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1. A PROPERTY THAT PRODUCES MOTION:
THE NONEXPLANATION FOR FALLING OBJECTS
NEVER HAVING TO ASK THE QUESTION
When we see an object fall, we don't have to ask the question why it falls
because we know the answer instinctively. It falls because of gravity. We
probably learn what gravity is before we learn about God because we become
aware of falling objects before we become aware of our own existence. We
have to keep away from falling objects, and keep from becoming a falling
object ourselves, if we want to continue to exist.
We know from our first thoughts why objects fall. They fall because they have weight.
We also know where objects fall. They fall down, toward the surface of the Earth.
When we become somewhat sophisticated, we can know something else. By measuring the rate at which objects fall, we can determine that objects accelerate when they fall, and they do so with the square of the distance over which they fall.
This tells us that whatever is making objects fall is diminishing inversely with the square of the distance from its source. Because objects fall toward the Earth, we can pretty much conclude that the source of the force has something to do with the Earth.
We know something else, too. We know that whatever the force is that is making objects fall, it is a current force. It is present in the here and now.
And, of course, we should be able to realize that because something is occurring in real time, that an object is accelerating while it is falling, that whatever is making it fall exists between the source and the object.
If it is doing something, then it must be something.
With all of these clues we might conclude that someone, somewhere would have long ago sat themselves down and figured out what was happening when a dropped object began to move.
Instead, we said nothing, that objects fall because of a force called gravity and gravity is a property of matter.
DEFINING THE FORCE AS A PROPERTY ASSUMES AWAY A RATIONAL EXPLANATION FOR
IT
A property is a quality that defines or describes an object or substance.
Gold is the color that identifies the matter we call gold. The color is
a property that defines the substance. Another of its properties is softness
or malleability. Steel has a property of hardness, ice a property of coldness.
Properties are physical characteristics we use to define classes of matter.
What does that have to do with falling objects? We don't pick up a piece of dirt or a rock, or point to a car or a house and say, look, see its property of gravity.
Causing motion is not an appropriate property of mater because it cannot be used to identify matter. Motion is something that is happening in reality. When something happens, we need a description that will tell us what is happening.
Gravity is not a property of matter, it is something that happens to matter. It can't be used to classify matter.
However, because things were moving in reality, we knew there was some force, invisible, that was causing the motion.
We were at a loss what that force was.
We therefore labeled the nonapparent, but necessary force that makes objects fall gravity so that we would have a word to use when we were talking about why objects fall.
That word contains no explanation about what the force is, how it is generated, how it moves from one place to another, how it acts on matter to make it move, or what it is doing when it is not acting.
Saying that gravity is a property of matter is saying absolutely nothing about the force that makes objects fall. It is a senseless statement, a meaningless phrase, it has no content, it is empty, the sugar cube at the core of modern empirical science.
How is it that we can be blind enough to create an explanation for the most basic force in our existence that makes no sense in reality, does not provide a physical explanation for what is causing the force or explain how that force operates, that is basically the assignment of a name, and place that explanation at the center of our understanding of the universe?
GALILEO'S FLIGHT OF FANTASY, BRAHE'S MATHEMATICAL MISPERCEPTION
The empirical fanatasy that is the mass/gravity concept is the result of
a convergence of a flight of fancy on the part of Galileo, the man history
credits as being most forceful in bringing down the old belief that the
sun traveled around the Earth and of a misperception on the part of Brahe,
the last man to defend the old belief to the death.
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GALILEO'S FLIGHT OF FANCY -- PERPETUAL MOTION
In attempting to prove that the sun didn't move around the Earth, Galileo sought to prove that it was the rotation of the Earth on its axis that gave the sun the appearance of movement. However, if he were to explain the sun's appearance of movement on the basis of the Earth's rotation, then he had to explain the Earth's rotation.
Because the force that causes planetary rotation is, like gravity, a nonapparent force, Galileo decided to assume it away rather than explain it. Unlike gravity, which made objects fall on you and thus couldn't be readily assumed away, nobody had ever been killed by the force that caused the Earth to spin. Galileo therefore took the tack that if something had set the Earth spinning, it would continue to spin so long as there wasn't anything to stop it from spinning. As space was devoid of anything, there wasn't anything in space to keep the Earth from spinning.
