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History of Science - problems with the history of physics
Homepage .
Albert
Einstein . Isaac
Newton . Rene
Descartes . William
Gilbert ....... General
Image Theory ..... Sitemap
Science teaching, in schools and in universities, now
often includes bits of science history - and there are some courses
specifically on History of Science.
While most older fiction works like Shakespeare's are freely
available to all on the internet, older science works generally
have very restricted availability and can involve substantial
charges. This website will seek to improve that.
Much of what is now taught on the history of science, including
much history of physics, includes some major errors discussed
below. And the education of most scientists in science history is
probably at its most limited ever today.
Problems with science history.
As a separate subject History of Science tends to be chiefly
concerned with people and especially with ;
1. who first produced a new science idea.
2. who helped with or helped inspire that new science idea.
3. who opposed that new science idea.
This can certainly be very interesting, but an excessive concern
with people can mean that the actual science ideas are not examined
closely enough and so can include major errors. And a science idea
itself can also have significant actual problems from ;
1. a scientist publishes a new science idea, but then develops and
amends it.
2. other scientists develop and amend that science idea.
3. others opposing that new science idea misrepresent it
(unintentionally or intentionally).
4. others merging that new science idea with their own amend it or
misrepresent it.
5. any new terms, or new use of existing terms, involved in a new
science idea can be misunderstood.
When science was all books written and read in Latin, that had some
big advantages and disadvantages for scientists in allowing
publication to be international but often very limited and censored
so the education of early scientists mostly involved Plato,
Aristotle and Euclid. But after Newton local natural language
science journals took over and scientists were soon addressing only
recent journal articles in their own language and were generally
poorly educated on wider science theory. Hence, Einstein was
chiefly knowledgeable only on other German language physics of his
time and grossly misunderstood Newton and earlier physics theory
ideas - and almost all modern physicists are similarly
ignorant.
Also now scientists publish their theories in ad hoc articles,
encouraged by government funders and science journals wanting
newsworthy briefs. But science theory write-ups need to be
comparable to show where they are compatible or incompatible to
identify their proof issues - in physics, 'Principia' basics
compatible write-ups are needed. Of course Newton's Principia was
essentially a write-up of three theories in one - Newton blackbox
physics, Gilbert attraction physics and Descartes push physics -
though they would maybe be more useful as three separate
write-ups. And without comparable write-ups a new physics theory
may seem to explain some claimed cosmology issues but hide the fact
that it cannot explain two marbles colliding.
This website presents a lot of history of physics, trying to
concentrate on theory ideas, as the final published thoughts that
you may be able to read especially of four specific famous
physicists - Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes and
William Gilbert. There are of course many others, but these four
give a good range of basic theories of the universe worth
considering here in an interrelated manner. And here it is the
scientific ideas that are examined, ignoring whether part of
Descartes optics may have come from Snell or parts of Gilbert,
Newton and Einstein ideas may have come from others. Not the
textbook physics history of rubbish and lies pretending smooth
scientific advance, but the real history of physics of both
religious non-scientists limiting its advance and of ignorant
unscientific scientists limiting its advance.
(While early science faced strong opposition from some powerful
religious factions, many early scientists were themselves strongly
religious and those that were not generally tried to present their
science as not challenging any religion. Even today some religious
factions argue strongly against evolution. But the mechanism of
evolution is genetics and its basics were the work of Gregor Mendel
(1822 - 1884) who was an Augustinian Christian monk who did his
genetics experiments in his monastery. Mendel was a skilled hobby
scientist like Gilbert, at least until he gained promotion to being
in charge of his monastery and his increased religious work made
him too busy to continue his science. Neither he nor his church
viewed science and religion as having any basic conflict, but some
do see science and religion as supporting conflicting
truths.)
Of the four sets of physics ideas examined around this website,
those of Albert Einstein and Rene Descartes are somewhat less
problematic in that their ideas were generaly taught reasonably
accurately though often not very clearly. Of course Descartes simpler
physics is not taught now, and modern General Relativity is taught
with key aspects not compatible with Einstein's theory. But the
theories of both Isaac Newton and William Gilbert have both benn
long taught as differing substantially from the ideas that they published,
often robbing Newton's theory of its Black Box base and robbing Gilbert's
theory of its Robot Matter base. Since there is no good reason for
Newton's and Gilbert's theories being so misrepresented, extra efforts
are made to ensure that they also are presented as correctly as possible
on this site.
