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2. THE OCCULT NOTION OF MOTION
OUR HALF-VAST KNOWLEDGE
We are told frequently that there isn't much else to know about physical reality. Of course, there are some details about how fast the universe is expanding, and some disagreement about how old it is, and there seems to be a bit of consternation whether a space traveler will cease to age in proportion to the speed of his spaceship, and, of course, there are a few problems with whether time can move backwards as well as forwards, and doubt about whether the mind, which has no connection to the body because it doesn't exist, can create alternate universes with its every thought.
Other than these minor problems, all that we need is one or two more terms to neatly wrap up the explanation for all physical reality and existence into one equation that will fit on everybody's forehead so we will be able to walk around and see eternity on everyone's face.
There is one little hitch with all this godly knowledge our genius has discovered.
We don't have the foggiest idea why anything in the universe moves!
We have no explanation for why objects fall when the are dropped, why the Earth rotates on its axis, why a planet orbits the sun, how the suns configure themselves into galaxies, we don't have any explanation for the movement of the flames that make up the fires that heat our food and warm our bones, we are clueless as to what causes the wind to blow, we are mystified as to the cause of the ocean currents and how light gets from one place to another, we have no idea at all what electricity is or how it moves, what causes two magnets to move toward or away from each other, what gets radio and television signals from their source to our sets, heck we don't even know what keeps our lungs operating or our hearts pumping.
We can ignore all of these little ignorances because our attention is focused on producing telescopes that will, so we believe, extend our visual range out to the edge of the big bubble that is the universe so that we can actually witness its beginning, the creation of space and time and the formation of matter out of a massive explosion that would obliterate it on Earth. When we aren't exploring that which is too big to measure, we are defining that which is too small to measure, manufacturing atomic particles, subatomic particles, particles that make up subatomic particles, and particles that make up particles that make up subatomic particles.
Why should we worry about little things like what
makes the sun come up, or what makes objects drop when we can focus our
attention on the nature of event horizons in black holes or the charm of
quarks?
WE DON'T LOOK FOR ANSWERS BECAUSE WE THINK WE HAVE THE ANSWERS
The reason that we drop the ball explaining the obvious realities of our physical existence, why we can ignore the fact that we don't know the source of the obvious motions in reality, is that we have been fed occult notions for those motions and accepted those occult notions as rote fact, instantly reciting dogma whenever questions of motion arise.
"What is the source of the force that makes objects fall?"
"Gravity."
"What is gravity?"
"If you don't know what gravity is, let's take a hike up the Empire State Building and I'll use you to demonstrate it!"
Everyone knows what gravity is, it's what makes objects drop. Anyone that doesn't know this is obviously an idiot. Idiots are surplus matter and can be disposed of by using them to demonstrate gravity.
Of course, the idiots are the ones that believe that naming the force that causes dropped objects to move to the surface of the Earth produces understanding about the nature of the force that causes those objects to move.
Such an idiot will respond to the question, "What is gravity?" by the rote, "Gravity is a property of mass."
This displays a considerable depth of knowledge, akin to being able to recognize that it's better to be hit by a pillow than by a baseball bat.
If you ask, "What is mass?" then you find out from the idiot that mass is what produces gravity.
Nothing about any of this tells us anything about the nature of the force that is causing a dropped object to move, but because the responses appear to be answers, after all, no one is saying the answer is wrong, they are just as good as answers.
When we know the answer to something, then we don't have to ask the question!
What makes the sun rise gets a little stickier because it requires a two level explanation. For years we thought the sun did just that, rise in the east, move across the sky and then set in the west. One of the biggest mistakes in our perception of physical reality is considered to be the acceptance at face value that because the sun moved across the sky, it actually did move across the sky. In fact, when we thought the sun moved across the sky, we didn't much care what caused dropped objects to fall because where else would they fall but around what everything moved, the center of the universe.
