FRACTURED KNOWLEDGE

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GRAVITY?

Do you believe in Gravity?

Does that seem like an absurd question?

Ask the average person and they will reply with an affirmative. Ask them why they believe it and they are not so sure. Ask the average person if they believe in an interventionist God and it seems to me, that while the majority reply in the affirmative there’s a bit more skepticism to the idea. In the end, most people believe in Gravity and God for the same reason. They grew up in a culture where it was the dominant belief.

I too grew up in a such a culture believing in an interventionist God and the modern consensus beliefs of Gravity. Though, at a young age I determined objectively that all religions were the same, though there are variations in their stories and characters, at their core, their prophets did all teach compassion, humility, grace, empathy and so on. At some point the teachings became institutionalized religion, at which point the core lessons are easily forgotten in the name of all that is holy, especially when faced with another institutionalized religion, and murder and mayhem dominate now that they need to destroy the evil others.

Is not the phrase, “religious war’ an oxymoron when the core teachings are peace, love humility and forgiveness? It is interesting to note the etymological Latin roots of the word ‘religion’ is ‘religare’, meaning, ‘to bind’. This is the essence of what belief does. It binds the mind and imprisons the mind. The analogy of Plato’s Cave speaks of a believe in the grey flickering shadows on the cave wall to such a degree they are mesmerized, hypnotized refusing to consider a colorful world if they just avert their eyes.

But I am not here to talk about a belief in God, I am here to talk about a belief in Gravity, as well as the possibility that belief dominates science. To which you might argue that gravity is not a belief, it is a proven scientific fact. Can you prove it I ask, and quite few people when asked this by me did mime a mic drop, as if it means something. How do you know any object that is falling does so due gravity? To which, some mention Einstein and Newton, without comprehension of what these men did or wrote, but for the most part, the average person doesn’t know why they believe in gravity. More importantly and to me, somewhat disheartening, is that they don’t care. Like their belief in God, they have been told by an authority to belief, to conform. And it is understandable why they don’t care, for they, the masses are being set upon in an economic war by the wealthy elite. Most people are struggling to just survive in an unjust society. They have little time for such considerations.

If you scour the interwebbies about gravity, what you generally find is that in the 1600s Newton discovered Gravity as a force and that through Einstein’s imaginative genius more than 200 years later he turned it into a field. What happened between the time of Newton and Einstein? It is a curious 200 years of the development of science and its principles built allegedly by standing on the shoulders of giants that came before. At least that is what they say. It is a time where certain mathematical concepts such as energy are derived, when laws of science were established to which, afterward, few ever question, for they are taught to accept. For 200 years there was no or little advancement on Newton’s force of gravity? Why was this so. The easy answer for the sycophant of the modern institutional consensus science, is to say that it is because gravity is not a force but a field and that was Einstein’s genius. They were looking at the wrong thing. And perhaps that is something you are comfortable with, in which case there is no need for you to waste any more of your time reading what I write. But, for me, at a gut level, this gap screams that something is amiss and the more I looked into it, the more problems I began to discover with it.

There is a YouTube podcaster, author and professor of physics by the name of Alexander Unzicker, who on his channel. Unzicker’s Real Physics, talked about mathematical constants in physics as being the ‘Gods of Modernity’. This is an opinion I whole heartedly shared. These alleged constants of nature are far too often merely a value that provided the proper results in their equations. There is no reason for it to be there other than it fits, so they give it a name, sometimes even naming it after another famous scientist to proffer on it a sense of legitimacy and claim it to be real. For some, such as Max Planck, they were not comfortable with these mathematical assumptions in their own work. Planck himself wrote as much that he was not comfortable with this mathematical constant for he could find no reason for it being there. It was only later in life, after experiencing the validation of his peers did he learn to accept it. Recently, due to Pierre-Marie Robitaille, we have reason to question Kirchhoff’s Law of Blackbody Radiation, which also brings rise to the validity of Planck’s Constant since it rests firmly on the back of Kirchhoff’s Law.

