"Aranearum telas texis", you are weaving the webs of spiders, an old proverb that would mean that the work is in vain, like the tailor who sewed for nothing and provided the thread himself. And many
people today are so far out, they would even say the same about the cosmos: that the work of the cosmos is in vain, whatever sort of demiurge is behind it, because it makes no difference which is which between important and trivial things. So it goes, so live
the dubieties, even if the aim of criticism is to see the thing as in itself it really is.
Tastes and taters
still are not all one. The irony of values and worth has been one of the roots of comedy and science older than the rocks. It can almost be a scandal too, the way that the British Guiana 1c Magenta and La Gioconda can easily fetch a fortune, for example, and
they are only a stamp and an old portrait picture. Sea-monkeys from collector comic books, with those funny advertisements, and salamanders and sylphs, would like as much, and the undines, gnomes, and Freemasonic Mexican politicians too, for the magic -- tel
absurde parce que, telo chose absurde también. Such an absurd because, such an absurd thing as well, like another government hotel hospital where Hawaii and Kenya are the same difference.
For instance, between all points and the mail, some say that experience has shown and any true philosophy will always show that the vast and larger portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant: and it should make no difference either,
why not, whether the sun orbits the earth, or the earth orbits the sun. As meaningless or inconsequential as it is to say that the difference existing between Hawaii and Kenya should be any reason for discussion or correspondence, whether in geography or government,
let it go, as much as it is to say that it is obvious, in fact, that the sun orbits the Earth.
Laisser régner l'équivalence. Vanity touches only the surface, of course, and everything should
be equal, as Einstein wrote that "those of us who believe in physics understand that reality is nothing more than a stubbornly persistent illusion". Therefore, "the struggle so violent in the early days of science, between the view of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus,
would then be quite meaningless. Either coordinate system could be used with equal justification".-1 If that would be true, to sweep it all together in summary, that the issue in momentous conclusions should have no practical importance, from where would the
illusion be coming? What motivation or direction percolates when science would prefer to take the mind away from actual reality into a world of increasingly confused mathematical abstractions?
Even if fummdiddles may have their part, in the round circuit of being, whatever is, is; and to simplify a little better, "it is impossible
that the same thing be and not be".-2 As much as everything must either be or not be, it is impossible that there should exist any parsed medium other than ultimate difference between logically contradictory opposites. Where the notion of consequence is close
enough, even if it is only the potential, it must be one or the other, as warm is not cold, even if not that hot. Like the law of the excluded middle, if not once or twice, therefore, the third time is a charm, e.g., principium tertii exclusi vel tertium non
datur.
"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false,
while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false."
As such things and such the likewise may be, the one that is false would leave a question about what is that the one that is true would rather
answer. As all events in respect of being are also in respect of truth, the one that is true would leave no doubt; yet Einstein would prefer to submit the entertainment of doubts as equals, as putatively the same things, yet different. As they would make exchanges
for foolishness, as distinctions without a difference for the sake of science, things would progress, yet "science without conscience is the soul's perdition."-3
Is there any reality of truth in nature according to kind, or nothing but
intellectual enthusiasms for theory and the convolution of appearance? Does common sense rather not show any account of the real state of the case? Avicenna wrote that those who deny manifest things and first principles "should be beaten or exposed to fire
until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical."-4 For "it is impossible to affirm and deny simultaneously the same predicate of the same subject," and
oftentimes "people seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character".-5
It makes no difference, only "another time's forgotten space", yet when people are able to confess the truth, and realize what part of it is in their minds, most will credit common sense and admit that the Earth does everywhere
seem to be still ... and that, therefore, it must be obvious that the sun, the moon, and the stars revolve around it. "The most remarkable thing about ordinary human understanding in its practical concern is that it may have as much hope as any philosopher
of hitting the mark"(6), and nobody notices the Earth moving in their entire lives.
