrons in streams. Rutherford, finding the streams blocked in places, theorized the existence of the atom, and before long, the world was treated to the classic view of the atom, proton in nucleus to keep electron in orbit, neutron in nucleus to give the atom weight, and electron in orbit to interact with other nuclei to form matter.
The deep thinkers about light sat on the sidelines never, for one moment, observing that, wait a minute, we’re using the conclusions of people, people who told us what light is, and these people didn’t even have knowledge about the atom, the matter that produced the light. We’re in la la land here. We’d better start over and figure out first how light is produced, and then figure out what it is.
As they slumbered on the sidelines, Einstein came along and demonstrated that light is a particle with the photoelectric effect, which has light producing an electron in a circuit. There was no photon until that point, but, with the light boys slumbering in their deep chairs, there was no one to say, hey, maybe light is made up of electrons, maybe the light isn’t producing an electron, maybe the light is an electron. Instead, the photon, like aether and everything else in science, was quickly made up to explain the obvious fact that light produced electricity.
It was the photon that was activating the electrons.
All of sudden, the great light sleepers, deep in slumber, started to stir. Light matter, light matter, light matter, matter light. Could there be a connection between the two?
Now we would expect the mark to say, hey son, it’s really you, I don’t have to have you flown to a hospital, do I?
But not a scientist!
Instead of saying, Gee, light is not a wave, it's a particle that interacts with matter, so to understand light, we have to figure out how matter produces light and then figure out what light is, the scientists said, we know light is a wave, we know it’s a particle, all we have to do is figure out how this newly discovered atom produces a light wave and we’ll have the last piece of the puzzle clear in our questing brains.
The quest began, and what a quest it’s been.
No quest at all!
Science’s starting point is what science’s starting point always is: Science is right.
Therefore, science already knew what light was, it was a wave. Being a particle at the same time made it a little more complicated, but since when has science shied away from making things so complex, they’re incomprehensible?
Actually, the particle notion of light combined with the photoelectric effect gave science something to chew on. See, the second thing science knew was that matter was made up of atoms and atoms were composed of a bunch of particles which are encompassed in what’s called the standard model, a sort of international agreement limiting the number of particles scientists could create. The standard model, of course, has the familiar orbiting electron whizzing around the atom. Before the invention of electron microscopes, science stuck by its idea that there were fixed numbers of electrons orbiting an atom’s nucleus in fixed shells although now, representations of the atom supposedly captured by electron microscopes produce a haze around the nucleus, demonstrating a cloud of electrons. This was then, though, and science was sticking by its individual orbiting atoms.
Here’s where it gets difficult for me to remember because it’s sort of like whether electricity flows from positive to negative or negative to positive or wave lengths get longer or shorter from red to blue or blue to red, examples where science has, at one time, believed firmly in one or the other, belief, of course, being consensus agreement like the standard model. There are many issues in science that cast me into the roll of the accountant who sits at his desk, every once in awhile opening the drawer and looking in. Finally, a coworker had to know what was in the drawer, so the accountant opened it for him. Written on the bottom of the drawer was “debits to the left, credits to the right.” Or is it credits to the right, debits to the left? Hmmm.
Anyway, it seems those orbital electrons now have specific characteristics, the basic one being in a ground state. When an orbiting electron is a ground state, it has its lowest energy. Now not only can this electron orbit the nucleus of the atom without science ever once attempting to explain how it can do so, it can absorb energy. Isn’t that just peachy. All of a sudden, the electron has an entirely new property, one that no one ever heard of before, but one that certainly can’t be denied. It is capable of absorbing energy. Here’s the particle that represents a fundament form of energy, and its pliable, it can soak up energy like a sponge. A fundamental energy that can absorb energy. Couldn’t the idiots just give it the property of motion so we’d have to stop asking what’s causing it to move? If it’s going to come up with an exotic energy absorbing property, why not motion?
Oh, well.
When an electron absorbs more energy to the point that it can absorb no more energy, then, boom, it takes off on its own, ionizes as they say in the quiet chambers of serious thinking. But we don’t have to worry about these ionized electrons because they are no longer orbiting and we want to know how matter produces light.