This sort of mental delusion is beneath contempt.
Objects don't move as a result of a force from the past.
They move with respect to a current force.
We see something moving in space, we are too lazy to sit down and figure out what is causing it to move, so we reverse reality and say, well, duh, it's moving, isn't it, so it'll keep right on moving unless something stops it from moving. The only time we'll have to trouble the old noodle is if we measure something slowing down. Then we can look for what's slowing it down, even though we still don't know what's making it move!
As proof for his claim of the Earth's perpetual motion, Galileo rolled balls down an inclined plane and measured how they moved when they rolled off the end of the plane. A half a century earlier, a man named Tartaglia had gone out onto the proving grounds and, by trial and error, determined that for distance the optimal angle for shooting off a cannon was forty-five degrees. Galileo was able to predict the same measurement in the confines of his study by reference to the rolling balls.
Galileo then promulgated one of the greatest misconceptions in history, stating that, because by mathematics alone he was able to predict the optimum angle of Tartaglia's cannonballs, that mathematics could be used to confirm as fact that which could not be directly measured.
Carrying this misconception to its next logical level, Galileo claimed that by mathematically extrapolating from his rolling balls he could state with absolute certainty that, if he were able to construct a frictionless path around the Earth, then his balls, once imparted with motion from the inclined plane, would roll around that path forever!
Galileo called the quality that allowed matter to move perpetually in frictionless space and thus the Earth to perpetually rotate on its axis, inertia.
Qualities, of course, are nothing but properties. There is no question that the Earth rotates on its axis. Galileo was simply attempting to come up with an explanation why it was doing so. But inertia, like gravity, is just a word to describe the physical result of an unknown force acting on matter, and has no meaning in and of itself, provides no explanation for what is causing movement, and in fact, with the Earth's rotation, assumes that cause occurred some time in the past, from Galileo's perspective, when God created the universe.
The error Galileo made was to believe a concept, inertia, could, by a system of mathematical extrapolation, be proven to be fact. Concepts are not facts, and can never be proven to be fact. Concepts are only mistaken to be facts by the gullible and the gulled.
Mathematical extrapolation works fine in producing technology because failures, not working in reality, allow trial and error to pinpoint success. In science, mathematical extrapolation just produces nondisprovable hypotheses which, because they withstand the test of time, which means they can't be disproven, become facts. Instead of the measurable fact that objects come to rest with respect to the forces acting on them, we create a nondisprovable hypothesis, objects move unless a force acts on them, and because it can never be disproven, label it a fact, or better, a law, reversing reality in the process.
Mathematical extrapolation doesn't work when it's used to make up stuff like perpetual motion.
Inertia went out the window when Galileo was called upon for demonstrable proof of the Earth's rotation in reality. He turned to the tides for the proof of the Earth's rotation because the tides act precisely as if the Earth's rotation were causing them. However, realizing that the sloshing of the tides would have constituted friction that would have long since overcome his hypothetical inertia, Galileo abandoned this line of thought, leaving his fanciful inertia hanging in nondisprovable space, an occult piece of fruit ripe for plucking by the gullible and gulled.
BRAHE'S MISPERCEPTION THAT THE MOON SPEEDS UP AND SLOWS DOWN
Brahe, the last defender of the preCopernican system, perpetuated the misperception
that planets can speed up and slow down based on the appearance of a change
in the movement of the moon much as the preCopernicans based their belief
that the Earth was the center of the universe based on the appearance of
the sun moving around the Earth.
Assume for a moment that we are all on a ship sailing slowly across a peaceful ocean. The pace, in fact, is so peaceful that we think we are standing still, just as the preCopernicans thought that the Earth was standing still in an ocean of space.
Being somewhat bored, we decide to start lifeboat races back and forth beside the ship. During trial heats we find that the teams always take less time to go from stem to stern than they take to go from stern to stem. Thinking this might be a product of the rowers becoming tired, we reverse the race, starting them at the back of the boat rowing to the front, and then again to the back.
