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5. TURNING BELIEF INTO FACT
DEALING WITH A DEAD-END SCIENCE
Science has been able to foist off on the public a belief that it is responsible
for the technological advances that have come from simple trial and error,
the testing of physical reality, by engineers whose goal in life is to make
things work in reality rather than to explain why things work in reality.
Whenever the efficacy of science is questioned, its practitioners point to things like airplanes and radar, television and elevators, ocean liners and computers to justify science's existence when all of these items are the product of engineering, the trial and error exploration of the limits of reality by practical people attempting to accomplish something in that reality.
Empirical Science finds itself constantly having to justify its existence by engineering accomplishments because the picture it has constructed of the universe is so self-contradictory, so very nonexplanatory, so downright ditsy, that it defies the very reason for which pictures are designed, to provide comprehension. Science has produced a modern artist's universe with made-up absurdities splashed willy-nilly on a canvass with neither dimension nor texture.
But worse from the engineering standpoint, from the view of those attempting to bend the boundaries of physical reality to the advantage of all, science constructs a universe out of theory and then claims that theory to be fact, frustrating attempts to deal with physical reality, in fact, making the actual nature of that physical reality invisible to the hopeful gaze of innovation.
Because Empirical Science claims to measure that which can not be measured, what Bacon referred to as the secret motions of things, it couches its conclusions about physical reality in mathematical formulae which take the expression of one things equals another thing.
Because these mathematical expressions cannot handle an unlimited number of variables, and because the universe is composed of limitless variables, to claim that mathematics can provide answers to the unknown facets of physical reality, the secret motions of things, mathematicians have to limit the terms of their equations by creating laws which do not vary in order that the variables the laws describe may be eliminated from consideration.
As a result, mathematicians, in producing a science which is supposed to describe physical reality, come up with invariables such as matter can neither be created nor destroyed, gravity is proportional to and therefore a property of matter or mass, motion is conserved in closed systems, objects always move in a straight line unless a force acts on them to change that motion, or with energy and mass interchangeable in a formula that relates them to the speed of light, no energy can cause mass to exceed the speed of light.
All of these negatives are utter nonsense, have no basis in reality, violate the basic tenet of Empirical Science that statements be testable and do not add to the task of coming up with a consistent picture that allows us to comprehend the universe.
But from the point of view of the practical engineer, the negative aspect of the statements, the negativism coming from the need to make the physical reality the statements deal with static, invariable, nonoperative, cause the statements to block the possible and close off attempts at trial and error experiments which might advance our ability to physically manipulate our environment.
The simple statement that gravity is a property of matter precludes any attempt to manipulate gravity because properties are merely inherent in matter and as a result, simply exist.
Without the ability to envision the possible, the engineer expends energy probing the impossible that is left, how to overcome the gravity, how to build machines and structures that can be pushed against gravity rather than how to build machines and structures that can utilize the force that makes objects fall to themselves move.
THE DIFFICULTY IN PROVING THE FACT THAT THE EARTH ORBITED THE SUN LED TO THE CONFUSION OF FACT WITH CONCEPT
It was not the Copernican realization that the Earth moved around the sun that defined modern Empirical Science. It was the inability to demonstrate it that doomed the search for a clear picture of how the universe operates to a four hundred plus year journey that, in a process similar to the massive mistake the Copernican realization corrected, produced clones of the mistake so that the errors in the tenets of Empirical Science are as numerous as the tenets of Empirical Science itself.
Copernicus made a simple statement. He said that the sun and other planets don't move around the Earth, rather that the Earth and the other planets move around the sun. Aristarchus had made the same statement seventeen centuries earlier, but the one hundred years of navigational experience that preceded the Copernican statement lent credence to the statement.
Credence or no, the statement was not provable. No one could take a ruler, walk out the door and measure the Earth going around the sun.
Some facts in reality are measurable, others aren't. Mathematics can, at times, be used to measure that which can't directly be measured. We can easily measure the distance from the front door to the street. We can use the relationship of lines and angles to compute unknown measurements from measurements that we know, measuring the height of the electric pole at the end of the sidewalk using the angle of the sun and the length of the shadow the pole produces. Processes can even be devised that allow us to measure the distance to the moon. We can, now that we know the relationship between the planets and the sun, devise mathematical procedures such as determining solar system distances by parallax that could only exist if the Earth traveled around the sun and for that reason prove that it does so.