Thomas Kuhn suggests advancements in science tend to simplify, meanwhile, the 20th century has produced scientific models of greater and greater complexity. In fact, it is used as an ironic selling point of Einstein’s GR. It’s so brilliant only a few truly understand the math and they are the high order of priests of mathematics and we are to just accept it. Or so the masse media would insist over and over again.

What is the the Gravitational Constant[GC]? This constant that is considered primary to Newtonian Gravity. But, what is Newtonian Gravity, since Newton never offered a hypothesis for gravity? Einstein’s General Relativity included GC, as determined by Cavendish, and over time evolved multiple constants, the Cosmological Constant, the Fine Structure Constant and more. This is not a simplification, if anything, it is an obfuscation. It is interesting to note, that Newtonian equation though apparently not as accurate as Einstein’s, so I am told, is preferred still today for its ease of use.

There is the belief that if you do not understand the math of GR, you are not qualified to criticize it. This is a fallacy. Do I need to understand the math of Ptolemy’s Geocentric Cosmology to refute the notion that the universe revolves around the Earth? No, I do not. I have the means to observe through a telescope that this is not so. Something not available to Ptolemy in his day. I also have half a century of discovery of what actually populates near earth extra terrestrial space since Einstein passed that to the unbiased open minded observer would prove the innecessity of GR. And it wasn’t a criticism of Ptolemy’s geocentric math by a theoretical mathematician that saw its downfall, it was a clear headed observation by Galileo of moons transiting Jupiter that opened the possibility for a non-geocentric universe. The math of this new cosmology would come much later via Brahe’s lifetime of observations correlated by the mathematical genius of Kepler and Newtonian mechanics. See the pattern. Observe and measure first, then work out the equations.

There is also a belief that says, if the math says it is so, then it must be so. Again Ptolemy’s math was highly predictable for over a thousand years, though it did require continuous ad hoc adjustments, it worked well for what it was intended for. Clearly, regardless of what the math says, a geocentric cosmology isn’t so. Mathematics is only as good as the observations behind it and the reasoning that went into trying to make sense of what they were observing. And this last part is paramount, for how much is reasoning limited by belief? It depends on how strong and how rigid the belief is. Let us not forget that belief is the source of what is called confirmation bias, where we only see the evidence that supports our preconceived beliefs. As I said earlier, it was easy to dismiss the religious beliefs of the mythological miracles of their God as mere storytelling likely connected to awe inspiring events that they couldn’t understand and so attribute to the will of a great omnipresent ubiquitous unknowable entity. An unknowable omnipresent power that the priests of the institutional religion exhort us to just have faith in. And while for some this might be tenable for religion, it is in my mind the antithesis of science.

Don’t get me wrong, mathematics is important in science, though not as a science unto itself, but as a tool of science and science is about observing. Good science comes from clear headed observations and generally throughout history it began with the question, what is this strange phenomena that I am observing? And an important question often overlooked is what are the limitations of my observations? For too often throughout the history of science they simply didn’t know what they didn’t know. An important aspect of this is an awareness of the environment in which you observe said curious phenomena. With Ptolemy deriving a geocentric model and when observations didn’t match the predictions of the math, rather than question his assumptions Ptolemy created his virtual motions to make his incorrect model work mathematically. These virtual motions are analogous to the mathematical constants of nature required to make the standard models of institutionalized science work mathematically. Anyone who says to just believe the math, does not know how math works, and such an exhortation does not belong in the halls of science.

While Professor Unzicker refers to these mathematical constants as the Gods of Modernity, which for modern science is tantamount to an insult comparing it to religion, I see them like religion as the product of profound ignorance. Which too can be perceived as insulting., but, is in no way insulting to the likes of Newton or Einstein. They were men of their time and I believe it is important to look at their discoveries in the context of their time, especially with all the empirical knowledge that we have learned since then. I have found in my journey the importance to ask, what, when, where, how and why; and often when it comes to science, they speak of the first four, but rarely get into the fifth. And the fifth, why, I have found can be quite telling especially when it comes to the philosophical foundations of their beliefs, or even of the zeitgeist of the social construct of the day.

