Introduction (continued)

When the scientific community agreed to accept theory as fact, it took the first step toward the fantasy world that makes up our scientific worldview today. Here’s why.
Using light as an example, Newton’s particle view of light held sway throughout the 18th century. However, the wave features, or what were thought to be wave features, that were measurable allowed a strong minority view to thrive, and that minority view finally took over with the explanation for Young’s experiment at the beginning of the 19th century. By splitting passing light through a pinhole, then with a vertical barrier, and then recombining the light on a collecting screen, the light had dark patterns through it.
When water waves' crests and troughs intersect, eliminating the wave, there is still water. On the collecting screen there was an absence of light, clearly not an analogous situation to the presence of water. In one case, there's something there, in the other, nothing. However, the scientific community jumped at the conclusion that light was like a water wave. No one thought to explore alternate explanations, the obvious one being that the light, once it had intermingled, had recombined. With almost two centuries of toying with the wave feature of light, Young’s experiment was blindly accepted as proof that light was a wave, as it is to this day.
The structure of light, like the physical workings of gravity, are not things we can readily know, are a part of Bacon’s hidden physical reality. As such, we can do no more than create concepts that might explain the facts that we see, and light being a wave would be one concept, although because in addition to light and water waves not being analogous as to the presence of water and the absence of light, light is a three dimensional phenomena while waves occur on a two-dimensional surface, making it a pretty poor concept to explain the facts.
Light as water waves, therefore, could never be more than a concept. However, it became a simple fact!
As soon as something is a fact, then science starts to manufacture other facts that have to exist as a condition of the first created fact. In the case of light waves' analogy to water waves, water waves needed a medium through which to travel, as they did not themselves have an independent existence. Thus, light waves needed a medium to travel though and science concluded that this medium was the aether, which filled space. As a subsequent fact becomes reality, it becomes the background for additional facts, and even testing.
Seventy years after Young’s created fact and the related creation of aether, the question arose in what direction the Earth was traveling and by direction, it wasn’t the direction around the sun, but the absolute direction in space. Michelson and Morley attempted to answer this question by devising a very clever experiment. A rotating platform was placed on a bed of mercury. On the platform, a series of mirrors was laid out so that light could enter an aperture, travel to the center of the platform, be split, each split traveling 90º in opposite direction, bouncing off mirrors and being reflected back to the center where they were recombined and sent to an interferometer, essentially Young’s collection screen able to discern degrees of interference patterns. (When Young’s experiment was performed by splitting the light through two pinholes in separate cards, it was discovered that moving a card would eventually cause the interference patterns to disappear.)
The notion of the experiment was that the light traveling in opposite directions of 180º would only produce interference patterns when the incoming light was directly aligned with the direction the Earth was traveling. This was because it was only in this condition that the two 90º paths would equal. If the paths were unequal, then the light would take different times to travel each path because one would be moving with the aether, the other against it. If the later happened, the light would recombine and wouldn’t produce interference patters.
The scientific community agreed in unison that the facts underlying the experiment were foolproof. There was no possibility of error. The results would be conclusive. So the experiment was performed to the utter astonishment of the entire scientific community. No matter which way the platform was rotated, the interference patterns always appeared. What a shock!
Did the scientific community then go back and check its underlying assumptions, light as a wave and the existence of the aether? Why should it? Facts are facts, nothing can change that, so the results of the experiment had to be explained some other way, in a way that would account for light being a wave dependent on the aether. How?
A couple of scientific geniuses came up with the answer commonly known as the Lorentz Fitzgerald contraction. This simply stated that the distance between the two 90º paths shortened or lengthened along the direction of their motion. How neat is that? Here we have a concept, light as a wave, producing a second concept, the aether through which light traveled, producing an experiment that used both the light and the aether, and when the experiment didn’t produced the desired results, it wasn’t the concepts that needed reevaluation, but a new fact to explain the discrepancy. And that new fact wasn’t something that was measurable in nature nor could it be, it wasn’t even intuitive, it was a fact that physical reality changed with motion.