We still find that the teams always take less time going from stem to stern, from front to back, than from stern to stem.
The mathematical formula that expresses movement is time times distance equals rate. If the time varies over the same distance, then the rate has to be changing. However, if the rate doesn't change, as would be indicated by reversing the starting point for the rowers, then the change in time has to be the result of a change in distance.
When we saw the teams taking less time one way than the other, and concluded they were slowing down because they were tired, we were assuming that the distance didn't change, that the distance between the stem and stern was as it appeared, the same as the distance between the stern and the stem.
The only clue we had that the distance might be changing, that the ship might in fact be moving, was the fact that changing the starting point didn't affect the outcome. The fast leg was always the leg from stem to stern, the leg from the direction in which the ship might be moving.
Knowing the ship was moving would have allowed us to know that the trip from stem to stern covered less distance because the stern was moving toward the lifeboat while the lifeboat was moving toward it and that when the lifeboat was moving from stern to stem, the stem was moving in the same direction the lifeboat was moving and the lifeboat had to go the added distance to catch up with it.
Even if we couldn't know, from appearance, that the ship was moving, faced with the fact that different times were being produced by the same apparent rate would have forced us to conclude that the ship was actually moving.
This is the type of mathematical extrapolation that works!
Tycho Brahe didn't have the clue provided by something taking different times to move the same apparent distance depending on the direction of travel when he set about measuring the speed at which the moon was traveling. Because the moon was traveling in a circle, he reasonably assumed that the distance the moon was traveling in its orbit was always the same distance.
Thus, when he found it speeding up in the summer and slowing down in the winter, it never dawned on him that the change in speed wasn't a change in speed at all, but rather a change in distance resulting from the movement of the Earth in its orbit around the sun, and the movement of the sun in space.
He thought the Earth was sitting stationary in space!
How could Brahe believe anything other than what he measured, that the moon was speeding up and slowing down. The facts were right in front of his eyes, as they are in front of ours. All anyone has to do is go out and measure the time it takes for the moon to complete an orbit after the winter solstice, and compare it to the time it takes for the moon to complete an orbit after the summer solstice to find out it slows down in the winter as the planet moves toward the winter solstice and speeds up in the summer as the planet moves toward the summer solstice.
The distance the moon is traveling in its orbit can't vary simply because its orbit is a circle. A circle is defined by the distance to its center and thus the distance something travels when it is going in a circle can't vary
This is the opposite of mathematical extrapolation. Measure something and draw the first conclusion that comes to mind. For thousands of years we went out and measured the sun moving across the sky and concluded it moved around the Earth.
Why shouldn't we conclude the moon is speeding up and slowing down in its orbit?
Certainly not because it is absurd to believe that something we think is moving as a result of a historical force could regularly change that rate of motion.
Certainly not because there is no source for the energy required to speed the moon back up once it has slowed down.
Rational thought is eclipsed by the measurable fact that the moon speeds up and slows down from season to season.
However, if the sun were in fact moving through space, then the distance the moon traveled in its orbit would be shortened by the distance the sun traveled while the Earth was moving away from the direction of the sun's motion, and the distance the moon traveled in its orbit would be increased by the distance the sun traveled while the Earth was moving toward the direction of the sun's motion.
This is in fact what happens as the Earth moves around the sun. Like the lifeboat example, as the Earth moves toward the summer solstice, it is moving away from the direction of the sun's motion, and thus the distance it travels, and the distance the moon also travels, is shorter than the distance the moon travels when the Earth has to catch up with the sun's motion as the Earth travels toward the winter solstice.
In fact, the differential in times allows us to calculate the speed of the sun!
So Brahe, instead of using mathematics as a tool of reason, used it to reverse reality, leading him to conclude that the Moon sped up and slowed down in its orbit.
So what?
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KEPLER COMPOUNDS BRAHE'S MISPERCEPTION
Kepler carried Brahe's misperception into his measurements of the orbit
of Mars.
Mars, which has the most irregular appearing orbit of any of the planets because the Earth's motion makes it appear to travel backwards at times is also subject to the same misperception of measurement as the moon. While Mars appears to speed up and slow down in its orbit, it in fact is actually moving at a uniform rate with the time difference being the result of it traveling different distances due to the sun's motion.
