7.FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF PROGRESS: FROM
BEING AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE TO BEING ISOLATED AND ALONE IN
THE UNIVERSE
"In the whole of sidereal astronomy there is, perhaps, nothing more difficult to determine than the parallax of a star. To think that among all the stars in the sky there is not one which shows a parallax of one second! Now, one second is a millimeter seen at two hundred meters, it is a hair of a twentieth of a millimeter seen at 10 metes (32.8 feet)! Well, it is in this width that the annual motion of a star is performed. The telescope magnifies it, of course. In the whole of sidereal astronomy there is, perhaps, nothing more difficult to determine than the parallax of a star. To think that among all the stars in the sky there is not one which shows a parallax of one second! Now, one second is a millimeter seen at two hundred meters, it is a hair of a twentieth of a millimeter seen at 10 metes (32.8 feet)! Well, it is in this width that the annual motion of a star is performed. The telescope magnifies it, of course without this it would be absolutely imperceptible; but how easily it can be concealed by the imperceptible motions of the telescope, by the influences of temperature, by refraction, precession, nutation, aberration, and by the proper motion of the star itself in space! All these united influences amount to several seconds, and are themselves subject to some uncertainties, and instrumental errors must still be added to them. How, then, shall we extricate trustworthy indications of the minute displacement due to the effect of the earth's motion? Astronomers, however, succeeded in doing so for some stars." Flammarion, Popular Astronomy (1894)
Nothing is more humorous than listening to some modern empirical slug snicker with condescension at the thought that humans could be so arrogant as to believe the ancient notion that they were alone, occupying the center of the universe. Broach the subject of UFOs, however, and the condescension will turn to outrage as the slug summons the empirical police.
Bruno was probably burned at the stake more for his suspected double agent activities than for his scientific beliefs, but there is no question that the logical conclusion he drew from what he accepted as the Copernican reality of the Earth orbiting the sun was disquieting to his interrogators.
If, Bruno reasoned, the Earth orbited the sun, then the lights we saw dotting the skies were also suns and they also had Earths orbiting them and those Earths also had people on them just like us.
The primary reason that this viewpoint was disquieting four hundred years ago was the implication that if there were other people on other planets, then those people's existence wasn't covered by the creation story in the bible. Such heretical assertions provided an excellent basis for frying an intelligence agent who may just have gone off-center.
Religion aside, there can be no greater reality than the truth of Bruno's assertion. The stars are suns, and those suns certainly have planets and those planets certainly have people on them.
So, when millions of people sight UFOs in the sky that, to empirical strictures, are aerodynamically impossible, but which, in this day of camcorders, are recorded traveling over courses extending for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, why not just accept them for what they are, vehicles occupied by other people representing advanced civilizations from neighboring star systems who are dropping by for a look-see at the local backward natives?
Why would Empirical Science insist on following a four hundred year old literal interpretation of the Bible?
It's certainly not because Empirical Science doesn't believe that life on other worlds is possible. NASA recently rigged up some life on Mars to give manned interplanetary exploration a long overdue shot in the arm, and astronomers, having exhausted other idiocies to garner publicity, are running up each other's rear ends in an attempt to show that mass wobble of stars is not only detectable, it demonstrates that planets orbit neighboring stars.
Is it because Empirical Science demands that its hypotheses be testable, and that life in other solar systems is merely another hypothesis that requires testing? Is it a perversion of the putative scientific method, a claim that until some evidence, more than a shred of evidence at least, turns up to demonstrate intelligent life on other planets, that the hypotheses of other intelligent life in the universe remains untested?
The incessant sightings of UFOs put Empirical Science at risk because it either has to claim that the population is suffering from mass hysteria or it has to deal with the possibility that the sightings are substantial, and that its laws therefore do not in fact describe physical reality, that Empirical Science is, in fact, what it is, a misassembled pile of occult crap.
Empirical Science can't prudently make either claim, that we're dumb or that it's dumb, although recently it has been coming perilously close to claiming we're dumb.
So Empirical Science makes the claim that UFOs can't exist because their behavior doesn't conform to the laws of nature as those laws are presently understood.
This is so patently absurd that it is laughable. Even Empirical Science is embarrassed by its claim that because it doesn't understand what's going on, what's going on isn't going on.
Therefore, Empirical Science has to fall back on its final line of defense against the ultimate apostasy, that we are being visited by curious neighbors in the universe who know something Empirical Science doesn't know, by claiming that the distance between the stars is so great that even if advanced civilizations exist, interstellar travel would be impossible.
In short, we may not be the center of the Universe but we might as well be, because there t'aint nothing out there that can drop by and say hello (as opposed to nothing out there that would want to drop by and say hello).
Now this is an extraordinary claim, that we can look out at the pinpricks of light in the darkness of space and measure the distances to those pinpricks, and in doing so determine they are so far away that traveling between them is impossible.
One must always be wary of extraordinary claims.
In fact, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof!
We wouldn't want to accept just any old proof or even tenuous proof that the distances to the stars are measurable and so vast as to be impassable because the psychological consequences of such a belief are just too great, dictating as it would a determination whether we are actually sophisticated beings curious about the universe, or just savages isolated by ignorance and superstition on some island in space, a dot of green and blue whose inhabitants' development, stunted by some unfathomable ancient cataclysm beyond their ken, has left them a sociological curiosity to curious voyagers.
WHY WOULD WE TRICK OURSELVES INTO BELIEVING WE KNOW SOMETHING WE CAN'T KNOW?
Questions of perspective plague the mind, which attempts to fill in the missing elements of the pictures of reality it forms by what it has available in its recall. If we are looking out to sea and we see a ship all alone bobbing up and down on the waves, we have no way of knowing how big the ship is. If our job is to repel invaders, knowing the size of the ship would be extremely important.
However, if the atmosphere is extremely clear, what's far away might appear to be up close, and if the day is hazy, what's up close might appear to be far away. We evolved with two eyes so that we might have depth perception as we moved through reality, but that depth perception disappears at distances where movement is not contemplated and thus strategies to deal with attempting to determine size over distance couldn't evolve.
We are really in the dark about how big the ship is because we have no way of determining how far away it is.
We are driven to estimate the size of the ships, however. Knowing how big the ship is would tell us how many people it carried, and thus the size of the invasion force.
Our survival forces us to make the estimate.
If we say the ship is a long distance away, we might say that the ship is very large to look as large as it does. We do some calculations about how big "large" could be and decide that the ship must be ten miles away because the largest ship that could be floating out there would be a thousand feet long, and a thousand foot long ship would be the size we measure the ship to be if the ship were ten miles away.
That circular computation completed, we can say that a thousand foot ship would hold a thousand people.
Of course, if it was clear, the ship might only be a mile away, making it only a hundred feet long, holding a hundred people.
Or, if it was hazy, then the ship might be a mile away and still be a thousand feet long, holding a thousand people.
All of this stuff is just mathematical bullshit because we simply don't have enough information to produce measurements. Businesses play what-if all the time with software programs that manipulate variables. The Office of Management and Budget will provide what-if disks dealing with the national budget so that people can make their own assumptions.
All agree that in things such as the budget, or business decisions, variables represent a future no one can know.
