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6. WE CAN
SEE LIGHT FROM STARS AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE BEGINNING OF TIME
AND FIBBER MCGEE AND MOLLY ARE OUT THERE SOMEWHERE
A MEASURABLE PHYSICAL REALIT Y
What happens when we light a match?
The match stem ignites, begins to burn and the match begins to emit light.
What physical presence does the light have?
The light has a physical presence in every direction that is not blocked by matter such as the match stem itself.
What geometric shape is produced when something has a physical presence in all directions?
When something has a physical presence in all directions, it forms a sphere. A sphere is a three-dimensional surface all points of which are equidistant from a fixed point.
Doesn't light fill the sphere?
Light produces something more than just a static sphere because the light is moving at approximately one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. At each instant the match is burning, it is emitting a sphere that is expanding like an inflating balloon out and away from the surface of the match at the speed of light. And because the match is burning over a period of time and is emitting a new expanding sphere each instant it is burning, the light that is being emitted from a burning match is a series of expanding spheres traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second away from the surface of the burning match.
What do we know about spheres?
We can determine various measurements relating to spheres by reference to specific mathematical formulas. We can determine a sphere's radius, its volume, and most importantly, we can determine the area of its surface.
What is the formula for computing the area of the surface of a sphere, in this case, a sphere of light?
The area of a surface of a sphere of light is 4 r 2 which is four times the constant pi times the radius, the distance to the center of the sphere, squared.
If there are two spheres of light being emitted from a match, how do they compare with one another?
The formula for determining the areas of all spheres with a common center has two constants, four and pi. The only term that differs is the radius, the distance to the center of each sphere. Thus, any sphere created by the surface of an expanding sphere of light being emitted by a match is related to all other spheres in that expanding sphere of light by reference to its radius squared, the square of its distance from the common center.
As a sphere of light from a burning match expands, its surface expands with the square of its distance from the match.
What does the surface area of an expanding sphere of light tell us about the light itself?
The surface area of any sphere in an expanding sphere of light is the surface area over which the light is distributed. All of the light that was emitted at any instant the match was burning is distributed over the surface of the expanding sphere, and as the sphere expands, its area becomes larger with the square of its distance from the match. The light is, therefore, being increasingly distributed over an expanding surface area, an area that is expanding in proportion to the square of the distance from the center of the sphere.
What is the effect on the presence of the light on a given surface area as the surface area of the expanding sphere becomes larger?
The larger the area the light has available for expansion, the less light there is available for any given area in the expanding sphere of light. As an expanding sphere of light grows larger, the same amount of light, distributed uniformly over that surface, becomes less for any given area of the surface.
What is the relationship, then, of the light that makes up an expanding sphere of light?
With the area of the sphere expanding with the square of its distance from the match, the light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it expands. As the distance over which the light expands becomes larger, the amount of light becomes less and the amount that the light becomes less is in inverse proportion to the amount the distance from the match becomes larger squared.
This leads to the physically measurable observation that the amount of light at any point from its source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source.
THAT WHICH DIMINISHES UNIFORMLY DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY
We have all been treated to the challenge of figuring out how long it would take to drink a quart of milk if each swallow were exactly one-half the prior swallow. Saying that we would never finish the quart of milk because half of half is always something plays into the hands of those anchored firmly in unreality because such word and number tricks ignore continuity and perspective, the inability to continually take half a swallow and the perspective of massive lips drinking molecules and atoms.
We don't have the foggiest idea what light is, but this shouldn't stop us from concluding that, because it diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it moves, distance will eventually eliminate the light and the light will cease to exist.
It doesn't take a knowledge of what light is to realize that with light diminishing inversely as it expands with the square of the distance from its source, it will eventually expand out of existence.
This is not too hard to test, and has, in fact, been tested in reality repeatedly in measurements of candle power over distance. This is not an interpretation of fact or a conclusion about a fact, beliefs such as interference patterns or angular momentum, but rather a simple, measurable fact.
When we are too far away from a source of light to see the light, our failure to see the light results not from a failure of acuity on the part of our eyeball, but on the fact that the light has simply expanded out of existence. We could get some binoculars or a telescope and improve our distance a little, gathering in some of the remaining rays that are too weak to register on our naked eyes, but even the strongest telescope in the world can't see light that isn't there, and light that has expanded out of existence is just that, simply no longer there.
