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3. MASS/GRAVITY IS BASED ON THE OCCULT NOTION
OF STRAIGHT-LINE MOTION
THE MIND EVOLVED TO COMPARE REALITY AND RECALL
When we fail to comprehend things we see in reality, when we witness an
event, a physical occurrence for which we have no explanation, we are uncomfortable.
The source of this discomfort is found in the way our minds work. The mind evolved to move our body safely through physical reality. To accomplish this, it stores pictures of physical reality in recall so that, as our body moves through physical reality, the mind can compare the pictures it receives from physical reality with the pictures it has stored in recall. If the pictures from both sources agree, then we can continue to move safely through physical reality. If the pictures don't agree, the mind stops operating, we feel discomfort and the discomfort stops us from moving through physical reality until we can form a picture of physical reality from recall that provides us with the recognition we need that will allow us to once again move with confidence through that physical reality.
This is how we keep from falling off cliffs.
The discomfort is also what causes curiosity, drives us to seek answers, makes us fill in the blanks of the pictures of reality that we form.
While the discomfort we feel when reality doesn't agree with recall is what keeps us out of harm's way, there are certain things about physical reality that aren't inherently harmful but raise questions none-the-less.
When someone throws a rock at us, we know the source of the motion of the rock, and we can put in our recall pictures that will allow us to deal with rock throwing and rock throwers. But when we see a rock drop, we don't have anything in our recall that would explain what is causing the rock to drop. We can put things in our recall that will allow us to avoid falling rocks, but we don't have anything to explain why the rocks fall in the first place.
Similarly, when we look at the sun moving across the sky, we don't have anything in our recall to explain why the sun is moving, and when we find out that it is the Earth rotating on its axis rather than the sun that is moving, we still don't have anything in our recall that would account for the Earth's rotation. When we realize that the Earth's rotation doesn't explain the moon's movement and become sophisticated enough to realize that the planets themselves are moving around the sun, we become totally stumped because there is no apparent cause for all the different motions, and therefore nothing to put in our recall.
And when we find out that light moves, we are completely lost.
The lack of an apparent force to explain the movement of the major physical occurrences in our existence produces discomfort when we become aware of them because we have nothing in our recall that would explain the motions and thus provide an agreement with those motions.
We can't go around in life feeling discomfort!
Because the motions are so very apparent, and so intrusive, they occur around us all of the time, we have to come up with something to put in our recall to agree with what we see or we would be discomforted to death.
WHEN THERE IS NO APPARENT CAUSE FOR REALITY, WE MANUFACTURE RECALL IN ORDER TO HAVE SOMETHING TO AGREE WITH REALITY
When we can't find answers to questions, we turn to the occult, the hidden world, the invisible domain obscured by the mists of the mind to obtain answers. When we are uncomfortable with the world we perceive, we are driven to create a world in our recall that can be used to agree with the world we see. When the world we see deals with the actions of people, the world of immorality, the evil men do, the unrequited agonies of endless wrongs, we create a world of religious belief, a structure that will give us answers that will allow us to avoid the discomfort of the unfair world we perceive.
However, when we are dealing with motion in physical reality we want objective physical answers for objective physical occurrences.
When the objective physical answers are not readily available and we are too lazy to pursue them, or when the pursuit becomes so overwhelming as to exhaust us, we settle for something else, not religious answers, but occult answers, agreed upon pomp and circumstance, repeated ritual, made-up words that will make us believe we have actually obtained objective answers.
Thus we create a force of gravity that is proportional to, and therefore a property of, matter to explain why objects drop. We don't know what gravity is, or how it is produced, how it moves through space, or how it affects objects to make them move, but we have Pavlov's answer for why objects fall, we say they fall because of gravity and we feel no discomfort.
We manufacture mindless answers to nonapparent reality that explain nothing but come to mind immediately when questions arise to quell the discomfort not knowing produces.