On the other hand, computing the number of people on the ship is not a crystal ball operation. There are a number of people on the ship, the ship is real, it exists, it's out there, it's a current fact, it's a threat to our continued existence and we have to come up with a number.
If we are like General McClellan, the eminently unsuccessful civil war general who consistently insisted on overestimating the enemy presence, we can overestimate the number of people on the ship and go into vigorous retreat. Or we could underestimate the number of people and meet the enemy totally outgunned.
When we are worried about invaders, we are forced to make assumptions about reality and then base estimates of the quantitative nature of that reality on those assumptions.
But why make an estimate if we don't need to know?
The distances to the stars and galaxies and the number of stars in a galaxy are not things that provide us with a present threat.
Why would we want to compute the distance to the stars or the number of stars in a galaxy if we didn't have to?
Why should we produce mathematical constructs to fool ourselves into knowing something that we can't know?
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DISTANCE BEGETS STARS
So that we will know what we are up against when we explore how Empirical Science has come up with its conclusion that even if there were other civilizations in the universe, we are alone because the distances are so great between the stars that they could never be traversed, it is necessary to look at the mechanisms of astronomical calculation.
Just as the number of troops on the bobbing ship depends on the size of the ship, so does the number of stars in a galaxy depend on the size of the galaxy. Astronomers are used to saying all sorts of silly stuff because they know that no one can double check them. Thus, an astronomer can point to a tiny dot in the sky and say that's a galaxy, an island universe, and it's made up of two and a half billion stars.
We, simple fools that we are, gasp at the massive brain work that must have allowed such a godly creature to be able to asseverate such a fact. Two and a half billion stars! That's a whole lot of stars.
We wouldn't think of asking this heavenly purveyor of fact how he had the time to count all those stars. We know, because we are told over and over, that Empirical Science is based on empirical observation, so we know that someone, somewhere, must have sat them self down and done the counting, and a dozen more recounted to empirically ensure that the original count was correct, but we don't dwell on how this might have been accomplished.
And, of course, we don't even dare to think the astronomer is just talking through his hat, making up bullcrap answers, that he hasn't the foggiest idea how many stars there are in the galaxy, in fact, a hundred years ago didn't even know there was a galaxy in which to count the stars.
What the astronomer has done is the following:
He has estimated the distance the galaxy is from Earth.
Using the estimated distance, he has estimated the galaxy's size.
He has then estimated how far he thinks an average star in a galaxy is from another average star.
He has then determined the volume of the galaxy using its estimated size.
He has then divided the average volume a star occupies if it is an average distance from all other stars into the average volume of the galaxy as determined by its estimated size as determined by its estimated distance, and come up with an estimated number for the stars.
Of course, this hasn't all been a bed of roses. The astronomer has no way of knowing how many stars make up the center of the galaxy, he just knows that the number of stars per volume of space in the center of the galaxy is greater than the number of stars for the same volume of space in the arms because he can't resolve the individual stars in the center of the galaxy. So he has to create one estimate for volume at the center of the galaxy and another for the arms of the galaxy.
But that's what Empirical Science is, a process of making exacting computations based on absolutely no fact whatsoever. One actual mathematical computation, volume into volume, gives the whole fantasy the color of measurable reality and thus deludes Empirical Science into believing it is dealing with measurable fact.
So, with all of these estimates based on distance, what does distance do to the estimates?
If the astronomer underestimates the distance to the galaxy, the galaxy is further away than it looks, it is larger than it looks, and therefore underestimating distance reduces the number of stars in the galaxy.
Simply by adding a little distance to his estimate of how far away the galaxy is, the astronomer does what all good necromancers do, he creates matter out of nothing.
On the other hand, in the unlikely event that he overestimates the distance to the galaxy, then he is creating too many stars in the galaxy. Reducing the distance would take stars away from his estimate, destroying matter as it were.
Why does the astronomer do all of this, make up answers for things about which he has no knowledge and for which he can have no knowledge?
What would you do if you were asked a question the answer to which you had not the foggiest idea and for which there was no obtainable answer to start with?
Would you want to say, "Hey, I don't know the answer to that question. It's just one of those things that we can never know. We are in a galaxy, and we have no way of knowing how many stars make it up. Other galaxies are blurs of light. We can't tell how far away they are, we can't tell how big they are and we can't tell how many stars make them up."
"Well, boot me Mama," we reply. "Didn't this idiot want a new telescope? What good's a new telescope if he can't answer our questions?"
The astronomer is in danger, at a minimum, of losing his toys if he comes back with the truth, that he just doesn't know the answer to our question.
So he's going to come up with an answer. Stupid us don't care what the answer is, we just want to hear an answer. Two and a half billion stars is about as meaningful to us as three and a half billion stars.
But why not a more realistic estimate of the number of stars?
If you were going to hand out stupid answers, would you hand out something that was questionable?
What if a sensible answer were in the tens of thousands?
That's something the average idiot can understand. We all spent time trying to count to ten thousand when we were kids and learning how to count. We might go out and second guess the astronomer if he came up with a reasonable answer to how many stars there were in a galaxy.
Why should he bother coming up with a reasonable answer when there is no answer to start with? Why not just overestimate what can't be estimated, and come up with mind-boggling billions instead of comprehensible thousands?
CREATING VAST DISTANCES HAS VAST PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
Before describing the step by step descent that led to the absurdity that distances in space are so vast that they can never be traversed, the consequences of such a belief deserve comment. When we attempt to make choices as to what we are going to believe, when we contemplate whether we can perhaps do something that will carry us beyond ourselves and our present capabilities, the choices, in many cases, have already been dictated by a priori blindness.
It's fairly obvious that if we think that distances in space are so vast that they can't be traversed, then we will never attempt to traverse them. But what does that mean in immediate terms?
The first thing that it means is that this is all there is because there ain't no more. We live on the third planet from the sun and none of the other planets are even remotely habitable by our requirements. If something happened to the Earth, then that would be it for us.
Because our life is dependent on our environment, without that environment, with an Earth like Mars or the moon, we would be no more.
If our existence is dependent on the Earth for its continuance, then we wouldn't willingly want to deal with the end of the Earth's existence. If we cannot bring ourselves to deal coherently with our own end, we can't be expected to deal with the end of life on Earth. This would drive us to create an Earth that would be habitable forever in the future, or at least for so long that its end would provide us with no immediate misgivings about our own end.
Thus, dipping into the old billions pool where the concept of the number is impossible to comprehend, we could say that the Earth has been around for billions of years, and its going to be around for billions of years to come.
When we have ourselves isolated from the rest of the universe, and blessed with life on a planet that will continue to exist like it is for billions of years into the future, an empirical substitute for the nonempirical belief in eternal life, we can settle into the same mindset we had when we were at the center of the universe.
What mindset is that?
Pure, unadulterated arrogance.
Once again we are the chosen people, the life form God created to populate the universe, the universe, of course, being our universe. Certainly there might be other life forms out there, and even the smug Carl Sagan, for whom all evidence that contradicted belief was no evidence at all, dearly hoped to encounter evidence of it someday, but for now, it's just out there somewhere and of no concern to us.
Arrogance dealing with our place in the universe leaves us without aspirations. We focus our attention on the technology required to feather our nest rather than on the technology required to extend our range of survivability into the future.