Just as we won't see light from a match when the match has gone out, we won't see light from a match if we are so far away from the match that the light has expanded out of existence before it reaches us.
AN INTERESTING QUESTION
If light expands over the surface of an expanding sphere, diminishing inversely with the square of the distance as it does so, then how is it that empiricists delude themselves into believing that they can see light from stars at the end of the universe and the beginning of time?
The fact that those deluding themselves into believing that they can take relationships, the space between objects and the changing space between moving objects, space and time, and quantify them so that they have an end and a beginning, will easily delude themselves into believing that they can see forever doesn't entirely answer the question.
Delusions need a basis in belief to take hold.
The basis for the delusion that light travels forever is found in the belief that finding a fact predicted by a belief proves the belief because it allows facts to be drafted into the service of beliefs.
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CAN'T BLAME THIS ONE ON NEWTON
It's truly a reflection of the ability of the consensus to fashion the shape of the world after its desires that the only assertion Newton made that was close to reality was the only assertion Newton made that the consensus denied.
Newton, because he needed little corpuscles of matter to compute the amount of matter in the Earth and moon by volume to prove that gravity was proportional to, and therefore a property of, matter, thought of everything, including light, as made up of little corpuscles.
Light as a particle, he reasoned, would account for why light bounced off of an obstacle, casting shadows as it did so. Light as a particle didn't, however, explain interference patterns, little ripples of light produced at the edge of the shadow as if the light were going around the obstacle, an effect that was pronounced when the obstacle was something like a pole, where the light had a tendency to move as if it had curled around the obstacle altogether. Interference was more analogous to water waves which could pass a pole unaffected.
More decisive in determining whether light was a particle or a wave was the interesting fact that for light to be a particle, it had to be something, it had to be emitted, and it had to therefore be part of whatever it was that was doing the emitting.
The question of whether light was a particle or a wave was actually a question of whether light was something or nothing!
If light were like a water wave, then it didn't have to be anything because water waves were merely a disturbance of the water and had no independent existence outside the water. The water was merely a medium for the waves produced by the disturbance with the waves merely passing through the water as a temporary disturbance.
To make a determination that light was actually something, that it existed as something physical in physical reality would require finding out just what that physical something was. That was a little too much like work. If Empirical Science can get away with making up some nonsensical term, gravity, for the most important force in our existence, the force that makes objects drop, and delude itself into believing that it understands what that force is by reference to the word, why can't it do the same for another obvious force in our existence, light?
If the choice comes down to explaining how something worked that didn't exist and how something worked that did exist, then it was a no-brainer.
It's a whole lot easier to explain something that doesn't exist!
We couldn't call light water waves, though, because light obviously has no similarity at all to water waves. We don't drown in light unless we're poets, and poets aren't empirical.
But, if we can't call light water waves, we can still say light is like water waves and accomplish the same thing.
PROVING THE WATER WAVE ANALOGY OF LIGHT
Arguing whether light was a particle or a water wave was getting old by the beginning of the nineteenth century when Young devised his two-slit experiment to show that light behaved just like water waves behaved.
Young took a single source of light, passed it through two slits in a barrier, allowed the light to intermingle after it passed through the two slits and collected the resulting light on a screen. The screen showed an interference pattern, a pattern of dark lines interrupting the light.
Young interpreted this to be analogous to the result of two sets of water waves intersecting each other. When water waves intersect, the troughs and peaks reinforce one another, but when the troughs and peaks intersect, they cancel one another out so that the surface of the water appears as if there had been no wave.
The dark bands of no light appeared as if there were no light, so that the peaks in the waves of light from one of the slits had to be canceling out the troughs in the waves of the light from the other slit.
"Appears" is the operative word, a word that, when applied to the absence of light produced by Young's two-slit experiment, illustrates the empirical process at its most delusional.
Water waves are a disturbance of a medium, and for that medium to be disturbed, it has to be contained by a force, gravity. Water waves are actually an interplay in the water medium of two forces, the temporary disturbance of the current force of gravity and then the current force of gravity regaining ascendancy over the temporary force of the disturbance until gravity once again constrains the contained water.
Young's experiment dealt with light which had no medium, and if it did, the medium was constrained by no force, and if it was, the force constraining the medium had not been disturbed.
More delusional, the dark lines of no light were analogized to the appearance of no waves when the crests and troughs of the intersecting water waves canceled each other out.
But when the intersecting water waves produced no waves, there was still water!
When there was no light on Young's collection screen, there was just that, no light!
