What is involved in developing a scientific theory? (2)

In my previous post, I showed how the protagonist in Athene’s Prophecy could falsify Aristotle’s proof that the earth did not rotate, but he could not prove it did. He identified a method, but very wisely he decided that there was no point in trying it because there was too much scope for error. At this stage, all he could do was suggest that whether the earth rotated was an open question. If it did not, then the planets could not go around the sun, otherwise the day and the year would be the same length, and they did not. At this point it is necessary, while developing a theory, to assume that as long as it has no further part to play in the theory it does, if for no other reason than it is necessary. By doing so, it creates a test by which the new theory can be falsified.

The logic now is, either the earth moves or it does not. If it does move, it must move in a circle, because the sun’s size was constant. (Actually, it moves in an ellipse, but it is so close to a circle that this test would not distinguish it. If you knew the dynamics of elliptical motion, you could just about prove it did follow an ellipse. The reason is, it moves faster when closer to the sun, and the solstices and the equinoxes were known. A proper calendar shows the northern hemisphere summer side of the equinoxes is longer than the southern hemisphere’s one by about 2 – 3 days, and is the reason why February is the shortest month. We, in the southern hemisphere, get cheated by two days of summer. Sob! However, if you have not worked out Newton’s laws of motion, this is no help.) So, before we can prove the earth moves, we must first overturn Aristotle’s proofs that it did not, and that raises the question, where can a theory go wrong?

The most likely thing to go wrong in forming a scientific theory can be summarized simply: if you start with a wrong premise, you may draw a wrong conclusion. Your conclusion may agree with observation, because as Aristotle emphasized, a wrong premise can still agree with observation. One of Aristotle’s examples of false logic is as follows:

Man is a stone

A stone is an animal

Therefore, man is an animal.

The conclusion is absolutely correct, but the means of getting there is ridiculous. A major problem when developing a theory is that a wrong premise that brings considerable agreement with observation is extremely difficult to get rid of, and invariably it has pervasive effects for a long time thereafter.

One reason why, in classical times, it was felt that the Earth must be stationary was because of Aristotle’s premise that air rises. If so, the fact that we have air at all must be because the Universe is full of it. If so, then if the earth moves, it must move through air. If so, there would be a contrary wind, the speed difference of which on either side would depend on the rate of rotation. There was no such wind, therefore no such orbit. We can forgive Aristotle here, but we forgive those who followed Archimedes less well. Had Aristotle known of Archimedes Principle, this argument would probably never have been made. According to Archimedes, air rises to the top because it is the least dense, but it still falls towards the earth. Space is empty. There were clues in classical times that space was empty. One such clue was that when a star went behind the moon, it did so sharply, which indicated there was no air to refract it. It was also known there were no clouds on the moon.

This shows another characteristic that unfortunately still pervades science. Once someone establishes a concept, evidence that falsifies that concept tends to be swept under the carpet as long as by doing so, it does not affect anything else. No clouds on the moon might mean anything. So, perhaps, you will now begin to see how difficult it was to get the heliocentric theory accepted, and how difficult it is to find the truth in science when you do not know the answer. That applies just as much today as then. The intellectual ability of the ancients was as great as now, and Aristotle would have been one of the greatest intellects of all times. He just made some mistakes.

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What is involved in developing a scientific theory? (2)

In my previous post, I suggested that forming the theory that the Earth was a planet that went around the sun was an interesting example of how a scientist forms a theory. When starting, the first task is to review the literature, which at the time, was largely determined by Aristotle. Since Aristotle asserted that the earth was fixed, it therefore follows that you must first overturn his assertions. One place to start is to decide why we have day and night. Let us use Aristotle’s own methodology, which is to break the issue down into discrete issues. Thus we say, either the Earth is fixed and everything rotates around it, or everything is more or less fixed, and the Earth rotates. Aristotle had reached that step, and had “proven” that the Earth did not rotate. Therefore the day/night must occur through the sun orbiting the Earth. The heliocentric theory, despite its advantages, is falsified unless we can falsify Aristotle’s proofs.

At this point, we should recognize that Aristotle was very clear on one point, and he has been badly misrepresented on this ever since. Aristotle clearly asserted that logic must be applied to experimental observations, and that observation alone was critical. So, what was his experiment? Aristotle argued that if you threw a stone vertically into the air, it always came back to the same place. Had the earth been rotating, the path length of a rotation increased with height, in which case the stone should drag back westwards. It did not, so the earth did not rotate. Note that at this point, Aristotle was effectively arguing for the conservation of angular momentum, similarly to the ice skater slowing her spin by extending her arms. Before reading any further, what do you think about Aristotle’s experiment? What is wrong, and how would you correct it, bearing in mind you have only ancient technology?