Our minds evolved to move us safely through the environment by forming a picture of that environment so that it could be compared with the picture of the environment we had stored in our recall. A by-product of this evolved mechanism is ..the ability to form a picture of the environment when it isn't there, and because we can alter the pictures we form of reality when reality is not present, we can alter reality. This accidental result of evolution allows us to create pictures of reality that are better suited to our survivability than actual reality, and to then go out into reality and alter that reality so as to make physical reality more conducive to our continued existence.
While the mind evolved to move us through reality, it is the tool we have to extend our range of survivability in that reality by forming pictures of that reality, altering those pictures, and then altering physical reality to conform to those pictures.
If we are nested, if we are happy, if we are content, if there is no threat to our continued existence, we will not attempt to alter the pictures we have of reality.
In essence, believing that we are isolated from the universe, that we cannot leave this solar system, that we are stuck right here on this planet forever causes us to place all of our eggs, our genes really, in one basket. We have no idea how long that basket, the Earth, has been here, we have no idea how long the solar system has been here and we don't know how long the Earth is going to accommodate our existence.
But simply by believing that we are unique, isolated, alone, we have accomplished our own demise, we have acquiesced in the probability that the unique life form that evolved on this planet, orbiting this star, in this galaxy, in this small corner of the universe will die in place where it evolved, never having made a rational attempt to determine what its place in the universe is, or indeed, whether it even has a place in the universe.
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ROBERT HOOKE BECOMES THE FIRST ESTABLISHMENT HACK
In mid-sixteenth century England, with the ascension of astronomy buff Charles II to the throne, Oxford scholars felt that it was necessary to rescue British Science from Cromwell's revolutionary disorder in the face of intellectual onslaughts from competing nations such as Italy, France and the ruling power of Holland. Science had become a big gun in the war between nationstates as the competition for colonization of the planet continued apace. Reputation was the report of that gun, with the larger the reputation, the greater the report and the bigger the implied gun.
Scientific firsts, especially discoveries and proofs of hypotheses, were the handmaiden of reputation, bringing it forth in all its pristine glory.
Mistakes about scientific firsts, on the other hand, were the bane of reputation, with false claims as to discoveries and proofs placing a nationstate in danger of becoming a laughing stock in the face of the world.
The Oxford scholars sought to form themselves into a Royal Society to organize Britain's discoveries and proofs, to filter them in order to avoid national embarrassment and to trumpet discoveries that were clearly verifiable, take credit for claims that could never be disproven and, if possible, claim other's discoveries as Britain's own.
Hooke, educated but poor, became the society's paid curator of experiments.
At this time, in the 1660s, just over a hundred years after the deathbed delivery of the Copernican proposition that the Earth moved around the sun rather than the converse, the question of proof was still raging. Galileo's idea of an inherent inertia turning the Earth in frictionless space had been more or less discredited in the face of his failure to realize that the tides would have long since caused the Earth to stop spinning.
There was a competition among nations to produce the Copernican proof and the nation that could prove that the Earth went around the sun would enhance its reputation beyond all bounds.
Royal Society members therefore began to kick around the idea of measuring parallax to prove that the Earth was in orbit around the sun.
WHAT IS PARALLAX?
If you hold a finger in front of your nose, you have three things to consider with respect to your finger. You have your head which contains your eyes which allows you to see your finger. You have your finger. And you have the background behind your finger. If the background is stationary, then you can move your finger back and forth side wise and see its position change with respect to the background.
However, there is another way that you can see your finger move back and forth with respect to the background that doesn't involve moving your finger. If you alternately open and close each eye, your stationary finger appears to move back and forth against a stationary background.
This movement is caused by parallax, an apparent change in position of an object because of the change in the angle at which the object is viewed. Each eye, located inches apart, views the finger at a different angle.
The members of the Royal Society discussed the fact that if the Earth went around the sun, then opposite sides of the resulting orbit would produce two angles of view. All that was needed was a sort of finger against which the two angles could be measured, and once measured, the measurement could be used as proof that the Earth did in fact have an orbit and that orbit was around the sun.
At the time, planets were determined to be planets because they moved independently against the starry background. Stars, on the other hand, were starting to be considered distant suns, with relative distance determined by brightness. Because light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it travels, bright stars were thought to be up close while dim stars were thought to be far away.
The fact that some stars were close and others far away led the members of the Royal Society to wonder whether the bright close-up stars wouldn't change position against the dim far away stars when the Earth was on opposite sides of its orbit, just like a finger appeared to move against a stationary background when the eyes were alternately opened and closed
Hooke was instructed to complete measurements of the parallax of an appropriate star and report back the results.
SOME OBVIOUS PARALLAX PROBLEMS
When we run through a rain storm, the drops look like they are moving away from our direction of travel even though they are dropping vertically. Thus, viewing stars from the platform of a moving Earth is thought to cause stellar aberration, a displacement of the stars as a result of the Earth's motion. Any measurement of a star's movement as a result of the changed perspective from the Earth being on opposite sides of its orbit would have to account for this stellar aberration.
Another small problem in measuring the apparent movement of stars because of a change in the Earth's orbital position involved what any schoolchild sees when looking at stars. Stars twinkle. Because of a star's distance, its light is being refracted at continually different angles in the atmosphere so that it is first here and then there. Stars appear to move while we look at them regardless of the movement of the Earth.
With four or five other problems, the star's proper motion in space, supposedly measurable, the reliability of the telescope to name two, a correction of a second or so (one thirty-six hundredths of a degree) must be made to claim accurate measurements. Because no measurement of parallax ever approaches a second of a degree, this is quite a trick.
Hooke thus had his job cut out for him.
He was being asked to measure that which couldn't be measured!
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SOME LESS OBVIOUS PROBLEMS WITH PARALLAX
The Royal Society directed Hooke to make the parallax measurements to prove that it was the Earth that was traveling around the sun and not the sun that was moving.
Well, if it wasn't the sun that was moving, then the sun wasn't moving, was it?
So right out of the chute the proceedings were handicapped with the assumption that the orbit used to define the parallax measurement was not itself moving.
The sun moves upwards of three million miles per year. In the half year between measurements then, the opposing measuring point has moved almost a million and a half miles, or almost one percent of the distance defining the measurement, twice the Earth's orbital distance from the sun of ninety-three million miles.
Failure to take this measurement into consideration totally obliterates any parallax measurement where the most accurate measurement claimed is at least thirty times smaller, less than three thousandths of a percent of a degree of the arc involved.
But, say the sun doesn't move as slow as it is measured to move, say it moves as fast as the Big Bangers say it moves, over forty-three thousand miles per hour. With everything moving away from everything else at that rate, parallax measurements would simply be a joke.
It's lucky that Empirical Science was able to use parallax to determine stellar distances before it was discovered that parallax was useless in determining stellar distances.
Otherwise, we wouldn't know what the stellar distances were!
Robert Hooke wasn't so lucky. His delusion didn't become fact before it was found to be fantasy.
Merry Old England wasn't about to stake its reputation on a chimera!
HOOKE MEASURES SOMETHING
Hooke picked the brightest star in the head of the Dragon Constellation for the parallax measurements needed to prove Copernicus, and thus bring King and country world renown.