The analogy of light to water waves made by Young's two-slit experiment is not only baseless, it is incomprehensible.
But the desire of Empirical Science to avoid dealing with reality for fear of being held accountable for any actual explanations of that reality prevailed.
It concluded that Young's two-slit experiment demonstrated conclusively that light was just like a water wave.
This left a nagging question about the analogy because, while light didn't exist if it were a wave, it still existed.
IF LIGHT DOESN'T EXIST, THEN THE MEDIUM THROUGH WHICH IT MOVES MUST
Water waves don't exist because they are merely the effect of a disturbance in a medium. If light was analogous to water waves, which Young's two-slit experiment proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, after all, all you had to do was perform the experiment and the interference patterns invariably appeared showing light to be like water waves, if light was a disturbance of a medium like water waves was a disturbance of a medium, then light had to be moving through a medium.
Here, Empirical Science came into its own.
If something has to exist then Empirical Science can do its job and name it, and that name for all time can be used to understand what is going on with the name becoming a substitute for reality.
For light to move from one place to another as a wave, it had to be moving through a medium which, after reference to duly constituted authority, was determined to be the aether, the ether a latter-day Sparks sent his radio waves through early in the twentieth century.
Here was something for Empirical Science to spend its time measuring. It didn't matter that it was just made-up stuff created to justify the idea that light was like a water wave. Even though light permeated the environment, was, in fact, a requirement before that environment could even be seen, was what we used to see physical reality, we didn't know what it was, so we said, it didn't exist, but because it didn't exist, the aether must, and therefore it's time to get down to the business of measuring the properties of this reality in reality, this palatable substance with a name that makes it understandable.
Measuring aether occupied wave theorists for the better part of the nineteenth century. Its tensile strength, its density, its resiliency, its pervasiveness, its constitution, even its speed and direction of motion were measured, debated and remeasured.
Its existence was used as the basis of one of the most famous experiments in history where Michelson and Morley used interference patterns produced by light being sent through the aether at ninety degree angles in an attempt to measure the speed and direction of the Earth in space. Instead of demonstrating the speed and direction of the Earth in space, the experiment demonstrated conclusively that space and time, the space between matter and the interval that occurs when that space changes, not only existed as objective quantities in reality, but were variables, a fitting result of creating the fantasy of aether in the first place.
The experiment really demonstrated that the aether didn't exist!
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A SEPARATE COURSE OF REALITY
While wave theorists were noodling aether and creating physical time and space, some people were fiddling around with physical reality, using the process of trial and error to uncover actual facts.
People had been parlor playing with magnets and electrostatic gimmickry for centuries. However, it was not until Volta produced a steady flow of electricity with a battery around the same time Young was jerryrigging his two-slit experiment to prove light was a wave that the play could become serious.
PLAYING WITH ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETS
Once a steady flow of electricity was achieved early in the nineteenth century, the first thing that was noticed about electricity and magnets was that the flow of electricity in a conductor would deflect a magnetic compass needle.
We had (and have) no idea whatsoever what was flowing through the wire, and we had (and have) no idea whatsoever why a compass needle lined up with the Earth's magnetic field (for which we had and have no explanation), but we could see that putting a compass needle next to a conductor with a flow of electricity in it deflected the compass needle.
This led to several decades of playing around with conductors and magnets, and resulted in the observations that resulted directly in our electric generation based civilization.
One observation dealt with the movement of a conductor and a magnet. Magnets have lines of force which are easily measurable by dusting a piece of paper with iron filings and letting the magnetic lines of force pass through the paper to organize the iron filings. If the conductor was closed in a circuit, then moving it at right angles to the measurable lines of force that surrounded a magnet resulted in an electric current.
Cutting magnetic lines of force at a right angle with a closed conductor somehow produced a flow of electricity that was the same electricity Volta's battery produced.
What would happen if an electric current carrying conductor rather than a magnet were used to influence the iron filings? A flow of electricity passing through a conductor placed perpendicular to the paper containing the iron filings caused the iron filings to line up in concentric circles around the current carrying wire.
This meant that a flow of electricity had lines of force surrounding it similar to a magnet.
What would happen if a conductor in a closed circuit were to be moved at a right angle through the lines of force produced by another conductor carrying electricity?
Joseph Henry demonstrated that passing a conductor in a closed circuit at a right angle through the lines of force produced by another conductor carrying electricity produced an electrical flow in the conductor, releasing the genie that produced the miracle of modern civilization.
