Kepler the Conniver (part 2)
Part 4 of 'Science as Philosophy' series. Kepler's philosophical choice.
Introduction
In the last post we looked at the foundational ideas for Kepler’s theory and his drastic amendment of Copernicus’ model. We noticed his occultism, his worship of the Sun, Platonic religiosity, the unjustified and unscientific use of Plato’s ‘solids’ and the Greek ideal of symmetry. We also witnessed his dependency on Tycho Brahe’s charts and observations. We saw that Kepler’s own maths could have ‘proven’ the Tychonic geo-helio-centric model, yet for personal and philosophical motivations he decided to align his complicated geometry behind Platonic theory. We will now discuss the concept of ‘proof’ for Keplerian theory which is never discussed or taught.
Models
Kepler’s modifications of the Copernican model did not alleviate the many anomalies regarding the motions of the planets which still remain today. Kepler’s maths explaining the elliptical motion of planets is only an approximation and could be described as a poor one. Planetary orbits are not perfect circles but are imperfect ellipses. The planets precess at different rates, and all contain eccentricities that cannot be explained by the Keplerian method.
“From the time of Newton, it has been known that Kepler’s laws are mere approximations, computer’s fictions, handy mathematical devices for finding the approximate place of a planet in the heavens. They apply with greater accuracy to some planets than to others. Jupiter and Saturn show the greatest deviations from strictly elliptical motion. The latter body is often nearly a degree away from the place it would have been had its motion about the sun been strictly in accord with Kepler’s laws. This is such a large discrepancy that it can be detected by the unaided eye. The moon is approximately half a degree in diameter, so that the discrepancy in the motion of Saturn is about twice the apparent diameter of the moon. In a single year, during the course of one revolution about the sun, the Earth may depart from the theoretical ellipse by an amount sufficient to appreciably change the apparent place of the sun in the heavens” (Charles Lane Poor, Gravitation versus Relativity, p. 129).
As with all ‘models’, Kepler’s and modern science’s use of abstract geometry can only approximate, quite inaccurately it should be declared, what transpires in the cosmos. They are not carved into-stone-absolutes. Another example is the parallax.
Brahe had rejected Copernicanism because it necessitated the existence of stellar parallax. This means that as the Earth revolves around the Sun, every 6 months it will be on opposite sides of its orbit. This entails that on Earth we should see stars closest to us ‘shift’ their position in the sky, when compared to the stars that are more distant. In Brahe’s day no stellar parallax had ever been found.
There was a slight stellar parallax identified by James Bradley circa 1725 (fraudulently I would say), and by Bessell in 1838 (perhaps) but this in no way confirms heliocentricity. In fact, the parallax phenomenon is so slight it tells us nothing about the purported movement of the Earth. Further the variation of star position under either geo-or-heliocentricity would be the same and is so fractionally meagre that it is almost irrelevant or at least, open to interpretation.
For example, in the Tychonic system stars revolve around the Sun every 23:56:04 (sidereal time), and the Sun revolves around the Earth every 24:00:00 (solar time). Because of this slight difference, the viewing angle of the stars that we have on Earth must, and do, change every day. This change is however so small that we simply cannot notice any change when we view two stars on any two successive nights. Does this mean that the Earth moves? Of course not. There are any number of explanations using geo-helio-centricity or a mix of both models.
Proofs?
So where are we with Kepler and the proof? Simply put, the Keplerian effort and modelling cannot prove anything definitive. Mainstream ‘science’ knows this. For example, apostle Stephen Hawking has admitted:
“We now have a tendency to dismiss as primitive the earlier world picture of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth was at the center and the sun went around it. However we should not be too scornful of their model, which was anything but simple-minded. It incorporated Aristotle’s deduction that the Earth is a round ball rather than a flat plate and it was reasonably accurate in its main function, that of predicting the apparent positions of the heavenly bodies in the sky for astrological purposes. In fact, it was about as accurate as the heretical suggestion put forward in 1543 by Copernicus that the Earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun” (On the Shoulders of Giants, ed., Stephen Hawking, 2002, pp. ix-x)
It is quite astonishing that one of the great apostles of modern Scientism has not bothered to read Copernicus or Kepler in detail! Copernicanism is more complicated than competing geo-and geo-heliocentric theories. This is never taught.
To wit one of the great pioneers of Relativity and complex calculus was Henri Poincaré (late 19th, early 20th centuries). He was asked whether the Earth rotated within fixed stars, or if the stars rotated around a fixed Earth. Poincaré could offer no proof that the Earth meandered around the Sun. He proclaimed the same falsity as Hawking that Copernicanism was preferred because it was ‘simpler’ (1901 in La science et l’hypothèse, Paris, Flammarion, 1968, p. 182). So much Science!