He erected a thirty-six foot long perpendicular tube through which he observed the stars passing overhead. However, his results were not readily forthcoming.
"Hooke was exhorted by the President to undertake observations of the parallax of the earth's orb to seconds . . . he was exhorted by the President to make the measurements with all convenient speed . . . Mr. Hooke was ordered during his vacation to observe the parallax of the earth's orb . . . The President of the Royal Society mentioned that he had understood . . ." went the requests.
"Inconvenient weather. . . would be a great indisposition in health . . ." came Hooke's replies.
"He was desired to prosecute carefully this observation . . . Recommended to Hooke to continue to observe . . . He was likewise exhorted to prosecute the observation of the parallax of the earth's orb . . ." the Royal Society minutes continued to direct.
Hooke finally threw in the towel and reported that he had measured the parallax of the bright star in the Dragon's head.
The English astronomer, James Bradley, later finding that the claimed measurement was 30" (thirty seconds!) away from reality, which is to say the error was about six hundred times greater than current claimed parallax measurements, which are in the area of one twentieth of one second, and noting that it was not only grossly off, but off in the opposite direction of stellar aberration, attempted to explain why the measurement appeared reasonable at first. Proffering the explanation that currently supports the entire house of cards that is modern Empirical Science, he stated that he "had no small opinion of the measurements' correctness because the length of the telescope (complexity of the equipment) and the care taken in making them exact (complexity of methodology) were both strong inducements to having thought them so."
In explaining today how stellar distances are computed by parallax measurements, Hooke's delusion is glossed over, much as the venerable Hershel's later discovery of the planet Uranus is, where whatever he saw and recorded was going in the opposite direction Uranus goes.
The end result was that the Copernican proposition remained unproven!
But the measurement of the distance to the stars beckoned. Empirical Science never says die when there is a measurement to find and a ruler that can be built in the mind to find it.
THE MAGNITUDE OF DISTANCE BECOMES "WELL UNDERSTOOD"
Things that are "well understood" in Empirical Science are by necessity divorced from reality. Galileo's inertia was destroyed by the friction of the tides, but it was "well understood" that frictionless movement is not affected by gravity. When Newton proved that gravity was a property of mass, it was "well understood" that the reason those same tides didn't slow the Earth's rotation down was because the mass of the sun and moon literally lifted the water out of the seabeds so that there was no friction resulting from all the sloshing.
And when a couple of shirt-cuff measurements came as close as less than a factor of three, one that found that the stars were a million times further away than the sun, and another that found that the stars were four hundred thousand times further away than the sun, why, it was "well understood" how vast the depths of space were.
Pretty damn vast!
Once something is "well understood" it then takes proof to alter that understanding. No one can prove that frictionless movement is not affected by gravity because no one can produce frictionless movement. Modern frictionless movement, satellites orbiting the Earth, is disproved every day by falling satellites, but Empirical Science claims that satellites fall because the Earth's atmosphere expands and creates friction for the satellites, a nonproveable proposition. No tide on the face of the Earth is predictable by the movement of the moon and the sun, but that isn't important. It is "well understood" that the tides in fact rise and fall with that movement, otherwise the Earth would have long since stopped spinning.
And, it would take extraordinary proof to demonstrate that the stars are not at least one hundred thousand times further away than the sun, proof that can never be forthcoming because there is no way to measure their distances to begin with.
When you can't measure something, the measurements you produce are going to agree with what you already "well understand" rather than what conflicts with that understanding.
All conclusions about the vastness of space were set in stone several centuries before Empirical Science became sophisticated enough to be able to make unquestionable claims as to impossible measurements, in short, before a claim of actual measurement was ever made.
It took two hundred years of a priori conditioning as to the vastness of the distances in space to dictate the conclusions to be drawn from attempting to measure how far the stars are!
THE "WELL UNDERSTOOD" DISTANCES IN SPACE ARE FINALLY CONFIRMED BY PARALLAX MEASUREMENTS
Huygens, of water wave fame, first attempted to establish the distance to the stars by comparing the brightness of the light from Sirius with sunlight and came up with an estimate that Sirius was about seventeen thousand times further away than the sun.
This was dismissed as not far enough, giving an indication of the desire to distance ourselves from the universe, of the need to return to the belief that we are alone and thus simulate the feeling that we are once again at the center of the universe.
Newton's contemporary James Gregory speculated that the sun was a typical star and that Sirius was dimmer than the sun only because of distance, a star's brightness having an inverse ratio to the square root of its distance. Disregarding Huygens' estimate, Gregory recommended studying Sirius when its brightness equaled the brightness of Saturn. Using the comparison of brightness at that point, and knowing the distance of Saturn from the sun, the star's distance could be computed.
Newton did so and estimated the distance of Sirius to be one million times further away than the sun.
James Brady, when not being appalled at Hooke's parallax mismeasurements, concluded that Newton was off by a factor of 2.5, that the stars were actually four hundred thousand times further away than the sun.
Now both these guys were blathering. They didn't have the foggiest idea how far away the stars were, and neither do we, but one of these guys was named Newton, and anything that Newton said, as long as it wasn't that light was made up of particles, was fact.
Galileo had been the first to suggest that because the distance of the Earth from the sun was so great, it could be used to measure the distance to the stars. He proposed using double stars to compute distance. Double stars were stars in the same line of sight so that from the different angles produced by the Earth's orbit, the closer star would move with respect to the further star. (When so many of these optical double were found that it seemed unlikely that they could all be in the same line of sight, unless of course the distances between the stars were not as vast as they were "well understood" to be, it was decided that the majority of optical doubles were actually companion stars, stars that appeared to be close together because they were held together by Newton's fanciful mass/gravity, and once it was "well understood" that these were companion stars, Newton's mass/gravity could be used to compute their mass, how much matter each star contained.)
61Cigni was finally measured in the mid-nineteenth century by the optical double method of parallax measurement to be about eleven light years away, with the angle produced being just over three tenths of a second. This is about one twelve thousandth of a degree of arc, which is an improvement on most parallax measurements, the vast majority of which fall in the area of one seventy-two thousandths of a degree of arc.
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SOME REALLY BIG PROBLEMS WITH PARALLAX
A measurement based on the Earth being on opposite sides of its orbit is a measurement based on the Earth being at points that are one hundred and eighty six million miles apart.
This is a pretty big distance. It is pretty seductive to let our minds form a picture of this immeasurably wide base which can then be used to determine how far away stars are. With a big distance like that, how can one think such an undertaking impossible?
The problem is in the execution. While the claim that the ability to measure parallax is based on the sophistication of the equipment used, the simple fact is, even a parallax of three tenths of a second means that in the example of alternately opening and closing our eyes we would be holding our finger over six miles away. While six miles seems like a small figure when compared to the big measurement of one hundred and eighty-six million miles that makes up the base of the Earth's orbit, the point is that the six miles would have a base of three inches, the distance between the pupils of the eyes. If you think it would be possible to discern any movement by alternately opening and closing your eyes with your finger six miles away, even if you could see your finger, then you are a prime candidate for an astronomership, where thoughts become fact without reference to reality.