But what goes around what is a relationship and relationships are both factual and conceptual. The bare distance between two points is a fact with no conceptual content. Facts in and of themselves neither convey meaning nor require understanding. The changing relationship between two objects, however, produces a fact that requires visualization, and therefore conceptualization. The changing relationship between two objects is time, which is a concept, and the relationship of what is where also requires conceptualization.
The Ptolemaists had no difficulty handling the simple measurable fact of static distance, and they had no problem with conceptualizing changing relationships, they, after all, could observe the sun and the moon move around the Earth.
The Copernicans were equally adept at handling both the simple facts and the conceptualizations of moving objects.
What neither could handle was the relationship of what went around what, and while this is a simple fact, when the simple fact is not known, then how the facts are viewed is bald conceptualization.
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WHAT WENT AROUND WHAT WAS A FACT BUT, BECAUSE THE FACT WAS UNKNOWN, ATTEMPTS TO PROVE THE FACT WERE ACTUALLY ATTEMPTS TO REFUTE A MISCONCEPTION AND THUS REQUIRED CONCEPTUALIZATION
The science of the Ptolemaic solar system, the Aristotelian concept of the universe, was called Philosophy and the practitioners of Philosophy were called Philosophers, quite the opposite of the meaning today, where anything philosophic is the opposite of scientific. Because the Philosophers believed that the sun went around the Earth when in fact the Earth went around the sun, they held a misconception about the factual relationship between the Earth and the sun.
On the one side there was a bad concept, a concept that opposed the facts, and on the other side there was a good concept, a concept that agreed with the facts.
But facts are not concepts.
Facts are facts!
Once we had the correct picture, we didn't need conceptualizations to prove it, we merely needed to form the correct factual picture. Facts merely need demonstration. Of course, knowing that the Earth and the planets move around the sun raises all sorts of other questions about the facts, questions like what causes the planets to move, that need conceptualization but the relationship of the planets to the sun no longer provides a basis for conceptual arguments.
When Galileo went up against the Philosophers in an attempt to prove the correctness of Copernicus, he was in the middle of a conceptual argument as to what the facts were. He was saying, "Mr. Philosopher, your concept of the solar system is wrong, it is not fact. The picture Copernicus painted of the solar system is correct." And although Galileo unfortunately never reached the point that he could finish the statement, if he could have conclusively demonstrated to the Philosophers that the Earth went around the sun, then he could have said, "What we had to argue as concepts because we didn't have the facts, the relationship of the Earth to the sun, is now a fact and no longer requires any argument. Facts don't have to be proven, they merely have to be demonstrated."
However, because Galileo couldn't demonstrate the fact, he had to diddle around with ways to prove the fact, and because it wasn't a demonstrated fact, the proof was an attempt to prove a concept.
The science that has grown up since Galileo has, as a result, confused the two, fact and concept.
Because the relationship of the matter in the solar system was a fact, it could be demonstrated. However, showing a concept about one set of facts to be correct does not mean that all concepts can be shown to be facts!
GALILEO INVENTS A PROCEDURE DESIGNED TO PROVE CONCEPT TO BE FACT
Simply demonstrating the possibility of the solar system by viewing the Jovian system did not satisfy the proofs needed by the Philosophers who were used to mathematical demonstrations of relationships and logical reasoning to express how those mathematical demonstrations applied to the facts.
Galileo, undertaking the thankless task of providing the Philosophers proof on their own terms, sought to center his formal proof that the Earth went around the sun on the demonstration that the Earth rotated on its axis thereby giving the sun the appearance of movement. However, he had no explanation for the Earth's rotation because the force that maintains the Earth's rotation is not apparent. He therefore set out to show that the Earth, set in motion at the creation of the universe, could continue to rotate because its rotation in frictionless space was unopposed. Once he had shown that the Earth could rotate forever in frictionless space, he planned to demonstrate the rotation by showing that the tides moved as a result of that rotation.
Galileo named the force that maintained his perpetual rotation inertia. To prove that inertia existed, he rolled balls down an inclined plane onto a level surface. He reasoned that the only thing that would slow the balls down on the level surface was the friction between the surface and the ball and that if he had a frictionless track that circled the globe, the balls would roll around that track forever.
