Special Internet Purchase Offer
4. THE SOLAR SYSTEM DOES NOT OPERATE ON THE
BASIS OF HISTORICAL FORCES
NAVIGATIONAL NECESSITIES
Today we can precisely fix our position on Earth by bouncing signals off
satellites. We can rent a car which contains a computer screen depicting
a map of the city we are visiting. The car's Global Positioning System will
locate the car on the map so that we need never be lost.
A hundred years ago, when a ship left port, its position was up for grabs, estimated only by the dead reckoning of its Captain and his ability to determine position from observing the starry lights in the night sky.
This was how we navigated throughout all but the most recent history. The inability to navigate kept navigation at a minimum.
Prior to the fifteenth century, the European demand for the spices from the orient was satisfied by Indian merchants riding the Monsoons to the Moluccas, the so-called spice islands east of Java, and returning with the spices through the Straits of Mallaca to the Malabar Coast where Arab traders transported them in their dhows on the ancient coastal trip to Egypt. The Merchants of Venice then brokered them within the confines of the Mediterranean or overland to European customers. These puddle jumping trips required little navigation because the ships hardly ever lost sight of land.
The spice trade, being a monopoly, was incredibly profitable and anything that is profitable attracts industry and invention. The industry and invention in the case of the spice trade was found in the Portuguese Prince, Henry the Navigator, who believed that if a way could be found to sail down and around the African Continent and out into the Indian Ocean that the Venetian choke hold on European throats derived from the preservative nature of the spices could be broken.
The Muslims, who had taken Constantinople and therefore played a significant role in the spice trade, also controlled the northern part of the African Continent, and Portuguese sailors had to head for deep ocean in order to conduct the exploratory voyages necessary to make their attempts a reality. In deep ocean, a ship's position had to be fixed by the stars. Prince Henry was responsible for much of the navigational equipment that was to become a necessity in the following centuries as trading nations fought for trade routes in the endless oceans of the world.
For thousands of years prior to Prince Henry's efforts to reach the Orient, the Ptolemaic universe ruled the heavens. The sun went around the Earth, as was attested each morning by it coming up in the east, traveling across the sky from east to west, and then setting in the west. The stars also went around the Earth, as did the planets.
Beliefs hold where there is no reason to question them, and the daily lives and economic relationships of the world prior to the fifteenth century provided no reason to question the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe. Many pointed out that it was the Earth that traveled around the sun, Aristarchus being the most vocal, but where it makes no difference, what people believe will dictate the reality that people see.
When serious navigation began in the fifteenth century, belief started to disagree with reality. The investors who backed the captain whose belief that the Earth changed its position among the stars because it traveled around the sun and who therefore brought back his ship laden with spices were much more receptive to believing the Earth actually went around the sun than the investors who backed the captain who believed that the stars went around the Earth and therefore ended up wreaked on a desolate section of the African Coast were to continue in their belief that the sun traveled around the Earth.
Economic success drives the mind to accept facts in reality that disagree with the facts people hold firmly in their recall as beliefs. Thus the stage was set for Copernicus a hundred years after Henry's thrusts deep into the Indian Ocean to formerly posit that the solar system was heliocentric, with the planets moving around what was believed to be a fixed sun in the center.
In the ensuing centuries, the necessity for navigational certainty led to the positing of theories that could be used to predict the position of the planets and the stars in the skies and therefore increase the accuracy of navigation. Knowing where a star or planet should be in the sky was half the battle in finding out at what latitude the ship was located, the other half plotting the ship's location from the position of the star.
Much labor was put into the production of ephemerides, tables positioning heavenly bodies over specific periods. These tables by necessity involved viewing the motions of the bodies as that motion had happened and then determining by inference where the stars and planets would be in the future. This is not the act of predicting, but rather the process of recording experience that is expected to recur in the future.
Sailors would then take these tables on their voyages and note on them any actual discrepancies with reality. Because drawing inferences also involves basing perceptions of continued movement on theory, theories underling the ephemerides were constantly being reevaluated.
A HIDDEN ASSUMPTION
The theory that could best produce accurate ephemerides was considered to be a theory close to reality.
These theories were not really theories, but rather conceptions about what the facts might be. The Ptolemaic system survived through Kepler's predecessor Brahe. From the pure Ptolemaic process of the planets and the sun all moving around the Earth, observational reality had forced changes until Brahe's solar system was reached, a solar system in which all the planets moved around the sun and the sun moved around the Earth.
