Astrophysics’ Black Box: The New Shamanism

Review of Peter Bros’ At the Gates of the Citadel: The Subjugation of Modern Science  (Financial Book Partners, 1994). 

Reviewed by David Stewart, Jr.

In At the Gates of the Citadel: The Subjugation of Modern Science, author and skeptic Peter Bros examines some of the problematic, irrational, and contradictory assumptions of the Galilean/Newtonian explanations for the universe.  These assumptions, far from proven but merely assumed through tenuous and ultimately inconsistent chains of deductive reasoning, have been granted the status of scientific fact.  Bros argues that such erroneous “facts” have become unchallengeable, with scholars declaring actual observed data to be anomalous when they diverge from the values predicted by theory, without reexamining or investigating the flawed assumptions of the underlying theory whose predictions do not match reality.  Thus theory becomes more real that observed reality itself!  Rather than using the primary data to in an unbiased fashion to synthesize a consistent picture of physical reality, astrophysicists have had to contrive more and more tenuous theories to ostensibly explain the mounting discrepancies between foundational theories and observed data, raising a teetering house of cards on a flawed substructure.

Science and Shamanism: Answers over Accuracy

The fear of not knowing overshadows the accuracy and integrity of the scientific process: people feel a need for answers, and for the “experts” to agree on such answers, and are ultimately unconcerned when the answers given fail to adequately match observed reality.  It seems that any explanation will do; we simply cannot say that we do not know.  Like the primitives who abdicated their authority to shamans and embraced mythological explanations for physical reality to assuage uncertainty, modern people have abdicated their ability to analyze the universe to scientific authority.  Bros observed:

When we started to realize that we had a big blank space dealing with what was keeping us from falling off the earth and into the endless darkness of space, a blank space we couldn’t ourselves fill in, we were more than willing to abdicate responsibility to anyone or anything that could fill in the blank for us...This is why we abdicated our authority to think!...We have given up our authority to analyze the universe! [15]...In exchange for the security afforded by gravity, we have abdicated our authority to determine the cause of motion in the universe! [18]

Early geocentric models were in fact based on observation.  It was the failure to recognize foundational assumptions – to look beyond the apparent to see the greater reality -- which led to erroneous conclusions:

The notion that the sun traveled around the Earth was a misconception.  We looked at reality, and we saw a relationship that didn’t exist in reality.  The misconception, however, was based on observation.  When we stand out all day in the sun, we can watch it moving across the sky.  The earth is stable under our feet.  In fact, we can tell a lot about the sun’s movement simply by sticking a stake in the ground.  The sun casts a shadow on the stake, and the shadow moves as the sun moves across the sky from east to west. [21-22]

Modern science has set itself up as the ultimate and infallible authority:

The geocentric misconception is usually held out to be the ultimate embarrassment in the historical process of constructing a consistent picture of physical phenomena.  It stands as a lesson against the type of arrogance that creates belief systems that lead us to see a picture of physical reality that doesn’t exist, and in the process, fail to see the reality that exists...It stands as a beacon to the openness of the scientific inquiry, an inquiry that evaluates all information in an objective manner in order to prevent such a misconception from ever happening again. In fact, because of the openness and objectivity of the scientific project...we have guaranteed for ourselves and our heirs that what we now know about the universe is in fact the final truth; we have finally arrived at the end of a long road of inquiry that has finally found us just a few predictive facts short of a full understanding of everything that existed, exists or ever will exist. [23]

Because science is so open and so objective, there could be no misconception at its foundation, and with no misconception, there can be no embarrassment like the embarrassment that led to the Copernican revolution.  Right?  Well, maybe not. [24]

Yet Bros points out that modern science has repeated the same methodological flaws as the geocentric theory, focusing on the apparent while ignoring or assuming that which is not apparent.  Modern scholars have been unable to step outside of their own assumptions to see the bigger picture of reality.

