Astronomy In Crisis
Where's Thomas Aquinas when you need him?
Galileo slaughtered the Ptolemaic Universe. Observations of sunspots proved the Sun was not a perfect golden orb. Observations of Jupiter’s four largest moons proved not everything revolved around the Earth. This threw the Vatican into a panic.
The Vatican had invested its power and authority into the Ptolemaic narrative. It had fought tooth and nail to suppress Copernicus and heliocentrism. It had promoted Aquinas’ creatio ex nihilo proof as the definitive cosmology, and by God nothing was gong to disturb the universal clockwork and harmony of the spheres it had decreed.
Not even objective reality.
The Vatican scrambled to save the Universe, carefully promoting “scientists” who followed the narradigm, and relegating heretics to the ash heap of history. Those who found ways to “prove” the Ptolemaic-Aquinas Universe were rewarded with patronage and praise. Those who actually observed reality were ridiculed, impoverished and shunned.
Today, we call this process “peer review”. Those who play the game get grants and are asked to present at prestigious seminars, while those who actually observe reality are unpublished, choked off from funding and slowly vanish into the aether.
In our “modern” mathemajical Universe, creatio ex nihilo has been re-branded as the Big Bang Theory. Its wizards of numerology, like Einstein, Schwartzshild, Hawking. and even (God help us) Neil DeGrasse Tyson are lauded and granted sainthood, while real mathematicians like Pierre-Marie Robitaille, Halton Arp. Anthony Peratt. and Stephen J. Crothers, who readily make monleys out of the lot of them, are shunted off to a quiet corner and warned to behave themselves.
Modern “science” is nothing more than rebranded religion masquerading as objective truth. It is a belief system, wherein the lay person is strongly dissuaded from free inquiry, in much the same fashion as the Vatican uses Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur to guide the faithful away from inconvenient thought. In fact, this is the modus operandi of the American Progressive movement.
However, in the same way Gutenberg put a Bible in every household, the internet has allowed access to obscure texts, radically new interpretations and lots of rawdata.
Let’s take a relatively common and accessible narradigm promoted by Scientism (i.e. rebranded religion).
Most people who attended grade school are familiar with the Solar System Formation narradigm. An ancient supernova blew off a cloud of gas and dust, which formed eddy currents and later condensed into stars and planets. These eddies spun around, drawing the gas and dust into a disk that eventually congealed into the Sun and our Nine Planets (Pluto is and always will be a planet). As the disk grew denser, gravity took hold of all that matter and squeezed it into balls, one of which caught fire and is still burning today, much like the Great Tire Fire in Springfield.
At the moment the Sun caught fire, the force of the explosion blew - in a vacuum with nothing to “blow” on - lighter elements, like gas and water, toward the outer edges of the system, leaving the heavier metals and silicates close in. Thus, the rocky planets form the inner Solar System, and the gas giants form the outer Solar System. The remaing water and volitiles created shells of disperse material such as the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.
According to the nursery rhyme, the amount of water and other ices should increase as we move away from the Sun, until we reach the Oort Cloud, with its population of “dirty ice balls” called comets.
It all seems perfectly reasonable, and who’s going to look to closely when you patch up the holes with calulus, trigonometry and algebra. That’s the mystic language of the gods, and we mere mortals must allow only the wisest and most indocrinated souls near that stuff.
There are so many problems with our current Standard Model narradigm that it is hard to know where to begin tearing it down. So, let’s take three of the best observed facts that destroy our serene little Universe: comets have little or no ice of any kind, exoplanetary systems defy the narradigm, and the Laws of Thermodynamics say it is impossible for our Solar System to exist.
Comets
A number of comets have been visited by space probes now, with fly-bys, long-term orbits and landings, and even bombings. In every case, comets were found to be desiccated, rocky bodies that look pretty much like every other asteroid, except for the coma and tail. The “out-gassing” was nothing of the sort, but rather streamers or charged dust and gas raising off the surface. The claims of water ice were actually hyroxyl groups that are one hydrogen atom short of wet. Yet, they cling desperately to the “dirty snowball” model, to the point of actually lying about the results.
Exoplanetary Systems
While our Solar System neatly fits into Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, with rocky bodies close to the star, and gas giants further out and the orbits being tidy harmonics of all the others, almost none of the exoplanetary systems discovered so far match this arrangement. This is highly inconvenient, since Kepler’s Laws were used to find Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Instead, what we find is a nearly random distribution of planet types across thousands of systems, with gas giants nearly grazing stars and “super earths” in distant orbits. If anything, our home system makes a great argument for intelligent engineering, but that’s a different column.