WHAT'S GOING ON WITH MAGNETS AND CONDUCTORS?
We don't know what electricity is and we don't know what magnets are but we do know that we can produce electricity by moving a conductor at a right angle through the lines of force produced by a magnet, or in the alternative, at a right angle through the lines of force produced by a conductor.
What we got was a total violation of the law dealing with the conservation of energy.
We got energy appearing out of nowhere!
This little problem was easily overcome by the empirical process of naming, calling electricity a form of energy and equating the amount of work electricity could produce when electric motors were fabricated to the amount of work a horse could do. If we have a one horsepower motor, we know what we are dealing with. We don't have to worry about where the energy is coming from. Electricity is one of the forces of nature, and we have just learned how to tap into that force.
Who needs to understand so long as we can know simply by naming things?
WHAT DO WE KNOW?
The lines of force that surround a conductor that contains an electric flow are called inductance.
As opposed to gravity and light, which are obvious, inductance is the most important nonobvious phenomena in our existence.
Instead of holding inductance up for examination, asking what it was, where it came from, how it worked, what caused it to produce electrical flows, Empirical Science analogized it to the lines of force around a magnet.
There is nothing wrong with this analogy, for the two are indeed the same thing.
However, by analogizing inductance to magnetic lines of force, Empirical Science answered all of the questions it had about inductance because it had already answered all the questions it needed to ask about magnetic lines of force.
Magnetic lines of force came with magnets. Magnetic material produced a disturbance in the great whatever that evoked these lines of force. All that was happening in a conductor was a different way to evoke lines of force out of the great whatever.
What else did Empirical Science need to know?
If instead of analogizing inductance to magnetic lines of force Empirical Science had analogized magnetic lines of force to inductance, then it would have left itself open to the question of where these lines of force came from, something that would then take mental effort to solve.
Mental effort is not empirical because the mind doesn't exist, and if it did, it couldn't be trusted. Better to leave it up to predictive facts to prove ideas.
Better to use the mental effort to derive the properties of that which doesn't exist, the aether, angular momentum, straight-line motion, than to attempt to solve problems of physical reality, things like what makes dropped objects move, planets rotate and orbit, and what shines from the sun.
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A SEDUCTIVE CONCEPT
One question could have clarified the nature of inductance.
As electrical flows were started and stopped, their associated inductances were established and collapsed around the flows. If moving a conductor through an inductance could cause a flow of electricity, could a flow of electricity be produced by allowing establishing and collapsing inductances to pass through a conductor?
Establishing and collapsing inductances did, indeed, produce a flow of electricity in conductors maintained at right angles to the conductor establishing and collapsing the induction.
This little trick couldn't be duplicated with a magnet because magnetic lines of force were permanent. It is the starting and stopping of the electrical flows that establishes and collapses the inductances.
There was no way to establish or collapse the magnetic lines of force around a magnet.
Magnetic lines of force simply existed!
This physical limitation should have eliminated magnetic lines of force from the playing field, reducing them to a historical curiosity along the lines of electrostatic generators.
But the idea of establishing and collapsing inductances implies a motivating force at work, something that can actually accomplish something, move something in physical reality, evoking tantalizing fantasies of some self-perpetuating cosmic water pump.
We have no idea at all where the electricity is coming from, but it is capable of doing work. It is very seductive to think of work being performed by collapsing and establishing inductances. We don't know what inductances are, we have already confused them with magnetic lines of force whose explanation also escapes us, but the whole business results in work, so the idea of the movement that occurs when inductances are established and collapsed is something, something happening in reality, something we can wrap our minds around.
So Empirical Science performed a little bit of reductionism, a practice dear to the hearts of its faithful.
An electric field, the flow of electricity, produces inductance, a magnetic field.
A magnetic field, the magnetic lines of force, produces an electric field, a flow of electricity.
Thus, every field, magnetic or electric, induces a corresponding electric or magnetic field, giving rise to Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetic waves.
The mind just rolls along in the universe as it follows wave after wave, pushed first by a collapsing magnetic field establishing an electric field, and then pushed by the collapsing electric field establishing a magnetic field which in turn collapses establishing an electric field, on and on forever.
The sophistry of this twaddle is self-evident.
First, defining everything as a field is absurd. A flow of electricity, the inductance produced by the flow and magnetic lines of force are at least two different things and the last two are also distinctly different in their operation.