Bros’ acknowledges that some things are unknowable, but observes that erroneously thinking that an answer is known when in fact it is not, can result in misdirection of the entire scientific endeavor by sending scholars on dead-end snipe hunts while ignoring that which is significant and knowable:

Some things are simply not knowable.  These things include such things as the age of the universe (and related ages) and how far it is to the end of the universe (or intermediate points in between)...Many times not knowing is preferable to knowing because knowing something that is not knowable, or knowing something when we in fact don’t know, conceptually blinds us to other things, many times obvious things, that are knowable. [64]

Astronomical Distances: Precision or Guesswork?

Astronomical distances claimed to reach “millions of light years” – conveyed with a measure of authority and precision – are also dubious because of the errors are greatly amplified.  The desire for certainty about that which is not adequately known leads to the abandonment of more mature, humble, and cautious scholarship in favor of arrogant dogmatism: 

There are only about a hundred stars that produce an angle that would exceed five percent of one second of a circle, about one five millionth of a circle.  Because we create assumptions and hypotheses, the application of the assumption of the relationship between the periods and brightness of whatever variable stars are to the hypothesis of the so called proper motions of stars caused by the earth’s movement around the sun to mention several, and then apply those assumptions and hypotheses to the initial tenuous measurements to extrapolate all other distances in space, any errors are telescoped in unimaginable ways. [146]

The distances we compute between stars and galaxies, the number of stars we mathematically compute in the resulting volumes of galaxies and the distances between those stars and galaxies increase exponentially with the compounding of any error.[147]

Revisiting Gravity

Bros presents powerful reasoning demonstrating that gravitational theory has blinded us to the question of what causes motion in the first place.  Inertia deals with the question of what stops matter from moving, and gravity deals with the question of what redirects motion.  But the question of where the motion comes from in the first place is completely ignored by Newtonian physics:

Our entire picture of the universe rests on concepts of forces and motion that require two opposing assumptions.  The first assumption is that everything in the universe is in motion. [24]

Why ignore the force that has to exist in order to make things move in favor of creating an assumption about a force that might be affecting the moon’s motion and then creating another assumption, the second opposing assumption, that would balance the first assumption?  Because the motion is apparent, just as the movement of the sun around the earth is apparent.  It is the force that is doing the moving that is not apparent!  The fork we took, then, is to limit ourselves to describing the motion instead of analyzing the cause of the motion. [25-26]

Why should there be a cause for the moon not traveling in a straight line, and no cause for the moon’s movement to start with? [27]

[Galileo] was saying that, but for friction, the ball would roll forever.  Therefore, even though the ball didn’t roll forever, because it would, motion must become a property of the ball doing the rolling.  Motion becomes a property of the matter doing the moving!  The concept virtually eliminates the question of what made matter move, a question which was very much on Aristotle’s mind.  If matter moved, then it had inertia, and would keep moving until something made it move otherwise. [48-49]

Bacon was looking for “the secret motions of things.”  Galileo said there was no secret, things moved because of inertia.  The question was, what stopped them from moving!  The Newtonian embodiment of these Galilean misconceptions is to ask not why the moon is moving, ask what is keeping the moon from moving in a straight line. [68]

Only a person whose mind was totally paralyzed, reduced to negate its function of thinking, could agree that matter moved because it was set in motion by mystical forces in the past, and remained in motion because it was a property of itself or the matter that embodied it to move. [18-19]

Perception and Reality

Modern science may be getting the wrong answers due to a conceptual reversal of asking the wrong questions.  Whereas the geocentric astronomer failed to grasp that the earth was moving because the motion was not apparent to him, modern scientists have ignored the (unapparent) causes of motion that can be measured:

What if we “discovered” a force to cover the wrong motion, apprehending the only force to be a force that changes existing motion, rather than looking for the force that keeps things in motion to start with?  If we have asked the wrong question, and have therefore misconceived the nature of motion, then what else have we misconceived?  If we assume movement, and then ask a question about what is redirecting that movement, we will blind ourselves to any question dealing with the cause of movement, thinking we have an answer to questions of motion in the force we have created to redirect the motion we have assumed.[28]