Gilbert had formulated from experiments his 'attraction physics'
involving matter responding to signals that travelled through empty
space from other matter (and with no reference to god or to
humans), in the 1580's when religions and governments with their
scholars and philosophers backed Aristotles non-experimental
'logical divine science'. But experimental science only really
began to be accepted from around 1650, when the
semi-experimentalist philosopher Descartes won wide backing
(including often by religions and governments) for his 'logical
semi-divine science' with a mechanical push universe including a
matter ether that filled space - and giving god and humans a
separate special place. Early supporters of Descartes claimed that
Gilbert-style signal response physics was 'unscientific' because it
required bodies to be 'animate' - but animals are animate and still
obey the laws of physics, so those claiming that the animate was
unscientific were being idiotic and Gilbert's physics was dismissed
without being disproved. Not the only case of physicists being
idiotic. Later attempts by Newton to disprove with experiments the
strongly entrenched Descartes' logic-physics, especially on its
ether, were so fiercely opposed by what were then peer scientists
that he had to moderate his opposition to Descartes physics and
moderate his support for Gilbert-style attraction physics. That was
enough to allow Newton's physics to be falsely presented as being
an improved-Descartes push-physics that included Descartes'
ether.
To date there have been 4 basic types of causal theory explaining the
behaviour of physical bodies, including gravity behaviour, that
have had some substantial support. These have had variants, and
there have been some other less well supported physics ideas also,
but the 4 main theory types are characterised in the diagrams below
;
- 
Of course there have long been some prefering 'non-causal
universe' physics often based on views of the universe having been created by
a God having chosen to create eg. a musical universe or a mathematical universe.
Hence early Kepler creationist physics included a Geometry Mathematics Physics
and a Music Mathematics Physics. And post-Einstein physics today maybe also
seems based on the view that mathematics is primary in the universe, with its Wave
Mathematics Physics and Quantum Mathematics Physics. Of course after Kepler
studied William Gilbert, he concluded that the universe is NOT really Mathematical
but is 'Experienceal', though Kepler's physics then went with a Descartes 'touch'
experience rather than a Gilbert 'signal response' experience. And such creationist
physics requires not just a God creating the universe using existing laws of nature,
but a God creating the universe and also creating the laws of nature as Descartes
supposed in 'The World'.
Newton, the probably most astute of physicists ever if not
always entirely correct, concluded that NO causal explanation fell within
science proper and that EITHER of the causal theory types 2 or 3 above might be
correct and give compatible mathematics. And comparison of the
diagrams above suggests also that a post-Newton type 4 theory
Einstein physics could be a mirror image of Gilbert type 2 physics.
Some of Newton's specific ideas were readily accepted, like his
almost-new conclusion that terrestrial gravity and planet motion
involved the same thing, but were not immediately taken as disproof
of anybody. Newton's experimental disproofs of chunks of Descartes'
logical physics were only fully accepted some generations on, and
his main blackbox theory was never widely accepted by scientists.
When there was a developed body of scientists their 'peer review'
generally worked well for smaller bits of science, but often worked
badly for big science ideas that required a complete rethink of
established science.
As a different alternative to part of Descartes push physics theory,
Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) produced an early light wave theory,
and later James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) developed light and 'force
field' wave theory. And using such ideas, Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
unsuccessfully tried to link gravity and electricity, saying 'The long and
constant persuasion that all the forces of nature are mutually dependent,
having one common origin, or rather being different manifestations of one
fundamental power, has often made me think on the possibility of establishing,
by experiment, a connection between gravity and electricity ... no terms
could exaggerate the value of the relation they would establish.'
Einstein also unsuccessfully tried the same later, though of course early
physics had produced two theories that gave a common basic mechanism
to all forces in Gilbert attraction physics and Descartes push physics.
Both are now ignored by modern physics, though many did make unsuccessful
attempts to develop push physics and only Newton made any real attempt
to develop attraction physics.
When Einstein arrived on the science scene
later, he started with smaller science ideas like the photoelectric effect
and built-up to his bigger ideas like relativity. And when he claimed to
disprove 'Newton's ether theory' - he was actually disproving Descartes
again, or rather the Lorentz modification of Descartes' ether, and was
really ignoring and not disproving Newton's real physics or indeed Gilbert's.
Often a majority of scientists have rejected a better theory to support a
weaker theory. And if England was one of the earliest centers of
emergence of experimental science from before 1600, it was also
early in the bureaucraticising of science from around the 1700's
that was to limit its development for hundreds of years.
Interestingly, 2005 saw an attempt in the USA to introduce a new
law called "The Restore Scientific Integrity to Federal
Research and Policymaking Act", requiring that science be
controlled by government science agencies rather than by central
government ! But the internet in 2009 looked close to opening up the
long-closed shop of science publishing, as 41 Nobel laureates call for
open access. Especially helped by one open-science website, Cornell University's
arxiv.org, and maybe a little by this website
and others. However 2010 raises some concern with Cornell considering some possible
charging policies for future users of ArXiv.org to cover its rising running costs, hopefully limited
to charging bigger institutional users and/or publishers orr maybe it carrying paid advertising ?