There is a state between ground and ionized, and this state is an excited electron. We all know what an excited electron is, don’t we? Well, maybe not. An excited electron is one that has absorbed energy. If you absorb energy, you get excited, too, right? And when you’re excited, why, you have to get rid of that energy, right? Right.
So how does the electron absorb energy? Why, it absorbs a photon or packet of light. What happens when it gets excited? It jumps to a higher orbit around the nucleus (this is where I go debits or credits, is it higher or lower). It seems that each orbit around a nucleus requires a specific amount of energy, so the orbit the electron jumps to depends on the number of photons it absorbs.
When the electron loses its energy, passes out of its state of excitement, it falls to a lower orbit, and as it does so, it gives up the same number of photons it absorbed to get excited in the first place.
If you don’t believe in this hogwash, just ask a scientist. He’ll have miles and miles of chalkboards covered with squiggles and symbols to categorically prove it all to be as real as the brown clay that gets stuck to your shoes when you run through the farmers field. If you wonder why it’s "he'll have," female quantum scientists are hard to find. After all, one of the basic features of the female mind is practicality and common sense, qualities that aren't evident in this jumble of incomplete and inconsistent ideas.
The creation of quantum mechanics was the act of the mark paying for the helicopter to evacuate the son after the mark finds out the son is sipping drinks on the beach. Science finds out as clearly as it can that light is not a wave, it’s a particle. It realizes that no one has ever sat down and tried to connect light to matter. It has matter with particles and light with particles. It then proceeds to graft its concept of light as a wave, created early in the 19th century, onto an atom created early in the 20th century. It does so by taking a particle, the electron, it made up to explain a phenomena, electricity, it discovered decades after it had cemented its idea of light as a wave, and then goes on to add a property to the electron that says it can absorb and emit light.
In reality, the mark realized he was being conned when he got the call from his son and simply abandoned paying for the helicopter. In reality, science refused to realize its concept of light needed revising and simply forged ahead working on concepts that had clearly been disproved by demonstrating the photoelectric effect.
For the mark to proceed in the manner of science, the mark’s reality would have to conform to the idea that his son was mortally injured. He’d have to injure the son to continue the fantasy. Science doesn’t have any son to kill, and unlike the mark, whose need for money forces reality into the picture, science has nothing that would force it to face reality.
In fact, its reality is the creation of more and more confusing and incomprehensible explanations so it can keep the paychecks popping, the grants giving, the honorariums honoring from the only source of money it has, us, the great unwashed.
It doesn’t matter what tripe they feed us, it just needs to keep the collection plate full. What’s the phrase, crazy like a fox, dumb as a doorknob? One applies to scientists, the other to us.

Are All Scientists Blind?

When it comes to light, which separates the blind from the seeing, science is totally blind, so blind, in fact, that it costs billions of extra dollars to come up with technology dealing with light, and that technology, I’m thinking the blue laser and LED, only occurs when an inventor throws out the scientific view and embarks on the opposite.
There was a time, back before Newton extended his influence to the entire world, that people held a reasonable view of light. While no one knew what light was, and no one even bothered to ask the question, how is light produced, scientists spent their time arguing whether light was a particle or a wave, with Christiaan Huygens holding mental sway through much of the 17th century with his view that light was a wave.
Other than arguing the light particle nature of light, color was taken for granted. Light struck an object and the properties of the object changed the light and therefore changed its color.
I mentioned briefly in my entries on gravity that science is pretty arrogant about light. It continually claims that humans are animals that hold no special place in the universe, that we are an accident of chance, that we adapt to nature. Yet when it comes to light, humans hold a very special position. While all of our thoughts about color are inherited from Newton, a man who lived hundreds of years before the discovery of the range of electromagnetic frequencies, Newton’s thought is stamped on the one portion of the range of frequencies that affect us most, color.