To put the situation in earthly terms, the claim that parallax measurement can measure the distance to the stars is as credible as a claim that the statue of the bull on Wall St. could be put in place by surveying the tip of one horn using the angle allowed by a hole the size of a dime on the side of the Empire State Building where the location of the Empire State Building is determined by surveying the clouds passing the flame on the torch of the Statue of Liberty through the same hole!
In short, claims that a star's distance can be determined by parallax measurement are chimerical, delusions. Parallax is one of those things that are covered in the first pages of a comprehensive text on astronomy, not to challenge, but merely to acquaint readers to a simple matter of fact, here that finding the distance to the stars is a fait accompli and initiates need not ask questions about the underlying assumptions and self-delusion that goes into establishing those distances. No self-respecting astronomer would spend his precious career looking into established facts when Nobels await the empiricist that measures the exact distance to the end of the universe or how much gas must a mass of gas unfurl if a mass of gas must have swirl.
The last part of the facetious example using a hole in the Empire State Building to survey the placement of a bull sixty blocks away, that the location of the Empire State Building has to be determined by surveying the flame of the Statue of Liberty against the clouds floating by in the background, presents an insurmountable problem with parallax measurement, a fatal defect in execution.
Do the finger thing with the eyes, but this time instead of a fixed background, create a movable background with a finger on your other hand. Put your background finger as far away as possible from you eyes, and your foreground finger as close as possible to your eyes. Alternately opening and closing your eyes provides considerable movement of your foreground finger in relation to your background finger.
Now move your background finger up close to your foreground finger and alternately open and close your eyes.
Hardly any movement at all.
Now, put your background finger out away from your eyes again and move your foreground finger next to it and alternately open and close your eyes.
Not much movement here, either.
Place your background finger far away and your foreground finger close. Then move your foreground finger out an inch and alternately open and close your eyes. A lot of movement. Move it out another inch and alternately open and close your eyes. Less movement! Move it still further and still less movement results. Keeping the foreground finger in place and moving the background finger forward produces the same result.
The movement of the finger back and forth as a result of parallax is proportional to the distance between the fingers rather than to the distance of the foreground finger from the eyes.
Parallax does not depend on the base, the distance between the eyes. Nor does it depend on the distance of the finger from the eyes.
It depends on the distance between the fingers!
Thus, if measuring parallax with optical doubles tells us anything, it tells us whether the optical doubles have distance between them, although it doesn't give us any quantitative information about that distance.
Measuring distance with optical doubles tells us absolutely nothing about the distance of either of the optical doubles from the base formed by the opposite sides of the Earth's orbit and thus about the distance to the stars!
Why is this fatal defect ignored by Empirical Science?
Knowing the distance to the nearest stars and thus knowing the dimensions of the universe is far too important in comparison with a silly little defect in the ability of parallax to measure the distance to the stars to discard the only tool Empirical Science has to measure those distances!
WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF PARALLAX MEASUREMENTS IN SIZING THE UNIVERSE?
The ancients classified stars on the basis of magnitude, with the brightest stars being of the first magnitude, and dimmer stars trailing off as higher numbered magnitudes resulting in the confusing process of having the dimmer stars' magnitude numbers higher than the numbers of the first magnitude stars. Under the empirical classification system, objects that can hardly be seen through telescopes have magnitudes in the twenties and really bright objects have negative magnitudes, a bit of legerdemain that lends credence to the belief that the measurements are actually measurements.
The ancients quiet naturally thought that the brighter the star was, the greater its magnitude and the closer the star.
Empirical Science is too sophisticated to make such a rash conclusion. A very bright object far away might look the same as a very dim object close-up. Thus, the magnitudes of the stars we see are only apparent. It is not possible to locate stars in space by their apparent magnitude, their relative brightness.
This is an empirically based conclusion.
Because it is theoretically possible that the stars are not ordered by brightness, it's an empirical fact that the stars are not ordered by brightness!
This means that stars of different brightness, and even size and color are strewn haphazardly throughout the universe.
Why would Empirical Science make such a conclusion? Why would it conclude that stars have differing degrees of brightness when there is no basis for making such a conclusion?
The assumption that the distances to the stars was not related to their magnitude creates employment for Empirical Science.
Any old fool could position the stars in the universe by their apparent magnitude, how bright they actually appeared.
Understanding that a star's apparent brightness has nothing to do with its actual brightness, Empirical Science, with its ability to know what can't be known, set about determining what a star's actual brightness, its intrinsic brightness, is so it can place the stars where they actually belong in the universe rather than where they appear to be.
What is a star's intrinsic brightness?
The intrinsic brightness of a star is the actual brightness that the star produces as it burns in space if the empiricist were standing right next to it. It is the result of assuming that stars are not located in accordance with how bright they are. If a bright star is assumed to be further away from the Earth than a dim star, then the further star has a greater intrinsic brightness than the dim star.
Empirical Science has no way of knowing a star's intrinsic brightness, and in fact, intrinsic brightness is simply a concept Empirical Science created to justify the belief that stars are not ordered in the heavens by brightness.
But the only way that a star's distance can be determined is to compare its magnitude with other stars of known distance. Thus, the first task of Empirical Science is to obtain a common measurement of brightness by neutralizing distance. It does this by ascertaining intrinsic brightness and converting it to absolute magnitude.
What is absolute magnitude?
Absolute magnitude is the intrinsic brightness a star would have if it were located 32.6 light years from Earth. If all stars are lined up by absolute magnitude 32.6 light years from Earth, then their relative brightness can be compared.
Why is a point 32.6 light years away from Earth selected?
A circle is divided into 360 degrees, a degree into sixty minutes and a minute into sixty seconds. A second is therefore one thirty-six hundredths of a degree of arc. Because there is no way to know what the distance between the star being measured and the background star is, and thus no way of knowing how much of any measured shift is due to this distance, an imaginary star is created that would produce a parallax shift of one second of arc if the shift were due solely to the distance of the star from one half of the baseline of the Earth's orbit. Because the radius of a circle is equal to just under one sixth of its circumference, called a radian, the number of seconds in a radian can be computed and is equal to two hundred six thousand, two hundred and sixty-five. With the distance to the sun being one second of arc, the distance to the imaginary star would be two hundred six thousand two hundred and sixty-five times ninety-three million, all of these arcane calculations being performed on paper in the confines of the laboratory without getting the lungs exploded, so to speak, in space. In short, the distances to the stars are created with pen and paper.
Look into the telescope and see a little twinkle over a period of six months (complexity of equipment) equal to one six hundred and eight thousand, seven hundred and ninety-fifths of a radian, multiplied by ninety-three million (complexity of methodology) and shazam, Empirical Science has the distance to 61Cigni!
Once the distance to the imaginary star has been empirically determined as a parallax second, or parsec, it can be computed in inches, feet, meters or miles, but because it is so large, it is usually given in light years.
And because it's computable, it's real!
The imaginary star is measured to be 3.26 light years from Earth and 3.26 light years is equal to one parsec. Because this point is closer than the nearest claimed measurement to a star, it is multiplied by ten to get the figure ten parsecs or 32.6 light years, an imaginary point in space used to measure the distances to the stars.
How is the absolute magnitude of a star determined?