It was only when we found out that it was not the sun that was moving across the sky, but rather the Earth that was spinning on its axis giving the sun the appearance of moving across the sky that we began to worry about what made dropped objects fall, because the only thing that was keeping us from being hurtled off the surface of the rotating Earth into the endless darkness of space was the force that was causing dropped objects to fall.
But what is the source of the force that causes the Earth to rotate on its axis?
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IF WE CAN'T SEE THE FORCE, THEN IT ISN'T THERE
Galileo, the foremost proponent of Copernicus, the person credited with overturning the misconception about the sun's motion, set out to explain what the force was that was causing the Earth to rotate.
But there was no apparent force causing the Earth to rotate!
In Galileo's time, this wasn't too much of a problem because it was universally believed that the Creator had produced the matter in the universe with its motion installed. Why create matter without motion when both tasks could be accomplished with the same act?
Thus, the fact that the Earth was spinning on its axis wasn't so much a problem for Galileo. His real problem was why it was still spinning.
This change in perspective is important enough to give us pause because it is at the basis of all of our misconceptions about motion today. It is similar to the question of whether the sun was or was not moving because how we perceive the cause of motion controls our perspective of the universe.
The person that was making the rules, so to speak, the man who was setting the groundwork for all subsequent understanding of motion in the universe was not concerned with what was causing that motion because he believed the cause to be obvious, God caused the motion, he was merely concerned with why the motion hadn't stopped.
The difference in perspective is the difference between knowledge and ignorance. We look at something moving and ask, what is making it move, or we look at something moving and say, what is keeping it from stopping!
Choosing ignorance, asking what is keeping something that is moving from stopping, produces two major obstacles to understanding physical reality.
The first obstacle is that God as the cause of motion puts the cause of motion in the past. We can't see the cause of the motion, and we certainly can't see God, He's not a palpable presence.
By producing a nonpresent source for the force, a historical source, we have placed the cause of motion outside our direct control, outside our ability to manipulate it. We cannot analyze what no longer exists, the creation of the motion at sometime in the past, and we certainly cannot directly affect that source if it is historic, if it no longer exists.
Worse, by creating a historical force beyond analysis, we can make up any old stupidity we want to explain the force. If God becomes unfashionable, we can come up with some other explanation. If it is not a current force, if it no longer exists, who cares? We can't do anything about it anyway.
The second obstacle to understanding physical reality that looking at motion as something that occurs unless it is opposed is that instead of looking for a cause that is keeping something moving, a current cause of the motion, we assume away the cause of the motion and look for a reason why it hasn't stopped moving.
What we have done is assume away a current cause of the force because we cannot visibly see what is causing the movement. Instead of looking for something that exists, the cause of current motion, we spend our time looking for something that doesn't exist.
GALILEO, THINKING HE HAS DEMONSTRATED INERTIA AS THE FORCE CAUSING ROTATION, CREATES THE OCCULT NOTION THAT HISTORIC FORCES PRODUCE CURRENT MOTION BY OCCUPYING THE MATTER DOING THE MOVING
With the cause of motion clear, God put the Earth in motion when He created it, Galileo only needed to demonstrate that the current motion was a result of this historic cause. He merely had to prove that the historic force was still causing the current motion.
How could he do this?
By showing that there was nothing to interfere with the historic motion, nothing to cause that historic force to stop acting. In short, all he had to do was prove a negative.
How do you prove a negative?
Phrase it in the positive!
The Earth, set in motion by God at the creation of the universe, will continue to rotate on its axis unless a force causes it to stop rotating.
What could stop the Earth from rotating on its axis?
Friction.
Because empty space is frictionless, it is after all, empty, and because the Earth is rotating in empty space, it is rotating without friction and thus the motion imparted to it by God continues to cause it to rotate.
Because Galileo was phrasing his proof in terms of what would keep the Earth from rotating, he called the force that maintained the Earth's rotation inertia, a resistance to a change in historic motion placed in the Earth by God.
How could this fact of inertia be proven?