The intervening degrees of conceptual evolution created a system of eccentric circles and epicycles together with equants, imaginary points around which the eccentric circles, epicycles and equants rotated. The heavens before Copernicus were made up of a changeable congeries of flying pinwheels and double rotating ferris wheels as concentric circles and epicenters were altered to what the builder of the particular ephemeris believed to be the situation.
We have to be very careful about how we view what was going on here.
What goes around what in the solar system are simple facts. We just didn't know what the simple facts were because we couldn't get far enough away to take in the full picture. Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter revealed what the solar system probably looked like at a distance, and looking at the Jovian system through a telescope could convince all but the most diehard fanatics of the Copernican reality, but any description of how the facts were ordered was simply an attempt to draw a picture of reality.
The builders of the ephemerides were constructing templates against which they could measure observed reality. They were taking what they saw, converting it into a picture of how they thought things were, and then saying if things are like this, then the positions of the planets will be thus and so next week, next month, and even next year.
Underlying all of these efforts, however, were several assumptions hidden from conscious consideration. Any process that used the past to determine the future, while not prediction, was based on the prediction that what has gone on in the past will continue to go on in the future.
And when we think that something that has gone on in the past will continue to go on in the future, then we believe that what we are seeing is an orderly, unchanging process.
We are used to the seasons following one another, we are accustomed to the moon traveling around the Earth and the sun always rising. These things are orderly, repetitive, without change.
Therefore, it isn't surprising that any template created to describe the movement of matter in the solar system would forever fix the motion of the planets in space, hold them to orderly courses which were both repetitive and predictable.
More important to the process of making irretrievable mistakes, once we have the picture, we say, ah ha, I have the picture. We say, I've got it, I finally know how the movement of the planets in the solar system happens, the planets go round and round the sun on a regular basis.
And because the picture is correct, the planets do go round and round the sun on a regular, orderly basis, we let the hidden assumptions enter our thought processes. The planets go round and round the sun on a regular basis in accordance with the template so that we can predict where the planets will be for any period into the future and we can compute where the planets have been at all times in the past.
We had to assume orderly motion to construct the template that would allow us to construct an ephemeris that could show future positions and once we got the template that uncovered the huge mistake, that the sun didn't go around the Earth, we accepted all aspects of the template and imposed its order on the movement of planets.
Special Internet Purchase Offer
A PICTURE OF HOW THE SOLAR SYSTEM OPERATES DOESN'T TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT HOW THE SOLAR SYSTEM OPERATES
The reason that we have to be very careful to separate the picture we are constructing of the factual make-up of the solar system and theories about how the solar system operates is if we ever hope to make sense out of what we see, the facts in our reality, we are going to have to be very careful to avoid believing theory to be fact. If we go around believing theory to be fact, then we are no better than our forebears who had a backwards picture of the facts, who believed the sun went around the Earth.
There is no difference between believing wrong facts and believing theory to be fact. Neither exists in reality.
In our self-congratulatory frenzy at finally getting a clear picture of the operation of the solar system, at seeing the factual reality we had so long sought, we naturally believe that we know how the solar system operates.
After all, we can see it operating in our minds as the planets move around the sun and the moons move around the planets.
Isn't this, after all, the operation of the solar system?
Isn't knowing that the planets move around the sun knowledge of an operation?
Doesn't operation mean what it means, an act, process or way of operating? The solar system doesn't operate by the sun and the planets going around the Earth, it operates by the Earth and the other planets going around the sun.
We now know how the solar system operates.
When something is in motion, we have a tendency to stop at the surface. When a child learns how a clock works, he says the hands move and when the big hand points to the one and the little hand points to the five, it's five o'clock. He doesn't have any knowledge about the springs or crystals, movements or electronic circuits that keep time pieces operating.
There are two levels of operation, one what we see on the surface and the other what is actually happening.
Knowing that the Earth and the other planets move around the sun doesn't tell us anything about how the solar system operates. The word operate is derived from work, and work implies force, something happening to make something do something. An operation isn't an operation without a doctor cutting and slicing, performing current work that consumes energy.
Knowing that the planets move around the sun doesn't tell us anything about what is causing that movement.
What don't we know about how the solar system operates?
We don't know what causes the planets to move around the sun, and the moons to move around the planets, and we don't know what causes a planet or moon, or the sun for that matter, to rotate on its axis.