These unmeasurable fantasies could be dismissed as harmless if they weren't at the center of Empirical Science, "empirical" meaning measurable!
Because Galileo couldn't devise a frictionless circular path around the Earth to prove his concept of inertia to be fact, he had to come up with some other way to demonstrate that inertia was, in fact, a fact.
Half a century before Galileo was carrying on all of these ruminations, a practical trial and error advocate named Tartaglia had gone out onto the proving grounds and shot off cannonballs at different angles in order to come up with the angle that would cause the cannonball to travel the furthest distance. After much banging around, he determined that the optimum angle was forty-five degrees.
Galileo allowed the balls that had rolled down the inclined plane to roll off the end of his workbench and measured the same angle, at forty-five degrees, the inclined plane produced the maximum trajectory.
He then said he had, in the confines of his study, by mathematics alone, proven that which was proven by trial and error on the proving grounds. It was acceptable procedure, then, to use mathematics to prove facts that were not capable of being directly measured.
Of course, Tartaglia had actually shot real cannonballs out of real cannons to produce real measurements. By duplicating the facts in his study, Galileo had not proven a fact that was not capable of direct measurement, he had just measured the same fact in a different way, measuring real balls that had rolled down a real inclined plane rolling off the end of a real workbench.
He hadn't proven anything let alone a concept, inertia, to be a fact.
Concepts about factual relationships can be demonstrated by measurement to be fact.
Concepts, however, can never be proven to be facts!
DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN CONCEPTS ABOUT FACTUAL REALITIES AND CONCEPTS THAT HAVE NO BASIS IN FACTUAL REALITY
The sun exists and the Earth exists, and the two move with respect to each other. Even if we don't know which is going around which, we know that one is going around the other. We are dealing with facts, and the relationship of those facts will eventually out.
Inertia as a force that can cause something to move, on the other hand, is simply a made-up fantasy. The Earth spins on its axis, that's a fact. What is making it spin on its axis is another kettle of fish altogether.
When Tartaglia shot his cannonballs off on the proving grounds, the force imparted to the cannonballs by the charge in the cannon was the existing force that propelled the cannonballs against the force of attraction that would otherwise cause the cannonballs to seek their lowest point, the barrel of the cannon. The existing force that put the cannonballs in motion no longer existed, so it was left to the Earth's attractive force to overcome the force that was imparted to the cannonballs by the charge.
The force of the charge did not in some occult manner take up residence in the cannonball. The cannonball was just a dumb piece of matter. Once it was set in motion by the charge, where it would land would depend on a number of external factors acting upon its progress, factors that included the air resistance, Galileo's friction, and the rotation of the Earth, the Coriolis effect, even the wind, but the primary force that would affect the course of the cannonball would be the force of attraction produced by the Earth. As it happens, when the angle of the cannon is forty-five degrees, the time it takes the Earth's attractive force to degrade the force imparted to the cannonball is at its maximum.
When Galileo rolled the balls down the inclined plane, he duplicated the forty-five degree angle of Tartaglia's trial and error cannon. When the balls rolled off the workbench with the force imparted to them from the plane inclined at a forty-five degree angle, the time it took for the Earth's attractive force to degrade the force imparted to the balls by the inclined plane was at its maximum.
In neither case does the matter that makes up the objects obtain anything other than motion that resulted from an existing force. Objects don't move with respect to historical forces, they come to rest with respect to existing forces, so that both Tartaglia's cannonballs and the balls from Galileo's inclined plane were set in motion by a current force and after the current force was removed, the balls began to come to rest with respect to existing forces.
To say that a force exists that causes the balls to continue in motion after the force that set them in motion ceases and call that force inertia is to create a concept to describe the motion that occurs between the time that an object is set in motion and the time it comes to rest with respect to the current forces acting upon it.
With no current force moving the ball during this period, the term inertia to describe that absence of current force is a meaningless concept, a concept that applies to a fact that does not exist in reality.
To then say that inertia causes a planet to rotate is to extend a nonfactual concept to the cosmic level.
When we are arguing about what goes around what, we are arguing about what the facts might be.
But we are still arguing facts!