Even
George Harrison expressed as much in the song, "Here Comes the Sun", since it goes without saying that the lyrics "here comes the sun" and "sun, sun, sun, here it comes", and "it is all right", mean that the Earth is not moving. The ground is not flying around
like a bowling ball in his quiet English garden, and it is the same for the rest of the planet, of course, through all geography, seasons, and climes of its different zones.
In spite of what he, like everyone else in the modern world, was taught in school, he reckoned what was true and also in the mind from a
subconscious level: that the Earth is still after all, and the sun, the moon, and the stars, therefore, revolve around it. "Here comes the
sun", around the sky to orbit the Earth, not the Earth coming around to orbit the sun.
May mankind one day also find peace in the study of geography and the sea, et cetera, or the weather and engineering, as much as poetry and music. And Archimedes would say the same thing as Harrison, and the four winds in Franklin's tower, when he said, "if I had the right lever and a place to stand, I could move the whole world". Obviously it would be a tremendous feat, and obviously
the first time, so Archimedes was telling people by this that the Earth is not moving. It is the only way these statements make sense. "Like a bee flying from flower to flower", the subconscious
mind is at work in science and art to bring out its awareness of what is true, also to reinforce the understanding gathered by the conscious senses -- the senses that all confirm that the Earth is not in motion in space around the sun, but that the sun, the
moon, and the stars are all in motion around it.
If guitar players
and engineers like Harrison and Archimedes would already know like that that the Earth is not in motion, and not rotating in space, and say it, then the common people should know it as well -- and, of course, at times they do, simple as it is, but what has
happened is they have been confused out of their minds about it. "Strings in the earth and air make music sweet, when all things have repose", yet many do not realize how ridiculous heliocentrism
really is, and that for it to be correct too many other things have to be wrong.
People do not have to have advanced training as
philatelists to observe that the Earth seems stable under the feet, as much as a postage stamp, and does not make them dizzy sick by spinning, wobbling, tilting, and rotating around at astronomical velocities. Through the days of weeks of the years, from Mardi
Gras, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, to the summer and fall and Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, et cetera, they can see already that it is not moving, and that it is settled in its place every day. In scientific terms added to common sense, the
Earth is subsumed worldwide in a profound condition of geodesic hypostasis.
A mysterious spark and range of force keeps
it current and fixed in place, de profundis, a vigilia matutina usque ad noctem; and it is not being affected or spun around by so-called "gravity" or "gravitation" from the sun, the moon, or the stars. As much as nature represents a collection of facts,
many available to the public, the terrestrial sphere has been better rooted and atmospherically preserved in its simple existence than any Copernican theory could allow. Copernicanism, however, introduced another way besides pantheism to try to bring the infinite
into the finite by the finite itself, if by some magnitude of subsequent motion or chaos of things, which, however, cannot be done.
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. If someone would expel nature with a pitchfork, remember to see when she always comes back. Where creation represents the finite dimension, even in return
of all the ages, it cannot contain the infinite, yet according to Christianity God is infinite, of course, the uncaused unmoved mover, who can reveal himself according to his will and through creation, and to creatures, but creation remains finite and cannot
contain or cause the infinite.
Rather unmoved too in its degree, through all the hours and seasons, the Earth always is at rest ... in something like a free-air form, or condition of residual electro-magnetic suspension. Equipoise, as Jovellanos wrote, is like the state of liberty,
and would be "a situation of peace, comfort, and happiness." So too a most subtle yet powerful force pervades to keep it immobile in place, fixed as ice as things move across it, and around it. And as much as the dew rolls away, it always is the first
order of authentic inertial stasis, for whatever frames of reference, however many there may be. And the sun, the moon, and the stars all sweep from East to West across the dome of the sky around it.
If not too obviously, within its magnetosphere, it is so simple and present at rest that it is totally contrary to the value and development of good
sense to imagine something so ridiculous and heinous as the Earth would be spinning in space to orbit the sun -- and only for the sake of a bad and heretical interpretation of astronomy!