A half a century earlier, Tartaglia had found that the optimum angle for distance to fire a cannonball was forty-five degrees. A fired cannonball had its parabolic trajectory cut off by hitting the ground. Galileo, rolling balls down a plane inclined at forty-five degrees, found that when the balls rolled off his workbench, they described Tartaglia's parabolic trajectory and concluded that without the Earth to cut off the forward motion of the balls, the forward motion would continue forever.
Because the forward motion would continue forever, Galileo reasoned that if he could construct a frictionless path that circled the Earth, then the force imparted to the balls by the inclined plane would cause the balls to roll around the Earth forever.
Inertia was, therefore, not a concept but an actual fact. A frictionless pendulum would swing forever, a spinning coin with a frictionless contact would spin forever, a ball in a frictionless circular path would roll around the Earth forever.
The only fly in Galileo's ointment of frictionless rotation in empty space as the basis for saying that a historic force was causing the Earth's rotation was his attempt to demonstrate that the tides resulted from the Earth's rotation. Even though the tides do, in fact, operate as if the Earth's rotation were driving them, all that sloshing back and forth would create friction which would cause the historic force causing the Earth's rotation to disappear as fast as love letters in the sand.
Galileo retreated as quietly as possible.
WHAT'S WITH THIS FRICTIONLESS BULLCRAP?
It's very difficult today for us to visualize why the Earth couldn't rotate forever in frictionless space without a current force. That's the second level in understanding why the sun doesn't move around the Earth.
"What makes the sun move?" little Joe asks.
"It doesn't move. It just appears to move because the Earth is rotating on its axis."
Little Joe gives this some thought. "Well, what's making the Earth rotate on its axis?" he finally asks.
"Hmmm. That's a complicated questions. Better ask the internet."
"What causes the Earth's rotation?" little Joe types into the appropriate block of the Scienceanswer.org website.
"Angular momentum." the Gurus respond.
"What's angular momentum?" little Joe types after an appropriate pause.
"It's, um, like, when an ice skater is spinning, and she draws her arms in and spins faster. Angular momentum is conserved in closed systems."
Little Joe pulls up Excite and types in "Live Nude Girls" while the Gurus at Scienceanswer.org go back to their discussion about how they can promote more respect for the scientific process among the young.
The reason that we believe that something can move forever in frictionless space as a result of historic forces is that it is intellectually true.
There is no frictionless space, and there is no historic force, but if there were a historic force and it put something in motion in frictionless space, then that something would most certainly move forever.
We visualize the world with our recall because it is with our recall that we form the concepts that provide meaning to the facts that make up the world. Thus, even though there are no facts in reality that would provide a basis for our recall that the Earth rotates because it received a force in the past and that force has continued to act because there is no other force opposing it, we believe it.
If we didn't believe it, then we would have to go out and figure out what the current force was that was causing the Earth to rotate. That might require some mental effort, and, because everybody has the same recall, everyone believes the Earth rotates as a result of an unopposed historic force, produce personal danger as well. Making assertions that oppose people's beliefs tends to get one strung up on the nearest yardarm.
Of course, another way to get yourself strung up is to claim that you have invented a perpetual motion machine, because such a machine, for openers, would require frictionless movement which can't in reality exist, but that just emphasizes how unimportant reality is in the face of our great ideas.
Tartaglia's cannonballs did not fall to the surface of the Earth because of the friction in the air, they fell to the surface of the Earth because the Earth in some way produces a force that causes objects to fall to its surface. Galileo's balls did not describe an arc that would produce forward motion forever, they hit the damn floor and stopped moving!
The surface of the Earth causes objects to come to rest with respect to the forces acting upon them, and the primary force acting upon them is what is called gravity.
For Galileo to make the mathematical claim that a frictionless pendulum would swing forever, or a spinning coin would spin forever if its contact were frictionless, or that balls would roll around the Earth in a frictionless path forever ignored the effect of gravity on the frictionless motion.