2007 did see the UK's Channel 4 TV disprove the theory
being supported by most environmental scientists that the Global
Warming weather changes that Earth is getting now are NOT mainly
due to man-made CO2 from burning oil, gas and coal. It certainly
seems to be due to some other cause - natural or man-made ?
William Gilbert and others had strongly argued for science theory
to be based on direct deduction from experience and experiment on
natural phenomena only. But Kepler and Newton supported the
validity of general logical deduction as from mathematics in
science theory, and Descartes also allowed religion deduction a
role. (Newton failed in trying to develop his physics to fit with
his religious ideas, and in trying to develop its effluvia/spirits
and chemistry.) And Einstein's adoption of 'thought experiments'
has perhaps encouraged many physicists now to confine themselves to
only logical theorising, now perhaps mostly based on manipulating
equations or mathematical language ? Of course as experiments have
revealed more complex natural phenomena needing more complex maths,
it is maybe understandable that real physics explanation has become
more problematic. And experiments (like the Mitchelson-Morley
experiment in our Albert Einstein section) are designed to
demonstrate something specific, and strongly tend to being
interpreted only in that regard even when they might more
realistically be demonstrating something different in fact.
The Unteachability of Science
It seems well proven that many people can be correctly taught small bits of science. But it is not proven
that many people can be correctly taught major science theories, and substantial doubts regarding that
have been expressed by all four of the key physicists considered on this website.
Gilbert, Descartes and Newton were all slow to publish their works and both Descartes and Newton
claimed to be publishing only after major pressure from others to do so. In England, Gilbert waited until he
felt that he had gained some sufficient support from Queen Elizabeth, and in France, Descartes' science
waited until he felt that it had been made sufficiently acceptable to the prevailing church.
Gilbert, Descartes and Newton certainly all saw one major problem to the teaching of any major new science
as being previously learnt wrong thinking - or, as Newton explained in his Principia's introduction to Book 3,
'prejudices to which they had been many years accustomed'.
But they all seemed to also conclude that most people would never be able to correctly understand any
major science. Gilbert specifically wrote that his work was not for the 'common person' or 'common scholar', while Newton
basically said that his science rested only on the work of 'science giants'. Einstein explicitely said numbers of
times that he did not beiieve that anybody fully understood his physics.
While small bits of science are certainly teachable, the history of physics theory certainly supports the
conclusion that major science theories are actually almost unteachable. And that casts major doubt on the modern
view that science generally can progress by 'peer review'. Clearly peer review should work fine for small bits of
science, but might not work for major science theories.
And the history of physics theory does indeed seem to confirm just that. Gilbert's theory was correctly
understood by almost nobody, as was the case with Newton's black-box physics and with Einstein's physics.
Of course there are always lots of people who will falsely claim that they do correctly understand those theories.
Science has always had lots of fools and liars posing as experts successfully, chiefly by understanding some
smaller bits of science.
This maybe backs Gilbert's trusting chiefly in nature experience
and experiment, more than in merely deductive or mathematical reasoning.
But the biggest case of experience or experiment being misleading is of
course the fact that on Earth it clearly appears that the Sun
orbits the Earth every 24 hours - though we now know that it is
actually the Earth revolving every 24 hours. Some of the supposedly
key experiments of physics are probably open to different
interpretations than those normally being assumed. And though
useful human invention began BEFORE science developed, science
ideas have helped useful invention - even science ideas that were
later fully disproved !
In more recent years, developed countries governments have taken a
strong lead in greatly dumbing-down and politicising education -
including science education - pushing to a-degree-for-everybody policy.
And in science, governments are now also
pushing views of everything being relative and of theorised ideas
being as valid as fact based ideas - or non-science being as valid
as real science. Physics theory, like most science theory, is being
driven backwards to mere government-sponsored philosophy as
governments have concluded that science theory is unimportant and
has little effect on technology. See Science Teaching Today.
Is modern physics dumbed-down or what ?
2009 saw two physicists claim proof that 'the LHC was disabled by a bird from the future' ;
"Sometime on Nov.3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.
While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
The LHC, a 17-mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons."
Quoted from November 2009 Stealthfusion.com
The number of people entering science professions in more recent
years is much greater than a hundred years ago, but in some
respects the range of people entering science professions has been
greatly narrowed. Hence though much good Physics has been done
using relatively simple mathematics, and now a physicist will
commonly have a computer or an assistant that can do more complex
mathematics for them, but physics exams lately have generally been
designed to fail all who have difficulty with complex mathematics.