Kepler had computed the speeds of the known planets and found that the further they were placed from the sun, the slower they moved. In addition, he had discovered that the orbits of the planets were not circular, something that even Galileo hadn't suspected. Kepler found that the orbits of the planets were ellipses. We can visualize these orbits if we think of the orbits being circular but for the fact that the sun is moving slowly through space. As the sun moves through space, it is dragging the planets slightly behind it so that their orbits are slightly stretched out, with one portion of the orbit being closer to the sun than the opposite portion.
Because of his measurement of the planets' speeds becoming slower with their distance from the sun, Kepler took the misperception that Mars sped up and slowed down in its orbit just like the moon did and created a mental image of the planets speeding up and slowing down in their orbits in concert with their distance from the sun.
If anyone wanted proof for the statement, all he had to do was look at the different speeds of the planets in their orbits. The further they were from the sun, the slower they went and the closer they were to the sun, the faster they went.
It is one thing for different planets to go different speeds at different distances from the sun and quite another for one planet to speed up and slow down in the same orbit, but in his desire to produce a universal mathematical law, Kepler only had to point to the variable speed of the moon as proof that planets could speed up and slow down.
The mathematical law that Kepler created was totally without basis in reality. He said that a planet's speed was proportional to its distance from the sun. The closer it came to the sun, the faster it moved. The further it went from the sun, the slower it moved. This resulted in the fact, easily demonstrated mathematically on paper because the orbits were ellipses, that any two equal times in a planet's orbit would produce areas swept out by the planet's movement that were also equal.
This law, that a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times is disprovable simply by sticking a stake in the ground and timing the movement of the sun. The sun reaches its northern most point during the summer solstice and its southern most point at the winter solstice. These two points are on opposite sides of the Earth's orbit so that, if Kepler's laws were correct, if the Earth were sweeping out equal areas in equal times, the times it takes for the Earth to move between these two points in its orbit, each describing exactly one half of the area of its orbit, should be equal. However, it takes about forty more hours for the Earth to move between the summer and winter solstices than it does for the Earth to move between the winter and summer solstices because the sun is moving in the direction of the winter solstice.
If Kepler's law is so easily disproven, how come it is still a law? Laws, by definition are correct, and being the consensus of the scientific community, reality must fall if it fails to agree. Empirical science, claiming to base itself in reality by measuring facts, actually just creates nondisprovable hypotheses which then become incontrovertible facts, facts which, because they are true regardless of reality, dictate reality itself.
Conforming planetary motion to Kepler's laws actually increases the time differential between opposite points in the Earth orbit to seventy two hours, disproving itself by its own operation!
One mathematical relationship inherent in Kepler's laws is the fact that an ellipse is a conic section which, because it is circular, has an area that is described by the square of its variable radius. The perceptive can quickly see that, by equating the areas swept out by a planet's passage with the time of the planet's passage, Kepler had inadvertently dictated that the change in speed that occurs as a planet speeds up and slows down had to be related to the square of its radius from the focus of the ellipse, the sun, because the area of a circle is determined by a constant, pi, and the square of its radius.
By making up a law that tied the speed of a planet and its distance from the sun to the area swept out by its passage, Kepler had forced the planet to not only speed up and slow down in its orbit, something it wasn't doing in the first place, but to speed up and slow down in a specific manner, at rates that were proportional to the square of its distance from the sun.
Thus, Kepler inadvertently created the same relationship for a planet supposedly accelerating toward the sun as existed for a rock falling to the surface of the Earth. The reason for the relationship wasn't the same, with a rock falling in an expanding sphere of force which diminished inversely with the square of its distance from the direction toward which the rock fell, and the planets doing so by dint of complying with a law equating the areas they swept out, but by the time Newton finished with the relationship, reason wasn't an issue.
NEWTON'S ALREADY DONE IT!
Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and Edmund Halley, the early movers of the
British Royal Society, sat around one day speculating that it was the matter
in the sun that made the planets move in their orbits. Kepler had posited
that it was something about the sun's rays that caused the planets to move,
but this was easily discarded as a hypothesis because the moon was orbiting
the Earth and the Earth didn't look anything like the sun.