When we are arguing about what makes objects move, we are arguing about intangibles that might produce the facts we see. We have no way of knowing precisely what those intangibles might be because they don't present themselves as tangible matter to which we can apply our tangible measuring sticks, or even our intangible mathematical measuring processes.
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BACON RECOGNIZED CLEARLY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FACTS THAT CAN BE MEASURED AND CONCEPTS ABOUT FACTS THAT CAN NEVER BE MEASURED
Sir Francis Bacon recognized that it was necessary to clearly delineate the line between facts that could be measured and facts that could never be measured.
Galileo had used deductive reasoning to conclude that the concept of inertia was a fact.
There is in reality fact and concept, facts being measurable and concepts being what we make up in our minds to make sense out of the facts. Empirical Science claims that by verifying its concepts, which it calls hypotheses, by finding facts those concepts deductively predict, it can protect itself from unfounded concepts such as the Ptolemaic mistake that the sun went around the Earth. Induction, on the other hand, is the process of producing concepts to explain facts, and inductionists claim that because the concepts precisely describe the facts, they too are factual.
In fact, the inductionist's concepts are the Empiricist's hypotheses and both end up in the same place, with concepts that are mistaken as fact.
By blurring induction and deduction, Modern Science creates a sort of moving target behind a claim of consistency, the scientific method, that avoids directs hits. When a direct hit looms, Modern Science claims that all of its conclusions are simply falsifiable, shifting the argument to epistemological grounds by claiming that surviving falsification produces consilience, agreement with facts, and therefore facts. If all else fails, Modern Science can shift the argument to religious territory by design arguments, thereby hiding God's hand in nature, the swirling mass of gas and big bang being the most prevalent.
In actuality, the mind works by storing information and recalling that information in the form of pictures. When a picture has a missing element, we look for the missing element so that we can complete the picture. If we are dealing with measurable facts, filling in the missing element, finding the missing fact creates a bigger picture and the new picture will now have holes in it, more missing elements, for instance, what makes the Earth move when we find it moves around the sun. This is the trial and error nature of the scientific method that produces technology. We recognize a missing fact, then go out and find it, measure it, size it, and put it into the picture we already have.
However, some facts are missing that are clearly there but appear to be missing simply because they aren't measurable. Objects fall but we can't pick up and measure what is making them fall. We see movement in the heavens, but without apparent force doing the movement, out telescopes don't produce a picture of what is causing the movement.
We have to come up with some sort of explanation and we do, and so long as the explanation doesn't produce a picture with more missing pieces in it, we never question the explanation.
This is what we have done with the secret motions of things. Bacon said we have to continue to perfect concepts about the hidden motions of things by uncovering more and more facts, that our concepts about the facts can never be facts, but have to evolve as our knowledge about the facts evolves.
Galileo had done quite the opposite, starting out with Tartaglia's physical measurements and reasoning that duplicating those measurements in his study would show that there was a force that caused the movement of the balls when there was no force present to move them. He then deduced that the friction acting on the balls degraded the balls movement and that without that friction, the balls would move forever, a purely inductive statement that, because it was derived from deductive reasoning, he took as fact.
Bacon said that the cause of movement, rather than the measurement of the movement itself, was secret. The rate at which an object falls toward the Earth is a physical measurement which results in a fact, but what makes the object fall is a secret. We can't, he said, measure the nature of the force that causes objects to fall or planets and moons to rotate and orbit because it is not apparent, it is not physically capable of measurement.
He labeled measurable facts to be facts, physical realities established by measurement and verification, and he labeled what causes movement to be the secret motions of things, and then stated that what caused the secret motions of things could neither be measured nor verified.
The solar system was too big to allow us to measure it directly, but because it was composed of the movement of matter, we could produce measurements as to its size and motion and the relationships of the matter that produced the motion.
What caused the motion, on the other hand, was a secret that was consigned to areas that were too small for perception.
It was necessary, however, to search out the nature of the secret motions of things, and it was to provide a basis for this search that Bacon came up with the process of inductive thinking.
Bacon said that the secret motions of things cannot be proven as fact, it can only be induced from the facts and anything that is induced from the facts is dependent on the facts and is not itself a fact. Because we cannot induce the secret causes of motion, we obviously do not have enough facts. Thus, what we have to do is go out and gather as many facts as we can, and eventually, when we know all of the facts there are to know, then we will easily be able to induce the secret motions of things from those facts. In the meantime, we propose concepts and change those concepts as our knowledge of the facts increases.