One of the first rules of critical thinking is to ask yourself why is someone telling you something and this is a simple universal rule of cause and effect. Every effect has a cause and of course, due to the persistent unilateral nature of time, cause precedes effect. We always have a reason for telling someone something and it doesn’t have to be nefarious by any means. But then again it very well could be. There are many reasons why we say what we do to others, in fact one might say a spectrum of reasons, and you gotta wonder by this point in the newsletter, what are my reasons?

Now of course the problem here is I cannot answer that question, for I can only tell you what I think the answer is if ego permits it. In truth we often do not fully understand why we do what we do and our journey through life is one of self-discovery. At least it has been for me. What I have already proposed is outright heresy to many by comparing modern institutional science to a modern institutionalized religion based on blind faith in certain mathematical constants of nature. How dare I? Am I mad? Who is this nobody with nothing more than a high school General Equivalency Diploma and no expertise to speak of that dares challenge modern consensus scientific belief? Clearly a case of the Dunning Krueger Effect. Dismissed!

Perhaps this is true. Perhaps there is something that I am missing. And how can I know this if I do not tell what I feel is true? Of course, in doing so I put myself out there to receive heaps of scorn and ridicule. But these emotional expressions against my character reveal more about the state of mind of the speaker and their perspective of me, which, no matter how much they think they know about me, it is not me. And frankly, why get emotional? You don’t have to agree with me. But getting emotional, in such a manner, seems to me a primitive reactionary fight or flight response that some might suggest is indicative of an internal sense of cognitive dissonance one is not ready to face. Or perhaps it speaks of an emotional attachment to a belief best described as religious. Such is the way of a heartfelt but mistaken belief. All belief is merely an unverified assumption. While they point the Dunning Krueger accusatory finger at me, I find myself wondering the same of them and their belief. For everyone suffers from the Dunning Krueger Effect, for no one can know everything. And the more you believe you do not suffer from the DK Effect, the greater the likelihood that you do.

I began this essay by asking if you believe in gravity? Do you? Can you prove its existence? You can’t because there is no such force unto itself called gravity. We can detect the electric force and we can detect the magnetic field, but we cannot detect this alleged force of gravity. There is no such thing as a gravity detector. We can observe objects of different mass/weight falling at the same velocity, but have no mechanism to explain it. We can measure this effect by dropping in freefall a prescribed weight and doing the math, but that is not detecting gravity, its measuring the effect called gravity.

As for Einstein’s General Relativity, it is not a mechanism for gravity. At least according to Richard Feynman in his book, “The Character of Physical Law.” More importantly with GR, it was born of the alleged failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment and a desire to rid science of this action-at-a-distance issue with Newtonian orbital mechanics. More importantly, Einstein’s GR requires a leap of faith in accepting the undetectable space-time matrix. Also, it should be noted, if I haven’t said it already; both Newton and Einstein were profoundly ignorant of the electromagnetic presence in their respective frames of reference. In fact, Newton likely had no idea of the electric force as he ignored and refused to allow to be published the research of a son of a cloth dyer named Stephen Grey who is accredited with discovering the conductivity of electricity. And Einstein also had no idea of the presence of the Solar Wind or any of the electromagnetic structures that populate the extraterrestrial space of the solar system.

Whether it is Newtonian or Einsteinian Gravity, a belief in either is more of a religious statement than it is a scientific one. In either case there is no empirical evidence of either, though, in Einstein’s case, there are many assumptions regarding deep space objects that are alluded to as being proofs. But these too are assumptions based on a belief in the mathematics of GR.

The fact is, my experience so far has been that most people are unable to even consider what I say and more often than not respond with dismissive insults. Such is the lot of a heretic such as I. Such is the way of religious belief.