Catch a Falling Star

Where does science come from? The best answer I can give is the funny-looking, pasty-faced English dude pictured above. Frankie not only emphasized the scientific method, but he personally started the scientific blossoming of Elizabethan times, and he may have recruited whoever the heck became the greatest writer who ever lived, William Shakespeare. He believed in verifying what you know to be true by experiment, verifying the veracity of each fact by repeating the experiment, peer reviewing the results again and again, and working out results with verifiable mathematical descriptions.

Sir Izzy was a scientific genius who made his mark not only as a scientist but also as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher (meaning he studied nature and physics in the physical universe through observation and experiment.) You probably think of him as the guy sitting under the apple tree when an apple bonked his noggin, making him suddenly shout, “Aha!!! Gravity!!!” Which makes you look simple. That, of course, means, “stupid” to overthinking brainiacs like me who routinely think so hard about things that brain stew in our stupid heads begins to boil and make smoke come out of our ears whenever we think about Sir Izzy. So, stop laughing at me and realize… it is more complicated than that.

Sir Izzy used the Scientific Method by collecting a bunch of facts that were observed in experiments or proven by applying mathematical interpretations to measured data. He came up with some re-observable and re-provable data for which he would need a unifying theory.

Sir Izzy obviously was aware, as was anybody who ever dropped an apple, that apples fall down. He didn’t actually get bonked to conclude that. But he did relate that fact to the question about why the Moon did not fall to the ground on Earth in a similar (though disastrous) fashion. He assumed that it would fall down similarly to the apple if it were not also moving forward across the sky. In fact, the Moon was falling to the Earth. Though not fast enough to actually fall all the way to Earth because it was moving around the curvature of the Earth as it fell. In other words, it fell into a stable orbit. Sir Izzy could prove this through careful measurements and mathematical formulas. (He had previously invented calculus, though he shared credit with the German mathematician Liebnitz for the creation of calculus even though he had invented it many months earlier than Liebnitz. To be fair, Liebnitz had also developed it independently almost simultaneously and with no knowledge of Newton’s invention.)

Newton could now draw a line around all these facts and unify them under the set name of The Theory of Gravity.

Now a theory can be disproven, and scientists work together regularly to disprove all theories. The Theory of Gravity has never yet been disproven, and will probably not be disproven unless some really drastic changes happen to the universe.

But even with a proven theory, numerous anomalies can occur causing a need for larger, more inclusive theories to be created. A star like the fact that Black Holes Exist does not fit in the circle I have drawn to represent the Theory of Gravity in the illustration above. That little yellow star would have to go outside the circle in the above representation. A new bigger circle needs to be drawn.

Our mischief-making friend above used the Scientific Method to create a bigger circle to include many new stars that the Science of Physics provided. He devised an astronomical experiment to prove that the gravity of a large enough material body can warp the path that light takes. He chose a distant star that could be measured against the Sun in that it was observed to be very close to being obscured behind the Sun when the telescope photographed it in January. If the Sun’s mass could not bend the path of the star’s light, the star would be behind the Sun when they attempted to photograph it on the other side, six months later in July. But our boy Albie calculated that the Sun would bend the starlight with its massive gravity and they would be able to photograph it on the other side. The photograph of the visible star was proof that Einstein’s new theory was correct. And the experiment was redone more than once since proof of a theory has to be repeatable. The Theory of Special Relativity also leads to conclusions through observation and math about how traveling at the speed of light expands time, how black holes can be created by dying stars, and the speed of light is a constant throughout the universe.

The Scientific Method is a thinking tool that has helped mankind to do all kinds of wonderful and magical things. Unfortunately, it has also made Elon Musk rich and Mark Zuckerberg appear almost human. But it is a key to learning and something that schools need to teach everyone.