Bacon's induction is therefore a generalization of Ockham's razor which states that what explains the most with the least prevails, Bacon demanding that the explanation consistently be revised as our knowledge of the facts expands, not that we take a few facts we know about, generalize laws, facts expressed as ignorance, and forevermore control the facts we see by the laws we have made up.
Induction is a process for coming up with concepts that can be used to explain what we see the facts doing.
It is not a way to come up with facts or laws that can then be used to control the nature of the facts.
LAWS ASSUME AWAY THE SECRET MOTIONS OF THINGS
Galileo's inertia was a historic force that explained away current motion. When Galileo tried to use the tides to demonstrate the Earth's rotation, he found that the tides would create a friction, a current force, that would degrade the Earth's inertia, a historic force, causing the Earth to stop rotating.
This debacle should have brought to an end occult attempts to explain away current force, Bacon's secret motions of things, by saying they became a property of the thing doing the moving.
Instead, it just altered Galileo's word "inertia" to mean a resistance to a change in motion rather than a cause of the motion itself.
The cause of motion became momentum, which was precisely what Galileo had thought of as inertia. Instead of the Earth rotating because of inertial forces set in motion when God created the universe, it rotated as a result of the angular momentum given the matter when God created the universe.
Neither, of course, was a cause of motion, rather merely dumb explanations for continued motion!
Angular momentum was subsumed in Newton's laws of motion, one of which stated that an object will continue to move in a straight line unless a force acts on it to change that motion, its inertia being to resist anything but straight-line motion.
Same occult bullcrap that Galileo had made up to explain the Earth's rotation!
Some force is applied to an object at sometime in the past, that force becomes a part of the object, is a property of the object, seeps into the object's pours, and then the object forevermore contains that force.
There is a big difference, however, between inertia and momentum, a difference that Galileo had recognized when he visualized the balls rolling around a frictionless course forever but which he was able to ignore when he was dealing with the rotation of the Earth. When he applied his frictionless motion to rotation, he didn't have to deal with the fact that the primary force that degraded the force imparted to Tartaglia's cannonballs was the Earth's force of attraction.
It was the Earth itself that was rotating.
With Newton's laws of motion, when the force of attraction caused the object traveling in a straight line to change its motion to circular motion, it did not degrade the motion inherent in the object, the object's momentum. Newton lifted Tartaglia's cannonballs off the surface of the Earth into frictionless space so that the force of the Earth's attraction equaled their straight-line momentum. Newton said that like Tartaglia's cannonballs in Galileo's perpetual circular courses, the Earth's force of gravity balances the straight-line motion of the moon.
With the two forces balancing exactly, neither was used up.
Gravity as a force that diminishes when it doesn't do anything but doesn't diminish when it does, when it alters the straight-line motion of planets into circular motion, and momentum, which isn't degraded like the momentum of objects on Earth is degraded by the Earth's attractive force, are fantasies at their most extreme. They are lies writ so large they can be naught but fact.
In reality, they're just silliness, a display of ignorance so great that only fools would attempt to defend them.
As a result, so that the holders of these beliefs can escape the label of fools, the concepts have to be rendered unnecessary of defense. To do this, they have to be expressed as natural laws of the universe, things that simply exist. Objects travel in a straight line unless a force acts upon them to change that motion, angular momentum is conserved in closed systems, the inverse square law of falling objects applies to planetary orbiting, these are not physical facts that have to be proven.
They are universal laws which the genius of man has induced from the facts!
In other words, we are too dumb and lazy to distinguish between fact and fiction, between reality and our made-up concepts of reality. We'll just call what we make up law and this will allow us to believe that we know the secret motions of things.
By creating laws that assume historical forces for current motion, we simply make the existing force that produces current motion invisible, no analysis need be applied, because we now believe we know everything there is to know about the secret motions of things.
And we know absolutely nothing!