This question rests on a simple factual determination, whether there is a current force that causes current motion in the universe, or whether the only force in the universe is the force which redirects the motion in the universe which has no current cause.[29] Our choice is whether matter moves with no explanation at all or whether matter comes to rest with respect to the forces currently acting upon it.[30]

Whether we perceive motion depends merely on our movement with respect to the matter in which we perceive the motion.  With the Copernican dilemma, we were moving with the surface of the earth and therefore perceived the motion of the sun.  With the current dilemma, we perceive the rock as stationary with respect to the surface of the earth, and the moon in motion, when in fact both are at rest with respect to the current forces acting upon them.[33]

The fact is that regardless of our perception, regardless of where we are at rest in the universe, all matter is at rest with respect to the current forces acting upon that matter and the only blanks we have to fill in are what those current forces are and how they are produced! [33]

Objective inquiry – allegedly the basis of the scientific method – is stifled as certain questions become forbidden, their answers assumed – even when they clash with reality:

What is the force that set [the moon] in motion?  We’re not concerned with that force.  That’s the force of God, the force of the swirling mass of gas, the force of momentum, the force conserved in closed systems, the Big Bang.  Don’t trouble yourself with philosophical questions.  Deal with reality.  The moon is moving.  We can see that something is keeping it from moving in a straight line.  Therefore, something is causing it to stop.  That’s the law!  What has happened is that we have taken an idea and made it the basis of a deductive process which is admittedly only as good as the idea that is used as the starting point.  If the idea collapses, then the entire chain of deductive reasoning collapses....Therefore, you don’t want anyone questioning the ideas that are at the basis of your chain of deductive reasoning. [38-39]

Those concepts merely reverse the reality of the universe, assume away the forces that produce motion in the universe so that everything is slowing down as a result of the only recognized force, the force of attraction, and that any other motion is the result of electrical and magnetic forces that are not yet clearly understood, and the slowing process in turn is merely countering some opposite force, open to discussion, that put everything in motion sometime in the past.[39]

By freezing the concept of motion to what is observable on earth, and then applying that concept to the universe, we have contradicted everything we see around us.  We are looking at reality and not seeing what exists in reality!

Invisible Reality

Modern science has failed to explain simple and important things, assuming forces that are not immediately apparent without adequately investigating them:

We never need to explain the obvious facts, which have become invisible to our efforts to understand physical reality.  Things like why the earth rotates on its axis, why the moon orbits the earth, why the planets rotate, and why they orbit around the sun, why everything does so in the equatorial plane of the sun, why the sun combusts, producing light in the process, what light is, why it bounces off objects like rocks that move when we drop them, what makes them move, all of the obvious facts are left for brainless explanations like motion is conserved in the universe, stars combust because of gravitational pressures, gravity is a property of the matter combusting, light’s a wave particle produced by orbital excitation, which if it doesn’t excite orbits, bounces off the matter that contains the orbits. [128]

The New Black Boxes

While important realities have been neglected by science, absurdities are invented which arise not from real observation, but from attempts to force new data to fit problematic old axioms.  Much so-called “cutting edge” research involves attempting to explain troublesome findings, not by reexamining and rebuilding the foundational theories, but by contriving precarious speculations in attempts to defend old dogmas:

The facts we spend our time explaining are facts we made up, black holes in space, dark matter, great attractors, synesthesial quarks, the sea serpents and daemons on the edge of modern medieval maps! [128-129]