When Empirical Science believes that it can directly measure the distance to a star, then the star's apparent brightness is the star's intrinsic brightness. The knowledge of distance and thus intrinsic brightness allows the computation of absolute magnitude because it is known that light diminishes in a precise manner as it expands, with the square of the distance over which it travels. While light diminishes as it expands, Empirical Science views light as being something that exists at the point of observation. Because it has to move stars back and forth to adjust for assumed differences in intrinsic brightness, it expresses the fact that light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it travels in terms of the measured brightness to the observer, that the apparent brightness of a star varies inversely as the square of distance.
Parallax measurements showing a dim star to be closer than a bright star would demonstrate empirically that the far star had a greater intrinsic brightness than the dim star, the empirical portion of the statement being the measurement of the stars' distances. But the intrinsic brightness of the two stars cannot be compared unless they are both placed at the same distance in space. This is where the 32.6 light year line comes into play. Because knowing the distance to a star determines its intrinsic brightness, the inverse square measurement of light can be used to compute the magnitude of the star if it were located 32.6 light years from Earth.
If a bright star was found to be twenty light years from Earth, its magnitude could be increased (reducing its brightness) by a factor of 12.6 light years. If a dim star was found to be ten light years from Earth, its magnitude could be increased by a factor of 22.6 light years.
To translate magnitude into distance or distance into magnitude, Empirical Science uses a magnitude chart which states that each successive magnitude corresponds to the fifth root of one hundred, or 2.512, a little bit of folderol that dazzles the mind with the precision involved in the pursuit of establishing deep space distances giving, as it does, an additional appearance of mathematical accuracy in the process. It also allows for the computation of incredibly vast distances. For instance, if a star's magnitude shift is five, from an absolute magnitude of zero to an apparent magnitude of five, it appears one hundred times dimmer ( 2.512 to the fifth power). With the star being 32.6 light years away at its absolute magnitude, it's actual distance is 326 light years, the square root of one hundred, ten, times 32.6 light years.
When all of the stars whose intrinsic brightness is known by parallax measurement and whose absolute magnitude can therefore be computed are lined up on the 32.6 light year line, they can each be compared with all other stars whose absolute magnitude is known.
Empirical Science has taken apparent brightness, the way stars appear without knowing how far away the stars are, assumed that apparent brightness does not produce information about comparative distance, convinced itself that it can measure the distance to some of the stars by measuring the angle produced by parallax and then produced a chart of the few stars that are measurable by parallax based on brightness alone, without distance being a factor.
Why has it gone to all this trouble?
Because there are only a handful of stars whose apparent brightness can be converted to intrinsic brightness by believing that parallax measurements exist and determine distance. That leaves billions, nay, trillions of stars whose distances have yet to be determined.
If Empirical Science can use distance to convert apparent magnitude to absolute magnitude, with so many light years equaling so many degrees of magnitude, it can convert a difference in degrees of magnitude into light years in order to determine the distance to a star. For instance, if the absolute magnitude of a star whose apparent magnitude is known by observation can be obtained, then the difference in degrees of magnitude between the stars' absolute magnitude and its apparent magnitude can be computed in light years and added to the known distance of the star at its absolute magnitude of 32.6 light years from Earth.
All measurements in the universe are therefore based on the parallax measurements of close stars!
How does Empirical Science determine the absolute magnitude of stars whose distances it cannot claim to measure and thus whose apparent brightness it cannot convert to intrinsic brightness by knowing its distance?
While Empirical Science can't assume that apparent magnitude, the brightness of a star's light, is related to distance because otherwise it couldn't engage itself in rebrightening, resizing and thus repositioning all the stars in the universe, there's nothing stopping it from assuming that the starlight itself is related to its distance.
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DETERMINING INTRINSIC BRIGHTNESS AND ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE WITHOUT KNOWING DISTANCE
Passing light through a prism results in a rainbow of colors as the distance the light travels through the prism progressively lowers its frequency, and passing very expanded starlight through a prism produces all sorts of distortions in these frequency changes.
Seeing distortions in the spectral analysis of starlight and having a strong desire to compute the distances to the stars quite naturally resulted in the empirical conclusion that a star's spectrum could be used to determine its distance.
But how?
If Empirical Science could find a bunch of stars that were close enough together to relate their intrinsic brightnesses to their spectrums, then the stars could be arranged into a sequence which would allow a determination of the star's intrinsic brightness simply by determining a star's position on the sequence using the analysis of its spectrum.
Once the stars were arranged into a sequence that related intrinsic brightness to a star's spectrum, the star's absolute magnitude could be determined if distance were known and once the absolute magnitude of the stars on the chart were known, then all stars in the universe could be placed 32.6 light years from Earth by placing them on the chart in accordance with their spectral analysis.
Once a star was placed 32.6 light years from Earth, its distance could be computed by the degrees of magnitude between that absolute magnitude and the star's apparent magnitude, how it is observed in space.
It was easy to find stars that were relatively close together. Stars that are close together are called clusters.
But how could the distance to a cluster be determined?
By parallax measurement!
Now, the particular cluster used to establish the star chart that classified the stars by spectral analysis is about forty light years away, beyond the distance at which parallax measurement produces even a color of reliable results. However, the need to create a stellar classification system dictated that the distance to the cluster be measurable, and therefore it was. After all, a group of stars is bigger than a star and thus its brightness more apparent. Empirical Science doesn't quibble about inconsequentials. The purpose is to categorize stars, the requirement is to measure the distance to a cluster of stars, measuring distance by parallax is theoretically possible, it can be accomplished in the mind and it is therefore a fact. Once the parallax of the cluster has been measured and its distance determined, the question of its accuracy never need be reopened, at least by those wishing to put food on the family table by exploring the mysteries of the universe and, in fact, its distance can even be used to show the maximum distance at which parallax measurements have validity.
Once the stars have been ordered into a chart that orders all stars by spectral analysis, then the distance of any star in the universe can be determined simply by analyzing its spectrum and placing it on the chart. If a star's spectral analysis shows it to be such and such a class of star, then its absolute magnitude is absolutely known and its distance is computable by the degrees of difference between that absolute magnitude with its apparent magnitude.
The only difference between this process and the process Huygens used to compare the light of Sirius with the light from the sun is the light from Sirius was the light measured from Sirius rather than the light from Sirius computed as if Sirius was next to the sun at some imaginary point in space, and the light from the sun was actually light, not the darkness of space 32.6 light years away.
Empirical Science has no way of knowing what the spectral distortion of starlight means, or even what it is, it is totally ignorant about what produces the spectrum and has no knowledge of why the spectrum of starlight breaks down unevenly in a prism, and it has no way of knowing the distance to a star, but it creates a system using color, or more precisely, the absence of color, and distance to classify stars, claims that classification arranges stars in accordance with intrinsic brightness, creates a point in space for a star's absolute magnitude, and then uses the conversion of the intrinsic brightness made up from a fantasy based on believing it knows about the star's spectrum and distance to determine the distance itself.
The process is so absurd, it is laughable.