Obtaining the picture of how the matter in the solar system moved told us nothing about how the solar system operates!
And yet because we believed it did, we sat back happy, self-contented, brain dead.
RELATING THE FORCES THAT MOVE THE PLANETS TO THE HIDDEN ASSUMPTION THAT THE SOLAR SYSTEM OPERATES ON A REGULAR BASIS
Overlooking explanations for the forces that are at work to cause the movement we see in the solar system is such a massive display of ignorance that we have to wonder how such ignorance came about. After all, even though we know the sun is not moving across the sky each day, the fact is, it appears to move across the sky because the Earth is rotating on its axis. Not knowing, not even asking why the Earth rotates on its axis means that we are so blind we don't even know why the sun comes up each day.
The answer we satisfy ourselves with, that angular momentum is conserved in closed systems doesn't tell us anything at all, is worse even than going around believing that the sun travels around the Earth because we are knowingly pulling the wool over our own eyes.
And when we actually see something going around the Earth, as we watch the progression of the moon across the night sky from hour to hour, to not know what is making it move, to not even ask why it is moving is colossal stupidity of the grossest proportions. The answer we satisfy ourselves with, that it is moving because of its momentum doesn't tell us anything at all, tells us less, if that's possible, than blathering about angular momentum when we see the sun rise.
The reason that we can walk around in such mammoth ignorance of the everyday realities we live with is found in the template we accepted, frozen in time when we finally got the picture of the movement of matter in the solar system right, not in what the template demonstrated, but rather what it implied.
With matter conforming to the movement of the template, then there is really no reason to explain what the forces at work moving the matter are because whatever the forces are, they are contained in the matter doing the movement and have been contained in that matter since the matter was put in motion.
For instance, Galileo attempted to address the rotation of a planet on its axis by saying that an object, once set in motion, would continue in motion unless friction caused it to stop moving. He called this property of matter inertia and claimed that because the Earth existed in frictionless space, its inertia explained its rotation. It wasn't necessary to show where the force came from because God created the universe and there was no basis for concluding that He created it without the motion we see in the matter He created when He created the universe.
Of course, space is anything but frictionless, and using a historical force for current motion doesn't explain anything, but if we are ever in doubt about the apparent explanation, all we have to do is point at the sun coming up every morning, the same sun our forebears used to claim that the sun moved around the Earth, and say, the Earth is rotating because of a historical force, because angular momentum is conserved in closed systems.
When Newton directed his attention to the movement of the moon around the Earth he concluded, using much the same tried and true reasoning that Galileo used, that the moon was moving as a result of the momentum it received when God created the universe, the tried and true referring to the reasoning rather than the cause of movement. If a misconception can exist uncontradicted for a century, then it is a pretty safe misconception to hang your hat on.
The only problems with Galileo and Newton's explanations for motion in the solar system, that it was a result of historical forces, was the explanation for that historical force, God. By the nineteenth century, God as a source of scientific force was definitely out of play.
As a result, the ubiquitous swirling mass of gas was created to explain both planetary rotation and orbiting, with the planets condensing out of the gas cloud with the swirling motion of the gas cloud imparted to the forming planets. This had the advantage of keeping the force historical while rendering the source invisible.
In this flight of fancy we were putting a template on top of a template. Remember that the template we created to produce a picture of the movement of the planets was perfected by using the actual movement of the planets. We took facts and created a template to allow us to visualize the facts. In the case of the movement of matter in the solar system, the successful template approximated the facts, and coincided with one central fact, what moved around what.
We were using facts to uncover a fact.
When we created the template of the swirling mass of gas, we were using facts, planetary rotation and orbiting, but the template we were creating was about facts that might or might not be true. We can't see the force that causes the motion in the solar system like we can see the motion of the matter in the solar system, so we don't know what it is. In fact, because we can't see the force, we assume it isn't there.
Because we can't see the force, we are free to make up any template for it we chose, and there will never be anything to contradict that template. We are dealing in pure theory, and theory is never fact.
By producing a template made up of a swirling mass of gas, we think we have created the same reality we produced when we created a template for the movement of the matter in the solar system, so we enshrined the assumptions of the original template, uniform, predictable motion, in the new template.
When we ask what causes the planets and moons to orbit and rotate on their axis, we say they orbit and rotate because of the force that was imparted to them by the original swirling mass of gas out of which they condensed.