When we realize that the planet that provides us with life and safety is rotating at about a thousand miles an hour and moving through space at about sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, we make up words, angular momentum, or create visual confabulations, swirling masses of gas, occult crap both, to explain the motion.
And when we find out that light actually moves from one place to another, we puzzle away the discomfort by assuming light's existence away, saying that it is simply a wave, or maybe a wave particle or perhaps a particle wave, whatever, so long as it makes us believe that we have found an answer to the question of what force is causing the motion and therefore dispels our discomfort.
ALL MOTION REQUIRES A CURRENT FORCE AND CURRENT FORCE REQUIRES A PHYSICAL PROCESS
One thing that we should know as we become sentient is that when something moves, something has to be moving it.
We can, of course, attend a seance. We can sit around in a dim room with hands locked in a circle of trust and watch with amazement as the table rises in front of us, magically levitated by an occult force from the great beyond. We can snake our dollars hurriedly through our slathering drool to the medium creating the illusion, or we can fight our way out into the light and say, this is trash, things don't move without something moving them, I've been tricked, I don't know how, but I'm not going to turn my resources over to someone until they turn the lights on, come clean, explain to me in clear words, paint an understandable picture of what is going on.
But the light of reality is blinding and we are driven back into the darkness.
Dropping a gold coin on the risen table, the medium asks: "Where is the current physical effort moving the coin? You can't see the force that makes the gold coin drop, why demand a current physical effort to raise the table?"
The line between the light and the dark, comprehension and ignorance, is very thin. Lifting a rock requires an apparent force while there is no apparent force moving a falling rock. It requires effort to overcome the nonapparent force, and effort is visible.
The medium would have us believe that because there is no apparent force making objects fall, he can make objects rise with no apparent force. We know that it takes current physical effort to move something against the force holding the table on the Earth and we should know that it is the same force that makes objects fall.
We could therefore challenge the medium, fight against the forces of darkness peddling occult nonexplanations for actual physical reality. "Force is produced by a current physical process." we could insist. "Just because the force opposing our effort is not apparent doesn't mean that it is not the result of a physical process."
When we demand an explanation for the current physical process that is producing the current physical but nonapparent force that requires current physical and very apparent effort to overcome, we are standing on the side of the line that leads to light, that produces understanding.
If, instead, we deny the medium's claim that he can lift the table without a current physical effort but fail to challenge his statement that an object falls without a current physical effort, we abdicate our sense, we say the force holding the rock to the ground is not a force that takes effort, requires work, is the result of something physically happening and, crossing the line into darkness, begin to travel the path of ignorance that immerses us in the occult.
To demand physical effort to move something against the nonapparent force that makes objects fall and holds them motionless against a surface between the falling object and the source of the force, and to demand no physical process in the force's production, is stupid indeed.
If we fail to require a physical process in the production of the nonapparent force that makes objects fall, then we will be free to make up all sorts of occult crap about that force
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SEPARATING THE FORCE THAT CAUSES OBJECTS TO MOVE FROM THE OBJECTS MOVING AS A RESULT OF THE FORCE
If we are to keep from slipping into occult explanations for force that confuses the force with matter, we have to isolate what we know about the force itself.
WHILE ALL MOTION REQUIRES FORCE, ALL MOTION DOESN'T REQUIRE THE SAME CURRENT FORCE
The first step in the descent into the occult belief that motion can occur without something physically happening, without a current physical process, is the observation that different objects require different forces to move. It takes more force to move a cubic foot of lead than it does to move a cubic foot of aluminum.
Motion becomes a product of force with the amount of force required to create the motion dependent on the nature of the matter being put in motion.
Clear thinking in the light of day would lead us to conclude that there was some force associated with the Earth that was holding the matter to the surface of the Earth. It takes effort to overcome that force and it takes more effort to overcome that force with respect to some matter than it takes with respect to other matter.
There can't be more than one force associated with the Earth so that the explanation for the difference in the force required to move different matter has to be found in the nature of the matter the force is acting on.