Empirical Science has attempted to produce a formula similar to the time times rate equals distance formula with absolute magnitude and the inverse square measurement of light as the two constants producing distance. But absolute magnitude is dependent on intrinsic brightness and intrinsic brightness can't be known until distance is known. The only distances for which there is a claim to measurability are the distances to the close stars way this side of the 32.6 light year line, and the only stars with actual claims to reliable measurement are the handful of stars supposedly between four and fifteen light years away, and even the claim to measuring these distances is absurd because parallax can only indicate a distance between two stars, not measure the distance to the stars, and its use in measuring the distances to the stars has consistently ignored the movement of the base line, the Earth's orbit, in space.
But the point is, parallax measurements are useful because they are the only way Empirical Science can determine the distances to the stars.
WHAT ABOUT THE DISTANCES TO THE ISLAND UNIVERSES, THE GALAXIES LYING OUTSIDE OUR OWN GALAXY?
A star, Cephei, can be seen to vary in brightness over time. We can't watch the star one hundred percent of the time, but the mind works to fill in the blanks in the pictures it forms, and when it sees a star vary in brightness, it attempts to put order to the rate the star varies.
Think about it, because astronomers can't. You see a star from night to night if the skies aren't covered with clouds. The task is to determine the regular cycle of a star that appears to vary in intensity. It grows bright, and then it grows dim, and then it grows bright again, then it grows dim again. You see the star maybe five nights out of ten, one or two of which, if you're lucky, might be consecutive, and then only one or two months out of a year and never from the same angle twice in any one year.
How do you determine its regular period?
More to the point, why would anyone even consider trying to determine its regular period?
Why would anyone think it has a regular period?
These considerations aside, Cephei has a regular period of 5.4 days during which it rapidly achieves its maximum brightness and then slowly recedes into its minimum brightness, the variation in brightness being on the order of one magnitude.
What in the world does this tell us about distance?
To know distance, we have to know intrinsic brightness, for it is by knowing intrinsic brightness that Empirical Science can place a star by its absolute magnitude on the 32.6 light year line, and thus compute a star's distance from Earth.
How could the fact that a star changes magnitude allow us to determine the star's intrinsic brightness?
Empirical Science determines intrinsic brightness of the stars close to the Earth by comparing their imagined distances. It determines intrinsic brightness by all other stars that can be resolved by comparing their spectrums.
Thus, determining intrinsic brightness is simply a matter of finding something to compare starlight with. If stars had pigtails, their intrinsic brightness would be determined by comparing oinks.
There are two things going on with a variable star: It is changing magnitude, which, while not intrinsic brightness is still brightness. And it has a period.
Thus, there is something, the cepheid's period, to which the brightness can be compared.
Why exactly does Empirical Science want to believe that the length of a variable cepheid's period determines its intrinsic brightness? After all, it can determine a star's intrinsic brightness by lining the star up on the star chart according to its spectral class.
Galaxies, islands of stars far, far away in the blackness of space, don't readily give up the spectral fingerprint of their individual stars.
Without a spectral fingerprint Empirical Science can't classify the star and thus fool itself into thinking it knows the distance to the galaxy. What it has to do is find lighthouses in the night, beacons in the void, cepheid variables in neighboring galaxies blinking on and off to fool itself into thinking it knows the distance to the galaxy. If all cepheid variables with identical periods have the same intrinsic brightness, all Empirical Science has to do is measure the period and it can calculate the intrinsic brightness.
And of course, with the basic tenet of Empirical Science, what you make up in the mind you will always find, firmly behind the proof that the intrinsic brightness of variable stars is directly proportional to their periods, variable stars were found in neighboring galaxies and their distances determined down to the last fraction of a parsec.
Where's there a whim, there's a way!
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PROVING THAT THE PERIOD OF VARIABLE CEPHEIDS CAN BE USED TO DETERMINE THEIR INTRINSIC BRIGHTNESS
In order to prove that the intrinsic brightness of variable cepheids was proportional to their periods, it was necessary to line them up by absolute magnitude on the 32.6 light year line.
The first question one might ask is how can something that grows bright and dim and bright again have an absolute magnitude. While astronomers give a lot of idiot explanations for why a star's brightness varies, the simple explanation is the same explanation for why things burn at a varying rate on Earth, they are burning at times faster than the fuel would normally permit because of changes in their environment. With a variable star this occurs as a result of the eccentric orbits of hot planets. Moving two hot objects closer together causes each to heat up as a result of its proximity to the other. A hot planet moving closer to a star causes the star to flare up, much as the conjunction of planets in the solar system produces solar flares on the sun.
But anything that is burning irregularly has no intrinsic brightness and absolutely no absolute magnitude.
Not to worry. As long as absolute magnitude is calculated at the same point in the cycle for all stars, empirical purity has been maintained.
So the spectral class of variable cepheids is taken off the star charts, their intrinsic brightness determined, their place in space adjusted so that they are 32.6 light years away and their periods compared.
Lo and behold, their periods correlate exactly with their intrinsic brightness!
Any cepheid that doesn't correlate can have its intrinsic brightness adjusted by the creative use of space dust. If the period is too long to agree with the proposition, then the star is dimmer than it should be because there is heretofore unnoticed space dust in the way and if the period is too short, why, then, too much space dust has been accounted for and some needs to be removed.
Because intrinsic brightness dictates absolute magnitude, any period can be made to coincide with any absolute magnitude simply by altering the cepheid's intrinsic brightness by adjusting the amount of space dust that might exist between the cepheid and the telescope.
If anyone thinks Empirical Science actually went through the above exercise, he isn't acquainted with the ways of Empirical Science. Why go through the motions when the outcome is known? If it is "well understood" that all cepheidic periods can be made to correlate to intrinsic brightness, if something is theoretically possible, if it is measurable in the mind, then it exists in reality.
It is so "well understood", in fact, that the Amateur Astronomer's Handbook points out that cepheids "have been closely studied and offer little scope for amateur work." In other words, measure "well understood" facts and risk being ignored. A lot of amateur astronomers apparently risk being ignored if the American Association of Variable Star Observers is any indication. There is always a lot of amateur activity in the two areas that don't follow Empirical Science's predictive delusions, variable cepheids and asteroids. Because of the difficulty inherent in viewing variable stars from a single vantage point, observers all over the globe view the apparent magnitude of variable stars and report the results to the Association. The resulting graphs are anything but regular, and in a manner that makes correction by space dust impossible, removing any basis for using the period of variable cepheids to determine intrinsic brightness.
However, without the proposition that the variable cepheids' periods vary directly with their intrinsic brightness, it would have been impossible to prove that the Andromeda "nebula" was actually a galaxy just like our own, and outside the boundaries of our own galaxy.
And that was what the proposition was made up to prove in the first place!
WHEN VARIABLE PERIODS AREN'T ENOUGH
When the distances computed by Empirical Science become so vast that even its most incredulous empiricists can't stomach the claim that variable periods determine intrinsic brightness, Empirical Science has to develop other yardsticks to dazzle the senses and confuse the mind.
At distances where intrinsic brightness is no longer computable by variability, variability has to be abandoned for other pigtails.
The pigtails selected were clouds of ionized gas. Empirical Science has absolutely no physical description of what is going on when what is measured on Earth as the ionization of a gas occurs, which is all the more reason why it can point at bright spots in the night sky and say, there rests a blob of ionized gas. Comparing the brightness of ionized gas clouds found in different galaxies therefore allows the determination of the intrinsic brightness of galaxies (intrinsic brightness of a group of stars!) and thus the computation of the distance to galaxies at the end of the universe.