And in doing so, we ignore the fact that matter only moves as a result of current force, therefore encasing our ignorance in stone.
Special Internet Purchase Offer
THE CONSEQUENCES OF ACCEPTING HISTORICAL FORCE AS THE SOURCE OF THE MOTION OF MATTER IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Only the truly witless, those ignorant beyond redemption, those so sure that they know what makes planets and moons rotate and orbit simply because they know that planets and moons rotate and orbit, can feel comfortable going to any lengths to discredit pictures of the solar system that disagree with their made-up pictures and still believe that they can maintain their integrity.
When you know something can't be wrong, then you know you have to be right in discrediting opposing pictures and it therefore doesn't make any difference how ridiculous your statements are in discrediting opposing pictures, because any picture opposing your picture has to be wrong.
The swirling mass of gas template used to hide the fact that we are ignorant of the current force that causes movement in the solar system dictates that the orbits of the planets and the moons cannot vary.
The motion that Newton assumed in orbiting planets and moons, straight-line motion maintained by momentum, is bent into circular motion by the only current force in the universe, the force of gravity. Thus, the matter in the solar system, other than the sun, appears in orbits created by the straight-line momentum being exactly counterbalanced by the force of gravity which is bending that straight-line motion into the circular motion that describes the orbits.
Because the force that put this matter into motion is a historical force, it is no longer present, then there is nothing to change that motion. With motion caused by a force that is no longer present, and the assumption embedded in the thought processes that the motion we see has always been and always will be, there is nothing other than the gravity that is proportional to matter to change the motion of matter in the solar system and because matter can neither be created nor destroyed, the amount of matter never changes and the motion can never change.
Thus, when Immanuel Velikovsky, a nonliterate in the workings of the solar system, uncovered archeological evidence that pointed toward the possibility that Venus, in recorded history, crossed the orbits of both Mars and the Earth, and witlessly published it as scientific, men of certainty such as Carl Sagan felt no restraints in discrediting him in the grossest possible public manner.
On the one side, Velikovsky had gone out and dug up ancient astronomical records that supported what he asserted.
On the other side, Sagan represented the consensus which asserted that the solar system was set in motion by historical forces, that there was no known force that would allow the planet Venus to move about in its orbit, after all, historical forces cannot cause changes in current motion, and that any records of Venus moving around in any orbit other than her current orbit, had to be either forged or misconstrued.
In short, one side was dealing with fact and the other with theory, and where theory disagrees with fact, theory always prevails. Sagan, firmly believing in the template, the immutability of the solar system, demanded empirical proof of Velikovsky's claim and poor Velikovsky, put on the defensive, kept coming up with proof not realizing that, because facts can never alter beliefs, believers will continue to spout any stupidity that comes to mind to argue away facts opposing those beliefs.
Because of assumptions made when we reveled in obtaining a correct picture of the movement of matter in the solar system, we have crippled our picture of the solar system, blinding ourselves to realities that exist right in front of our eyes. Like the believers in the Ptolemaic system, facts will never change our beliefs. Unlike the Ptolemaic system, where measurable fact existed to change belief, there is no central fact to change the belief in the template of an orderly, unchanging solar system because there is no fact to support such a belief to begin with.
NO ONE HAS EVER MEASURED REGULAR MOVEMENT IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Newton, in deriving his mass/gravity scenario which produces the belief that we understand the forces at work in the solar system as well as in the universe as a whole, recognized that there were constant discrepancies in the movement of matter in the solar system. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, whose predictions of performance are made difficult by the assumption of uniform motion, to see the irregular motion of the movement of the moon. Entire books have been written trying to reconcile the irregularity of the moon's motion with the swirling mass of gas template of planetary operation. The moon is even, though delusionally so, measured to speed up and slow down, something that couldn't be a product of historical forces.
There are so many discrepancies between theoretical and factual reality with respect to the motion of the matter in the solar system that the unexplained motions are categorized as perturbations for easy filing and forgetting.
Newton felt that to maintain the solar system's equanimity, to keep the planets moving in their prescribed paths, God had to come around and do a little touch-up work periodically. Halley computed that the discrepancies he measured in Jupiter's orbit were causing it to contract by a degree every thousand years while Saturn's orbit was expanding by twice that amount over the same period. Newton died in despair of Halley coming up with measurements of the moon's orbit that would show that it was operating in accordance with an inverse square law, the moon never operating in a uniform enough manner to confirm what its actual orbit was.