Second, while inductances are like magnetic lines of force, magnetic lines of force are not like inductances in that they do not collapse and establish themselves. They simply exist in proportion to the magnetic material with which they are associated.
Third, while an electric flow actually induces an inductance into existence whatever that inductance might be, to get electricity out of magnetic lines of force something has to move the conductor back and forth at right angles through the magnetic lines of force. It takes work to get electricity out of magnetic lines of force which means it isn't induced.
Thus, half of the statement described by Maxwell's equations is wrong on its face. A magnetic field does not collapse and therefore does not itself induce an electric field.
Without an electric field induced by a collapsing magnetic field, Maxwell's equations produce the physical specter of one hand clapping, and the fantasy of a motive power pushing electromagnetic waves through endless space collapses.
NOTHING BECOMES A SMALL PART OF NOTHING
Maxwell's equations contemplate electromagnetic waves created as a result of the interaction between collapsing electric and magnetic fields, with wave lengths dependent on the rate at which the fields interact. A slow drop in a pool creates leisurely waves, while a fast drop creates faster waves. A drop's effect on the pool is soon dissipated as gravity overcomes the force of disturbance. With electromagnetic disturbances, however, the motive power is the interaction of the collapsing fields, which produces a wave which continues forever.
Thus, once generated, electromagnetic waves are self-perpetuating, with the alternating collapsing electric and magnetic fields pushing the wave through the aether until it splashes onto the end of space at the beginning of time.
In seeking to determine the properties of these waves, Maxwell, computing the speed they would have to be moving as a result of their alternating collapsing fields, predicted that they would move at the same speed light waves moved. Because the speed of light had been measured some two hundred years earlier, the prediction was akin to Galileo's mathematical prediction of the optimal angle for distance of cannonball fire proved by Tartaglia half a century earlier.
Not much chance of error!
The success of the prediction allowed Maxwell to view light as an electromagnetic phenomenon.
In fact, light was just an insignificant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, one we gave entirely too much importance to simply because light is how we subjectively see the world.
Thus, the decision that light was nothing was a correct decision, because even though it was something, it was only a small part of that something which, being a wave, was, in turn, also nothing, merely a disturbance of a medium.
Maxwell's vision of a self-perpetuating oscillating electromagnetic field moving forever through space, while seductive, falls short of reality in that it requires a motive power that is unnecessary, an interaction of two aspects of the same thing that cannot occur because magnetic fields do not collapse and still needs a medium which doesn't exist.
HERTZ DETECTS ELECTRIC OSCILLATIONS AT A DISTANCE
There is, however, a more elusive prediction on which Empirical Science bases its belief that light is an electromagnetic wave.
The fact that a Leyden jar, an early electrical storage device, could be used to produce electrical oscillations led Hertz to wonder if he couldn't devise something to detect the frequencies produced by those oscillations some distance away from the Leyden jar.
Although Maxwell's equations had been promulgated at the time of Hertz's trail and error effort to detect electric oscillations over a distance, Hertz did not believe that detecting the resulting frequencies over distance would prove Maxwell's equations. Rather, he stated that "I am never content until I have constructed a mechanical model of the object that I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand; otherwise I do not. Hence I cannot grasp the electromagnetic theory of light. I wish to understand light as fully as possible, without introducing things that I understand still less. Therefore, I hold fast to simple dynamics for there, but not in the electromagnetic theory, can I find a model."
Reasoning backward from the fact that a collapsing inductive field produced a flow of electricity, he devised a detector that would measure an induced flow in a circuit some distance from the source of the oscillations producing the frequencies.
Succeeding, Hertz went on to show that these frequencies behaved just like light, they reflected, refracted, even diffracted and moved at the same speed.
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EMPIRICAL SCIENCE DRAFTS HERTZ'S DETECTION AS PROOF OF MAXWELL'S EQUATIONS
The logical conclusion would have been that because frequencies produced by electrical oscillations were similar to light, that light must therefore be a frequency,
However, as reluctant as Hertz was in referring to light as electromagnetic waves, leading to his relative obscurity in relation to his incredible contributions, his heirs, with Maxwell's seductive fantasy in mind, concluded that because everyone knew that light traveled in waves, the frequencies produced by a Leyden jar or an oscillating inductive coil were also waves.
As they were waves, then Maxwell's equations were proven because they predicted Hertz's discovery, and as Maxwell's equations were proven, then light, in Maxwell's words, "consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena."