However, because it takes different force to move different matter, we are in danger of focusing our analysis on the matter rather than the force. Focusing on force when we are dealing with matter will make us confuse the two, and lead us to view the two as the same thing, view the force as the same as matter.
We might make the occult mistake of saying different matter exerts different force.
The fact that it takes different force to move different matter just means that more of the same force is keeping the matter from moving. It doesn't tell us anything about the force itself.
WHILE IT TAKES DIFFERENT FORCE TO MOVE DIFFERENT MATTER AGAINST THE NONAPPARENT FORCE, THE NONAPPARENT FORCE MOVES ALL MATTER THE SAME
We have to exert a current force to move matter because there is a force acting on that matter that is keeping it from moving. We can find out something about that force by seeing how it acts on matter that is not restrained from moving. We can drop objects and see how the objects drop in order to see how the force acts on matter.
Measuring the way matter moves when it is dropped and moving freely as a result of the force acting on it, we discover that the matter accelerates generally with the square of the distance over which it moves.
We also discover something else about the matter. We find that it doesn't make any difference whether we are dealing with lead or aluminum, or anything else. Everything moving freely in the force accelerates with the square of the distance over which it moves.
This again tells us something very important about the structure of the matter that the force is moving, how the force is acting on matter itself.
But we still aren't concerned with what makes up matter. We have to be very careful not to get sidetracked and confused. We don't want to run the risk of confusing the force with matter and thus thinking one is the other. We want to isolate the force that makes objects move toward the Earth and makes them stay there once they get there.
Knowing that the force causes an object to accelerate with the square of the distance over which the object moves, we can conclude that the force diminishes inversely with the square of its distance from the source, apparently the surface of the Earth.
WE KNOW TWO THINGS ABOUT THE FORCE
So we know two things about the force itself. We know that the force diminishes inversely with the square of its distance from the surface of the Earth and we know that the force is associated with the Earth because that's where released objects move.
We know nothing else about the force.
Nothing else!
We now have the choice whether we will accept an occult explanation for the source of the force or demand that the force be the result of something actually happening in physical reality.
AN IMPORTANT CHOICE
We can pretty much figure out that, if the force is associated with the Earth, then it is diminishing inversely with the square of its distance from the surface of the Earth because the surface area of the Earth is defined by the square of its radius. Anything emanating from the surface of a sphere would diminish inversely with the square of its distance because its distance is the radius of the sphere defined by its expansion away from that surface.
We know from our efforts overcoming the force that force is the result of something happening. We have to exert ourselves to overcome the force that holds objects to the surface of the Earth.
Can we expect anything less from the force that causes dropped objects to fall and stick to the surface of the Earth?
Do we conclude that there has to be something about the Earth, that the Earth has to be doing something, to produce the force that causes dropped objects to move toward its surface?
Or do we conclude that the Earth is doing nothing, that for this special case, where the cause of the force is not obvious, nonapparent, where it might take a little mental work to figure out the source of the force, do we conclude because we are too lazy or incompetent to figure out what's going on, that nothing is going on, nothing is happening to produce the force?
The answer to the question is important because if we decide to chose to view the nonapparent force as being the product of no effort being expended, then we will be helpless in our confusion, we will be incapable of separating the force from matter and we will step into the darkness, become comfortable with the ignorance that the force and the matter are the same, that one is a property of the other.
ARISTOTLE ORIGINATES THE BELIEF IN FORCE WITHOUT PHYSICAL CAUSE
Aristotle solved the problem of the nonapparent force making objects fall by assuming the force away altogether. He concluded that because the Earth was the center of the universe, anything under its influence simply gravitated to its surface because that's where the natural order of things required it to be. If a rock was lifted from the surface of the Earth, then it just sought out its normal position whenever the force that was keeping it from falling was removed.
Aristotle further claimed that thrown objects also moved of their own volition which made a fitting transition to his assertions about the objects in the heavens moving in circles around the Earth. These objects, Aristotle concluded, were embedded in the firmament, the famous aether, the medium through which Huygen's water wave light would be propagated several thousand years later, and as this aether moved around the Earth, it carried the heavenly objects around with it.