Even if frictionless motion existed, the force of gravity would cause the pendulum to stop swinging, the coin to stop spinning and the balls to stop rolling.
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THE LEGACY OF THE BELIEF IN FRICTIONLESS MOTION
By assuming away the cause of motion as historical, we contradict the only measurable reality we have, the way motion is measured on Earth.
On Earth it takes force to get something in motion because gravity is omnipresent. Once something is in motion, then it comes to rest with respect to the forces acting upon it. A pendulum, set to swinging, will slowly stop swinging as it comes to rest with respect to gravity. A cannonball bolts out the end of the cannon and immediately starts to come to rest with respect to the forces acting upon it.
Nothing on the face of the Earth moves without the application of force, and nothing on the face of the Earth continues to move without the application of force.
Objects come to rest with respect to the forces acting upon them!
However, Galileo didn't look at it this way. He said something continues in motion unless friction acts to retard that motion. He said a force sets something in motion, and then it becomes, in effect, a part of the matter, a property of the matter. The cannon or the inclined plane imparts an actual force that becomes a part of the matter doing the moving so that when the initial force is removed, there is still a current force moving the matter.
Instead of saying what is actually happening, that an object is at rest with respect to the current forces acting upon it, a current force has been applied to cause an object to move with respect to the current forces acting upon it, and when the applied force has been removed, the object will continue to move until it returns to rest with respect to the current forces acting upon it, Galileo said the matter obtains inertia which causes it to continue to move until another force acts on it.
He made up a current force, inertia, to explain the movement of matter that was merely coming to rest with respect to current forces.
As a result, instead of matter moving in response to applied force in space as it does on Earth, matter moves in response to the failure to apply force and only changes that movement when force is applied to change that movement.
We had two choices to make when we looked at the moon moving across the sky, and when we realized that the Earth was rotating on its axis and the Earth and the planets were thus orbiting the sun.
We could say, there is a force that is causing all this movement and our job is to sit down and put on our thinking caps and come up with the cause of the force, a physical description of what it is, how it is generated, how it moves through space and how it acts on the matter to cause it to move. We could say, this is incredible stuff, all this movement. It is a priority to figure out what it's all about because surely this knowledge is central to our understanding of the universe and thus our continued existence in that universe.
Or we could say, "Well, look there at all that movement, duh, there's nothing there so therefore there's nothing there causing the movement. If there's nothing there causing the movement, then all the movement must have been caused in the past, God, swirling masses of gas, big bangs, it doesn't really make much difference because it can't be seen so it isn't there anyway. If anyone questions us, well, no one has ever proven there isn't a God, and no one is going to prove there wasn't a swirling mass of gas or a big bang or something to set everything in motion."
We had the choice of using our minds and coming up with some answers that actually explain the movement we measured, or making up a bunch of dumb cluck nonanswers that don't explain anything but which keep the questions from coming up.
"Where did the universe come from?"
"God created the universe."
"Didn't you hear, God is dead?"
"Well, then it condensed out of a swirling mass of gas."
"But only the solar system is swirling."
"Then it came from a big bang."
We had the choice to accept that matter in space works like matter on Earth, it requires current force to produce movement, and then to look for that current force, or we could accept nonexplanations for the obvious realities in our existence.
We chose nonexplanations!
HOW THE ARGUMENT FOR CURRENT FORCE WAS LOST
Four hundred years ago when these decisions were being made for us by dead men who knew nothing, there actually were strong proponents for a current force at work moving the planets.
Kepler, as a result of his mentor Brahe's mistaken measurement that the moon sped up in the summer and slowed down in the winter, believed, as a result of applying Brahe's mistake to the orbit of Mars that the planets sped up and slowed down as they moved around the sun.
Now, if a planet speeds up and slows down, what conclusions have to be made about Galileo's historical force imparted at the creation of the universe? The fact that Galileo had apoplexy at Brahe's measurements of the moon speeding up and slowing down should provide a hint.