Thus we have nonsensical physical impossibilities like black holes – which do not exist and have never been observed, which in turn is “explained” by absurd claims that the transmission of light is overcome by the weakest known force in the universe, gravity.  Science then becomes infested with charlatanism.  Quasi-religious beliefs in the impossible contrived to preserve flawed theories become unchallengeable: the idea that if two parallel lines are extended out to infinity, they will eventually meet; the claim that if mass is large enough, eventually light will not be able to escape; that if we extend the timeline far enough back in time, life will eventually arise from the organic soup, although we have never able to produce this even under the most biased laboratory conditions.  Such contrived nonsense is conveniently invoked when it is needed, but ignored when its logical application would generate contradictions.  It is believed, for instance, that a “critical mass” of matter can constitute a “black hole” from which not even light can escape.  It is also believed that all matter was together at the beginning of the so-called “Big Bang” universe in a mass that dwarfs current presumed “black holes” by vast orders of magnitude – but that not only light, but also matter, was able to escape outward from this huge mass at high velocity.  Such wildly contradictory claims demonstrate the flawed foundation of modern astrophysics.  Either gravity can be great enough to allow light and matter to escape or it cannot.  If it can, there could have been no “Big Bang,” and if not, there can be no black holes.

Astrophysicists cannot find two-thirds of the predicted matter in the observable universe. Where have they misplaced it?  Equally intriguing is the so-called “dark energy” producing vast but unknown forces. The Wikipedia entry on Dark Matter notes: “Determining the nature of this missing mass is one of the most important problems in modern cosmology and particle physics. It has been noted that dark matter and dark energy serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance, much as the marking of early maps with terra incognita.”  These are garbage-pail speculations contrived to explain away the vast discrepancies between theoretical predictions and observed data.  It seems that no theory is too bizarre or too stupid for publication in scientific journals, so long as does not require revision of foundational fallacies.

Astrophysicists’ vast ignorance about the universe has not led to the humility or caution that quality scholarship would demand. They claim to know the precise sequence of events in the first three minutes of the universe – when they cannot even find two-thirds of the predicted matter in the universe or nearly three-quarters of the predicted energy!  When scholars consistently find that the movement of heavenly bodies beyond our solar system consistently differs significantly from their most careful theoretical predictions.  Are they really in a position to make definitive decrees about what happened “in the beginning” when present realities are so poorly understood? Yet such highly speculative theories, are presented to the public as definitive fact without the necessary disclosures of the theories’ contradictions and our limited grasp of the present.  The scholarly community is happy to assuage the public’s fear of uncertainty by providing what they claim to be definitive answers, even if these answers amount to little more than contemporary mythology. 

The black box of Aristotle (the “Prime Mover”) and the black box of the medieval church (God) have merely been replaced by the new black boxes of modern science: perturbations, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and so forth.  Only modern science claims that there is no black box!  The roof is raised on the house of cards, all to avoid reexamination of its teetering base.

Is the Universe Dying?

The failure to understand or even acknowledge the existence of such forces results in a picture which is drastically at odds with observed reality.  With a redirecting force (gravity) and a slowing force (inertia) but no force to cause motion in the first place, contemporary science would predict a universe which is winding down and dying:

The conceptual shift of the resulting misconception, a force that redirects motion rather than a force that causes motion, would be phenomenal!   Instead of knowing why things move, why the Earth rotates on its axis, why it orbits the sun, why the moon orbits the Earth, why the sun moves in its a structure, the milky way galaxy, a galaxy whose own movement is outlined by the suns that make it up, all questions for which we lack answers, we would end up with a universe that, with the only available force being a force that redirected motion, would eventually wind down and die.

Instead of the merely factual question of whether the sun traveled around the Earth or the Earth traveled around the sun, we have a question of survival, the question of whether the universe is dynamic, made up of self-organizing systems that continually adapt to the existing forces that currently affect the matter that makes it up, or whether it is like a clock, created at some point in the past and simply running down to its death.[28]

Yet the universe is not winding down – it is winding up, propelled by forces unknown to modern science!  With the gravity and inertia being the only available forces, the rotation of the earth and the moon on their axes could slow down, but not speed up.  Yet observed reality demonstrates that the earth and the moon not only slow down, but also speed up – with no obvious source for the seemingly obligatory input of energy:

