On 2/13/2016 1:25 PM, Richard Lovison wrote:
...
"Mostly guesswork". Hmmm.
I would say thoughtful, educated guesswork. :-)
I enjoy listening to the thoughts and theories of most physicists and astrophysicists. Some of the better ones possess
a childlike wonder about the world and universe surrounding them and seem to be joyful about the miracle of it all.
They enjoy trying to figure out how it all works. The late Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan come to mind.
The guy who has that, but bugs me lately, is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Awfully full of himself and his own wonderfulness, and
so sure that current theory is Truth. There's this quote, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not
you believe in it."
Does he know, or care, nothing about the history of science? Just in my relatively short lifetime, the "Truth" science
has given us has changed dramatically, in all branches. When I was a science nut early teen, the Big Bang was a new
theory, and in serious competition with Fred Hoyle's Steady State Universe. Fred is still alive, and Halton Arp still
carrying the banner. When we read histories of science, how often is it the underdog, persevering in the face of almost
universal disdain and disapproval that wins the day? Of course, we know who won (and may even have been right, at least
for a while), so we know to root for Galileo while he in under house arrest.
But what about now? The whole of our picture of the Universe depends on one phenomenon, cosmological red-shift. And that
is all speculation, informed, well thought out and mathematically modeled, but speculation, in that there is no direct
measurement corroboration. Hubble noticed an association between red shift and the distance of a few, rather nearby
objects. That works fine as Doppler effect. He and others then expanded beyond Doppler effect to cosmological red-shift,
the theory that the red-shift of distant objects is not Doppler, in the sense that we are each locally moving at a great
relative speed, but a result of the rate of expansion of the Universe between them and us as the wave/particle energy
makes the trip.
What happens when the observed effects of so far unseeable, immeasurable somethings that we have interpreted as dark
matter and dark energy turn out to be results of another form of field, and cosmological red-shift turns out to be
another effect? All the cosmology of the last 100+ years disintegrates.
The very fact that scientists have used the names dark matter and dark energy makes me suspicious that their theories
have more to do with the human psyche than accurate depiction of whatever forces are interacting, along with the
visible, measurable ones, to determine the rate of expansion, if any, of the Universe. It's common now to think of the
Ptolemaic model of the heavens a poor one. It's easy to assume that any fool who bothered to check would see that it
didn't work. But that's not true. The winners get to write at least the popular history. But the fact is that, up to the
time of Copernicus and Galileo, the Ptolemaic model was quite adequate to the task of predicting all the movements in
the heavens. For example, Jesuits wowed the Emperors of China with their accurate to the minute in time and mile in
location predictions of solar eclipses.
So, while the model may have come out of religious ideas of the nature of reality, it was, in fact, highly effective at
describing and predicting all the movements of the heavens, until those pesky moons of Jupiter.
When Carl Jung married Emma, he used the money she brought for several things. One of them was collection all the
alchemical texts he could find. He reasoned that all the explanations of the behavior of the external world of the
alchemists were by then known to have no physical basis, and were generally wrong. Therefore, all this complex system of
knowledge had to be projection of the inner psychic contents of these people onto outside phenomena. Thus, study of
their 'knowledge', while useless as science of the outer world, was an otherwise unprecedented view of contents of the
human psyche. Most of his discoveries and understanding of our interior structure and way of operation and all of his
later published work came out of this approach.
As the examples above, and endless others, show, there are always more than one apparently true explanation of things
not fully understood (which actually includes pretty much everything). Culturally, there is a tendency to only 'see'
those possible explanations that align with our inner psychic natures.
So when Cosmologists start talking about the psychic qualities of Anima, Dark, or hidden, Mother = dark matter, and
Animus, Dark Father (Darth Vader) = dark energy, I am convinced that, in trying to explain phenomena which seem to be
real, but can't be seen or measured in any direct way, they have leaned toward explanations that echo the structure of
their psyches. In the same situation as the Alchemists, they have gone the same way - it's human nature. Doesn't mean
they ARE wrong, may mean that way the much heliocentric model explained all the same phenomena, and more, in a much
simpler way, there may be another, simpler and more useful explanation of these phenomena.
Cosmic Moose
Believing Skeptic Moose
--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
--
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