Anyone who has bothered to study the evidence knows this is a lie. This ‘axiom’ is untrue, and it repeated by ‘The Science’ because that is their only justification for their philosophical model choice. The Keplerian Copernican has almost twice the number of equants or epicycles (retrograde motions, non elliptical movements) as the Ptolemaic or Tychonic.
Apostle Max Born, another noted physicist, and Relativist also admits that the choice of model is based on your philosophy not science:
“...Thus we may return to Ptolemy’s point of view of a ‘motionless Earth.’ This would mean that we use a system of reference rigidly fixed to the Earth in which all stars are performing a rotational motion with the same angular velocity around the Earth’s axis…one has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein’s field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick- walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein’s point of view, Ptolemy and Copernicus are equally right. What point of view is chosen is a matter of expediency” (Max Born, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 1962, 1965, pp. 344-345)
Physicist Hans Reichenbach a contemporary of Einstein and a firm supporter of Relativity, supports Born’s comment that the chosen Copernican model is due to questionable expediency, not ‘science’:
“…it is very important to acknowledge that the Copernican theory offers a very exact calculation of the apparent movements of the planets…even though it must be conceded that, from the modern standpoint practically identical results could be obtained by means of a somewhat revised Ptolemaic system….It makes no sense, accordingly, to speak of a difference in truth between Copernicus and Ptolemy: both conceptions are equally permissible descriptions. What has been considered as the greatest discovery of occidental wisdom, as opposed to that of antiquity, is questioned as to its truth value” (Hans Reichenbach From Copernicus to Einstein, 1970, pp, 18, 82)
Reichenbach’s ‘truth value’ is indeed a perplexing question. What if the Keplerian astronomy is wrong or mere philosophy? What if Brahe is right? Philosopher of science I. Bernard Cohen wrote in 1960:
“There is no planetary observation by which we on Earth can prove that the Earth is moving in an orbit around the sun. Thus all Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope can be accommodated to the system invented by Tycho Brahe just before Galileo began his observations of the heavens. In this Tychonic system, the planets…move in orbits around the sun, while the sun moves in an orbit around the Earth in a year. Furthermore, the daily rotation of the heavens is communicated to the sun and planets, so that the Earth itself neither rotates nor revolves in an orbit” (I. Bernard Cohen, Birth of a New Physics, revised and updated, 1985, p. 78)
Movement?
In 1887 Michelson and Morley carried out a very sensitive interferometer experiment which found no movement of the Earth. Apostle Hawking admits this and throughout his career, focusing mostly on unprovable black hole theories, happily ignores the implications. He just assumes that the Earth moves. This is the ‘postulate’ or starting point. Thousands of experiments do not find any movement of the Earth.
“(Michelson Morley experiment)…designed to measure the speed at which the earth travels through the ether…If the speed of light were a fixed number relative to the ether, the measurements should have revealed light speeds that differed depending on the direction of the beam. But Michelson and Morley observed no such difference.” (Hawking, p. 95)
The experiment did not result in ‘no fringe shifts’ but fringe shifts much smaller than the size of those equal to an Earth revolving around the Sun. Michelson-Morley found shifts in the interference fringe which were maybe commensurate with a ~1,054 miles per hour speed in a 24-hour rotation (this could be either the Earth rotating within a fixed universe, or a rotating universe around a fixed Earth, both the Tychonic and Keplerian models can explain this).
Michelson-Morley’s result is nowhere near the required velocity of 66.000 miles per hour which is what Keplerian-Copernicanism demands. It is not even 2% of what was expected. Yet no one bothers to explain this non-null result. Why is that? Isn’t this problem the real reason why ‘Relativity’ was invented by the wizards and magicians?
“Those who hold to the Copernican Principle believe there is no center, or every place is a center, but if there is a single center it is any place but here, and they propose this as a scientific position. But where is the science behind that? It’s not. It’s a metaphysical commitment. It’s not science anymore. So it’s not the geocentrist that is being unscientific here, it is the other side that being unscientific, because their commitment precedes the science.” (Martin Selbrede for the scientific documentary, The Principle, produced by Stellar Motion Pictures, LLC, Los Angeles, California, 2013)
The commitment of Kepler to Sun worship and Platonic religio-philosophy and the commitment by the Relativists to that same doctrine, is what animates all of what is termed ‘modern physics and cosmology’. The underlying premises and ‘postulates’ are never looked at, never criticised and never proven. They are simply accepted in-toto.