As the Earth wasn't a ball of fire, and the sun was, there must be something else the two had in common that made objects fall toward them. Well, they must both be made up of matter. If it could be mathematically shown that planets, following Kepler's laws, accelerated the same way that a rock falls to the surface of the Earth, then could not the force that caused a rock to fall be the same force that was causing the planets to fall toward the sun?
And couldn't that force therefore be produced by the matter toward which the objects were falling?
Haley undertook to ask the occult mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, if such a proof were possible, and was told that he, Newton, had worked it out some time before.
Brahe's misperception that the moon sped up and slowed down in its orbit set in concrete the rather silly idea that the planets were falling toward the surface of the sun in the same way that rocks fall to the surface of the Earth. The fact that whatever the force was that makes objects fall is a straight line force, and the planets are going in near circles, didn't provide a pause for reflection. When things work so well in our minds, when the delusions we produce strike the soul of the consensus as being elegant, then looking up at reality as it exists becomes irrelevant.
Newton was able to state that he had already worked out the inverse square law with respect to falling planets, and according to Kepler's laws, the planets were dropping like rocks toward the sun.
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BUT WHAT'S THE PROOF THAT THE FORCE IS PRODUCED BY MATTER?
Showing that the planets were accelerating the same way falling rocks accelerated
on Earth did not show that the matter in the Earth and the sun was producing
that force.
Could Newton mathematically demonstrate that the force was related to the matter toward which rocks and planets fell?
Newton reasoned that he could mathematically demonstrate that the force was related to the matter assumed to be producing it by showing that there was a relationship between the movement of matter and its size, even though Galileo's Leaning Tower of Piza experiment had proven there wasn't -- objects fall at the same rate regardless of weight. Newton, however, couldn't demonstrate the force on Earth because all he could do was drop rocks. Rocks didn't physically attract other rocks. They only moved toward the Earth.
Planets and moons were something else, though.
If Newton could show that the planets moved in accordance with a force that was proportional to the amount of matter in the planet and that force turned out to diminish in the same manner as the force that caused rocks to drop, inversely with the square of the distance over which it was acting, then the force, tied to matter by its proportionality to matter, had to be a property of the matter.
The basic problem Newton faced was trying to figure out how much matter there was in a planet in order to compute the amount of force the planet produced.
NEWTON USES VOLUME TO DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF MATTER IN A PLANET
Newton conceived of matter as made up of uniform balls, little units of matter that were evenly spaced throughout the matter (much as we think of magnets as made up of little magnets that are evenly spaced throughout magnetic matter). With matter made up of equally spaced units, if gravity were a property of matter, then the amount of gravity would be proportional to the amount of matter present.
By mathematically demonstrating proportionality, Newton would show the force to be a property of matter.
Newton chose the moon to prove that the force was proportional to and therefore a property of matter because, while the moon's orbit was only barely measurable, the orbits of the planets weren't measurable at all, Kepler's exacting measurements upon which his laws and Newton's enterprise was based being measurements of the mind rather than measurements of anything happening in physical reality.
Newton computed the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon by volume, equated that matter with the force that makes objects fall to the surface of the Earth, assumed the force extended out into space and therefore mathematically diminished it by the square of the distance between the Earth and the moon to obtain the force the two were exerting on each other, the force that was causing the moon to fall toward the Earth at an accelerating rate.
However, any idiot could see that the moon wasn't falling toward the Earth at an accelerating, or at any rate!
If the moon weren't falling toward the Earth, then there must be a force that was keeping it from falling to the surface of the Earth.
This force, the force that was keeping the moon from falling to the surface of the Earth, was the force that allowed Newton to construct an equation that would demonstrate that the force was proportional to, and therefore a property of matter.
NEWTON MAKES UP A FORCE TO PROVE THE FORCE HE MADE UP
Newton was attempting to prove that the force that caused a rock to drop
extended out into space to affect the movement of the planets, affirming
that they were falling toward the sun in the same way that rocks fell to
the surface of the Earth.