If something is speeding up and slowing down, then it cannot be operating as a result of a historical force, it has to be operating as a result of a current force, otherwise there would be no way for the planet, or the moon, to regain the force that it had lost when it slowed down.
In the face of Galileo's total denial on the subject, Kepler argued that because planets had to speed back up after they slowed down, there was a current force causing movement in the solar system. He felt that the force that produced the current motion in the solar system somehow resulted from the sun's emissions.
Besides being a religiously risky assertion, after all, a current force denied that God had created motion when he created the matter in the universe, Kepler had no way to respond to the observation that if the sun's emissions were the source of motion for the planets in the solar system then where was the source of the moon's motion around the Earth.
In the mid-twentieth century, astronomers were still claiming the negative that there was no evidence that planets were internally hot and thus produced emissions. In fact, today it is generally believed that thermal equilibrium prevails, that the Earth only gives off the heat it receives, having maintained its temperature in empty, temperatureless space for some five billion years, so it is easy to see where Kepler's idea that it was something about the sun that caused the planets to move on a current basis ended up.
It was summarily dismissed!
This is one of two perfect examples that point out the fallacy of creating laws based on limited information and then applying the laws to all subsequent facts. There is no argument today that the Earth is hot. It is only the rare idiot that gets up and claims that volcanic magma results from the friction of plates beneath the surface of the Earth. The Earth's core is hot as hell, and the Earth is an emitter, clearly removing objections to Kepler's claim of a current force based on emissions, but uselessly so, since historic force, objects travel in straight lines unless, is a law, and no current force is necessary. The other example, of course, is making up the laws that apply to magnetism, heat, light and electricity before having any knowledge of induction, and then continuing to apply those made up laws in spite of induction.
Descartes avoided the problem with the moon moving around a nonemitting Earth by claiming that the movement of bodies in space was circular, that circular movement in water caused vortices, and thus the planets and moons were moving in the vortices created by their own movement. Leibnitz later reflexively subscribed to this theory in opposition to the historical force Newton adopted from Galileo.
The problem with planets and moons moving in the vortices created by their own movement was a chicken and egg problem. Which came first, the movement of the planets to cause the vortices or the movement of the vortices to cause the movement of the planets.
There being no way to argue that current force produced current motion in the solar system, the door was open to Newton's occult notion that momentum and gravity could affect each other without being used up.
OVERCOMING THE CHICKEN AND EGG PROBLEM BY INCORPORATING THEM IN A HISTORICAL FORCE
Huygens, the guy responsible for the water wave theory of light and thus much of our total ignorance about the nature of physical reality, stunned the scientific world by inventing the pendulum clock. By putting weights on a few pulleys and chains and regulating the effect of the weight on the pulleys by gears which also could be connected to hands that measured the timing of the whole process, he produced a clock that worked forever, the only requirement being that a servant come along periodically and reverse the effect of the weights, pulling them back up so that the Earth's attractive force could keep the whole thing operating.
The weights of a pendulum clock descend so slowing as a result of gravity's gear-muted tug that their movement is hardly noticeable behind the rhythmic swinging back and forth of the ever-present pendulum.
If we ruminate about the great thinkers in history while watching the pendulum swinging back and forth, we could say, after the fashion of Galileo, that the pendulum, without friction, would just swing back and forth forever.
These daydreams, nonreligious in nature because they are based totally on observation, might even be extended to a bouncing ball. If the friction of the atmosphere, and the friction between the ball and the floor were removed, wouldn't the ball bounce forever?
After all, what was there to slow it down?
Well, there was the same thing that slowed Tartaglia's cannonballs down. As soon as the cannonballs were shot out of the end of the cannon, they began to fall to the Earth because of the force of gravity.
But what if the surface of the Earth weren't there? What if they were, like the balls rolling off Galileo's workbench, describing parabolic courses which would retain their forward motion forever? Wouldn't shooting a cannonball off into space result in the cannonball being released from the friction of the atmosphere and also from the effect of the Earth's gravity?