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BELIEVING THAT NEWTON ACTUALLY PROVED A CONCEPT TO BE A FACT, THAT A PROPERTY OF SOMETHING COULD ACTUALLY CAUSE SOMETHING ELSE TO PHYSICALLY MOVE, WHEWELL LOOKED TO BACON FOR A BASIS TO EXPLAIN NEWTON'S ACCOMPLISHMENT
There is nothing factual about Newton's mass/gravity fantasy. Newton relied on God for his straight-line motion, we rely on a swirling mass of gas which if made up of mass would clump instead of swirl, straight-line motion doesn't exist in the universe, objects don't move unless something causes them to change motion, objects come to rest with respect to the forces acting upon them, gravity, a straight-line force, provides no basis for circular motion in the solar system, the inverse square nature of Kepler's laws upon which Newton based his idea that the planets fall toward the sun the same way that a rock falls to the surface of the Earth are disprovable by any first grader with a stick, the list of absurdities is endless. The one thing that the mass/gravity concept can do is compute, using the inverse square law and the law of straight-line motion, what's in the center of planets and at various points around the universe where there is no visible matter.
And these computations, which can never be checked, provide useless information.
But mass/gravity is as real as the effect the moon has on the tides. The fact that the friction of the tides would have stopped the rotation of the Earth in frictionless space had long puzzled Philosophers and later Naturalists, the predecessors of Empiricists, so that when it was found that the moon could exert a gravitational pull on the water, literally lifting it out of its seabed, sighs of relief were heard round the world as the friction problem was solved.
No tides can be predicted by the movement of the moon, just as no evidence can be produced to show that the attractive force is a property of physical matter, but that is of no concern when everybody on the planet believes it to be so.
And it was that belief that Whewell wrestled with when he tried, a hundred years after the fact, to relate Newton's discovery with the procedure he had to have used to come up with whatever Newton discovered so that he could show that there actually was a connection between the attractive force and physical matter.
It is hard to show how a fact was discovered when a fact wasn't discovered. When Columbus discovered America, it was simple to show the winds he took to get there and the winds he took to get back by getting on a ship and going there and coming back.
When facts are facts, facts are easy to demonstrate. Even the fact that the Earth goes around the sun is easy to demonstrate now that it is known to be a fact. Erroneous concepts about facts can be corrected by measurement.
But when concepts are mistaken for facts, then its not so easy to demonstrate that they are facts.
Newton's mass/gravity fantasy is more than a concept, it is a group of interrelated concepts that has no relationship to reality, so demonstrating its factual nature is not a simple thing to do.
And yet Whewell knew that Newton had proven a concept to be a fact, so he knew that he should be able to sit down and demonstrate exactly how he had done it.
And he demonstrated and demonstrated as chapters became books and books, volumes and volumes, sets.
If facts are easy to state, why then did it take Whewell volumes?
Because he wasn't dealing with facts. Every time he got to the core of the mass/gravity matter, every time he faced the straight-line law of motion, he was in a conceptual minefield because he knew he wasn't dealing with a fact. But because it is true that an object will always move in a straight line unless a force acts on it to change that motion, after all, who can disagree with the statement that an inch tall elephant will always fit in a watch pocket, Whewell was faced with the question of where Newton came up with it. It was not deducible from anything, it was just something that had to be operating in the universe if gravity were a property of matter and as gravity was a property of matter, as elephants are an inch tall, then it was something that was operating in the universe.
It's either deduction or induction. If a true statement can't be shown to be deduced, it must have been induced. Aristotle had talked about inductive thinking but everything Aristotle talked about was wrong because he was wrong about the relationship of the Earth to the sun. Bacon had also talked about inductive thinking and because Bacon knew the correct relationship of the Earth to the sun, Newton must have been using the Baconian inductive process to derive his true statements about motion.
Looking at the orbiting planets, and the fact that they could be going in a straight line if they weren't falling toward the sun, Whewell had to conclude that the only way that Newton could have derived his fact, his law of motion, was by induction.
Bacon said that the secret motions of things would be obtained by allowing facts to produce inductive thoughts that explained the facts, and that's precisely what Newton had done.
Thus, Newton used Baconian induction to come up with mass/gravity!
MISTAKING FACT FOR UNDERSTANDING
The secret motions of things requires the use of the mind to understand. Because we cannot form a picture in our minds of the forces at work moving matter in the solar system, we have to produce concepts that explain that motion.
Assuming away motion is not a process that produces concepts that explain motion. By manufacturing the fantasy of a swirling mass of gas to explain planetary orbiting and rotation, we have assumed away the cause of planetary motion.