Thus, for Aristotle, objects on Earth moved with no apparent force, they were merely seeking their position at the center of the universe, and objects in the heavens moved as a result of a nonapparent force, the invisible aether. If something in the heavens came close to the Earth, then it escaped the nonapparent force moving the objects in the heavens and assumed its natural position at the center of the universe.
Aristotle set the precedent for two types of motion, one type for the movement of things on Earth and another type for the movement of things in the heavens above.
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GALILEO KICKS OFF THE MODERN DECENT INTO THE OCCULT WITH ROTATIONAL MOTION
When Galileo was discovering the moons of Jupiter, scientists were called Philosophers and spouted Aristotelian precepts the same way empiricists spout eternal laws of motion, energy and matter, mindlessly. Copernicus earlier in the sixteenth century had delivered his deathbed work claiming that the Earth went around the sun. The Philosophers, pointing directly at reality, said, look, the sun clearly goes around the Earth, so shut up and die.
Galileo set about proving to these doubtless Thomases that the sun only appeared to go around the Earth, that it was in fact the Earth that was spinning and the sun that was standing still.
"If the Earth is spinning," came the chorus of philosophical certainty, "then what is making it spin? The fact that we aren't being thrown off the Earth into space is ample proof that the Earth isn't spinning."
Galileo, of course, couldn't answer the question, what made the Earth spin, because whatever is causing the Earth to spin is not apparent, just as what is causing objects to drop is not apparent. He could overcome the argument that we would be thrown off the surface of the Earth if it were spinning by claiming that whatever made objects fall and stick to the Earth's surface would keep us from being thrown off the Earth as well. But he couldn't come up with an explanation for what the force was that was causing the Earth to spin, if in fact the Earth was spinning.
However, if the Earth happened to already be spinning, and that spinning was occurring in nothing, then because there was nothing causing it to slow down, it would continue to spin. So with something having set the Earth spinning in the past, and with nothing slowing it down, it continues to spin right up to the present day. There was no question in the sixteenth century what set it spinning. God put it in motion as part of His creation, and He placed it in frictionless space so that it would continue right on spinning forever.
Therefore, the sun wasn't going around the Earth and Copernicus was proven.
"Not so fast." said the Philosophers. "We need some concrete proof the Earth is spinning on its axis."
Galileo went into his study and started rolling balls down inclined planes. A ball reached the end of the inclined plane and rolled across the table.
Galileo claimed that the ball rolled across the table after it left the inclined plane because the force the ball received from rolling down the inclined plane had been imparted to the ball and that if he created a frictionless path around the Earth, the balls would, as a result of that imparted force, roll around the Earth forever.
He called the imparted force inertia.
Galileo was taking the unknown force that makes objects fall and injecting it into the ball that was falling. He thus had the force coming out of the Earth into the ball where it would remain unless friction wore it off.
FRICTIONLESS MOTION ELIMINATES THE EFFECT OF THE FORCE THAT MAKES OBJECTS FALL
When Galileo claimed that the ball would roll around the Earth on a frictionless path forever once it had gained inertia from the force that makes objects fall, he was saying that the force that makes objects fall has no effect on the motion of the ball.
In other words, while gravity can cause objects to fall to the surface of the Earth, it can't cause them to slow down. Slowing down objects is the sole function of friction.
To make this point clear, Galileo pointed to a pendulum swinging back and forth. If, he stated, a pendulum could be constructed with frictionless parts, then once the pendulum was set in motion, it would swing back and forth forever.
This is really seriously deficient thinking. It's like saying that, without friction, a bouncing ball would bounce forever when in fact it isn't friction that slows a bouncing ball down, it is gravity. In like manner, gravity brings a pendulum to a halt regardless of how frictionless it is, and Galileo's ball would have about as much chance of rolling around the Earth forever in a frictionless path as Galileo would have of building such a frictionless path.