Looking at any frequency chart, we can see the frequencies getting smaller on a regular basis, and as they get smaller, they have different characteristics and are adaptable to different uses. However, when it comes to light, we don’t have a series of frequencies. With light, for some reason, we have a bundled frequency. And, while humans are just an accident of the universe, that bundled frequency just happens to be the one that allows us to see color. It’s as if the universe created a whole range of frequencies, with one special bundled frequency, and we are the ones the universe created the bundled frequency for. Evolutionists could argue, if forced to face the fact that white light is the only frequency in the entire range of electromagnetic frequencies that is many frequencies bundled together, that our eye evolved to see the bundled frequencies. But our eye could only evolve to see the bundled frequencies in their unbundled form, as green leaves, blue sky, brown dirt.
Which brings us to the basic question. Did nature bundle the frequencies, or did we bundle the frequencies?
Using the term bundled is just a substitute for the scientific fiction that white light contains all colors, or to put it another way, all frequency colors are contained in the frequency of white light. I’m certainly no artist, but I do know that there are millions of colors, or at least that’s what my computer monitor claims it can resolve. With white light containing all colors, when white light strikes the surface of a leaf, the leaf absorbs millions of colors and only reflects the green color back (of course, if the leaves are changing, every section of the leaf is absorbing millions of colors and reflecting a different one so we see the symphony of colors that is fall).
This is really a complex thing for nature to develop when all she had to do was alter the frequency of the white light with the nature of the material it was bouncing off. But Newton “proved” that white light contained all colors. He passed light through a prism, which broke white light into the color frequencies, then recombined the color frequencies to come up with white light.
How this proves white light contains all color frequencies escapes my ability to discern the verities of scientific dogma, but the consequences, turning pigment into something that absorbs, rather than reflects, light doesn’t. Instead of matter reflecting light, it is now absorbing all sorts of frequencies and reflecting only the color frequency we see.
Actually, I can go to the color wheel on my computer and disprove Mr. Newton. The color wheel uses the computer's ability to combine color frequencies to produce all sorts of colors, millions of them. What is this thing called color adding? It’s the same thing Newton did when he recombined all color frequencies. He increased the frequency of the reflected light, in Newton’s case back to the white frequency, in my computer's case, any frequency I want.
Frequency adding has produced a very accurate test for color blindness, which shows a deficit of either red or green. As we all know, combining red and green produces yellow, another case of frequency adding. This fact has been incorporated into the anomaloscope, a device that allows a viewer to see half a yellow disk with one eye, and the other half of the disk, which is a combination of red and green, with the other eye. Using a calibrated knob, the viewer adjusts the knob until the adjustable half of the disk is the same yellow color as the yellow half of the disk. The calibration tells the tester what portion of red and green it took to produce the yellow frequency.
The anomaloscope not only works to demonstrate color adding (as well as determine the type of colorblindness involved), it disproves another of Mr. Newton’s unfounded notions, a notion that is taken as gospel today, one that cripples technology. Newton determined that light was lined up the way it came out of the prism. This is the famous Roy G. Biv notion, where we have light emerging in order of red, orange, yellow, blue and so forth (could never figure out what the indigo and violet were doing in there).
On a practical basis, we are only concerned with red, yellow, green and blue. After much hoop-de-do, science decided that red was the longest wave (science still thinks of light in terms of water), with blue the shortest wave. In my lexicon, that would translate into red being the longest frequency, blue the shortest.
How many ways is this wrong?
For starters, any idiot knows that heat translates into frequency. The shorter the frequency, the more it’s going to scramble your cells. Radiation 101. Scientists can simply turn on their Bunsen Burners, assuming the last time they saw one wasn’t in college, and notice the color of the flame. The inner cone is blue, and its temperature is about 500ºC. Proceeding to the outer cone, the red flame is graded from 500ºC to 950ºC, when it starts to turn yellow, where it stays till it reaches 1450C at the peak of the outer cone and turns, what else, white. Blue is clearly the longer frequency, with red the shorter. But according to this, yellow is even shorter than red.