And much good Biology has been done using no art drawing, and now a
biologist will commonly have a camera or an assistant that can do
art drawings for them, but biology exams lately have generally been
designed to fail all who have difficulty with art drawing. Exams
needed to enter science professions often severely limit the range
of entrants and help limit the scope of the sciences concerned.
This compounds science funder restrictions and science teaching
restrictions.
Some bits of science with seemingly strong proofs are not believed
by a majority of the public, though other bits of science that seem to
have weaker proofs may be widely believed. This can be due to poor
science teaching or due to the science being actually wrong, or often
really due to the science having some conflict with popular cultural
thinking of the time.
PS. For a very interesting and good if imperfect recent work on
some issues of science history and theory from a philosophical
viewpoint, see Laura Aline Ward's Objectivity
in Feminist Philosophy of Science PDF 250 kb - allow up to 1
minute for this to load !
The physics time chart below for the chief physicists considered here, has bars for when they lived and filled when their science chiefly published ;
Gilbert .... Kepler ... Galilei . Descartes . Newton .... Einstein
Of these six, only Gilbert and Newton seem to have studied most
physics theories available and Newton seems unique in being able to
both understand and use very different types of theory. Hence for
gravity Newton used Gilbert-like attraction theory but he also used
particle and wave theories elsewhere - while using a blackbox
theory and not committing to any one explanation theory. Gilbert
publishing very late in his life, had little time for defending or further
developing his theory.
It is common for modern physics theories to use terms like 'Field' or 'Continuum' or 'Particle' or 'Wave' with no full or specific definition of the term, but with partial definitions or implied definitions that can contradict the terms common meanings and can include logical contradictions. So often the use of such terms in modern physics has little or no real scientific meaning, as see -
Definitions.
Much modern physics can be taken as blackbox science where it is the mathematics of processes that is being defined rather than physical reality, and that may or may not be taken as generally being satisfactory.
But mathematics can be taken as having no limits so that it can support anything, while actual nature has real limits. In principle experiment on nature should set limits to the mathematics acceptable in a science.
But some particular science theory and its mathematics might fit well with the well established and understood experimental results of many common natural phenomena, while concentrating on the experimental results of some one abstruse natural phenomenum might not fit that theory well and may seem to fit some more abstruse theory and its mathematics better. It is not clear that this always disproves the first theory, though it may cast some doubt on it.
It is also common on modern physics websites to see comments asserted as being scientific like 'Revisionism is a serious offence'. (Google it !)
This basically means 'Trying to disprove a current science theory is a serious offence' - and is of course what Galileo was put under house arrest for and other good early scientists were executed for. Current science's 'anti-revisionism' is really anti-science.
Google Books - a great new growing resource
New Science theory really has to commend Google Books on
becoming a great new growing resource for older and rare books -
and increasingly so for early science books that are not readily
available otherwise. To search them yourself go to Google, More,
Books and then to Advanced Search and click FullView with an author
or book name.
New Science Theory will be keeping a keen eye on Google Books for
good new additions that we can offer freely to you, this often
depends on good universities or others helping Google -
unfortunately far too few to date. You might do some real good for
this world, by helping Google Books, if you have a good older
science book that they do not now have in FullView or if yours is a
better copy than Google Books have.
For now, thanks to Google Books, you can download below from this
site three great physics books in PDF ;
(if you need one, a good FREE PDF reader is available (from
www.Adobe.com)
1. download Isaac
Newton's Principia (1848 English 24.1mb - imperfect),
2. download Isaac
Newton's Opticks (1730 English 16.2mb),
3. download William
Gilbert's De Magnete (1600 Latin 27.6mb).
OR see our helpful book sections ;
USA
science books or UK
science books
USA
Einstein books or UK
Einstein books
USA
Newton books or UK Newton
books
USA
Descartes books or UK
Descartes books
USA
Gilbert books or UK
Gilbert books
PS. This site strongly believes that much more science should be
freely available to all on the internet - now there is regretably
little available even on the many subscription sites. The internet
should have more science books and papers, but also more science
computer models - nice working computer models of Gilbert's
terella, of Kepler's rudolphine tables, of Newton's tide forces,
big bang models and more ? Ideally computer models that allow user
inputting and good numerical result reporting. Some could use a
spreadsheet like Excel that can do iterative calculation on
equations to some accuracy.
Todays many well paid career scientists seem unable to produce much of use
for computer or internet users, but if YOU have or know of some
good science that this site could host or could link to, then do
tell New Science
Theory.
Two websites to help inform you on what physicists and
astronomers are up to lately are Physics World and
Universe
Today.
For imperfect free online Latin translation see here.
Or you may want to learn a bit about Learn or relearn how to kiss and how to date.
otherwise, if you have any view or suggestion on
the content of this site, please contact :- New Science
Theory
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