Here, where there is no chance of reproducing the effects claimed, the occult verges on outright fantasy and Empirical Science establishes its scientific facts.
Even though rocket scientists today claim that their satellites would orbit the Earth forever if space actually were frictionless, the Philosophers were not impressed with this twaddle.
Which is unfortunate because their continued skepticism led to the greatest misconception of all time.
GALILEO WHIPS UP A SYSTEM CLAIMING TO PROVE BELIEF TO BE FACT
In answer to continued doubts on the part of the Philosophers that the Earth was spinning because it contained inertia from God's hand, Galileo let the ball roll off the top of the table. It proceeded out into space until the force that makes objects fall caused the ball to start to fall just like a cannonball falls to the surface of the Earth.
A half century before, practical experimenter Tartaglia had gone out on the proving ground and shot off cannons until he determined that the optimum angle of the cannon for distance of the cannonball was forty-five degrees. Galileo, measuring the course the falling ball took in his study, computed the same angle, forty-five degrees.
Galileo then said that he had measured Tartaglia's reality in his study. Because he had been able to measure a reality not present in the confines of his study, Galileo claimed that, by mathematics alone, he could prove that which he could not in reality measure. Therefore, while he couldn't in reality measure that the Earth was turning on its axis as a result of inertia, the fact that the ball obtained inertia from the inclined plane proved that the inertia existed and that the Earth was turning on its axis because of this proven inertia.
The Philosophers duly impressed, they were, after all, as confused about force, matter and motion as Galileo was, asked Galileo for objective verification that the Earth was spinning. Galileo, knowing the tides worked just as if the Earth's rotation were causing them, pointed to the tides as confirmation that the Earth was spinning in space.
Unfortunately, the friction from the tides would have long since overcome the Earth's inertia, so that was the end of that, unless one wishes to discuss vis viva, the force Galileo created to imbue matter with life thereby allowing it to move without apparent force, a religious inertia that moved forward in Empirical thought of its own accord through the nineteenth century.
Copernicus remained unverified even during the seventeenth century when it became something of a test of the scientific competency between nations to come up with proof. Robert Hooke, the underpaid and thus obsequious employee of the British Royal Society, under undue pressure from his employer, even attempted to measure the predicted displacement of stars measured on opposite sides of the Earth's orbit as proof that the Earth had opposite sides to its orbit and thus moved around the sun. His claimed parallax measurement, eventually drastically disproved as delusion (to be charitable), didn't stop future empiricists from using parallax measurements to measure the nonmeasurable distance to the stars, just as Galileo's failure to demonstrate inertia didn't stop empiricists from not only firmly believing in its existence, but in believing also Galileo's absurd claim that beliefs could be proven by mathematics alone to be fact, that if something is computable in the mind, it exists in reality.
NEWTON TRIES USING GALILEO'S SYSTEM OF PROVING BELIEF TO BE FACT TO PROVE HIS BELIEF THAT THE FORCE THAT MAKES OBJECTS DROP IS THE SAME FORCE THAT CAUSES PLANETS TO ORBIT
In the fourteenth century, Buridan came up with the maxim that impetus would endure if unopposed. Between the time of Buridan and Newton there was some pretty strange stuff espoused about motion, especially by the ever influential Huygens, of water wave fame, who noted that circular motion would require centripetal acceleration. Huygens had turned light into a wave to assume it away and thus avoid explaining the source of the current force that was causing it to move. "Centripetal acceleration" was just another way of assuming away current force with the use of words, constant circular motion requiring only the constant application of a current force.
It took Newton to crystallize everything into a few neat laws, the first of which was the occult notion that an object will move in a straight line unless a force acts to change that movement, occult because it assumes away a cause for the straight-line motion.
Why did Newton need a law that something would move in a straight line unless a force acted on it to change that movement?
Newton was attempting to prove that the force that caused objects to fall was the same force that was involved in planetary orbiting. If he could show that the planets moved in response to the same force that caused objects to fall, he could claim proof for the occult notion that the force was a property of the matter toward which the objects fell.