Returning to the anomaloscope, the colorblind viewer sees a yellow half of the disk and something other than yellow, which is adjusted until it is yellow. The adjustment changes the mixture of red and green. If we go back to Roy G. Biv, where does yellow fall in this interpretation of the lineup of frequencies?
It falls between red and green!
If the viewer is deficient in seeing red or green, or both, how is it he can see the yellow side of the disk without any adjustment? And how is it that, after color adding, he can see yellow on both sides of the disk? The simple answer, in fact, the only answer, is that yellow has a higher frequency than either red or green.
Before Newton’s color folly, people sensibly thought that the light moving through the prism was being changed (they didn’t understand what light was, so they didn’t know how it might be changing) by the glass in the prism, with the further the light traveled in the prism, the bigger the change. If we examine light’s path through a prism, we can see clearly that yellow travels the shortest distance. Thus, in modern day lingo, at least in my lingo, the white light’s frequency has been reduced the least at this point. Red and green come out of the prism on either side of yellow, with the red traveling a slightly shorter distance than the green, so this put the frequency lineup yellow, the longest, then red, then green, then, traveling the furthest, blue.
How scientists can’t see what’s right in front of their eyes demonstrates the ideological blindness science operates in. With disciplines fracturing basic scientific knowledge, educated scientists learn the basics by rote, gravity is a property of mass, white light contains all color, light is lined up the way it comes out of the prism, and because these statements are attributed to the scientific deity, Newton, a deity who can never be questioned, scientists go through life parroting this mindless tripe back and forth to each other and out to us, the great unwashed.
Unfortunately, engineers soak this stuff up and, when it comes to searching for technological improvements, are themselves blinded by mindless ideology. Take the laser. The first laser produced red light. If red is the longest frequency, what the heck are the chances that experimental fishing would stumble upon the weakest laser around. It’s simply more logical to conclude, trial and error is going to stumble over the laser that’s the easiest to produce, the laser with the highest energy content. But not to scientists and the engineers (for one, the scientists were too busy attempting to take credit from the engineers).
While a blue laser was sought, the blue LED was much more critical. If light arrays were to be constructed from LEDs, blue would be needed along with red and green, the second laser to be found, in order to produce the millions of colors necessary to realistic viewing. The hunt was on. Billions of dollars was spent looking for something that would produce the shorter wavelength blue LED. After a decade, during which several possible materials were ruled out because they would only produce longer frequencies, a maverick named Shuji Nakamura said the heck with theory, let’s just start working by trial and error on the materials considered to be unworthy of the time. He had a blue LED before anyone else could blink an eye, and, because he was smart, no scientist could touch him.
But that’s not where the blue LED/Laser story ends. As soon as the blue LED was proven, the blue laser followed quickly behind. Perhaps you have purchased a new piece of electronic equipment in the last year or two. I remember when I had a bank of recorders that, when I turned the lights out at night, made the room look like a Christmas tree with all the red indicator lights. I shuddered at the electronic leakage this was producing, along with the cost. While there’s nothing we can do about the cost of indicator lights on equipment that has to stay on, all of a sudden, the color is changing from red to blue. Now when I buy a piece of electronic equipment, at least one that is high end, it has blue LEDs. Why? Because the blue LEDs use less electricity than the red LEDs. Why? Because the blue LEDs are a longer frequency than the red LEDs, and thus take less electricity to produce.
But the real payoff is for the recording industry. Disks recorded with blue lasers hold considerably more information than disks recorded with red lasers. Pretty soon, all of our DVD players will be using blue lasers to read disks. Why does a blue laser, the so-called shorter frequency, access so much more information than the supposedly longer frequency red laser? Because the longer the frequency, the less intrusive it is, and the less intrusive it is, the smaller area of information it can access. That means the blue laser, accessing more information, is less intrusive than the red laser, and therefore a longer frequency than the red laser.
But why stop in the laboratory, or in technological achievement, to see just how blind scientists are? Why not just step out into one of the glorious Pacific sunsets? Ask scientists why the sky is blue, and they’ll respond that the atmosphere is scattering the blue wavelength so that it become visible. The red and yellow, why they pass right through undisturbed because they are longer frequencies.