And while we’re at it, an Oort cloud, essentially a hypothetical shell of ice cubes, has never been observed around our nor any other star. The only “proof” of such a thing are coments with extremely long orbits, but we’ve already seen that comets are dry, rocky bodies.
Laws of Thermodynamics
This is the fun one, because it states that no observed star in the Universe should exist under the current narradigm. Here’s the problem:
Fill a container with an ideal gas. Place the container inside of a vacuum chamber. Using a remote manipulator, open the container of gas. If you took high school physics, then you already know that the gas will disperse to fill the chamber until it reaches equilibrium, with every atom of gas being equidistant from every other atom. No matter how large the chamber is, the gas will expand to fill the available space. The only way to compress the gas again is to apply outside pressure until it condenses, and since the same Laws of Thermodynamics forbid a system from performing work on itself, the gas can never condense itself.
Given this very simple fact, it is impossible for the gas from an ancient supernova to condense into stars, and thus neither our Sun nor any other star should exist. Instead, the gas should expand until it reaches the limits of the universal vacuum. And since the dust which permeates the observable Universe is supposedly created by supernovae as well, there should be nothing to build planets with, since the stars that went nova to create it never existed.
You see the problem here.
It’s a chicken-and-egg paradox. The Universe should be a very cold, dark place with an almost undetectable trace of hydrogen gas. To make things worse, gravity is such a weak force, as even Scientism mustadmit (inverse square rule), then there would never be sufficient impetus to draw the atoms together, as the atoms would disperse far to quickly for gravity to have any effect whatsoever. Einstein would have us believe that gravity is a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, but that requires gravity to pull on the ball to warp the sheet - otherwise known as a circular argument.
Clearly, there are some major issues with the current narradigm, and no amount of wand waving and mathemagic can make the issues go away. For four hundred years, the Vatican has tried desperately to patch up its Ptolemaic-Aquinan worldview, but cold hard facts keep blowing more and bigger holes in it.
Though adherents of Scientism will vigorously deny being in the throes of religious dogma, their Big Bang ‘creation out of nothing’ and all the supporting structures demand an external force to initiate it and hold it together, which brings us right back to where we started, but with an intricate labyrinth of misdirections, detours and mirrors hiding the plain truth.
Does this mean that God doesn’t exist?
Not at all. In fact, stripping away all the dogma and appeal to authority means that the Universe itself and everything in it is a living entity. Thus, we are all pieces of God, if you will, and everything we can and can not percieve are essential parts of the whole.
In this view, we do not need a heirarchical authoritarian architecture with the sole power to commune with the Divine and interpret it for us bovine masses. We ARE divine, containing the whole within ourselves, while being a part of the whole. As above, so below.
With every new apparatus, a little more of the authoritarian facade is chipped away. “Seeing” in new wavelengths, peering deeper into the void, confirms the simple truth that we understand nothing…yet.
Ptolemy proposed a series of perfect nested crystal spheres carrying the seven “visitors” and the background lights. But when the retrograde motion of the planets became know, it was necessary to create mini spheres embedded in the larger spheres. Then there were those annoying comets that should have smashed the spheres to bits, but obviously didn’t, and so more ad hoc patches were created.
This process has continued for millennia, until our modern cosmology is composed of nothing but layers of bandages, bubblegum and baling wire that threatens to collapse in the next breeze.
It is time we leave our nursery rhymes and faery tales behind, and see the Universe for what it truly is. We can do this voluntarily, seeking a new path with our eyes wide open, or we can find ourselves in the smoking heap of ruined civilzation without direction or purpose.
It is the choice between leaving home for the first time with a plan of action, or being kicked out to the curb with no clue and no support.
In either case, the old authoritarian paradigm has come to an end.
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Nice one. Really enjoyed it. There is no doubt that the universe contains all its qualities. and expresses them, to paraphrase Leibniz. There is also no doubt that the universe has more than one coördinate frame, one being material and the other being “consciousness”, as described by William Tiller. Most of the problems find easier resolution with separate coördinate frames, each with their own properties. This is akin to the co called multiverse theories, but they fail because they treat consciousness as paranormal. In other words, they double down on failure and try to spread it around, in “Brownian motion”, of course. Once we honestly review Tiller’s work, there is room for both divine persons, and for materialists to enjoy the benefits of the divine without having to do any of the heavy lifting.
Mostly over my head, but enjoyed the language and metaphors. Don't need to understand the details to appreciate your style.