Laplace, who dreamed up the swirling mass of gas as a replacement for God, proved mathematically that the gravitational pull between Jupiter and Saturn caused their orbits to contract and expand in nine hundred year cycles. Not being capable of disproof, this fantasy became further proof that Newton's static solar system was the correct picture, leading to Laplace's famous declaration: "Such has been the fate of Newton's brilliant discovery, that each difficulty that has arisen has become for it a new subject of triumph, a circumstance that is the surest characteristic of the true system of nature."
Of course, the first difficulty was that Newton's theory that the force that makes objects fall to the surface of the Earth was the same force that bent the straight-line motion of planets into circular orbits was never proven leading perforce to its adoption as law and then its use as law to claim knowledge as to what was in the center of the planets, safe claims because their accuracy could never be checked.
If planets and moons don't move on a regular basis, then how come they have stayed in orbit for the five billion years we delusionally think they have been around?
In showing mathematically that Jupiter and Saturn have repetitive orbits that makes them move back and forth from each other in nine hundred year cycles, Laplace had to assume that the variance in a planet's motion had to have boundaries. That's how you mathematically prove fantasies about reality, you assume all sorts of constants so that your mathematical equations balance, and if they don't balance, it isn't because they don't describe reality, it is because the wrong constant has been chosen, the right constant has been chosen but it hasn't been assigned the right value, or there is more than one constant. That's why computers are so valuable in determining what reality is, they can handle more calculations with less constants during any particular funding year.
Perhaps we could just say that the motions of the planets are all over the place, and as a result cancel each other out.
That, however, has no scientific validity because it is not a quantized statement that can be used to predict outcomes.
Another solution to the instability of the solar system would be to say our hidden assumptions were simply wrong, that the solar system didn't operate on historic forces, it operated on current forces that varied on a daily basis. Because the production of the force was steady on an overall basis, the force was actually holding the system together against variances that tended to cause it to come apart. We could use the fact that the force did a good job of producing order out of chaos as a clue to the nature of the force itself.
However, to take this approach would require the use of the mind. While we may well have minds when we are trying to figure out what to order for lunch, we don't in reality have minds because the mind has never been cut out of the brain and put in a bottle. Whatever it is that does our thinking for us is not something that we should give much credence to in trying to figure out what is going on in the universe. Forget the fact that it is what we have to make sense out of reality, whatever it is, it's too subjective, too flawed.
Better to make mindless conclusions such as historic force and uniform motion which keep us from thinking than make assumptions that something is actually happening which would require us to do a little thinking to figure out. Thinking is work, and work is not particularly useful when we can produce mathematical systems to think for us and to conform reality to, and especially when we can produce computers that can do mathematical computations even better than we can.
Perhaps we could just handle the solar system's instability the way we handle the tides. Everyone knows that the tides are caused by the rotation of the Earth and the movement of the moon and the rotation of the Earth with respect to the sun.
No tide has ever been predicted on the basis of computing the movement of the moon, the Earth or the sun, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone because everyone knows that the tides can be predicted by those motions. We can just say, well, we know the tides don't conform to the movement of the matter causing them, but because we know they do, we just haven't figured out how to go about predicting them. We'll get busy on that next week. In the meantime, if we want to know when tides occur, we can just go to where they are occurring and measure them for a day or two, and we'll have the rhythm of the thing.
But the planets don't wash up on any shores, so this logic seems to fail us in explaining the instability of the solar system.
Woe, oh woe is us, we lament. How the Swirling Mass of Gas has rained down troubles down on our bowing heads.
Special Internet Purchase Offer
PUTTING IRREGULAR MOVEMENT ON A REGULAR BASIS
We can't analogize the movement of matter in the solar system to the tides, although we ascribe the tides to the movement of matter in the solar system and we can't use our minds to counter the fact that there is no regular movement in the solar system.
Yet we have to say something because the irregular motion is constantly measurable and thus constantly coming up.
What we need is a constant that would allow us to be able to compute the regularity of the irregular motion so that we could make some statements about the boundaries of the motion and thus find out the laws that govern it.
The way to do this would be to produce a mathematical portrait of the orbits of the planets at a hypothetical point when they condensed out of the swirling mass of gas. Then the orbits of the planets could be computed forward in time to the present from this initial condition.