Does this sound logical? Logical would be if the longest frequency was scattered first. Is there a way to demonstrate this? Simply wait until the light has more atmosphere to pass through. This occurs as the sun sets and the sunlight we see is no longer the shortest distance, straight up, but now passes through many layers of atmosphere as the sun moves lower on the horizon. What happens? If the atmosphere is cloudless, we'll see a yellow sun. The red is being scattered, but it is lost in the darkening sky. However, if the atmosphere has clouds, those clouds will pick up the scattered red light and provide dazzling sunsets, with yellow and red, and every hue in between. If this were happening according to science's color lineup, a little bit of atmosphere couldn't scatter the longer wavelengths, but a lot of atmosphere could. It's not logic, it’s the reverse of logic.
In fact, blue, the longest frequency, scatters first when the sun is overhead, and as the sun sets and has to pass through more layers of atmosphere, it starts to scatter the next shortest, red, then the shortest of all, yellow, producing the incredible, multicolor sunsets we enjoy. What happened to green in all of this? Well, there is an unusual effect called a green flash that has been reported off and on, but it is very rare. Why? In my opinion, the transition from blue to green is subtle, whereas the transition from blue to red is startling.
But let’s assume our scientists, after a day on the links, and an even longer stay at the 19th hole, are too snookered to even see the sunset, and thus can be excused for their blindness. We can always turn to day-to-day life to see if they are aware of anything. While there are probably as many insurance agents as there are scientists, the insurance agents aren’t as blind as the scientists. They do studies of accidents and car colors. Guess what car gets hit the most: A blue car. Guess what car gets hit the least: a yellow car. Wonder if it has something to do with visibility, which couldn't possibly have anything to do with frequency, could it?
Sure it does! When was the last time you saw a blue fire engine? They’re traditionally red. What color are safety experts starting to paint them? Yellow. These fools must know something scientists don’t, but don’t try and tell a scientist that because, by definition, no one knows what a scientist knows.
So we’ll muddle on through our ignorant lives, making improvements to our electronics, increasing our safety, and enjoying our sunsets, in spite of what blind scientists mindlessly repeat as they stumble through life reaping tremendous rewards for providing nothing.

Gravity is . . . Part IV

Scientists, who claim that they go only where the evidence leads them, that nothing is sacred but the truth, are quick to point out that my explanation of inductance is meaningless because it doesn’t conform to the scientific definition of induction. That definition states that inductance is a property of an electric circuit by which an electromotive force is induced in it by a variation of current either in the circuit itself or in a neighboring circuit. What’s an electromotive force? Something that moves or tends to move electricity. What’s electricity? A fundamental form of energy. What is fundamental? When science knows nothing about anything, here energy, it simply classifies like things, here forces that produce work or can be converted to BTUs, and calls them fundamentals.
So let’s see what science knows about what it pretends to know about. A fundamental form of energy, electricity, something science has no idea where it comes from, can come from a property of an electrical circuit doing something to produce the fundamental energy, electricity.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I went out and bought a huge encyclopedia of science about 1,300 pages long, a really big book. I also purchased a stack of 5X8 cards. At the time, I still thought science knew everything it claimed to know and it was my understanding that was falling short. Each morning I’d start the day by excerpting one of the entries, along with its cross references. During the day, whenever I had a free moment, I’d refer to the card, finding out what I understood and what I didn’t understand, using the back of the card to jot down questions I had about the entry.
This went on for several years when I started to realize something. I was going in circles. Every explanation contained in the encyclopedia, other than just those items that categorized things such as the table of elements, referred to other entries for a fuller understanding. Those other entries referred to still other entries. If I followed the path of referrals, I ended up with the referrals being to the original entry that raised my question.
In short, I found that science, at its base, was nothing more than a giant ring of circular references that didn’t explain anything. It was like the actual circular explanation for gravity. What produces gravity? Mass. What is mass? Mass is what produces gravity. No one can get out of the circular pile of non-information once inside it.
