CathGPT

I’m working up a tech history piece on the 1611 telescopes of Christoph Scheiner, who bridged the gap between alidades and lenses. I felt the need to reconnect with the beacons of the universe lately, and Maragha is where the beacons are found.

Ran across this piece in a 1902 history of astronomy by Agnes Clerke. It’s not really part of the Scheiner story, but it does connect nicely with yesterday’s item on my own stupid ChatGPT thinking, so I’ll write it now.

The moral of the story: Don’t start with rationality and inference. Stick to physical observation until you have enough real observations to form an inference.

The alleged “scientific method” starts with an inference or null hypothesis. The hypothesis nearly always leads us astray. The corrupted version of the “method” that serves grantors and Deepstate is even more astray.

= = = = = START CLERKE:

The discovery of sunspots in 1610 by Fabricius and Galileo first opened a way for inquiry into the solar constitution; but it was long before that way was followed with system or profit.

The seeming irregularity of the phenomena discouraged continuous attention; casual observations were made the basis of arbitrary conjectures, and real knowledge received little or no increase.

In 1620 we find Jean Tarde, Canon of Sarlat, arguing that because the sun is “the eye of the world” and the eye of the world cannot suffer from ophthalmia, therefore the appearances in question must be due, not to actual specks or stains on the bright solar disc, but to the transits of a number of small planets across it!

To this new group of heavenly bodies he gave the name of “Borbonia Sidera”, and they were claimed in 1633 for the House of Hapsburg, under the title of “Austriaca Sidera” by Father Malapertius, a Belgian Jesuit.

= = = = = END CLERKE.

Both failures at once. The a-priori hypothesis blinds the observer to reality that disagrees with the hypothesis. And then Malapertius obeys his paycheck to advance the idea of planets. If sunspots weren’t planets, we’d lose an opportunity to make war against competing countries; therefore sunspots are planets.

= = = = = START CLERKE:

A similar view was temporarily maintained against Galileo by the justly celebrated Father Scheiner of Ingolstadt, and later by William Gascoigne, the inventor of the micrometer; but most of those who were capable of thinking at all on such subjects (and they were but few) adhered either to the cloud theory or to the slag theory of sunspots.

The first was championed by Galileo, the second by Simon Marius, “astronomer and physician” to the Margraves of Brandenburg. The latter opinion received a further notable development from the fact that in 1618, a year remarkable for the appearance of three bright comets, the sun was almost free from spots; whence it was inferred that the cindery refuse from the great solar conflagration, which usually appeared as dark blotches on its surface, was occasionally thrown off in the form of comets, leaving the sun, like a snuffed taper, to blaze with renewed brilliancy.

= = = = = END CLERKE.

Both inferences were premature, but at least they weren’t influenced by Church idiocy or Deepstate idiocy. Clouds are a sensible guess, and the real thing turned out to be a type of cloud, a mass of atoms spawned by an updraft on the solar ocean.

Slag turned out to be wrong, but it resulted from a natural experiment, not an a-priori axiom. It’s properly scientific.

CARVER:
LOOK ABOUT YOU.
TAKE HOLD OF THE THINGS THAT ARE HERE.
TALK TO THEM.
LET THEM TALK TO YOU.

If you want to do science, you stop after those four steps. Anything beyond those four steps is outside science. If you use the observations to make a new gadget or improve existing gadgets, you’re doing technology. If you use the observations to prove a theory, you’re doing religion or war.