Philo-sophistry paths
We know that Kepler’s system and model was entirely premised on Brahe’s work. Unlike Kepler, Brahe was a geocentrist. Kepler was clever at maths, less clever with astronomy. He could have ‘proven’ Tycho’s system and followed down Tycho’s path. Instead, he decided to promote his own Sun-worshipping theology and amble down the Copernican path. It was a metaphysical decision, not a scientific one. Both the Tychonic and helio-centric models ‘save the phenomena’. Copernicanism has always been at its very core, a philosophical exercise.
“The answer is that the details did not matter, and that it was not necessary to read the book (Copernicus’ work or Kepler’s) to grasp its essence. Ideas which have the power to alter the habits of human thought do not act on the conscious mind alone; they seep through to those deeper strata which are indifferent to logical contradictions. They influence not some specific concept, but the total outlook of the mind. The heliocentric idea of the universe, crystallized into a system by Copernicus, and restated in modern form by Kepler, altered the climate of thought not by what it expressly stated, but by what it implied…” (W Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 218).
As Koestler notes, ‘details don’t matter’. Philosophy and Scientism are the foundations of Copernican theology. The entire edifice of medieval and Greek philosophy and science was being investigated and questioned in the 16th and 17th centuries. We also need to reference Gutenberg’s 1440 invention of the printing press which changed everything. Movable type and automated bookmaking were perhaps the most far-reaching inventions in history, at least in forming ‘scientific’ attitudes and establishing Scientism.
In with the new
The zeitgeist in Kepler’s era was increasingly, ‘out with the old, in with the new’.
Printing presses containing the complicated pseudo-science of Copernicus, Kepler and anyone else could be issued to the masses. The 15th – 17th centuries were frenetic and reflected in the streams of printed material – books, newsletters, fliers, pamphlets, adverts, of all sizes and interests. The ‘Enlightenment’ was built on the printing press and in its propaganda declaimed that all which came before the availability of mass reading material was ‘dark’. ‘New’ ideas and knowledge was to be venerated.
Magellan, Columbus, Cartier, Champlain, Cook, the age of discovery, extended trade, resources, slavery (White and Black), empire building, Martin Luther (deranged, myopic), all led to the sceptical questioning of Aristotle’s authority in science and naturalism, along with that of his apologists the medieval schoolmen. New systems were being rapidly introduced, the old views were being amended and attacked. All systems were being systematically refactored and reformed. This was Kepler’s world. ‘New’ ideas, even if they were pagan and Greek in origin and not new at all, ruled (W. Carl Rufus, “The Astronomical System of Copernicus,” Popular Astronomy, 1923, p. 516).
Bottom Line
The emphasis in Kepler’s era was on ‘new’, ‘renewal’, ‘rebirth’, and continuing the ‘renaissance’. Capital, extended trade routes, new prosperity, an improvement in living standards, an increase in literacy due to book printing, all contributed to the axiom that ‘new’ was ‘progress’, and ‘new’ meant ‘light’ in learning, understanding scripture, reason, life and living.
Into such a milieu a man such as Kepler, driven as most within the ‘science’ are by ego, profit and notoriety, would of course choose to support the ‘new’. His underlying addiction to Platonic philosophy and his central belief in the divine powers of the Sun, meant that he could only align his complicated geometry with heliocentrism and the ‘new light’ of ‘reason’.
This was however, entirely a philosophical, not a scientific decision. Kepler could quite have easily ‘proven’ the Tychonic model to be ‘true’. How much different would ‘science’ be today if that had happened? All hail.
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Note Bene: List of scientists for and against Copernicanism (16-17th centuries)
There was never a ‘consensus’ to use that ridiculous modern apology, that Copernicus or Kepler was right. Quite the opposite.
For: Copernicus, Rheticus, Mæstlin, Kepler, Rothman, Galileo, Gilbert, Foscarini, Didacus Stunica, Ismael Bullialdus, Jacob Lansberg, Peter Herigonus, Gassendi, Descartes (inclines to this belief), A. L. Politianus, Bruno
Against: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Theon the Alexandrine, Regiomontanus, Alfraganus, Macrobius, Cleomedes, Petrus Aliacensis, George Buchanan, Maurolycus, Clavius, Barocius, Michael Neander, Telesius, Martinengus, Justus-Lipsius, Scheiner, Tycho Brahe, Tasso, Scipio Claramontius, Michael Incofer, Fromundus, Jacob Ascarisius, Julius Cæsar La Galla, Tanner, Bartholomæus Amicus, Antonio Rocce, Marinus Mersennius, Polacco, Kircher, Spinella, Pineda, Lorinis, Mastrius, Bellutris, Poncius, Delphinus, Elephantutius
(Dorothy Simpson, The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe, p. 81-82
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