Like the frictionless pendulum that would swing forever, wouldn't the cannonball, if given just the right momentum, continue forever around the Earth just like the moon, and just like the planets move around the sun?
Sure it would, and that's just what is happening. The moon and the planets received their motion in the past and because they are moving in frictionless space, they just keep right on moving like the pendulum would move if the pendulum could move without friction.
Huygens' swinging pendulum, Galileo's frictionless balls, Tartaglia's cannonballs, all these things were eminently measurable quantities and provided a basis for the measurable conclusion that the objects in the solar system were moving in frictionless space as a result of a historic force.
Because the measurements hid the fact that the cause of the movement remained unexplained, the explanation was occult. The mathematical bullshit hid from view the continued fact that the source and nature of the force that produced motion in the solar system remained unknown.
The cannon charge was the source of motion for Tartaglia's cannonballs, the inclined plane for Galileo's balls, the weight for Huygens swinging pendulum.
And God was the source of the force for Newton's planets!
But what about the fact that the planets sped up and slowed down? After all, Newton had used the inverse square nature of the measurement produced by the fact that Kepler's planets were supposed to describe equal areas in equal times for his explanation that the planets and moons were falling toward the sun and the planets like rocks fall to the surface of the Earth, inversely with the square of the distance over which they fall.
Newton had to concede that they were speeding up and slowing down.
How could they be speeding up and slowing down as a result of a historical force?
Not to worry!
As the planets fell toward the sun, they were speeding up weren't they? Their speed increased with the square of the distance over which they traveled. Kepler's laws said so even though Brahe's measurement of the moon and Kepler's measurement of Mars had them slowing down in the winter and speeding up in the summer, which would mean that the planets' speed increased as they fell away from the sun and decreased as they fell toward the sun, the opposite of Newton's fantasy.
In spite of this, the result of Newton's idea was the belief that the planets regained their speed by falling toward the sun. As they moved away from the sun, just like a bouncing ball that is moving up away from the Earth, the planets lost their speed, slowed down, but then, just like a bouncing ball, when they got as high as they could go, they started to fall back toward the sun, and regained their speed.
The chicken and the egg were incorporated into opposite sides of an orbit's measurement, force in on the fall, force out on the rise, and in the process the lack of knowledge about the current cause of the force was totally obscured.
But a bouncing ball eventually comes to rest on the surface of the Earth. Why haven't the planets come to rest on the surface of the sun?
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GRAVITY AND MOMENTUM ARE NOT USED UP WHEN INTERACTING THEREBY MAKING THEM MORE OCCULT THAN GOD
A freely swinging pendulum eventually comes to rest as a result of the Earth's force of attraction, gravity, acting upon it. A spinning coin is eventually upended by gravity slowing its spin. Galileo's rolling balls eventually come to rest with respect to gravity as do Tartaglia's cannonballs.
Objects come to rest with respect to the current forces acting upon them and gravity is the most effective force in the universe for bringing objects to rest. Gravity causes objects to stick motionless to whatever surface is between the source of the gravity and the object and it takes a great deal of force to unstick those objects.
But that is only in the real world, the world we measure here on Earth.
In frictionless space, even though frictionless space doesn't exist anywhere in the universe, things work differently.
When it is not doing anything, when it is merely diminishing, gravity is used up.
However, when it is causing the planets to accelerate, or when it is slowing the planets down, causing them to decelerate, it is not used up. The gravity causing the Earth to accelerate toward the sun does not prevent the same gravity from causing Venus to decelerate.
So we are dealing with a force that is not used up when it does something but is used up when it doesn't do anything.
That's clearly beyond the realm of human understanding, about as occult as you can get.
But what's more occult is the momentum the occult force of gravity is acting upon.
The planets are traveling in a straight line. That's clear from Newton's laws of motion. All matter travels in a straight line. It was the motion the matter received when it was created by God, swirling masses of gas, big bangs, whatever.