In my ebook, Athene’s Prophecy, my protagonist dismisses the experiment by arguing that vertical is defined as the point where the stone falls back to the same place. By defining the point thus, if the stone does not come back to the same place, it was not thrown vertically. He then criticizes Aristotle by arguing that the correct way to do the experiment is to simply drop the stone from a high tower. The reason is that while Aristotle would be correct in that there should be a drag to the west going up, exactly the opposite should occur on the way back down. What should happen if dropped from a tower is that the stone would strike the ground slightly to the east of the vertical position, and in Rhodes, where this was being discussed, also slightly to the south. Can you see why?

That the stone should go east follows from the fact that the angular velocity is constant, but the path length is longer the higher you are, so it is going east faster higher up. The reason it goes south is because the stone falls towards the centre of the earth, and thus very slightly decreases its latitude, but the point at the base of the tower does not. In my ebook, however, my protagonist wisely refused to carry out the experiment, because it is not that easy to carry out, even with modern equipment, and in those days the errors in measurement would most likely exceed the effect. Notwithstanding that, the logic is correct in that any effect like that going up will be exactly countered coming down, and consequently Aristotle’s “proof” is not valid. Thus one can falsify an experiment through logic alone. Of course, disproving Aristotle does not prove the earth is rotating, but it leaves it open as a possibility. Carrying out the dropped stone experiment would, provided you could guarantee that what you saw was real and not experimental error. That is not easy to do, even now.

What is involved in developing a scientific theory?

Everyone knows about people like Galileo, Newton, etc, but how are such theories discovered? Now obviously I have no idea exactly how they did it, but I think there are some principles involved, and I also think some readers might find these of interest. I hope so, because therein lies the third task for my protagonist in my novel Athene’s Prophecy.

The reason that is in the novel is because the overall plot requires a young Roman to get help from superior aliens to avoid a disaster in the 24^th century. The reason for the time difference is, of course, relativity. Getting to the aliens involves being abducted by other aliens, but once taken to another world, the protagonist has to be something more than a specimen that can talk. To get the aliens to respond, he has to be someone of interest to talk to. Suppose you had the chance to talk to someone from the 16^th century, or to Galileo, who would you choose? My proposition is, Galileo, so the task for my young protagonist is to prove the heliocentric theory, i.e. that the earth moves around the sun. That is similar to what was in the film Agora. The big problem was, everybody was so sure the earth was fixed and everything else went around it. Not only were they sure, but they could also use their theory to calculate everything that mattered, such as when the solstices and equinoxes would be, when Easter would be, and when various planets would be where in the sky. What else did they need?

The alternative theory was due to Aristarchus of Samos. What Aristarchus maintained was that the earth was a planet, and all planets went around the sun, the moon went around the earth, and the solar system was huge. This latter point was of interest, because Aristarchus measured the system. His first measurement was to obtain the size and distance of the Moon, and what he did was to get two people to measure the angle at the exact moment an eclipse of the moon started. These two people were separated by as much distance as he could manage, and with one distance and two angles he had a triangle that would permit the measurement of the distance to the moon. The size then followed from its solid angle. The method is completely logical, although the amount of experimental error was somewhat large, and his answer was out by a factor of approximately two. He then measured the distance to the sun by measuring the angle between the sun and moon lines when the moon was half shaded, and used his moon distance and Pythagoras’ theorem. His error here was about a factor of five, and would have been about a factor of ten had not the error in the moon distance favoured him. The error range here was too great (to see why, check how tangents get very large as they approach 90 degrees) but he was the first to realize that the solar system is really very large. He also showed that the sun is huge compared to the earth.

Aristarchus, following Aristotle, also postulated that the stars were other suns, but so far away, and they would have to be going at even greater speeds. This did not make sense, so he needed an alternative theory. In my opinion, this is invariably the first step in forming a new theory: there is some observation that simply does not make sense within the old theory. Newton’s theory was born through something that did not make sense. If you believed Copernicus, or Aristarchus, if you had heard of him, or of Galileo, then the earth and the other planets went around the sun, but there was a problem: Mars could only be explained through elliptical orbits, and nobody could explain how a body could orbit in an elliptical path with only a central force. Newton showed that elliptical orbits followed from his inverse square law of gravity. Relativity was also born the same way. What did not make sense was the observation that no matter what direction you looked, the speed of light was constant. What Einstein did was to accept that as a fact, and put that into the classical Galilean relativity, and came up with what we call relativity.

So we now get to the second step in building a new theory. That involves reading about what is known, or thought to be known, about the subject. If we think about the heliocentric theory in classical times, we now know that much of what was thought to be correct was not. So, here is a challenge. If you had to, could you prove that the earth goes around the sun, while being restricted to what was known or knowable in the first century? Answers in the next few posts, but feel free to offer your thoughts.