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Formalising The Heavens (Part 1)
| SERIES: Formalising The Heavens AUTHOR: Jim Schofield |
STRANDS: PHYSICS |
ABSTRACT: This series was elicited by an article in New Scientist (2682) in which the author was putting forward a new explanation for the finding of supernovae “beyond” the extent of the Big Bang Universe. The previous “fix” for such anomalies had been the idea that the expansion of the Universe was increasing in speed the further out it extended. Obviously, such acceleration was the opposite of what had been expected, for the only possible and known force was gravity. But if the opposite was true it needed a force to propel it, and so the idea of a Dark Energy or Force had been “revealed”. Clearly, an unknown force from an unknown source, which does not diminish with the vast extension of the Universe, is an obvious frig. But, when you are totally wedded to equations, an alternative would be hard to come by. The author suggest a “lens” of greater gravitation around our piece of Space, which distorts the seeming position of these supernovae, and makes them seem much further away or earlier in time, or indeed whatever will paper over the cracks. This paper, in response, spends little time on the frig, but a great deal of time on the authors' philosophical and methodological standpoints, explaining their exit from a materialist scientific standpoint and method, and their entry into one that sees everything driven by formulae alone. And of course such a switch puts them into an entirely different category. Indeed, it positions them squarely into an idealist standpoint, in which as long as you can find the mathematical scaffold, you have explained everything. I’m afraid not! |
SYNOPSIS: 1. Cosmology has become part of the same mathematics-based approach that also dominates Modern Physics. And this change is even more damning in Cosmology for in this discipline there can be NO controlled experiments. It could, and has, only one way to go. The Universe has been “tailored” to fit the mathematics. 2. But, such formalism actually arose in the first scientific efforts to address the Cosmos by Newton and his colleagues. Though the effect on earth-bound investigation was also more and more directed into very similar paths too. 3. It is clear that from that time onwards, there was a strand among scientists that believed that things were the way that they were because they followed, indeed “obeyed” formal laws. 4. For experiment no longer “logged Reality as is” (as was possible in the heavens), but on Earth it involved the constraining of sections of Reality, so that such “logging” was both easy and revealing of steady, unchanging relations. Thereafter, these abnormally extracted “laws” were deemed to be the driving essences of Reality. 5. This had definitely revealed an alternative path for Science, which could only be termed idealistic rather than materialistic, and such was all ready and waiting to completely take over, when the quantum revelation seemed to totally undermine the classical, explanatory approach with the conundrums discovered in Sub-Atomic Physics in the late 19th century and beyond. 6. The following triumph of the maths-led approach emasculated real scientific endeavour. The unavoidable contradictions and impasses had always been a part of Science, and an essential spur to its necessary conceptual renewal, but this had now been removed! 7. It terminated holistic explanation, and made it a sin! It condemned the obvious “never completely true” feature of such explanations , by comparing them with the Absolute Truth available in the purely formal world of Mathematics. The final blow was that the equations could predict: what more could you possibly want? 8. But, such prediction can only be retrospective – exactly the same recurrences, with identical conditions, can be dealt with, but with the wholly new, and in different conditions, the prediction score was NIL! It can’t be done! |
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