Even if mankind knew almost nothing with any certainty, other than the stars, perhaps, existence would still make him dream. The fascination of creation touches the sun, moon, and stars
from the earliest days, and people have long wondered what explanations there could be for these appearances, and the phenomena of the Heavens,
that marked the passage of time. Ancients puzzled over the shape and origin of the Earth and the cosmos, as much as what the planets and occasional passing lights of comets were, and how they came into existence, and why their positions shifted between each
other, as they wheeled across the mighty vaults of the sky.
They wondered why
there was fire in the sky and developed ideas of crystalline spheres, like different bands all encircling the Earth, with the Earth as their balanced center. "The men who studied the movements of the stars and planets were among the wisest in the ancient world.
They kept count of the seasons and predicted the harvest"(7), developing calendars and celestial charts to reckon time, and were able to predict eclipses accurately, all based on the assumption that the Earth is not moving, and that it is fixed at the center
of the cosmos.
If anyone hypothesized that it was the Earth instead that was in motion
orbiting the sun, he could never offer any intelligent proof for it, and no one could observe it. No one could examine it. It was only some mental speculation, beyond observation, and no eclipse predictions or calendars were made based on anything like that.
Almost everyone believed the Earth was stationary and orbited by the sun.
Before Copernicus,
only a very few oddly wigged and uncertain ancients hypothesized the strange notion that the Earth orbited the sun, and the records of these speculations today are obscure and incomplete. Aristarchus of Samos is the most well known, but he could never offer
any reasonable proof. Neither could Philolaus of Crotona, or Heraclides, two others sometimes mentioned as wanting to believe that the Earth orbits the sun, or that the Earth is not the physical center of the cosmos. The best they could do was shroud the strange
and scientifically unjustifiable idea in unscientific mysticism, bundled together like a pagan sort of gnosis, a mystery school of fire and sun worship.
To be more precise, it was Aristarchus of Samos
who was most known for it, and Cleanthes of Assos, the Stoic philosopher, said that he should be prosecuted for impiety, because he made the Sun instead of the Earth the center of the Universe. Philolaus too believed that the earth was not at the center of
the cosmos, and that everything moved (or was energized) around a "Central Fire", something somewhat mystical, which, however, was not the Sun itself. Like the Stoics, he held great regard for fire, and said that fire was the most important of all the elements,
and there was "fire in the middle at the centre ... and again more fire at the highest point and surrounding everything."
"By nature the middle is first, and around it dance ten divine bodies - the sky, the planets, then the sun, next the moon, next the earth, next the counterearth, and after
all of them the fire of the hearth which holds position at the centre. The highest part of the surrounding, where the elements are found in their purity, he called Olympus; the regions beneath the orbit of Olympus, where are the five planets with the sun and
the moon, he called the world; the part under them, being beneath the moon and around the earth, in which are found generation and change, he called the sky".-8
In his "Treatise of the Sky", written in the early 4th century BC, Philolaus wrote that, "it is the fire that occupies the center [of the cosmos]; the Earth is only one of
the moving stars, and its circular motion about its own center produces the day and the night." As part of this cosmology, he seems as well to have believed in a theory that would construct "another Earth, opposite of ours", which would be called "the anti-Earth,"
or counterearth.-9
Some philosophers
and stoics believed that fire was the elemental power that drove and dominated the universe. Gnostic association of lightning and fire with the powers of the gods was somewhat religious. There were prophecies and marvels, prodigies and lightnings, where
fire or the sun impressed them as with a spectacle of the primordial forces of nature. Like Philolaus, Heraclides imagined that fire was not simply an element or quality of matter found and shaped in mutable things. To him it was the most active and transforming
force in the cosmos, something transendental, even a divine power and an eternal sign of the first order of things. The celestial fire of the stars and the generation of the Phoenix were the beginning
and end of all things: "ignis natura renovatur integra", by fire nature is completely renewed, et cetera.
