This article does not make a positive claim, such as Flat Earth. Instead, the main goal is to question the scientific community’s unfounded authority to prescribe dogma, by revealing the pitfalls of one of its most esoteric teachings: gravity.
The Gravity Hunch is Wrong.
If mass attracts mass, then by Newton’s standards there must neccessarily be an acceleration and a force. Gravity is not the acceleration, as free fall is merely the effect. Gravity is neither the force as was later declared by theoretical physicists. What then is gravity? How can it provide a coherent explanation to astronomical phenomena? In short, it can’t.
“So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.” - Nicolaus Copernicus
Really grasp at what Copernicus is saying here: astronomy will never satisfy the scientific method. Pseudoscience will conflate observation with the hypothesis itself, and further interchange these observations with their causes.
The Origins of Bad Science
Einstein defrauds the Scientific method. In 1915 he submits 4 papers to the Prussian Academy of Science Proceedings, explaining General Relativity. His papers are the first “peer reviewed” scientific literary pieces to assert theoretical models with not a single experiment. Instead they are backed with hand wavy math. While Cavendish (poorly) attempted to present an experiment a century before, Einstein completely neglects to provide one.
Predicting natural phenomena based off a hypothetical model does not establish a cause without further experimentation. The cause in this case is concerned with why “gravity” alters the state of matter, not what it does to matter. Pointing at math equations which mimic the effect of gravity does not explain the mechanism. Math ≠ physical proof.
This is why the scientific method is completely butchered by modern researchers to this day: Einstein excluded empirical research in conjunction with an independent, dependent and a controlled variable.
Do Soyentists Even Know the Scientific Method?
Observation is the first step in the scientific method, then hypothesis, then a well thought out experiment and eventually postulate a Theory.
It came as quite a shock that Elementary school’s have changed the way in which they teach the scientific method. The old school way is rigorous and uses inductive reasoning. Let’s match the definition of the scientific method up to a common “science experiment” children are told about.
On Bill Nye the Science Guy, we see the dropping of a feather and bowling ball in a vacuum. We observe two objects with differing mass, density and shape falling at the same rate. Does this prove gravity? According to the Scientific method, no, not at all.
All we are able to conclude is the rate at which an object falls is dependent on the air pressure, which was our independent variable. Nevertheless, we are still only observing the effect of falling. We cannot work backwards and establish a cause. The scientific method is not bidirectional.
We can acknowledge the effect of a downward force, however observing the effect of this force does not prove the cause of gravity (the cause is what science is concerned with).
Gravity is a reification. It is an attempt at representing a high level description of physical law i.e. mathematics, as matter itself. There are no physical attributes of Gravity, because it isn’t a force but an effect of something inaccessible to us. The most honest take one could hold is to acknowledge that the current model of gravity is at best an educated guess and at worst completely baseless.
Faulty Experiments
Cavendish’s non-experiment consisted of building an apparatus to demonstrate mass attracts mass. He designed a rod hanging from a wire with two masses at either end. Next to this rod were two lead weights. A source of light pointed at a mirror connected to the rod would measure any rotation, if the masses were to allegedly attract.
This is an invalid scientific experiment because we never observe mass attracting mass. Orbiting planets, in other words “action at a distance” phenomena, are merely assumptions. If we observe two bodies moving towards each other, the term attraction is dishonest.
The hypothesis is not even slightly rigorous. Is a mass moving in the general direction of another mass? Hypothesis proven! You can’t isolate the independent variable (which is the mass assumed to be causing movement) separate from the movement itself, since the movement is the verification of the hypothesis. This is clearly confirmation bias and circular reasoning, two things which are not allowed in the scientific method.
What’s more obvious is the flaws of the apparatus, it was designed in the late 18th century after all. Perfect precision is impossible in carpentry , especially two hundred years ago. All it takes is for the wire to not be directly attached to the center of the rod, which may have varying density, causing some inner torque and friction. The imbalance from anomalies like humidity, holes, or the grain of the wood, could easily be the missing variables explaining the negligible movement of the masses towards the weights.
Not only is concluding mass attracts mass dishonest, it’s a inversion of what the word mass conceptually means. Inertia is the tendency for an object to resist a force. It does not imply that same object can cause a force in and of itself.
LIGO
“But dude! Gravity is made of waves! It has been proved through experimentation!” Great to hear. If you thought of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) as evidence, try again. This facility (allegedly) detects gravitational waves to prove gravity’s existence. That should already raise a red flag but let’s be rigorous.
Firstly, a wave is not a particular, it is a happening. A wave is a type of behavior, which cannot by itself be a physical item. If I threw a pebble in a pond and asked you to point to the wave, where would you point? Where does the ripple start and end? Sure we can observe and measure the wave but that wouldn’t tell us anything about why the wave is occuring. What caused the wave? The pebble.
In science, to say something exists is a natural claim. It must be a physical entity. The ripple in the pebble example is not made of “ripple particles” or in gravity’s case a “fabric of space-time” but instead is an abstract idea that is reified to make sense in a physical framework. We cannot conflate the behavior of the water with water particles.
Observing phenomena doesn’t imply a cause. In other words, it doesn’t answer why something happens: Hearing something loud does not answer why it sounds loud; Seeing something fall doesn’t explain why it falls. Observation is a prerequisite to establishing a physical cause.
