Tycho Brahe was the foremost astrologer of the 16th Century. Born in 1456, 13 years after Copernicus had delivered his work placing the sun in the center of the solar system, Brahe was nonetheless a lifelong believer in the Ptolemaic system which positioned the Earth as stationary at the center of the universe, stationary being the operative word for Where Science Went Wrong.

Brahe was also a systematic observer of the motions of the heavens, plotting the courses of the moon and the planets on a timely basis, which is to say, he timed their passages across the heavens. He discovered that the moon sped up in the summer and slowed down in the winter. His measurements of the other planets showed they too sped up in the summer and slowed down in the winter.

Now, the time it takes something to move from one position to another is strictly controlled by the formula, time equal rate times distance traveled. Brahe, looking at the fact that the heavenly objects sped up in the summer and slowed down in the winter, was therefore faced with deciding whether the time differential was due to a difference in rate or a difference in distance traveled. If the sun were traveling toward the winter solstice, then the solstices would move forward during the transit from winter to summer, making the distance traveled shorter by the heavenly bodies than the distance from the summer to winter solstices, which would be longer because the solstices were moving in the direction that the heavenly bodies would be moving.

If the distances were different, then the rate the massive planets traveled through space would be uniform for the planets and the moon that traveled around the Earth. Who, after all, would believe that something as massive as the moon and the Earth sped up and slowed down in their orbits?

That was the second choice Brahe had, the absurd notion that instead of a steady rate of speed with the planets traveling at different distances, the planets and the moon were traveling at the same distance, only the rate was changing.

Brahe chose the latter. Why? Because he not only didn't believe the sun was at the center of the solar system, he believed that what was at the center of the solar system, the Earth, was also the center of the universe and was therefore stationary. If the Earth was stationary, with all the heavenly bodies traveling around it, then it followed as night follows day that the distance these objects traveled in winter and summer had to be equal.

The rest is the history of our ignorance about the solar system, the galaxy, their movement, and the nature of the current forces that cause that movement. Brahe hired a brash assistant, Kepler, who poisoned him, stole his table of observations and turned them into a law that not only has no basis in reality, but can be disproven simply by picking up the current Farmer's Almanac at the local store, the idea that the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times (see cover shot for At the Gates of the Citadel.)

With the planets now speeding up and slowing down by law, Newton was able to use Kepler's Law as part of his demonstration that gravity is proportional to matter, leading to the dead-end science we are immersed into today, where the nature of the current forces that cause motion is ignored, and all time is spent peering into the innards of black holes and measuring the effects of dark matter instead of a science that actually reflects realtiy. See the discussion on precession.

Where Science Went Wrong: Tracking Five Centuries of Misconceptions not only delves into this false start, the fact that our entire scientific structure rests on an observation misinterpreted because the man that made the observation believed the Earth was the stationary center of the universe, but covers the range of major scientific stupidities since, including the most recent, the notion of the neutron as a reality.

For the ultimate exposure of empirical science, Let's Talk Flying Saucers: How Crackpot Ideas Are Blinding Us to Reality and Leading Us to Extinction carries Where Science Went Wrong to the logical conclusion that empirical science is a fantasy made up to cover the ignorance of its practitioners so that they can live off the populace, pretending to know what cannot be known in order to enjoy both monetary and ego rewards.

Trade Paperback, 215 pages, $16.95 No shipping or handling charges

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