Q: By what authority do you state that the scientific method is not a valid tool for probing
physical reality?
A: By no authority. Well, perhaps by the authority of physical reality itself.

Q: How can physical reality have authority?
A: By its very existence. Facts exist, concepts about facts don't exist. Empirical science claims that the scientific method can prove hypotheses. It then claims that proven hypotheses are facts.
Hypotheses are nothing more than concepts. Concepts can never be proven. So empirical science is merely another belief system.

Q: A belief system?
A: Sure. It allows its practitioners to believe that its beliefs are fact. The great religions of the world demand that believers accept religious facts on faith in revealed truth. Empirical science asks its believers to accept its scientific facts on faith in a process that turns those beliefs into facts. Of course, the testing part of the scientific method, the trial and error process that leads to technological development does so because it disproves what doesn't work, directing engineers and inventors in the direction of what does. When it is applied to the realm of ideas, however, the only ideas that can be disproven are ideas that are not physical facts. Thus, instead of proving ideas, the scientific method just leaves standing nondisprovable ideas.

Q: Such as...
A: Gravity as a property of mass is the most widespread...

Q: But it is a physical fact that objects fall.
A: Sure it is. But ideas about why they fall are not fact, they are ideas. Mass/gravity is nothing more than a simple belief.

Q: But I thought that Newton proved gravity was a property of mass.
A: Newton attempted to show that the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon by volume
would produce a force that, computed on the basis of an inverse square law that is measurable in
falling objects, would keep the moon from moving in a straight line. This, he felt, would show the
connection between falling objects and the motion of the moon and thus demonstrate that gravity
was a property of the matter by volume.

Q: Didn't he?
A: The moon had too much matter measured by volume to stay in orbit. Everyone has heard the
stories about it being riddled with caves and other fantasies to reduce the apparent matter. Newton
bugged Sir Edmund Halley, the Astronomer Royal, till his death to get more accurate measurements of the moon's motion in an attempt to prove the theory, but it never happened. Then when the same logic was applied to the planets, it was found to never work.

Q: So how is it accepted as fact?
A: Everyone decided, and when you are dealing with a belief system, you are dealing with a
system in which the consensus rules, whether elite or not, everyone reached a consensus that they
could measure the rate objects fall over and over and therefore there was no question about the
nature of the inverse square law. That being a physical fact, all they had to do was apply it to
Newton's assumption that gravity was proportional to and a property of matter, and they could let
the assumption determine the amount of matter in the moon or a planet. This can never be verified,
so the entire house of cards can never be disproven, leaving it one of the pre-eminent beliefs of the
empirical belief system.

Q: There are others?
A: Mass/gravity isn't even the biggest. The silliest concept, one that reverses reality but is still at
the basis of empirical reality, is that objects move in a straight line unless a force acts to change that motion. You couldn't find a more untestable proposition yet who could ever disagree with it?

Q: So what's the problem with it?
A: It assumes away motion! If you start out with everything going in a straight line, then you don't have to ever worry about what's making things move in the first place. And you don't just assume away the motion of the planets, the moons, even the stars. You assume away the motion of falling objects, because the only thing that changes straight line motion is the gravity produced by the mass that is moving by an assumed away motion to start with. We have absolutely no idea what's going on in the physical reality around us because we have abdicated the effort to find out to a belief system that claims we know everything there is to know, and what we don't know is not worth knowing, is a question of philosophy. Thus, why objects fall, why the planets orbit, even why they rotate, which is basically the question of why the sun comes up each and every day, these are questions unworthy of the noble science of empiricism.

Q: But look around you. We live in a era of technological wonder. Empirical science can't be
wrong if it has produced cars, planes, spaceships, planetary exploration.
A: Technology has nothing to do with empirical science, and in fact, it is a wonder technological
progress has proceeded this far in the atmosphere produced by empirical science. Any gains in
technology have been made in spite of, rather than in pursuance of empirical science.

Q: That's a pretty broad statement.
A: Nonetheless, it's one that empirical science generally agrees with. Technology is the product of
engineering, both vision and the resulting trial and error process that brings vision into the realm of
reality. Empirical science negates vision because its mathematical process requires that reality be
limited to conform to the strict requirements of the testing necessary for proving hypotheses to be
fact. Empirical science creates laws that discourage vision. With gravity a property of mass, it can
never be overcome because it would take more mass to do so. Energy can never be created nor
destroyed so that any attempt to create overunity devices is laughed out of existence, the definition
of overunity being anything that remains undiscovered. We can't even go anywhere, we're doomed
to die on the planet, or at least in the solar system, because nothing can go faster than the speed of
light and the nearest star, the distance to which is empirically measured of course, is too far away.