And, of course, because Maxwell's equations predicted Hertz's discovery, Empirical Science claims sole credit for the television industry.
AN ASSUMPTION THAT TRAVELS FOREVER
Just because light is but a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum doesn't mean that it is immune from the immutable laws applicable to the electromagnetic spectrum. If it is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, then like the electromagnetic spectrum, light can travel forever under its own motive power of alternating collapsing magnetic and electric fields.
But light doesn't travel forever!
While there is no question that frequencies can be produced by the interaction of inductive fields that propagate an expanding sphere away from the oscillator producing them, whether it be a Leyden jar or an inductive coil, light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it travels.
In fact, the oscillations that have been used to carry radio frequencies also diminish with the square of the distance over which they travel.
And yet, no matter how many textbooks on astronomy, optics or physics are produced, many with identical illustrations and cloned, precisely misworded phraseology, they only rarely contain a discussion of the fact that light diminishes with distance, and then as a statement rather than as a discussion. Diminishing light is treated as a curiosity in the fashion of the H. G. Wells measurement of gravity, where if mass/gravity were correct, then the center of the Earth would be mathematically weightless.
When your laws, principles and scientific facts have no basis in reality, the opposition of reality to those laws, principles and scientific facts become mere curiosities.
But diminish light does, so, as Empirical Science views the light from stars at the end of the universe and the beginning of time, it somehow has to take into consideration the fact that light diminishes, if only to give the fact lip service.
Because Empirical Science believes that light can travel forever as a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it has to carve out that part of light that is obviously diminishing.
Since ancient times, stargazers have graded stars by magnitude, with first magnitude stars being the brightest. For thousands of years, the assumption was that the brightest stars were the closest, and the less bright stars were further away until there were stars that could hardly be seen at all, which meant their light had expanded almost out of existence. This assumed stars were all the same size and burned at the same rate.
However, as telescopes were developed and improved, dimmer stars were brought into focus better, a process, one would think, that was the natural result of the telescope lens concentrating less light better.
But, instead of taking this straightforward point of view, the delusion crept into the empirical process that the stronger the telescope, the closer it was moving us to the stars. Thus, instead of a telescope concentrating light, it was seeing further into space. When Maxwell's equations grafted light onto a wave that traveled forever, the size of stars became problematical. It wasn't long before a near bright star was resolved by a powerful telescope into a galaxy of stars located very far away. If one star didn't obey the dimmer the star the further the distance dictate, then it was not a dictate, it was a canard like the canard about the sun going around the Earth, and had to be totally discarded.
Brightness was therefore something that was only apparent, like light. It didn't itself provide us information about comparative distance because it didn't take into consideration size and luminosity, the brightness resulting from the star's energy output.
If the stars weren't all the same size, with distance producing dimness, then the stars were all different sizes and burning with all sorts of different intensities.
The fact that Empirical Science was dealing with stars of different size, energy and intensity could be empirically proven right here on Earth.
A hot ember will look the same as a cooler ember if it is far enough away.
A large cool ember will look the same as a small hot ember if it is far enough away.
And, of course, a cool ember can be measured to be older than a hot ember.
As no one can disprove the claim that stars are different sizes or burn with different intensities, it is a safe assertion that all stars are different sizes and burn with different intensities.
It is a star's magnitude, its brightness, its luminosity that is diminishing with distance. The brightness itself is an illusion resulting from size, distance and inherent luminosity. But because the brightness diminishes inversely with the square of the star's distance, we can use this mathematically measurable fact to compute how large a star is, how intense that star is burning and by golly, even how old the star is.
Light might be part of the electromagnetic spectrum which travels forever, but brightness is intrinsic to a star, and it is this brightness that diminishes inversely with the square of its distance that allows us to further categorize the star as to size, energy and age.
The measurable fact that light diminishes doesn't conflict with the belief that light is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum and electromagnetic waves travel forever because it is the brightness, the luminosity, the magnitude that is diminishing!
This absurdity, where a measurable physical phenomena is ignored so that Empirical Science can see what doesn't exist, light at the end of the universe and the beginning of time, but employed to allow Empirical Science to measure that which can't be measured, the size, energy and age of stars, clusters and whole galaxies, heck, even the end of the universe and the beginning of time illustrates the delusional nature of believing that finding a fact predicted by a belief proves the belief.