Plutarch wrote that "the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled," and Heraclides was convinced that the universe
was not made by any god or man but always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself and going out by regular measures. In his view, fire was the primal force animating and controlling all things, as much as "it throws apart and then brings
together again; it advances and retires," etc.-10
In a way perhaps similar
to idealization of the motion and power of fire, when people say that "the world is turning", they are talking about the four seasons and the temperatures, and length of day and night, and the turning fortunes of life, and of things that turn corners and change
in the passage of time -- which are all phenomena after the tropics of the sun, and the years, not the surface of the earth actually spinning and tilting. "As the world is turning", if sometimes burning, for a course in history, the big river rolls on; but
the terra firma is not flying around the sun. When Aristarchus said that the Earth orbits the sun, he was speaking from the imposture of his own metaphysical beliefs not generally genuine scientific ones. He might as well have been acting; and similar to Philolaus
of Crotona and Heraclides, the root for them was some form of fire worship and pagan mysticism; and there was never any practical proof for it.
If at the same time some ancient people imagined that the Earth might be flat, or they were not sure what overall shape it had (and that it was, in fact, as logic and the evidence would have it, a
sphere) at least they were right that it was not rolling or spinning around under their feet. No worries there. Who could miss an overwhelming thing like that? Who could miss a massive astronomical velocity revolving directly underfoot and generating such
incredible force from the very surface of the Earth? The Earth is the biggest thing close to home, everywhere people go, and who could not notice if it were flying?
People noticed the cycles of the seasons, the months of moons, the days and years, but from week to week, watch to watch, nobody could notice the Earth flying, even down to today. That would
be a lot of torque and catapult to go unnoticed -- and when some poor pilgrims guessed that it could be flat, it was also because in the subconcious mind they associated its evident great calmness with the smooth surface of still water, and they had not really
thought through all the extensive geometry.
Things continued like this for many years until the modern era and the fame of the Enlightenment of the long eighteenth century. More than any other age perhaps the eighteenth
century could use a disorders analyst, yet as much as the others, if reinterpreted correctly, it could "illumine the horizons of generations to come".
Then it became fashionable doctrine of scientific materialism, liberal politics, and even social revolution, that the ancients and common sense had all been wrong, and the Earth was in motion, "all in a whirl, like
a humming-top", wheels on fire, and orbiting the sun. The Enlightenment (1685 -1815) questioned traditional authority and promoted ideas of elite intellectuals like Isaac Newton, a leading figure, as though there were being represented in society a new and
higher order of reason than had obtained before. Yet Newton's ideas about heliocentrism and the motion of the Earth were not exactly new, since they were derived in wide measure from Aristarchus, Philolaus, Heraclides, Copernicus, Gilbert, Kepler, and Galileo;
but they were never better received before his time with the Royal Society and the Bank of England, founded 1694, where he also became Master of the Mint.
Not generally known as an occultist, Newton, however, wrote over a million words on alchemy, and practiced the art with a passion, also trying to turn lead into gold. Whatever works better
than tungsten, and Newton spent days locked up in his laboratory, at times even suffering chronic bouts of nervous disorder (insanity) from mercury poisoning. After his death in 1727, the Royal Society deemed that his papers on alchemy, to the tune of thousands
of pages, were not fit to be printed, but they were rediscoverd about 200 years later; and "most scholars now concede that Newton was first and foremost an alchemist", and that "the inspiration for his theory of gravity came from his alchemical work."-11
Every dog would have his day, and to the intellectual imagination of the Enlightenment it may have
seemed as though even logic would have changed from the stone age. Since they were discovering ways about the cosmos much smarter than Aristotle or Ptolemy, or the old traditional views of creation in the Bible or Plato, for example, the stone age almost seemed
undermined. But truth and logic are one, from beginning to end, and in them there is no progress. In the truth, as much as there is no infinite regression, there is no advancement away from the essential
properties that obtain in things. No matter the extension or velocity in space, wisdom and logic have not changed from first light, or in the dark, and are even remaining the same as they were before the advance of time.
Since the ephemerides and the everlasting represent two different cases of two different sorts, some things are the same
as always, even though they happen more than once, and everywhere have the same categorical priorities in view of the natural world. Recurrence is all around, when the parallel is universal, as the universal runs parallel. They say "sicut transit gloria mundi",
so passes away the glory of the world, as if seen before -- and "the starry heavens above and the moral law within fill the mind with an ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily we reflect." -12
Inventions said to be new are called new because the discovery involved has been recent in terms of the people
who use them, yet the principles were always there, hidden in the possible things from before.