If the moon was falling toward the Earth as a result of that force acting on it, then, because it wasn't in reality falling toward the Earth, there must be another force that was keeping it from doing so.
Reaching back into the history of nondisprovable ideas, Newton found Galileo's inertia, the force Galileo made up to prove the Earth was spinning, giving the appearance of the sun moving across the sky. Newton said that if an object can spin in space unless a force acts to stop that motion, then it can also travel in a straight line unless a force acts on it to change that motion.
Thus, the moon would be traveling in a straight line if it weren't in orbit around the Earth and the moon would fall to the surface of the Earth if it weren't traveling in a straight line. Thus, the force causing the moon to fall must be equal to the force making it move in a straight line.
This was where Galileo's flight of fancy about the perpetual motion of heavenly bodies caught up with Brahe's misperception that the moon could speed up or slow down in orbit.
The force making the moon move in a straight line was easily computable (as is anything that is nonexistent). All he had to do was take the moon's speed, multiply it by the amount of matter in the moon as determined by volume and he would have a force that equaled the force he had already computed that was making the moon fall toward the Earth.
If the two forces exactly matched, then the hypothesis that the force was proportional to matter would be proven because it would predict the moon to be falling toward the Earth in accordance with an inverse square law. Being proportional to matter, the force would have to be a property of the matter to which it was proportional.
The straight-line momentum of the moon would be exactly overcoming the force that made rocks drop to the surface of the Earth so that the moon was in a state of Galileo's perpetual motion, like one of his little balls on a frictionless path around the Earth, circling the Earth in frictionless space for almost forever.
Newton had to assume away a current cause for planetary motion in order to have something to measure, momentum, a planet moving in a straight line. If he didn't have anything to measure, then he couldn't measure what he couldn't measure to start with, the force that made a rock drop making the moon fall!
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NEWTON FAILS
If Newton had been able to show the equivalence of the forces as determined
by the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon it would have been pretty
convincing evidence that the force was proportional to and therefore a property
of matter. Not conclusive, by any stretch of the imagination. After all,
the force could be a result of something the matter was doing, say vibrating
at an atomic level.
But to be convincing at all, the equating of the two forces by the inverse square law had to be predicted from the amount of matter. Otherwise, there was no way to connect the force to the matter, or to say the force extended out into space to affect the motion of the moon or the planets.
But establishing a connection between the force and matter was moot because the equation simply didn't produce the intended result. The moon was too large to stay in orbit if the amount of gravity it produced were to be proportional to the matter that made it up by volume.
Newton first made Halley Astronomer Royal, and then hounded him to death (his own) trying to get measurements of the moon's motion that proved the hypothesis that the same inverse square law that controlled how objects fell on Earth also applied to keep the moon in its orbit.
NEWTON'S HEIRS REVERSE REALITY
In the century after Newton's death, the orbits of the planets become measurable,
and while Kepler's Laws were never questioned, are in fact used to this
day to plot the orbits of planets, applying Newton's failed proof that the
inverse square law controlled the movement of the planets to the planets
themselves demonstrated that it not only didn't apply to the planets, it
didn't even come close.
The difference between how big the moon should be if it balanced the equations using the inverse square law, and how big it actually was, was not great enough to disbelieve the conclusion. Many explanations were given for the discrepancy between hypothesis and fact, some surviving to this day. Thus, some held the idea that the moon was made out of green cheese because cheese had a bunch of holes in it, allowing for the apparent matter that couldn't be there if Newton's proof were correct. Others assumed, because the backside of the moon never faced the Earth, that it was concave, accounting for the missing matter in that way. Still others contented themselves with the thought that the moon was filled with caves, fantasies that were carried into the earliest science fiction movies.
Some believe to this day that the Earth is hollow, accounting for the missing matter by turning inward, as it were.
However close the moon came, the planets didn't even come close to moving as predicted by Newton's hypothetically extended inverse square law. Nothing in the solar system worked out in accordance with the predictions of the Newtonian equations that assumed that gravity was proportional to and a property of matter based on volume and extended out into space to affect the motions of the planets, decreasing inversely with the square of its distance as it did so.