Attempting to mathematize why the moon isn’t where it should be in frictionless space on a pretty constant basis has become a science all on its own, tracking the pervasive perturbations that don’t perturb in accordance with perturbation theory.  And, of course, the earth itself slows down and speeds back up.  As does all matter in the solar system!  Galileo’s line of reasoning...went down in flames as a result of an internal self-contradiction in his chain of mathematical deductive reasoning. [57-58]

Data demonstrates compellingly that the solar system does not consist of a star and rocks in deteriorating orbit.  Astrophysical “laws” are completely inadequate to explain the motion in the solar system:

Kepler’s laws are measurably wrong on their face, and yet we have treated the solar system as if it worked in accordance with those laws since they were formulated some four hundred years ago. [152]  Because no planet’s orbit ever returns to the position that it was in, and none are measurable where mass/gravity predicts they should be, it finally came to someone’s attention that these little discrepancies add up over the years. A small discrepancy in orbit...would, on a cumulative basis, be so great as to make the solar system unrecognizable.  Therefore, there must be some reason that the actual measurements of the solar system don’t correspond with reality. [154]  With only a little thought, and even less mathematics, it can be conclusively proven that, while a single discrepancy would create chaos in the solar system, there is not a single discrepancy. In fact, nothing measures out to the inverse square law. Thus, there are massive discrepancies. [155]

If the theories of astrophysicists were correct, the solar system would long ago have fallen apart. Yet it is not.  Gravity, inertia, and other forces claimed by modern science cannot account for the discrepancies between prediction and observed reality.  Minor discrepancies between theory and observed values, would have led to the planets drifting away from the sun and the solar system falling apart.  The earth would freeze and all life on it would die. 

The solar system, and the universe in general, demonstrates dynamic properties of self-regulation, such as we would see with a living organism or a very complex machine – not with matter chaotically thrown into space by the “Big Bang!” 

We are self-organizing systems, we are surrounded by self-organizing systems, the solar system, a star dragging its planets behind as it journeys through space has to be a dynamic self-organizing system else its planets would long ago have been lost.  We look at the dynamic universe and we see a universe that is not even static, but that is running down, the victim of some historical force we little comprehend but can only mirror by measuring current motion. [40]

The Need for Regulating Forces

Bros’ demonstrates that the presumed forces of gravity and inertia are wholly inadequate to maintain the observed motion of the earth – and thus life on the planet – and of the entire solar system.  He also shows that the solar system demonstrates the self-regulating, adaptive properties of a very complex machine or vital organism, rather than the properties of entropic matter floating aimlessly in space until the clock ticks out.

With the understanding of these facts that scientists have blinded themselves to, one can appreciate the inevitability of a central control mechanism to regulate the solar system. Such a mechanism is provided by the governing planets of the Book of Abraham.  Better future scholarship will one day demonstrate that the existence of governing planets provides a consistency with observed physical data that the black boxes of modern astrophysics – black holes, dark matter, and dark energy – cannot.

Summary

On the whole, At the Gates of the Citadel is a must-read for anyone interested in astronomy or astrophysics.  Peter Bros presents compelling logic in identifying where science has gone astray.  Citadel is not light reading, yet it is concise, informative, and very eloquent.

Bros repeatedly alternates without notice between his own statements and the viewpoints of the proponents of arguments he is refuting, requiring the reader to carefully follow the reasoning to understand what Bros is actually saying.  Although slightly disorienting at first, this method ultimately succeeds by requiring the reader’s careful attention in thinking through for himself the strengths, weaknesses, utility, and absurdities of the traditional scientific dogmas being analyzed. 

Bros’ writing offers penetrating insights that cannot fail to provide readers with an enriched perspective of the universe.  He provides few definitive answers, yet nevertheless renders a valuable service in exposing the problematic assumptions of modern theory.  He helps us to retrace our steps to the forks at which astrophysics went astray, providing a basis for a future, more sound rebuilding of the discipline.

Peter Bros’ At the Gates of the Citadel can be ordered on the Copernican Series website.