Q: But surely empirical science made the space program possible.
A: Empirical science couldn't even hit the moon with a rocket. Because the inverse square law
predicts the wrong neutral point between the Earth and the moon, rockets were going every which
way. It was only by actual trial and error experience that we got there.

Q: And the probes to the outer planets?
A: Course correction committees worked full time analyzing elapsed time, course history, and
primarily current photographs to locate where the probes were and make course corrections from
there.

Q: But the atom bomb...
A: Who wants to take credit for that? Surely not empirical science. But seriously, most of the
vision for the atom was laid down by talented amateurs working in privately financed laboratories
with success as the major criteria. The concept of the atom is the most successful concept in history simply because it has been so commercially productive. We're clearly in the realm of the engineers.

Q: Well, given that everything you say is true, who the hell cares? We're doing fine with
technology, and why the sun comes up every morning, well, it does come up every morning, so
who cares about the why, or in your terms, the what makes it?
A: I don't know about you, but I want a consistent picture of the physical reality of which I am a
part. I am only going to be here so long, and before I go, I'd like to get at least a glimmering of
what I'm doing here, even if the answer is nothing. Empirical science is delusional. It is made up of a bunch of made up stuff that has no relation whatsoever to the reality that we occupy. Because it can't answer the obvious questions in our reality, what makes objects fall, what makes the planet rotate, what makes the planets and moons orbit, what makes the sun burn, what is light, where life comes from, what, for crying out loud, is going on when we snap a light switch on, even why little magnetic dogs kiss and turn tail, empirical science makes up a whole bunch of stuff that nobody will ever be able to know about, black holes in space, dark matter, worm holes, subatomic particles with color and personality, and then directs our attention at massive projects to prove the existence of these exotic things.

Q: Maybe it's not so delusional.
A: Maybe not. Maybe it's just using the delusions it creates to misdirect our attention while it pulls
another rabbit out of the hat, but that shouldn't stop the rest of us, the ones that know that the
magician's tricks are just that, tricks, from putting together a consistent picture of physical reality,
or from at least making the attempt. And, of course, there is another reason we might want to find
out what is actually going on in physical reality.

Q: What's that?
A: Because empirical science is delusional, because it doesn't have any actual answers about
what's going on in physical reality, it has brought heaven to Earth to keep the deluded happy.

Q: What does that mean?
A: It has created an incomprehensible time frame in which we evolved, which of course puts our
source back beyond rational analysis and hides empirical science's actual ignorance about that
source. But creating an impossible historical time frame also produces an impossible future, a future without end. Thus, it may be okay to know nothing, but we have an eternity to find out all of these inscrutable answers.

Q: And the fact?
A: I don't know what the facts are. We can't know anything but the present, history and the future
being nonexistent. But I think that a good look at the moon will provide a picture of the Earth's
future. The model of the Earth that empirical science provides is one in which there is thermal
equilibrium, all incoming radiation (another something for which empirical science has no
explanation) exactly matches all outgoing radiation so that the temperature we see is what we've had for five billion years.

Q: And will continue for five billion more unless the greenhouse effect produces global warming and kills us all!
A: See. Now there's an excellent delusion. Here we are, a planet sitting in space, a space with a
temperature that approaches no motion, nothing, really cold, and the planet is supposed to be
getting warmer. When hot things exist in a cold environment, they get cold, not hot. The planet, at
one time probably as hot as Venus, has been cooling off, and will continue to cool off until it is as
cold as the moon. Of course, that can't be because the moon, the Earth and Venus were all formed
out of the same empirically verified swirling mass of gas, but I rather think it is true. The planet is
cooling, and I think the effects of its cooling are evident today. One of the biggest delusions we
have is that if we want to survive we have to do so on Earth. If we want to survive, if the life that
evolved on this planet is to survive in the universe, it is going to do so only if it gets off this planet.
And the time for getting off this planet is not measured in the billions of years, or even in millions
of years. The time is now. It is said that of the two types of scientific revolution, seeing old things in new ways and finding new things, finding new things leads to technological revolutions. However, when we can't see what we find because we are seeing new things in old ways, the technology we develop from the new things we find will be distorted. It is only by seeing old things in new ways that we will be able to see the new things we find clearly, and thus create a technology that reflects physical reality. If we don't start seeing old things in new ways, we will be chiselling our epitaph by inaction.