What to do?
Well, the encomiums for Newton had already been carved in stone. There was no question that he was right. So either the universe was wrong, highly unlikely, or Newton had overlooked something.
Think, think, think. What could Newton have overlooked?
Ah, it finally dawns on his heirs. Not only is matter not distributed evenly throughout a planet, nothing is writ in heaven that all planets be made up of the same matter.
Newton had overlooked the hard, earnest fact in reality of density!
But, Newton knew that factoring in density would prevent him from computing the amount of force a planet produced, and not knowing the amount of force a planet produced meant that he couldn't show that the planets moved on the basis of an inverse square law and that the force was therefore a property of matter.
If you don't assume volume, you can't show that there's a connection between a falling object and the matter toward which the object falls by showing the planets move as a result of an inverse square law predicted by the amount of matter.
Oh, well, said the eighteenth century sages, we can't have everything. We know that objects accelerate in accordance with the inverse square law when they fall on the surface of the Earth, that's directly measurable. And we know that Kepler's laws dictate that planets accelerate on the basis of an inverse square law. That's the law.
So what's to prove?
The value of Newton's equation is not that it proves anything, his heirs concluded, but rather that it provides a means to compute the amount of matter that makes up a planet!
Newton's heirs, not being able to balance his equations with matter predicting the hypothetical force, the inverse square law, decided to use the hypothetical force, the inverse square law, to predict nonverifiable matter, what's in the center of planets.
This reversal of logic, a mirror misanalogy, starting out using the amount of matter assumed to be in a planet to prove that an inverse square law controlled a planet's movement, that the planets were falling toward the sun as a result of the same force that made objects fall on Earth and ending up applying the inverse square law to the orbits of planets to determine the amount of matter in the planets is absurd to say the least, leading it to qualify as one of the greatest scientific misconceptions of all time.
NONDISPROVABLE DELUSIONS RULE
When we apply the inverse square law to the movement of planets and stars,
we end up eliminating matter, or worse, creating it. Thus, Jupiter becomes
a ball of gas, comets, belching fire every inch of the way, showing up on
photographs as solid chunks of red hot rock, become snowballs, the sun,
the matter that is supposed to be attracting all of the planets, becomes
helium, lighter than air.
There is no way to determine what exists at the center of the planets or in the sun, so these become eminently fertile areas on which genius can pontificate without any chance of a Copernicus coming along and embarrassing them by proving them wrong. Computing the assumed motions for all of the assumed stars in a galaxy creates ninety percent more matter in the galaxy than can be seen, a safe assertion that sets off billion dollar searches for this "dark matter".
And if making absolute determinations about what is in the center of planets seems too dangerous for all but the most timid, we can just apply the inverse square law to space and come up with the ultimate in safe assertions, black holes from which no light can escape. If no light can escape from nothing, then no one will be able to find nothing, and if you can't find nothing, you can't disprove nothing, creating Empirical Science's answer to elves.
The matter created and destroyed by measuring motion isn't just ordinary matter, it is the matter that produces gravity, so it has to have a more exalted designation than just matter, else someone might figure out it was basically meaningless.
Besides, the term matter is ambiguous because it doesn't take into consideration density. When we look at something, we have no way of knowing what's inside the something, how much of whatever is there. On Earth, we can find out specific gravity by having the matter displace water, but we can't expect empiricists whose job it is to accurately measure what they see in the universe and report on the results to dump planets into oceans. They wouldn't fit.
So mass is the density that results from applying the inverse square law to a planet's motion.
This results in mass/gravity, a meaningless phrase with no basis in reality that we use to answer the question, what makes objects fall.
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HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DELUSION
Thoughtful people have treated this situation a number of ways. Some use
electrostatic surface tension to trick themselves into believing in the
reality of mass/gravity. There is evidence that Newton was among these.
Some have claimed capillary action in vegetation as proof of mass/gravity, presumably because it only works in plants when the massive sun is overhead.
Others have said, well, mass/gravity may not be the answer, but it is as close as we are ever going to get, so let's let it go at that.