Although Einstein disavowed both the aether and any connection to the Lorentz Fitzgerald contraction, his theories, which have all become facts, basically involve the alteration of matter and time with speed, and those facts in turn have begun to generate new facts, the most absurd of all being the new fact of worm holes. I could talk about all the facts the mass gravity concept has created, but it would take a book itself. To name just two of the more ridiculous, try black holes and dark matter. Here science is creating something it can’t even observe and calling it a reality, the black holes being the produce of gravity overcoming the physical structure of the matter that produces it, the dark matter being the extra mass that has to exist in the galaxy for the galaxy to behave in accordance with Celestial Mechanics, which, if you recall, turned Newton’s efforts to predict orbits around by now claiming orbits predict gravity. With the stars not having enough mass to hold the galaxy together, it must be held together by missing matter we can’t see (but like the aether of old, we apparently plow through with immunity).
So the question arises, if we can’t know certain things like the cause of gravity, the cause of orbiting and rotation, the nature of light, electricity and magnetism, how do we deal with them? We are hopefully past the time when scientists get burned at the stake for ideas and the battle for a secular worldview of physical reality has long been abandoned by the church, although there are still many that scoff at any idea that opposes the Bible.
How do we deal with ideas, make sure they stay ideas, flexible, changeable ideas, and therefore do not themselves start to produce facts? Nothing wrong with ideas producing more ideas, but how do we handle the myriad questions for which we have to say, we just don’t know because we can never know?
We can apply several principles when evaluating concepts. We have to rate the concepts we consider because we have to test our concepts in reality and we don’t want to spend a lot of money testing concepts that will never go anywhere. The first principle is obvious, Ockham’s (or Occam’s) razor. Although there are thousands of interpretations, it’s basically translated from the Latin as "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” This is another way of saying that the concept that explains the most facts with the least assumptions is the best concept. A lot of scientists state that it really means the theory that predicts best is the best theory. They use the example of the Ptolemaic, Earth based solar system compared to the Copernican sun centered solar system. Copernicus’ prediction was correct, therefore better. However, that’s not Ockham’s razor. The reason Ockham’s razor favors Copernicus is that he reduced the Ptolemaic number of orbits by half, making it a much simpler explanation for the same facts.
As an aside, the use of prediction in science to prove concepts is the cause of our fantasy world of science. A concept predicting a fact doesn’t prove the concept, it just makes the concept better because it explains one more fact. One of the biggest mistakes of science is the belief that finding a predictive fact proves a concept because it places science at the mercy of when facts are discovered. If a concept becomes a fact because it predicts another fact, then the chance finding of a predictive fact cements our thinking, forcing us to view the concept as fact and other facts that disagree with the concept anomalies, or simply non facts.
Add to the principle of evaluating concepts by selecting the one that can explain the most facts with the least assumptions the overriding rule of consistency. Science Magazine’s view of gravity demonstrates how inconsistent science is: It clashes with quantum theory, it doesn’t fit in the Standard Model, nobody has spotted the particle that is responsible for it and, in fact, Newton’s apple contained a whole can of worms.
Focus on the statement the particle responsible for it has never been spotted. How can science hope to be consistent if its practice is to make up a particle for every effect? With the advent of atom smashers, the particle creation situation got so bad, there had to be an international sit-down to limit the number of particles (in what’s called the Standard Model in the reference) and even then, with the particles limited, they multiplied by adding human perceptions to them, charm and color the most prominent. As a result, we end up with a mishmash of concepts about physical reality, none of which are consistent with one another, and many of which are internally inconsistent, for instance, the electron orbiting the atom, where does it get its motion from? This question in college will lose you a science major.
Consistency and simplicity are the rulers to apply in evaluating concepts, knowing all the time that the selected concepts could be wrong, even though they work to produce real products in reality. We have all sorts of technology, lasers and transistors come to mind, that work in reality but for which we have absolutely no coherent concepts to explain.
Consistency and simplicity.
I approach the problem by creating a single elementary particle. I assign that elementary particle two properties. I then apply those properties to scientific basics, the production of light, electricity and magnetism. From these applications emerge a principle called field replacement that explains much of the physical reality that we observe.
With this process, which opens the first chapters of the book, I set the stage for explaining the operation of the universe as we see it, not as we imagine it. When I was writing the first book explaining the particle (this book is a condensation of the 9 volumes of The Copernican Series into an easily understood concept application), I devised one final test to see how accurate my elementary particle might be. I said, if the particle I can describe reality with can also be used to describe the human organ that can discern and attempt to make sense out of that reality, in short if the particle could also describe how the mind worked, then I would be as close to having a correct concept as is humanly possible (although there’s no way to actually know).