The basic misconception, that light can travel forever while actually diminishing, illustrates an even greater misconception, the drafting of facts that appear similar to beliefs into the service of those beliefs as predictive facts, whether it be Hertz's detection of electrical oscillations at a distance to prove light is an electromagnetic wave or Young's jerryrigged two-slit experiment to prove that light is a wave to start with.
But then, when we are dealing with beliefs, made up stuff, anything goes!
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LIGHT IS SOMETHING
The consequences of not knowing what light is are conceptually catastrophic. We not only see physical reality with light, Empirical Science uses light to measure, or at least, to think it measures, all sorts of things, starting with the distance to other stars, continuing with what stars are made up of and concluding with which way the sun is moving in space, measurements which are all erroneous, with the latter error being mathematically demonstrable. (See the cover of At the Gates of the Citadel, the first volume of The Copernican Series.)
The belief that light does not exist, is not, in fact, something, but rather a disturbance of a medium, was not even shattered by another of Hertz's discoveries. Hertz's observation that light not only behaves as a particle, but is interchangeable with electricity, the photoelectric effect, should have put the wave silliness to rest once and for all.
But how can the wave silliness be put to rest in a system where beliefs are easily converted to facts by simple belief. Pass light through two slits and see the interference patterns. Light is a wave.
Bell rings, lick lips.
When an experiment is devised to demonstrate a fact, as Young's two-slit experiment was, then it becomes extremely hard to sit down and figure out just what is happening when light is divided, recombined and collected on a screen, especially when we don't think of light as something that diminishes uniformly with distance until it diminishes out of existence, but rather think of it as nothing at all.
Knowing that light is a wave from viewing Young's two-slit experiment, and knowing that light is a particle from the demonstrable physical output of turning light into electricity, Maxwell's heirs have concluded that light is both a wave and a particle. What more fitting conclusion to the conception of light as some sort of incomprehensible jumble of waves moving at right angles to each other throughout all three hundred and sixty compass degrees, and all points in between, than its conception as a nonexistent wave that is also an inconceivable particle, a particle having both location in space and movement in time, but never simultaneously.
The mistake, of course, is the hallmark of Empirical Science, assuming away that which it is too lazy to explain.
When it couldn't come up with a force causing the Earth to rotate on its axis, Empirical Science assumed the force away, making the force a historical force which it named inertia. When the motion of the planets couldn't be accounted for, Empirical Science assumed the force causing that motion away as straight line motion occurring as a result of a force exerted at some time in the past. When the mechanics of gravity could not be described, Empirical Science assumed away the force that makes all dropped objects move by claiming it was a property of the matter toward which the objects were moving.
When it came time to explain what light was, Empirical Science assumed its very existence away, calling it nothing more than a ripple in the occult pond of the universe.
And when Empirical Science assumed light away by analogizing it to a water wave, it assumed away any coherent explanation how light is produced, what causes it to exit physical matter at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second, how it can move through space in a way that it not only diminishes with distance, but does so precisely, inversely with the square of that distance, and more incredibly, does so uniformly.
When Empirical Science assumed light away, it assumed away any explanation for how light interacts with matter, how it not only bounces off of matter but interacts with the surface of that matter to produce heat, and how, if there is enough light, it causes that matter to itself start emitting light.
And, because in assuming away light, Empirical Science has eliminated coherent explanations for all of these things, it has also assumed away any reasonable explanation of what matter itself is, how it is made up, how it got that way, and how it can, itself, move with no apparent motive power as a falling object or as a rotating or orbiting planet or as light itself.
The ignorance that empirical laziness produces is insatiable. It consumes all available comprehension.
It's time to start asking the hard questions, and take the time to answer them, that will allow us to start to understand what the hell is going on around us, why objects, from rocks to planets, move, what the universe is and what we are.
It is only then that we might start to get a glimmer of what our place in the universe is.
Instead of assuming light is nothing, we have to assume that light is something, and then get busy finding out what that something is.
It's simply silly for Empirical Science to pretend that it knows what's going on at the end of the universe and the beginning of time when it doesn't have the foggiest idea what's going on right under its nose.
Unless, of course, it's practicing empirical misdirection, hocus pocusing the nondisprovable to call attention away from its abysmal ignorance of the most obvious phenomena in our existence, making Empirical Science a flimflamming freeloader of miraculous magnitude and catastrophic consequences, because, thinking we know everything, we will become extinct knowing nothing.
Copyright 1997 Peter Bros
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