Of course brightness is the quality the ancients used to order the position of the stars in the universe to begin with, the quality Empirical Science chose to ignore in favor of using parallax measurements to determine the imagined intrinsic brightness, and thus provides no empirical information as to distance.
But, hey, parallax measurements don't work at these distances so Empirical Science has to use what it can to come up with precise measurements for the distances to the stars and galaxies. And why stop at comparing ionized gas clouds?
If Empirical Science can get this far with made-up up stuff, why not go whole hog?
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USING AN EFFECT AS ITS CAUSE
Knowing absolutely nothing about the nature of light, how it was produced, how it moved, what happened with it once it got to where it was going, it was very easy for Empirical Science to say that light was the same as sound. As sound waves traveling through the medium of the atmosphere can be elongated or compressed, so can light waves traveling through the emptiness of space.
That settled, having no idea whatsoever about what happens when light goes through a prism, being totally ignorant of the nature of color, acting like monkeys when viewing light refracted by a prism (monkey sees color, monkey says order), it was very easy for Empirical Science to say, compressed light waves look blue and elongated light waves look red. If a train is moving away from us, its sound waves are elongated and their pitch changes. If a star is moving away from us, its light waves are elongated and the spectrum it produces moves measurably into the red.
This pile of donkey doo results in the conclusion that everything in the universe is moving away from everything else, and the further away it is moving away, the faster it is moving away, truly one of the most ludicrous fantasies ever created by the mindless musings of man.
But, if something is moving, and it is moving at a certain rate, the old time times rate equals distance formula actually does become feasible. By golly, Empirical Science should be able to use this empirical fact to calculate the empirical size of the universe and the relative distances of all matter within it.
The proportionality of the red shift to the rate of expansion then becomes Hubble's Constant and once Hubble's Constant is known, Empirical Science can use the spectral analysis of starlight to position any star or galaxy in the universe, locate its speed, direction, distance, and what it is having for dinner (the fuel it's consuming).
Empirical Science knows what Hubble's Constant does. As it drops, the distances it calculates increase proportionally. With the Constant dropping by a factor of seven since its creation early in the century, the universe has been turned into one very big, very rapidly expanding bubble.
The only problem is determining what Hubble's Constant is!
The way Hubble's Constant is determined is to use the distance ladder, going from parallax measurements to spectral classification to cepheid variables and ending up with ionized gas clouds, all the while manufacturing and eliminating space dust wherever necessary or unnecessary to make everything come out just so (the size of the bubble and its rate of expansion have to equal the age of the universe, all empirically calculable quantities for sure).
But Empirical Science can't be too accurate when it's determining the size of the endless expanse of nothingness we call space and fondly refer to as the universe, so as a service to mankind, it forever hones its measuring tools.
Using the clarity and contrast in the arms of spiral galaxies as a comparison tool instead of ionized gas, Hubble's Constant was found to be a little bit off kilter.
And when it was discovered that comparing the rotational velocity of galactic disks could also be used to determine intrinsic brightness, the distance ladder came full circle.
The rotational velocity of a galactic disk was determined by the red shift whose coefficient was Hubble's Constant which was what was being changed by altering intrinsic brightness by rotational velocity!
As Hubble's Constant increased the size of the universe, it also increased the number of stars in the galaxies.
But one thing didn't increase.
The distances to the nearest stars, determined by parallax measurement, the distances on which Hubble's Constant was based, the first step on the delusional distance ladder remained the same.
But then that distance can't be determined to start with!
Ye who allow Empirical Science to enter abandon all pretense to reason because sense is no more.
Empirical Science determines the distance to the stars by determining that the distance to the stars is equal to the distance to the stars and is therefore precisely the distance to the stars.
SO HOW FAR ARE THE STARS?
In "Mathematics," Chapter Seven of At the Gates of the Citadel, the first volume of The Copernican Series, a little spoof is perpetrated. In showing how to calculate the speed and distance of the sun, it is posited that if current methods of computing distance in space produce a sun going about forty-three thousand miles per hour because of overestimated distances, and the sun is actually going about three hundred and twelve miles per hour, then we should be able to take the fraction produced by putting the sun's actual speed over the miscomputed speed, apply it to miscomputed distances and come up with the actual distances in space. This little bit of tongue-in-cheek has been taken seriously, which shows how far gone Empirical Science is. The reason that the fraction won't produce an accurate estimate is that the bottom of the fraction, the speed of the sun produced by Empirical Science, has no basis in reality, and any distance to which the fraction is applied is outright fantasy.
We have no idea how far it is to the nearest stars.
We can, however, make a reasonable estimate.
One of the space probes recently sent back pictures of the sun from far planetary orbits, and these pictures showed a very bright star. Double or triple the distance and we would have a star that would be equal in magnitude to some of the stars we see from Earth, demonstrating in reality that our sun would appear as a star at only two or three times the distance to Pluto.
Another approach to estimate how far the stars are is to ask how close the stars could be together.
All motion in the solar system results from what goes on in the sun's emission field as it expands out from the sun and back away from the direction of the sun's rotation. As the sun's emission field becomes weaker, diminishing as it does with the square of distance, the interaction of the planets within that field becomes less. One of the interactions, the rate at which a planet falls in the sun's emission field, becomes less with distance. The interaction of a planet's emission field with the sun's emission field also determines the planet's rotation and thus its axis.
Uranus lies on its side, attesting to the weakness of the sun's emission field at that distance. Neptune's orbit hasn't been measured long enough to establish and it's questionable whether Pluto even has an orbit, further attesting to the weakness of the sun's emission field at these outermost distances.
Thus, by Pluto's orbit at least, the effect of the sun's emission field is extremely weak. Triple the distance to Pluto and a star the size of our sun would look like a star, and could exist without attempting to orbit our sun, or without our sun attempting to orbit the star.
Add another distance to Pluto and we would have a reasonable estimate of the average distance between single stars in the bright centers of galaxies.
We are in one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, and the stars in the arm are drifting apart, increasing the interstellar distances between them so that a viable estimate for the closest stars would be in the neighborhood of six to eight times the distance of Pluto from the sun. (The distance of the closest stars computed by the facetious fraction in Chapter Seven of At the Gates of the Citadel is sixty-six times the distance to Pluto, about one sixth Huygens' estimate derived from comparing Sirius to the sun.)
If these distances seem minuscule, their reality is bolstered by an absolute limitation on the distances to the stars that we see. Light from stars expands over the surface of an expanding sphere and as it does so, it diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it travels.
It eventually expands out of existence!
We can't see light that has expanded out of existence no matter how strong our telescopes, and no matter how sophisticated our electronic detectors.
The New Astronomy thinks it can because otherwise there would be no New Astronomy.
But what we see is limited by the fact that light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it travels and that limit places stars a whole lot closer than they are "well understood" to be.
Galaxies don't have billions of stars, they have tens of thousands of stars. They aren't a hundred million light years across, they are trillions of miles across.
Stars and galaxies are not separated by endless oceans of space, they are right next door.
In short, if we can see it, we can probably get to it!
Copyright 1997 Peter Bros
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