The only thing that could keep a planet from moving in a straight line was a force acting upon it to keep it from moving in a straight line.
Gravity is the only force in the universe, it was created as a property of matter by God when God created the universe, so gravity is the reason that, although everything in the universe is going in a straight line, it isn't. Gravity bends the straight-line motion of the planets and the moons into circular motion.
But because gravity is not used up when it does so, no energy is expended in bending the straight-line motion into circular motion. With none of the gravity's energy expended in bending the straight-line motion, none of the momentum produced by the straight-line motion is used up by being bent into circular motion.
Thus, unlike the bouncing ball which eventually comes to rest with respect to the forces acting upon it, when the planets and moons decelerate as they move away from the sun and the planets, they are not losing any energy doing so.
As a result, unlike the bouncing ball, they can regain all the height they lost.
The momentum of the planets and the moons, not being used up when it exerts itself against the force of gravity, is also beyond the realm of human understanding and therefore it is just as occult as the gravity it is not using up.
But that's not as occult as it gets. The occult notion of motion pushes beyond the realm of human understanding even further, creating matter where none exists and eliminating it where it does!
THE RESULT OF APPLYING THE INVERSE SQUARE MEASUREMENT OF FALLING OBJECTS TO THE OCCULT FORCES OF GRAVITY AND MOMENTUM
Newton attempted to show that gravity was a property of matter by mathematically demonstrating that it was proportional to matter. He set out to show that the momentum of the moon was equal to the force of gravity produced by the matter in the Earth and the moon. To do this he had to know the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon. By showing how much force there was in the Earth and the moon, he could show that that force, diminishing inversely with the square of the distance over which it acted, equaled the momentum produced by the amount of matter in the moon and thus, operating on the basis of the same inverse square law that caused objects to fall to the surface of the Earth proved, at least to the indiscriminate, that it was a property of that matter.
The whole enterprise depended on knowing the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon, a definite unknowable unless the assumption was made that the matter in the Earth and the moon was spread uniformly throughout.
Newton therefore made up his corpuscles of matter which he claimed were uniformly distributed throughout matter.
The whole business failed of proof, the moon having too much matter by volume to stay in orbit. It failed even more miserably when applied to the motion of the planets.
Thus, gravity was never proven to be proportional to and therefore a property of matter and there was no relationship demonstrated between the inverse square measurement of falling objects and the movement of the planets.
But what the hey, when we are dealing with historical forces there is nothing currently existing that can contradict anything we want to say. We can make up bullcrap to our heart's content, and who can gainsay it. We are, after all, dealing with the occult, the occult by definition is hidden from view beyond the realm of human understanding, so we can feel free to roam whither our fantasies carry us.
While it's true that no one can measure what's inside the planets and the moons, if we call the inverse square measurement of falling objects a law and apply it to the movement of the planets, then we can compute the amount of matter that makes them up. All we have to do is measure the circular motion and then compute how much matter would be required to cause that circular motion if the matter produced a force of attraction that diminished inversely with the square of the distance over which it acted.
If we can't use matter to prove that a proposed inverse square law demonstrates that the attractive force is proportional, and therefore probably a property of matter (as opposed to something the matter is doing, vibrating, oscillating, sweating), we can create an inverse square law to show how much matter is causing the gravity.
Why prove the inverse square law when we know that's how objects fall when they are dropped, and why prove gravity when we know that dropped objects fall.
We'll just assume that both apply to the movement of matter in space and use the result to compute the amount of matter causing the force.
Thus, measuring the orbit of the planets with the belief that those orbits are the result of the inverse square measurement of falling objects on Earth, the inner planets become planets with cores made out of nickel and iron and the outer planets become planets with cores made out of gas. In the meantime, the moon has a concave backside, is filled with caves, or is made up of cheese, and the crowning glory of Modern Science, fiery comets in the sky are, because the application of the inverse square law to their orbits dictates it, actually snowballs!