Empirical Science justifies this by its requirement that facts be verified. If a Naturalist goes out into the field and discovers a giant bone, he will be automatically accused of fraud. When a dozen Naturalists follow him and they all find identical giant bones, the giant bones will be accepted as fact and concepts will be created to explain their existence.
However, when the things sought aren't retrievable, then Empirical Science has no way to deal with them. Thus, when someone spots Nessie in Lock Ness, or Bigfoot in the great northwest, when reports of unconventional objects moving in the skies abound, when alterations in the environment such as crop circles appear without a physical basis for their existence, Empirical Science has no recognition capability to deal with the phenomena. It labels them frauds or worse!
If it can't be put on a shelf in a fifty museums, then it isn't.
Empirical Science approaches the secret motions of things in the same way. There's no apparent force causing current motion in the solar system. Even though on Earth any movement requires the application of current force, because there is no current force apparent in the solar system to cause the current movement, Empirical Science simply says it doesn't exist, that the movement of matter in space doesn't require current force like it does on Earth.
Because the matter in the solar system is doing something, it is moving, measuring that movement is used as a substitute for understanding what is causing that movement. The Newtonian explanations for that movement, straight-line motion and gravity, are bald concepts with no basis in reality other than the fact that gravity obviously exists, it causes us to stay glued to the surface of the Earth and released objects to drop.
It is patently absurd, however, to say that what causes objects to drop makes them orbit.
Whewell said that the complimentary use of induced laws allowed Newton to come up with an explanation for all of the motion in the universe when Newton didn't come up with an explanation for anything, let alone motion. Whewell pointed to Bacon as justification for Newton's claimed achievement when Bacon had said that facts had to be verified, but that the explanation for facts could only be conceptually induced from the facts.
Whewell called Newton's fantasies of straight-line motion and universal gravitation as embodied in the inverse square measurement applied over infinite space laws that Newton induced which then allowed him to explain motion, but Bacon would have called them concepts that were made up to explain a series of facts and were only as good as the facts that they explained.
Bacon's induction was a living process in which the explanations, the concepts induced from the facts, were only as good as the facts they explained and the whole purpose of seeking out and verifying additional facts was to alter, to expand the concepts induced from the available facts.
Bacon didn't say, make up a bunch of bullshit from a purposely limited set of facts and then say, because the bullshit explains the specific set of facts it was made up to explain, it is now a fact to be treated with greater respect than actual facts in reality are treated.
Bacon said induction required that concepts explain verified facts. Newton made up a bunch of concepts that explained each other, the moon would be falling if it weren't going in a straight-line which it isn't because it is falling, and Whewell comes along and says Newton's right because he used Baconian induction.
Oh, the injustice!
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WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON HERE?
J. F. W. Hershel, the grandson of the Hershel that is renowned for discovering Uranus, perhaps in an attempt to explain why, if his grandfather's computations were correct, he had Uranus going in the opposite direction it's actually going, found himself constrained to clarify Whewell's use of Baconian induction to justify the Newtonian mass of conceptualizations. By this time, it was clear that Newton's procedure failed to demonstrate that gravity was a property of the matter around which other matter orbited. Newton had used volume to determine the amount of matter in the moon and the Earth, and thus compute the amount of force that each was exerting on the other so that he could mathematically demonstrate that the force was related to the amount of matter.
Computing the force on the basis of volume didn't work for the Earth and the moon, and it certainly didn't work for anything else in the solar system, so the whole pile of Newtonian bullcrap was simply nonoperative.
And yet, everybody knew that Newton had come up with the right conclusion, that the planets operated in accordance with the same inverse square law that caused objects to drop on Earth.
Instead of using matter to predict the force, it was concluded that, because it was measurable on Earth that objects fall in accordance with an inverse square measurement, that measurement was actually a law, it didn't need verification, proof, and that the amount of matter in the planets could therefore simply be computed by applying the inverse square law to motion.
Hershel looked at Baconian induction and said that the concept induced had the greatest validity where it was in agreement with all of the facts but one, and then that fact was found. In this view, Newton had induced a process that was in agreement with all facts, the movement of the moons around the planets and the movement of the planets around the sun. The only thing that the concept didn't agree with was the position of the planets. However, because Newton's induced concepts could be used to predict the position of any planet at any time, the missing fact was continually being proven and Newtonian Mechanics provided a self-generating proof of its own validity.