With electricity, all the words, property, force, something, fundamental, energy, they’re all meaningless as explanations for anything. We all know how electricity behaves. We can measure how it behaves. It doesn’t add to our knowledge to say a grump stitcher forces ploobars as a result of moving a wire in a zolloback field around the electricity. But neither does saying it’s a property whereby something moves something else to produce electricity.
It’s even worse when the labelers and categorizers of our scientific ignorance claim an electron produces electricity and the definition of an electron is a moving charge, which is what, of course, electricity is. No one explains anything by describing what it is. When something is dynamic, it takes a dynamic explanation, an explanation that actually explains.
One thing is pretty clear about electricity. It is produced by particles that have two properties, one a property of motion, the other, a property of attraction. The property of motion is self-evident. When electricity was first harnessed, it was done so in a battery that had terminals. Thus, using a magnetic analogy, electricity was thought to move from positive to negative (or vice versa depending on the decade and logic).
When inductance was discovered some 30 years later, positive and negative clearly had no application. A circuit, while it has two points, does not create a flow between those two points. By definition, a circuit is circular, so the electricity is not moving from one point to another, it is moving around in a circuit.
The one thing we do know about the electricity, though, is it’s moving, so instead of making up properties and electromotive forces and the elusive “something,” let’s just assign the electron the property of motion, which it obviously has.
Next, the property of attraction is also pretty clear. Once electrons begin moving in a path, they move in unison, so it’s pretty lame to think they haven’t come together in mutual attraction. It's simple logic that if electrons repelled each other, circuits would not exist. The electrons simply wouldn't stay together. Also, it’s only normal that a flow of electrons would attract a circular flow around it simply because at every point in the flow, there are electrons. If those electrons had a property of attraction, they would attract other electrons out of the environment to form the circular flow.
Of course, all this is impossible because by the time inductance was discovered, a whole generation had grown up with the notion of positive and negative and by the time anyone got around to wondering how matter was constructed, another three or four generations of labelers and categorizers had cemented their reputations on the notion, so, like gravity is a property of matter, it simply became a given. Thus, when the atom was constructed with electrons orbiting a nucleus, the only thing that could hold the electrons in orbit, which had become negative by that time, was a positive particle, so a positive particle was made up, put in the nucleus to hold the electrons in orbit, and now that particle is as real as grey clay. In the scientific view, there's no force moving the orbiting electrons, just a minor problem.
The simple fact is, moving a conductor in an inductive flow around a primary flow of electrons will produce a flow of electrons in the conductor if the conductor is itself in a circuit. What easier thing to explain? The physical material of the conductor is capturing the electrons orbiting the primary flow, I prefer to use the image tipping the electrons into the conductor. They in turn become a flow of electrons. The electrons lost in the inductive flow are quickly replaced by electrons in the environment.
And here’s the key, a small point science wishes to ignore, much like it ignores, no, will destroy, a scientist who presses for an answer: What's the force that makes the electron obit the nucleus in the first place? There’s no question if motion is assumed in the electron, but as it is, science has no answer to the question and has no intention of providing one. The key is the movement of electrons in what I call the ambient field.
Science readily acknowledges that an electrical current will ionize atoms. Lightning ionizes atoms in the atmosphere. True to form, science doesn’t bother to explain how this might occur, but does admit that the atom loses “an electron” in the process. Wonders behold, science’s vision of the atom has, in recent years, evolved into one of an amorphous cloud of electrons orbiting the nucleus, rather than fixed numbers in fixed shells. Thus, ionization results in a massive loss of electrons in an atom.
Where do these electrons go? Into the ambient field, which is to say, the atmosphere. What do they do? Chase concentrations of electrons, be that concentration an atom, an electric flow, the clouds that generate lightning, or perhaps as inductive flows around flows of light from the sun.