Nihil sub sole novum,
nec valet quisquam dicere: hoc recens est, iam enim praecessit in saeculis quae fuerunt ante nos. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us. Whatever matter
the form and system could assume, since the universal is one, denominated from the habitude of one, even in the case of many inventions, the predicable and subject of relation were always already there.
As a Whig from Cambridge with political connections, Newton enjoyed an influential career, setting a special mark in the world of intellect with his famous book the “Principia”, published in 1687, coincidentally
the year before the "Glorious Revoltuion" of 1688. With an appearance of mathematical precision and rigor and deceptive
use of vocabulary, it added a new touch to old absurdities and seemed impressive. Yet in many places it was simply impossible to
understand, if not very difficult to read. Galileo and Kepler had done similar mischievous things before, all for the same difference, but not quite like Newton, who surpassed them both as an authoritative
voice in dissociative nonsense. And in the 20th century Einstein and Time Magazine would have to work only a little harder to pass them all. Yet "the line of Newton's work would
become the principal source of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conception of the universe as one grand machine".-13
The peculiar course that led to Newton’s erroneous influence in cosmology can be traced back through Galileo, Kepler, Gilbert, Digges, and Copernicus, at one level, and from there to Aristarchus of Samos, where, at another
level, the influence of Newtonian heliocentrism begins to share some of the signs of pagan gnosticism, mystery pantheism, and pre-Socratic monism, et cetera.
Would it all be as one, never to step in the same river twice, yet accordingly as whom and dust in the wind? Where to be and to have meaning are the same, something holds, yet vanitas, vanitatum by the inverse squared
said Qoheleth. Even from before the first millenium BC, the sages used to warn "vanity of vanities, and what profit does a man have from all his labors under the sun"?
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury"
and sometimes crowded with many mistakes.
Copernicus published his treatise
on heliocentrism, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" in 1543, which for numbers could be remembered as a transposition of 1453, the year Constantinople fell to the Turks and became Istanbul, and it seems to have remained like Istanbul ever since. In 1453 Constantinople fell, and from 1543 the cosmos itself in the West would not quite fall but slowly begin to come unglued, unraveling little by little under the stars, crumbling down over the years, tripped up
in theoretical physics by the philosophy of heliocentric skepticism.
Copernicus
died the same year his book was published, and it never really caught on at the time or gained a popular audience, as has been misrepresented. Ptolemy's "Syntaxis Mathematica" remained dominant, had many more publications, and was much more widely read, studied,
and actually used. Nautical almanacs even today are based on geocentrism, and after the first run of "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium", which was 1000 copies that never sold out, there were only four reprints through the next 400 years, with one reprint prior to 1700, and it was of no great importance compared with other astronomy books of the day.-14
Rather it was Ptolemy's "Syntaxis Mathematica", whose reprints continued into the hundreds, that was still authoritative and formed the continuing basis of European calendars, astronomy,
and navigation.
Ptolemy was a better writer and astronomer, clearer and more easily understood; and his geocentric system was more accurate, simple, and immediately correct.
Copernicus claimed that he had devised a simpler and more improved system, but this was not true.
"The
superior simplicity of the Copernican system was just as much of a myth as its superior accuracy."-15 His system had more complications than Ptolemy's and was much less supported by facts. Copernicus tried to justify his theory by admitting that while Ptolemy's
system was consistent with all the data, it was yet unsatisfactory because it had too many equants and epicycles, but Copernicus himself had at least eight more epicycles than Ptolemy. In his arbitrary system, which was contrary to even the most primary evidence,
there were 48 epicycles, whereas in Ptolemy's there had been 40. Even Copernicus's most basic assumptions were unsound and unprovable, and they were, in fact, simply wrong.-16
In the model he proposed, the sun would become the immovable center of the cosmos, but that cannot be, as the sun is moving through all the constellations of the ecliptic
every year. The sun transits through the twelve tropical signs adjusted about one month at a time every year. This movement of the sun through the zodiac is the original basis of the solar calendar and its months in the first place. Its placement is constantly
changing as its position gradually shifts against the background of stars -- and in their circuts in space the fixed-stars and three distant planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars are consistently passing the sun not orbiting it.