Still others have out-occulted Newton's occult concept where the force acts without exerting work, causes real movement in reality without depleting itself, doesn't exist between its source and its effect, and exists an infinite distance from that source. They come up with multidimensional concepts, quantify that which doesn't objectively exist, space and time, to produce inconceivable warps in nothing illustrated with Galileo's balls rolling around on checkered rubber sheets.
Many in the profession cry, "Abandon Newtonian Mechanics? Not on your life. It's just too useful. How else would we be able to tell you what's in the center of the Earth, the moon, the sun, even in the center of shrouded planets like Venus and Jupiter!"
And finally many say, who cares? After all, objects drop, planets move, the sun comes up. What difference does the answer make so long as it doesn't raise other questions that can't be answered? In fact, why not just leave the answer alone so that other questions won't be raised? Knowing that the Earth goes around the sun hasn't added anything to the progress of mankind. The sun's still there and we're still here, and its only recently that the knowledge has been useful in sending rockets to the planets.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHY OBJECTS FALL?
When we think we know something, then it becomes invisible.
If we think we know what makes planets move, then we will never attempt to uncover the force that is actually making them move.
If we think we know what makes a rock fall, we will never attempt to find out what the force is that actually makes objects fall.
Technology involves testing reality to see if it is amenable to being shaped to our purposes. Science, its methodology, whatever that is, the empirical process, the use of mathematics to dictate what we see, has hidden behind technology, pointing to technology as its fruit when, in fact, scientific conclusions have more to do with the absence of technology than the existence of technology. Scientists are extremely reluctant to test reality because of the embarrassment of being proven wrong, and are more comfortable in realms where no testing is possible, determining what is at the center of planets, in deep, dark space, or declared unmeasurable in atomic structures. It has only been during the last half of the twentieth century when technology has outstripped scientific theory that we have seen advances transcending the negative dictates of the nebulous nontheories dealing with magnetics, electricity, heat and light.
But gravity remains out of reach because we all know what it is, a property of matter, and we all know that properties simply exist, gold is yellow, steel is hard and ice is cold, and that's the scheme of things and nothing can be done about it.
We use technology to extend our range of survivability in reality, using our minds to bend reality to our needs, evolve it to our purposes rather than risk going missing, becoming extinct, as a result of changed reality. If we think we know something when we don't, we can't test reality, and thus we can't bend reality to our needs.
If we think we know reality, and we don't, we risk extinction
IT'S NOT THE ANSWER, STUPID, IT'S THE QUESTION
The most obvious fact in reality is the force that holds us to the surface
of the planet. Not knowing what that force is, how it originates, how it
moves over distance, how it acts on matter, is absurd, reducing us to savages
playing with the toys we accidentally create with our minds.
There is a hypothesis in physiology called Bernstein's Hypothesis. When electrical impulses were probed as a source of bodily action in the nineteenth century, it was thought that electricity traveled on the outside of a conductor. As nerves weren't like conductors, and no current could be measured on their outside, an idea was cooked up that made nerve impulses travel similar to light. A state of polarity was assumed in the nerve which was disrupted by sensory stimuli. Nothing moved down the nerve, rather the disturbance in polarity traveled down the nerve.
Today, when we know much more about electricity, at least to the extent that it moves in conductors rather than on the outside of conductors and that conductors need not be limited to copper or silver, we still hold the view that nerve impulses don't exist in and of themselves. This results in extraordinary conceptual blindness when it comes to how the physical mechanisms of the body work, leading to universal disclaimers on product information statements dealing with the clinical pharmacology of drugs that the exact mechanics of the effect the drug produces have not been definitely demonstrated.
We think that dropping an object demonstrates all that is needed to be known about the effect, that gravity is the answer to the question why objects fall, when it is the mechanics of the force we need to know about, not its effect.
What gravity is, how it is produced, how it moves and how it acts on matter to move it, these are the questions we need to be asking.
There is nothing wrong with attempting to come up with answers based on the information available, but the information available to Galileo, Brahe, Kepler and Newton was next to no information at all.
There is something wrong with being too lazy to attempt to come up with answers based on current information.
Our slavish belief in the unsupportable conclusions of dead men who knew nothing is criminal because it will lead to our own extinction.