But this process won't provide anything to compare the orbits with, so the way to accomplish a comparison would be to produce a second set of initial conditions slightly different from the first set of initial conditions.
This, of course, is precisely the situation we have in the solar system. With only mass to bend straight line motion, as the two sets of initial conditions were tracked over billions of years, the precise variance set as initial conditions should continue throughout the tracking.
What was found, duplicating reality this way on a computer, was that an initial difference as small as one ten billionth of an orbit, which is about how far the Earth travels in one three hundredth of a second, resulted in a variance so great that it would be impossible to specify where the Earth would be with respect to its sister initial condition after a hundred million years.
Thus, it was clear that whatever the unknown boundaries at work were, boundaries such as Laplace had used to mathematically prove that the measured change in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn operated on a nine hundred year cycle, they were still at work.
The only job was to figure out what the boundaries were that allowed the chaos demonstrated in the solar system by duplicating the initial conditions of its operations and checking them against an almost identical set of initial conditions to maintain the uniformity of movement that existed.
What we have done is to assume that there is uniform motion in the solar system as a result of a historical force, and when we found that the uniform motion we had assumed wasn't uniform at all, we created a computerized process that would show us how irregular the motion was so that we could create assumptions that would demonstrate why the irregular motion we measured was actually regular motion.
It's lucky that we aren't depending on this silliness to navigate on the far oceans of the world because we would fall off the face of the Earth.
WHO IS WE?
When we first sent satellites up to orbit the Earth, we expected them to stay in their perpetual Newtonian orbits forever. When they didn't, when we found that they stayed in orbit, or fell from orbit with no rhyme or reason, we looked for the cause of our satellites' failure to meet our laws of nature. Noting that solar flares seemed to produce some drastic shifts in the stability of satellite orbits, we looked back to Galileo for the answer we sought. We knew that the satellites would continue to move in a straight line but for the force of gravity, and we knew that the force of gravity wasn't increasing because we had made up a law that stated that gravity was a property of and proportional to mass and the amount of mass in the Earth wasn't increasing with the activity on the surface of the sun.
So, if mass wasn't increasing, the only other reason for the satellites to change orbit was if there was friction being produced in space which hadn't been there without the solar activity.
What could cause an increase of friction in space?
The only thing around was the Earth's atmosphere, so the solar flare-ups on the sun must be affecting the weather in such a way as to cause the atmosphere to expand into space causing friction which slowed the movement of the satellites.
By golly, there it was, the empirical evidence needed to understand why our laws didn't apply to a satellite's orbit. Can't get much more scientific than that, unless its the conclusion that the tides are caused by the moon. If the tides weren't created by the moon, then the friction their movement would cause would have slowed the Earth's rotation down. The Earth is still turning so the tides have to be caused by the moon. The falling satellites were absolute confirmation of an expanding atmosphere because if the atmosphere wasn't expanding, the satellites wouldn't be falling.
When we sent the first probes to the moon using our laws of motion, they came nowhere near the moon. It was only when we started recomputing the courses on the basis of actual reality, on how far off the probes were from the made-up reality computed by our laws of motion, that we started to hit the moon. And, because we had no idea where the moon was going to be when the probe got there, we had to evidence eternal vigilance on a visual basis to make sure the probe was not going to arrive when the moon didn't.
We spend a lot of time marveling at how we can send a space probe to the outer planets with such accuracy, but the science of orbital determination, where teams gather around daily to examine pictures taken from the probes, delays in radio signals sent from the probes, and beams of one sort or another bounced off the probes in order to figure out where the hell the probes actually are, belies this accuracy.
The entire trip of anything in space is a continuous process of course correction based on trail and error and has absolutely nothing to do with our hoked-up laws of motion!
The simple fact is, reality, the movement of matter in the solar system, or for that matter, the movement of falling objects on Earth, has nothing to do with our made-up laws about what is causing that motion.
Bacon referred to the cause of motion as the "secret motion of things" and he said that this is the goal of our search for understanding, to come to an approximation of the explanation for that motion, falling objects, rotating and orbiting planets and moons. What causes the motion cannot be seen, and the only thing with respect to the causes that can be measured are its effect on the matter it is moving.
We have turned the task of figuring out what the causes of motion are over to a bunch of mindless nitwits who insist that because the cause is not apparent, it doesn't exist.