In a less direct way than Ptolemy, William Herschel would reiterate these basic points in a technical paper
before the Royal Society as late as 1782, since elementary but important facts at times may be forgotten, and the situation at times can become foggy. “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,” and the Royal Society and the London Interbank Offered
Rate, for example, cannot correctly tell themselves or the public which way the moon actually goes around the Earth, even down to today, since heliocentrism has been forced by prior arrangements to reverse that detail as well.
For general heliocentric theory, misdirecting the moon in its path has been par for the course, inviting people
to believe that the moon is going from West to East, falling behind the Earth's astronomical rotations into the East, but, of course, it simply is not the case. For one, there is still never any evidence at all that the Earth rotates, and all indication is
that it is not; and for two, the moon is clearly going from East to West every day.
But
heliocentrism has never been based on any method of proof other than bewilderment of nature. To undermine good sense, getting lost in the woods and then the cosmos is where it all starts. Startled wonder at the simple passing of day and night, convoluted and
spaced-out fantasies, false concepts and false arrangements, big metaphysical numbers, big words and crazy theories of relativity, and undetectable and "unaccelerated" motion, and so-called universal gravitation and hypnotic calculations, have really been
the extent of it.
The heliocentric theory of gravity, for instance, has been
presumed to be mutual to the earth and to all points of the compass, and to the cosmos at large. However, as much as admittedly it is not innate to matter, it has remained beyond natural human intelligence to explain it with any real understanding, since it
is beyond the experience of sense, logic, and all technical skills to discover it. In any situation, "that which is nonexistent cannot be known", therefore, Newton wrote one of the most absurd and densely moronic books that could be imagined, the central argument
of which was that if nobody will be able to understand it, then certainly no one can disprove it.
Setting stars may bring the mind around to sleep, yet far away from the alchemical madness of Newton, and his theory of universal gravitation, the soul would awake as from a coma. Endless is the search of truth, and "there is absolutely
no thing whatsoever that brings itself into existence", and "as ground of every living movement there is the resting earth."-17
A fundamental and present cause cannot reasonably remain
unassigned, especially among titans or giants, and except for the crazy math fumdiddles, there is no positive logical connection or excuse between the falling apple and the mixed up space that was inside roaming around Newton's brains by the inverse squared. As a matter of science, heliocentrism has never been anything other than what some peculiarly distorted minds could put down on paper, like division by zero, and proofs that all numbers and locations are equal, and
for probability 1+1+1=1 ⇔ 2+2=5. However, "unbeknownst to almost all modern-day believers in the solar system of Copernicus is one stark but incontrovertible fact: the popular idea of the Earth revolving around the sun has never been proven."-18
The only fragmentary piece of evidence, other than the passing of day and night and the moons of
Jupiter, that has ever been advanced for it, outside of nutty books and bad math, has been the Foucault pendulum, and even that is not honest proof. No physical experiment has ever proved that the earth is actually in motion.-19 And ironically, Foucault's
pendulum is evidence not of its hypothesis but of the manifest contrary.
*("planet"
is from the Greek (asteres planetai), “wandering stars”, from planasthai “to wander”. The original 7 planets include the sun and moon as the first two major ones, as well as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn,
as a second five, because they all have apparent and separate motion through the moving background of the constellations of the ecliptic.
In a technical sense, the Earth is not a "planet", since it is not a wandering star, but rather the most fixed: fixed in the center of the natural order of the cosmos. The Earth does not move through the constellations. Rather it
always is in all signs of the ecliptic all the time. The only way that this is possible is if the Earth is at the center of the ecliptic, and, therefore, also of the cosmos.)