And, when we really get carried away by our fantasies, we can look deep into space and find that, without enough visible matter present to hold the stars into galaxies, those galaxies are actually made up ninety percent of dark matter, stuff we can't see and never will, and that, in addition, the fabric of space, the definition of which is blank, empty, frictionless, nothing, is rent throughout with holes which, because they are black, cannot be seen.
Hidden from view?
Beyond the realm of understanding?
This occult bullcrap makes God's presence palpable!
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MALICE OR STUPIDITY?
It's one thing to look up at the sun crossing the sky and argue about whether the sun is going around the Earth or whether the Earth is going around the sun. For one thing, as far as appearances are concerned, it actually looks like the sun is going around the Earth. The millennia through which the subject never even got discussed attests to the power of this appearance.
And besides, what difference did it make? The relationship didn't become important until the mid-twentieth century when we started to shoot rockets into space.
Today, the question of whether there is a current force operating the solar system is not even a question. The solar system was put in motion by a swirling mass of gas and has operated unchanged for some five billion years, and will continue to operate unchanged for another five or ten billion years unless an asteroid (as opposed to a giant snowball like a comet) comes along and causes a temporary glitch which will wipe out life but leave the planet relatively unscathed.
Does it make any difference what operates the solar system, God, historical swirling masses of gas, or some little invisible guy with a crank and some very thin gears?
What's wrong with occult notions of motion?
Does not knowing the cause of motion make any difference?
It does make a difference!
The force that operates the solar system is the same force that makes objects fall to the surface of the Earth. If we view the nature of the force as occult, hidden from view beyond the realm of human understanding, then we will never obtain an accurate picture of physical reality, and without an accurate picture of physical reality, we will never be able to do what we evolved to do, move safely through that physical reality.
Consigning one source of motion, rotation and orbiting, to a historical force and the other source of motion, falling objects, to the status of a static property of matter, and then dismissing all movement as the interaction of the two, that orbiting objects would be going in a straight line but for the fact that they are falling and they would be falling but for the fact that they are going in a straight line, when they are doing neither, destroys the mind because it itself is a mindless assertion with no basis in reality.
We can't compare ourselves with the preCopernicans who walked around with a mistaken fact of a relationship of the movement of the Earth to the sun because at least they were mistaken about a fact.
We can't even claim to have made a mistake about a fact, what is causing the motion of the matter in the solar system, rotating and orbiting planets and falling objects, because we have simply assumed the cause away, said it doesn't exist, there is no current force other than that wrapped up in matter as a property like texture and color and hardness.
There is a thin line between malice, the intentional infliction of harm, and stupidity, the oafish negligence to duty that can be dismissed as relatively blameless. Being dumb and ignorant about what causes movement in physical reality is simple stupidity.
But claiming knowledge when none exists starts to border on malice.
The line to malice is clearly crossed, however, when the subject is totally ignored while mulcting billions out of the very people in whose name the knowledge is being sought for bogus explorations into matters such as black holes, event horizons, gadzillions of elementary particles, forces at the core of nature and formulae that explain everything.
What is the harm inflicted by the malice?
Knowing the cause of motion is at the basis of any attempt to come up with a consistent picture of physical reality.
Having a consistent picture of physical reality is an absolute prerequisite to our survival because our survival depends on our ability to manipulate physical reality to our benefit. Without an accurate picture of what we are manipulating, our manipulations will result in disasters rather than in our survival.
Directing efforts away from this basic task of constructing a consistent picture of physical reality simply because of laziness, the inability to confront difficult questions, robs everyone who has put faith in the process to come up with answers that will allow the human race to move forward in the universe of an opportunity to contribute.
If we don't know the cause of motion, and we think we do, we will never attempt to uncover the cause of motion.
If we think we know the cause of motion when we don't, we'll die ignorant, never having had the chance to make the attempt to uncover the cause of motion and thus produce a perception of the universe that approximates realty, a perception of the universe that will allow us to extend our range of survivability in the universe.
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