"We" has to be separated from "them."
There is the "we" that believes in occult bullcrap answers to motion, explanations that have no meaning, gravity is a property of mass, rotation is the result of angular momentum being conserved in closed systems, orbiting is the result of force imparted from the primordial swirling mass of gas.
That we is them!
And there is the "we" that wants to know why things move, that demands an explanation for the obvious realities in our existence, why objects drop, why the sun comes up, what make the moon move around the Earth, the "we" that is not going to put up with nonsense any longer, that is going to demand a little work from the people we pay to explore these questions as evidenced by a little success in actually answering the questions.
That we is us!
Special Internet Purchase Offer
WHY DO WE WANT TO KNOW?
Not knowing the answers to the obvious facts in our reality is probably okay so long as we are not aware of our own ignorance. Thinking that we know the answer to questions of motion because we have made up a bunch of nonanswers and made them real by universal agreement, leaves us dumb and happy. Being able to live with absurdities such as the conclusion that it takes force to move matter on the surface of the Earth, but it takes force to keep matter from moving in straight lines in space is fine if we just want to wallow through life in our own ignorance.
But ignorance has consequences!
All evolved organisms attempt to extend their range of survivability in the environment simply as a result of the drive to continue to exist. Complexity furthers this goal. Moss is rooted in place and come the winter dies in place. Trees can't run away from the forest fire like more complex ambulatory animate matter can. Sentient animate matter can do more than flee the changing conditions of the environment, it can alter the environment itself.
We, in the sense of the "we" that is sentient rather than the insentient "them" that makes up laws governing reality and then forever limits reality to the operation of those laws, we have the ability to produce a picture of the environment when the environment doesn't exist, and it is this ability that allows us to change the pictures of the reality we form to produce a reality that would be more conducive to our survivability and then to go out into the environment and conform the environment to that made-up picture.
If we limit the pictures we form of reality to pictures we have made up, instead of the actual facts that make up physical reality, then the pictures we form to alter that reality are not going to have anything to do with that reality, and the technology we produce to manipulate our existence in that reality is also going to be distorted.
We are going to be washed up a wreak on foreign shores
If we make up a gravity that cannot be manipulated because it is a property of the matter that has to be used to manipulate the gravity, we will never attempt to manipulate gravity, but rather build machines that have to oppose it, planes with wings and engines, rockets with thunder and fire. Instead of attacking gravity directly, we use the atmosphere like fish use water and we do so being as blissfully unaware of reality as the fish are unaware of the water in which they exist.
If we have an inaccurate picture of the physical reality that we occupy, then the technological solutions we create to further our range of survivability within that environment will not accomplish their goal, and we will fail.
The result of the failure to extend our range of survivability is quite simple.
We cease to exist!
It is generally believed that the greatness of Galileo, Kepler and Newton was that they went beyond mere description to discover the "true system of nature" and in the process extracted from flawed and confusing data the simple fundamental laws that control our existence in the universe.
A wonderful achievement, if the goal is to describe something other than reality, which unfortunately is the movement of matter by current forces which, because those forces are constantly changing as a result of the movement of the matter itself, does not conform to our fundamental laws.
Galileo, Kepler and Newton lived when the storehouse of knowledge was extremely limited. Working on the basis of limited knowledge, they claimed to discover universal principles, frictionless motion continues forever, planets sweep out equal areas in equal times, the inverse square law measurable in falling objects controls the movement of matter in space, none of which describe reality.
We know that none of these principles applies to reality simply by observing and measuring reality, by the simple weight of evidence.
And because we know the weight of evidence, we also know the facts. We are not dead men who knew nothing, and therefore had to rely on making up laws and principles to cover our ignorance, we are living people with minds that can be used to analyze physical reality and come up with explanations that provide a basis for an effective technology that can be used to extend our range of survivability into the future.
We know that the movement of the planets are actually chaos, that there is no order in the solar system. This doesn't reconfirm our belief in orderly motion, it tells us that whatever is causing the motion in the solar system is a current force, and that the current force causing the motion, while continually changing, is actually holding the solar system together against the consequences of that changing force.
If from that starting proposition we cannot sit down and come up with an explanation for the forces that cause the current motion in our existence, then perhaps we deserve to go missing, become extinct.
At least we will die happy.
But for crying out loud, we'll die without even knowing why the sun comes up everyday!
Copyright 1997 Peter Bros