That's why the claim is made that the Newtonian scheme is the most proven theory in history.
Strip Newtonian Mechanics away, however, and we find the same process we have if we want to find out the timing of the tides, we show up and measure them. What has happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. The planets were here last year, they'll be hear next year.
And interpreting Newtonian Mechanics as producing a self-generating proof of its own validity, and relying on Whewell's persistently lengthy claim that Newton derived his procedure from Baconian induction, Baconian induction becomes the production of simple statements of fact that agree with measurable phenomena, the planets and the moons would be moving in a straight-line but for the fact that they are falling toward the sun or the planets which they aren't because they are moving in a straight line.
Induction becomes computer modeling where piles of ad hoc bullcrap concepts are tweaked to adjust the model to observed reality, and in the process, turned into facts.
This is called enumerative induction today, but currently generalized as induction by Empiricists. Bacon characterized it as nothing but static description, requiring his concept of induction to be capable of growing with the facts.
The reason everyone has trouble applying Baconian induction is that Baconian induction involves the generation of concepts to explain facts, concepts are only as good as the facts they explain, and concepts can never be facts.
The reason everyone has trouble applying Baconian induction, for crying out loud, is that Baconian induction requires the use of the mind!
However, the evolution of Galileo's belief that he could, by mathematics alone, in the confines of his study, demonstrate things which he could not measure, his belief that a ball would travel around the Earth forever in a frictionless path, to be facts into Hershel's belief that a concept derived from a number of facts that explained a missing fact became a fact when the missing fact was found, all in the name of Bacon, thanks to Whewell's belief that Newton had turned a concept, that gravity is a property of matter, into a fact using Baconian induction has formed our picture of physical reality with a mindless process that produces a picture of physical reality that has no basis in fact.
Today, we say we isolate a couple of facts, bad enough in itself, derive a testable hypothesis from those facts, testable meaning that the facts deductively predict an unknown fact that can be verified, or in the current vogue, a hypothesis that can be falsified, and then test for the fact or attempt to falsify the hypothesis. If the predicted fact is found, which it generally will be sooner or later, after all, that's what we were looking for in the first place, then the hypothesis itself becomes fact. If the hypothesis escapes falsification, if its stands the test of time because it is so fanciful that no test in reality can dislodge it, the mass/gravity fantasy being the preeminent example, it becomes fact.
What we end up with are a bunch of nutty propositions accepted as fact because they predicted a fact that was eventually found to be true (facts like quarks, black holes, dark matter, the sort of thing that can never be falsified), and a bunch of nonsensical notions like event horizons for black holes, the pervasive big bang explanation for the formation of matter in space to compliment the fact that when matter is exploded on Earth it comes apart, or even the venerable swirling mass of gas.
Empirical Science, by its refusal to recognize that it takes concepts to understand facts, the Baconian inductive process designed to grow concepts until they approximate reality, and instead believing induction to be a process that proves concepts to be fact by making them law, has conditioned itself to accept not just mistakes about physical reality like the sun travels around the Earth, but any absurd statement that happens along.
Facts never have to be proven. If they are, they exist, they are measurable, they are facts.
Concepts can never be proven to be facts.
Concepts can never be proven to be facts.
Concepts can never be proven to be facts.
Spin around three times and say it again.
There is no process, no procedure, no hocus-pocus bullshit legerdemain that will turn a concept into a fact.
There are things that we will never know for certain.
However, if we make up things and then believe them to be fact, there are certain things we will never know at all!
Mass/gravity is a concept, not a fact. Angular momentum conserved in closed systems is a concept, not a fact. The swirling mass of gas is a concept, not a fact. Inertia or momentum, or any combination of either is a concept, not a fact. Deduction, induction, falsification, indodeduction are all concepts, not processes that produce facts. All objects in space traveling in straight lines but for the fact that they aren't isn't even a concept, its simply ridiculous, and to claim that current motion is the product of historic force is to proclaim massive ignorance.
If we want to figure out the current forces in the universe that cause matter to move then we are going to have to recognize that there are current forces in the universe that cause matter to move!
Copyright 1997 Peter Bros