Which brings us back to Young’s two-slit experiment, where the spheres of expanding light are intersecting and, in the process, recombining. The only way they could be recombining is if the expanding light had inductive flows regulating its expansion. When the light intersects, the light that matches up on the basis of direction and frequency acts like flows of electricity in two electric wires that are brought into proximity with one another. The inductive flows combine the primary flows of light, and this results in the uniform absence of light on the collection screen.
The question is, how do the inductive flows regulate the uniform expansion of the light in the first place?
Picture light expanding on the surface of the sphere. At any point on the sphere, the light, like the light in the two-slit experiment, is overexpanding. Thus, the expanding light on the surface of the sphere is like the light intersecting in the two-slit experiment: Each point is a tiny sphere, and the light in these tiny spheres, light from the same source that has traveled the same distance and is aligned with respect to frequency, intersects and recombines.
What is the physical description of this recombination? Unlike the light in the two-slit experiment, where the light has been grossly overexpanded, the light doesn’t disappear. As soon as it overexpands, the light contracts, not to the point that it was at the time it began to expand, but at the next point further on, the next expanding sphere. It is the consolidation of the light after it overexpands that creates the next expanding sphere (in effect, replaces the next expanding sphere which has itself expanded into the next, and so forth).
Thus, while the flows of light that make up the expanding sphere of light are frequencies, the expanding sphere itself is an oscillation, a sphere the surface of which is constantly expanding and contracting. When the sphere expands, it is moving out into an area available for it to expand. When it contracts, it is consolidating itself.
What effect does this consolidation have?
The consolidation of the overexpanded light by the inductances regulating its expansion produces a mechanism at any point on an expanding sphere of light. The overexpanding spheres are intersecting at every point. Every point of intersection is connected to the expanding sphere by a flow of light. Thus, mathematically, these points are vertices of cones. The surface of an expanding sphere of light is therefore covered with cones that have the pointed end facing away from the expanding sphere. The inductive flows collapse this cone. The mechanism that regulates the uniform expansion of light can be visualized as a cone, with the vertex pointed away from the expanding sphere, collapsing back into the expanding sphere to form a new expanding sphere of light.
However small this mechanism is, it has force, and anything that might be caught in the mechanism would move back toward the source of the emissions. Once a unit of an atom, for instance, was caught in the mechanism, it would move back toward the source of the emissions. As expanding spheres surround the area around a source of emissions, at each point a unit of an atom was pushed back, it would be caught in another mechanism, a point closer to the emissions, and be pushed back once again, only to be caught in the next closer mechanism, and so forth until something intervened to stop the movement.
If we visualize the nuclei of atoms as having units, without attempting to put names to them, we know that these units are held together by some force. Whatever force is holding the units of the nucleus of the atom together would not come into play as long as all the units were being caught up in the mechanisms and being pushed back toward the source of the emissions. Only when something stopped the atom's movement, and the atom came to rest still subject to the mechanisms that were holding it to whatever stopped it, would the force holding the units together come into play. If an attempt were made to move the atom against the mechanisms, then the force holding the units together would require all the units be moved at once. Thus, the more units, the more work it would take to move the atom against the force, and this is exactly what we have when it comes to matter acting in a field of gravity.
As to the measurement of the unit’s force at any point in the expanding sphere, the light is diminishing uniformly with the square of the distance from its source. As the inductive flows are proportional to the primary flows, the inductive flows are also diminishing inversely with the square of the distance from the source of the emissions. As the force of the mechanism equals the force of the inductive flows, the strength of the mechanisms are also diminishing inversely with the square of their distance from the source of the emissions.
This, of course, is the measurement for gravity.
Examining how emissions expand provides a mechanism that describes exactly how matter moves as a result of gravity.
As to the inability to detect magnetic qualities in expanding light, with the inductive flows equaling the expanding primary flows, there is no measurable charge.
The mechanism that produces gravity is associated with a dynamic source of matter doing something, it results in the inverse square acceleration of matter as it diminishes inversely with the square of its distance from the source resulting in objects of different weights falling at the same rate but moving against the mechanisms at different levels of force, and the mechanism itself has, as its primary purpose, the regulation of the expansion of the electromagnetic emission field, which in our example, is represented by light.