Secondly, how do we know this wave behavior isn’t something else? If we are trying to find what a gravitational wave looks like, how do we know what to look for? “We have theoretical models!” Right, because theory is always the same as practice. Having a candidate model wave and then looking for it in empirical data is the definition of confirmation bias. We aren’t even observing gravitational waves, we are just inferring thats what we see. In the case for LIGO, how do we conduct an experiment proving an undefined variable (gravity) using undefined variables (space-time)?
Space and time are conceptual and cannot by themselves establish the cause of anything, no matter what experiment you try to come up with.
Space is the privation of matter. Similarly shadows are the privation (or absence) of light. In either case we can observe effects and mistake them for causes (like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave). A shadow is not a particular, it is the effect of an object and a casting of light. The light is a variable so we can turn it off, resulting in no shadow. However there isn’t even an independent variable to observe space. There is no way of verifying the distance between two points in space from only one vantage point. It’d be pretty ignorant to base a theory off of something we can’t verify.
If space is the absence of matter, to claim we can measure it is nonsensical. It’d be like saying we could quantify the effect of coldness. This is really just measuring the amount of heat (average kinetic energy).
Freeman Dyson suggested that gravity might be like temperature in a way:
“You can measure temperature, you can talk about temperature, but you can’t quantize it, there is no way you can talk about temperature as a quantum object. There is no such thing as a tempon”.
Reification comes up here again. There is no such thing as a “graviton” either.
Secondly, time is conceptual. It’s an abstract tool we use to measure changes in magnitude we see in the natural world. We cannot directly observe time or its properties directly. That is, it’s not a material object but a perfect concept. Observing change in things is simply an observation of particulars not time itself. For example, observing that a satellite runs 38 milliseconds fast every orbit does not imply time is a physical quantity that can be compressed or stretched like a ball of play doh.
If time and space are abstract concepts how can they be independent variables with physical properties in an experiment to explain the phenomenon in question?
Straw Men
“Well can you see wind?” Our argument does not claim if we can’t see something it isn’t real. We can remove wind by setting up a wall, and can verify it causes a flag to wave or not wave in it’s absence. Replicating this removal with gravity is not feasible. You’d have to make many assumptions about it before you could propose an alleged experiment.
“Well can we see wifi?” We know wifi exists because it took experimentation to engineer it. Obviously they didn’t get devices working with wifi on the first try. All technology goes under extensive trial and error. The reason we’ve gotten so far with technology is because of electricity and magnetism. Unsurprisingly, wifi is just a radio (electromagnetic) signal.
The experiments and research done with E&M are actually based in the scientific method. Furthermore, E&M has a much more grounded explanation to how matter interacts with matter and is the only true source of force (and perhaps sound) we have ever undoubtedly confirmed.
For “gravity”, its supposed self validating experiments are just research grants being done in the name of further understanding E&M. Even if we wanted to measure the bend in Space-Time like with LIGO, we’d be measuring Spacetime from within Spacetime itself. Since there is no reference point the whole experiment is not scientific.
To say the “bending” of Spacetime can be measured is complete absurdity. Space and time are the two fundamental preconditions for observation. How can we measure the bending of spacetime if it inherently encompasses the prerequisites of measurement?
Academic arguments for this stuff comes off as satire:
“There is a bend in Spacetime because of this wave we saw through our machine which matches the modeled wave we created.” - NASA Intern
When we ask ourselves what the physical properties of Spacetime are, such that it could be bent, we quickly realize the concept is a poetically unnecessary description of what we’re observing. This bears no weight in the scientific method. There is no basis in reality for the fabric of Spacetime.
Dark Matter
A more recent esoteric teaching is Dark Matter, which is another bogus concept theoretical physicists drivel on about.
“Wait! There isn’t enough matter to justify the way the universe is behaving! Might as well misplace concreteness by inventing a negative space called dark matter. Sure it isn’t verifiable, but it fits the model. You wouldn’t want to question grand assumptions that has progressed us into modernity now, would you? Now that we have concluded dark matter has to exist it turns out there is exactly enough of it to justify our hypothesis of the universe! The good thing about science is it’s what we declare as true whether or not you believe in it! Oh wait.” - Neil DeSmush-stache Tyson
The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity
It’s important to point out, whether inadvertent or not, that the scope of Einstein’s relativity extends outside the field of science into the philosophical realm. If we can never truly know the velocity of a body, since allegedly there’s no reference point, can anything truly be known? In other words under epistemic nihilism, one must admit any knowledge claim is illusory and surrender their own worldview.
At the end of the day science has utterly failed to demonstrate the cause of gravity. Soyentists can only describe the what i.e. the effect, not explain the why. They claim an immaterial magnitude, 9.81 m/s², is the cause for how objects fall which is only describing physical law and is by definition not science.
We cannot recreate gravity, manipulate it or explain it through experiment. Science’s explanation for gravity is not scientific, but instead esoteric. It smuggles in metaphysics, yet it’s taught as if it were strictly mechanical. It would require just as much, if not more faith to believe this contradiction, than to accept our limited ability to comprehend the natural world was predetermined and is ultimately good.
Further Reading: Celestial Mechanics Unanswered Questions - Miles Mathis