Newton's problem was to connect the force to the matter, and the only way that he could do this was to make the force proportional to the matter of which it was a property and then show that the moon moved with respect to the Earth as if the force was produced by the amount of matter in the moon and the Earth as diminished inversely with the square of the distance between the two, the mathematical rate at which falling objects accelerate, the acceleration conveniently satisfying Huygen's need for acceleration in circular orbits (which is to say, oh my, even though this is taught in every classroom on the planet, I'm so embarrassed to put it in print that I have to force myself, the moon stays in its orbit because it gains speed by falling toward the Earth!).
Newton could compute the amount of the force in the Earth and the moon by computing the amount of matter each contained by volume. However, this only gave him half an equation. For the other half, he needed to know the opposing force, the amount of force the force of attraction between the Earth and the moon was overcoming.
This force was found in the moon's momentum as it circled the Earth. If he assumed that the moon wouldn't be circling the Earth but for the force of attraction between the two, then it was very simple to compute the amount of force found in the moon's momentum. It was a product of its size, the amount of matter it contained, and its speed, how fast it was going.
To obtain the second half of the equation, Newton needed to assume that the moon would be moving in a straight line but for the fact that it wasn't, the thing he was trying to prove, that the force that made objects drop to the surface of the Earth, which diminished inversely with the square of its distance, was proportional to the matter in the Earth and the moon because the force that amount of matter produced, reduced inversely by the square of the distance between the Earth and the moon equaled the amount of force required to bend the straight-line motion of the moon into its circular motion.
By showing that the force was proportional to the amount of matter producing it, Newton could declare that it was a property of that matter.
The whole scheme failed to balance with respect to the moon, and when applied to the planets, failed abysmally.
Faced with this failure, Empirical Science was forced to accept the inverse square proposition as law, as opposed to a hypothesis that had to be proven, or even a proven hypothesis, and now uses it to create matter wherever it can measure motion, and some places, such as the hearts of nebulae, where it can't.
But where did that leave the occult concept of straight-line motion?
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NEWTON CALLS GOD INTO OF THE MISTS
Newton was well aware of the problems involved in his use of mathematics to prove that which can't be measured in reality, that the moon and the planets move in response to the same inverse square law that makes objects drop. All the measurements of the moon's motion made in Newton's lifetime failed to prove the belief, with Newton carrying the hope to his grave that when measurements got accurate enough he would be vindicated.
However, before his lifetime, during his lifetime, and for all periods after his lifetime, there was no empirical basis for the statement planets move in a straight line but for the force of gravity bending that straight-line motion. Whewell, using Newton's mathematical hocus pocus in an attempt to craft some sort of rational statement for Galileo's method of turning beliefs into fact kept running into the problem of justifying the statement. While never coherently doing so, creating in the process a sort of inductive regression where the empirical truth was up there somewhere in a hierarchy of empirical statements, Whewell knew that Newton had found the secret of the universe, so he just kept on rephrasing the law, knowing its truth lay in the sense of all mankind that it is thus so it must be so.
But to explain where the force came from that put the planets in motion was a different matter. Newton knew the source of that force. It was God.
And, responding to the instinctive feeling that Galileo was wrong, that the gravity exerted by the matter overcoming the straight-line motion of the heavenly bodies would eventually erode that motion, or perhaps foreseeing the truth of Huygen's belief that light was like a water wave after all, and the aether through which the waves were propagated would slow the planets down, Newton claimed that God came back periodically to minister to what He had created, thereby keeping a planet's speed up to snuff to overcome the ever-present gravity He had created at the beginning of the universe.
GOD EMBARRASSES NEWTON'S HEIRS
We can only imagine the chagrin, then, when it was discovered that there was no God, and if there were, He certainly wasn't one to come back to this little corner of the universe to give the planets a periodic boost, and even if She was one to come back, Her very existence was an embarrassment to a science that prided itself on producing objective explanations for physical reality rooted right in the physical reality itself.
