Mel Acheson Playing w Dogmatic Thinking Thunderbolts

In previous episodes of this 7-Arc series, we covered how the development of new instruments has accompanied or generated fundamental shifts in scientific thinking. The instruments measure overlooked discrepancies and detect unimagined qualities. The previous explanatory ideas won't stretch over the new evidence without patching, and the patches become awkward and arbitrary. At some point, scientists decide that the old patched ideas are too much of a nuisance, and they come up with new ideas that fit better. Brawley's more precise instruments arguably led to the replacement of Ptolemy's kinematic model of planetary motions with Newton's dynamic model. Hatching Ptolemy's perfect circles with ellipses, especially when strong objections were already raised against his linear equant element, would have been playing with dogmatic thinking. The great increase of instrumentation in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the replacement of Newton's dynamic model with Einstein's rubber spacetime model in the 20th century. Gravity as a force was abandoned in favor of gravity as a warped coordinate system. But the use of the same term for both conditions caused confusion. People still talked about gravity as a force. The invention of electronic instruments and the ability to send them into space has now brought a flood of new data that doesn't fit Einstein's spacetime. But instead of looking for clearer explanations, theoreticians are playing with dogmatic thinking. Early in the 20th century, astronomers categorically ruled out the possibility that electricity might compete with gravity as a cosmic force. That decision became a dogma that prevented them from even looking at plasma experiments. With little knowledge of the actual behavior of plasma, they hid the new data behind ad hoc excuses of collapsed matter and undetectable dark matter and unexplained dark energy. They patched Einstein's rubber idea with fantasies that were invented to make the math work and to save the theory. But the theory is obscured by the stitches. For example, the idea of neutron stars began as a patch to conventional gravity and gas theories. Some stars appeared to be too small to contain enough conventional matter to produce their observed gravitational influence and light output. So astronomers invented an untestable form of collapsed matter. They imagined that the increasing and unresisted gravity of a shrinking star would squeeze the electrons of atoms onto their nuclei. This allowed many more atoms to be packed together, enhancing gravity and radiant output. When they found motions and energetic outbursts that exceeded the neutron stars' capacities, they presumed that the now irresistible bending of gravity followed their equations of collapse to the mathematical point of zero. They didn't seem to realize that they were crossing the empirical border into metaphysical nonsense. Because gravity would bend space-time so strongly, nothing, not even light, could escape the collapsed star. So it would be unobservable. Hence, this second patch was named a black hole. Only, crackpots remarked that the point that exploded at the beginning of the Big Bang would have been the mother of black holes and therefore the Big Bang couldn't have happened. But it turned out that much was escaping, if not from the black hole, at least from nearby. The black hole was reconceived as the mathematical point as well as the nearby phenomenon. It could be observed after all. In fact, black holes often appeared not just to pull everything in but to blow everything out. They were transformed into white holes with magical mathematics. Astronomers never considered that the nearby phenomena might be caused by something other than a black hole. Similar difficulties of too much energy in too small a space also turned up in observations of galactic motions. Galaxies and clusters were moving too fast for their mutual gravity to hold the cluster together. Most clusters should have dissipated long ago. And stars in the arms of spiral galaxies should move slower the farther they were from the center. But they appeared to be moving at about the same speed regardless of their distance. In fact, the entire universe was more energetic than could be explained by the gravity of its calculated mass. So, dark matter and dark energy were imagined to save the theory of gravity from complete falsification. Those patches made 96% of the resulting universe of theory unobservable. Astronomy abandoned scientific principles and sank into dark speculations about dark phantasms. Black holes and collapsed matter are not explanations, they're excuses. They try to squeeze the abundance of energy that's observed and that's available in electrically active plasma out of the dearth of energy that is all theories of gravity and gas can supply. Dark matter and dark energy hide a pretense of bloated gravity behind an empirically dishonest claim of invisibility and untestability. Because astronomers believed in the 19th century gravity and gas universe before plasma was discovered, they believed that electricity in what they imagined to be empty space was impossible. The old theories became a belief system, a dogma, that was absolutely true and unquestionable. What else could it be, believers exclaimed, transforming the question into a foregone conclusion. Many observations confirm relativity, they declared, but confirmation only confirms what the believers already know. The new evidence and new ideas confront them with what they don't know. Discovery lies in the disconfirmations, the anomalies. Discovery lies in searching for and testing alternative explanations. Even as the traditionalists retreated into dark dogma, the pioneers of radiant matter, that Langmuir later renamed plasma, and Birkeland's Torella, were exploring electricity in space, striations and bubbles, plasma not gas, bound by double layers and sorted by its various characteristics and moving by a hand that could be much heavier than gravity. Theoreticians shunned the new experimental findings because they couldn't be expressed in prestigious mathematical generalities from which the real universe of observation could be deduced. Hannes Alvén, an early plasma experimenter and one of the founders of plasma cosmology, wrote this about the situation, "...the cosmical plasma physics of today is to some extent the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory. Many of them still believe in formulas which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong. Several of the basic concepts on which theories of cosmical plasmas are founded are not applicable to the condition prevailing in the cosmos. They are generally accepted by most theoreticians, they are developed with the most sophisticated mathematical methods, and it is only the plasma itself which does not understand how beautiful the theories are and absolutely refuses to obey them. Hiding in conceptual darkness and playing mathematical games with imaginary objects negates the foundational assumptions of scientific thinking. The objects of investigation must be sensible, that is, able to be sensed, able to be detected. They must be amenable to experimentation. They must be explainable, not solely predictable. Theoreticians must not only follow the math but also follow the language. Theories must mean something. Scientists must search for alternative explanations and test them for coherence and correspondence with the alternative interpretations of the selected evidence. Ad-hoc patches complicate theories. The standard model is suffocating itself under its arbitrary patches. Plasma is detectable with many instruments. It can be generated in laboratories and its properties observed. Explanations of its behavior can be proposed and tested. Its observed properties correspond with the observed behaviors of cosmic phenomena and provide simple and straightforward explanations. But its electrical properties are not allowed in the standard model. Mechanical inventions and the mysterious mathematics must stand in for electrical activity. The alternative to patching is the development of new fundamentals. The old theories and the old thinking served well to get us where we now are. But they're becoming a hindrance. They're becoming obscured by dogmatic thinking. Space-age evidence is surprising and unexpected. Predictions from the old theories are not found. Contrary evidence that falsifies them is found. We should stop pretending that the old gravity and gas thinking is adequate for our needs. But the revolutionary effects of such a change in thinking will not be limited to one discipline. The previous metaphysics of uniform and gradual change affected all of thinking. Now the possibilities of larger and faster changes in the natural world will revolutionize all disciplines. The empirical world has moved into a new conceptual space. A new way of thinking is emerging, one that rejects the worshipful belief that only gravity is of importance in cosmology. An awareness of the greater energy and power of electrical activity in plasma systems in space opens our thinking and our worldview to larger and faster working explanatory possibilities. The electric universe model of cosmology is one such possibility.