Thus, motion as a result of God's hand was out of the question.
What a pickle to be in, having a bunch of laws that were unquestionably true, objects moved in straight lines, gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter, space was frictionless, and no explanation for the foundation of those laws, that things moved without force. Without something setting the moon and the planets in motion at some time in the past, there was no straight-line motion for gravity to overcome.
Empirical Science, however, never at a loss for making up ad hoc absurdities, came up with one of its best.
If, Laplace reasoned, the solar system condensed out of a swirling mass of gas, then the motion of the planets would be imparted to the matter making up the solar system by the swirling mass of gas.
And, to boot, with a little imagination, planetary rotation, which Newton had ignored because it wasn't computable in his mathematical scheme of things, could be ascribed to the same source, the swirling of the mass.
Of course, if there was a mass of gas, and the gas was made up of matter, and the matter had mass, and mass had gravity, then the mass of gas wouldn't swirl, it would just go clump in the night of space!
But, when Empirical Science seeks to explain reality, it can't let a little thing like reality intrude. Reality, while based on, and obeying Empirical Science's mathematical processes, is not reality if it conflicts with the mathematical outcomes of those processes.
And there is nothing more mathematical than a swirling mass of gas. Once the random motion in a jar full of gas molecules can be explained, it's all downhill, the direction most empirical conclusions lead.
Even the Smithsonian's wall-size chart showing the origin of the solar system has a big question mark about this swirling mass of gas. But when there is no other explanation, any explanation is acceptable.
SO WHAT DOES THAT LEAVE US?
The swirling mass of gas is required only because straight-line motion is required, and straight-line motion is required because otherwise there would be no basis for proving that gravity was proportional to, and therefore a property of matter, the explanation for the original nonapparent force, the force that causes objects to fall.
But gravity was never proven to be proportional to matter, Newton's use of volume being incapable of predicting motion.
And even assuming that the force could be somehow connected to the matter, the conclusion that it is a property of matter doesn't necessarily follow. It could, for instance, be the result of something the matter is doing.
The whole enterprise was poisoned from the beginning, for reasons more cogent than the claim that volume was not necessarily an indication of the amount of matter present, but once the enterprise was undertaken, its consecutive failures had to be cemented over until the empiricists doing the cementing had no concept left of the original structure.
And yet, the whole stagnant enterprise is based on a belief in straight-line motion, in the necessity that, because of pure laziness and incompetence in the attempt to figure out the cause of motion in the first place, motion has to be assumed away, its cause placed somewhere out of reach in the past.
Once we base an enterprise on belief, it doesn't make much difference whether we source that belief in God or swirling masses of gas or gravity wells, we're just sitting around making up stuff and then agreeing on which stuff deserves belief.
We don't know what causes objects to fall, we don't know what causes planets to rotate on their axes, we don't know what pushes planets around in their orbits and we don't know what causes light to move from one place to another. We don't even know what holds the atoms together to form the paper on which these words appear and we know nothing about the nature of the light that allows the words to be read or about the electricity that produces the light that allows them to be read.
Our ignorance is stunning, simply stunning.
Making up occult explanations for the hidden causes of motion is understandable. It's a simple defense to the discomfort that not knowing produces.
But automobiles and airplanes, rockets and computers were not built by people omming around a table waiting for it to rise magically into the air.
Technology is created by engineers who ask hard questions about physical reality, then sit down and, through a process of trial and error, come up with ways to alter that physical reality.
When we believe we know something, when we think we know all the answers, then we won't attempt to find out what the actual explanations are.
An understanding of motion is at the basis of all technological enterprise.
Believing in nonexplanations for motion or assuming motion away, believing that it occurred in the past, or that it is inherent or that the thing moving doesn't actually exist limits how we will tackle technological innovation.
While our ignorance is stunning, the fact that we docilely accept absurdities as explanations for the forces that rule our lives is downright stultifying.
Empirical Science has made us the Cargo Cult of the universe!
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