@IAHM-COL and KL-666;
IAHM-COL, thank you for directing me to Decartes'
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. It was a fascinating read and one that I wish I had read years ago to have an understanding of the Cartesian scientific method.
To be truthful, I found it quite unsettling as Decartes is so adamant that, on the one hand he posits the four rules for scientific inquiry, then spends most of the treatise explaining why he does not trust the perceptions the results from conducting research based on those four rules would produce. I found this completely inconsistent with his immortal statement
cogito ergo sum. I kept thinking if that is the true sum of the human experience, how can anything be trusted as truth? And then Decartes goes on to present a complicated logic for the existence of God and truth. I finished the work thoroughly confused.
So I went to Wikipedia so see if I could gain some added insight into Descartes as a man and in reading through his biography I came across the name of the philosopher, John Locke. And a light went on. You see, my religious tradition, the movement that became my denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) was founded by men who were educated in Scotland during the Enlightenment and were very heavily influenced by the work of John Locke. Locke was not just a physicist, but wrote on political, economic, religious and social issues, and was required reading in the universities these men attended before they eventually emigrated to America. So, that Lockian perspective on perception has been engrained in me since I was a child. Rather that the Cartesian perspective of the senses cannot ultimately be trusted because they are limited, I have been educated in a world view that says the senses must be trusted because they are all that we have to interact with what is out there in the world. Do you see the huge difference in how data will then be interpreted between these two epistemological points of view?
For example, back in 1993, Comet Shoemaker—Levy 9 broke apart and created what astronomers call a “String of Pearls” and a year later, in July 1994, collided with Jupiter. The impacts were so large they were easily visible with my 6 inch (150mm) Newtonian reflector telescope, so I set it up in the yard and invited all the neighbors over for a viewing party.
![Image](http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/uploadsgallery/1297538807/gallery_110100_13_44679.gif)
Image: Hubble Space Telescope
Jupiter was high in the southern sky, so it was an easy target. The first fragments began colliding on July 16. Jupiter was approximately 860 million km (431,965,443 nm) from Earth.
All I had to do was go to the JPL Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impact website and get the impact times for each of the fragments. We couldn’t see the cometary string because it was behind the planet, so we had to wait for the impact “crater” to rotate into view. I put crater in quotes, because Jupiter is a gas giant, and what we would be seeing, we hoped, was some kind of evidence of the collision. Now the good thing is that Jupiter’s rotation is extremely fast, its day is only 9.84 Earth hours! The Hubble Space Telescope, however was high enough that it had a different angle and line of sight on Jupiter, so, as you see above, it captured photos of the comet’s String of Pearls. The Galileo space probe was also in the Jupiter system and able to be configured to capture images, as was Voyager 2 and several other space probes.
As the comet’s fragments, some several kilometers in diameter approached Jupiter, all the world's major observatories were trained on it. There were lots of theories what might happen but no one knew for sure what would happen. Descartes would have been beside himself with glee over the situation. As it was, the angle of the impact was close enough to the visible side of the planet that when the first large pieces began impacting there were huge flashes of light visible to the observatories, calculated at thousands of miles high above Jupiter’s atmosphere.
But wait. There is another issue here that has to be taken into account. That is the time it takes light to travel from Jupiter to Earth. C = 186,000 m/s or 300,000 km/s, and at Jupiter’s distance that converts to about 48 minutes.
When that light flash arrives at Earth, the astronomers looking through their telescopes were looking back in time 48 minutes.
My neighborhood Jupiter party is excited while we wait the 48 minutes for the light from Jupiter to reach us. Then as I peer through the eye piece, right on time the dark round smudges come into view as predicted. I call everyone over to get in line to take a look. The humongous dark explosion cloud tops rotate into view one after another. We are very cognizant of the historical uniqueness of this moment.
The Big Question:So, now the Cartesian view versus the Lockian view. Looking at Jupiter and knowing how far it is away from Earth, I know that the light is 48 minutes old, because, the speed of light,
C, has been set as a constant. Is the image of Jupiter I viewed in July 1994 the truth or just one of a possible number of truths? And if the latter, how does one distinguish which of those truths I was perceiving according to Cartesian logic? Or do I have it all wrong?
As a Lockian, I contend that I saw the actual remnant of the cometary fragment's collision on Jupiter 48 minutes after the light containing that information got to my eyes aided by my telescope that is a piece of technology designed to allow me to accurately see what actually happened (my 6 inch mirror does not have enough light-gathering surface to capture the flash--it is a matter of mirror technology and the physics of how many photons can be collected on the surface and bounced to the eye piece) And I further contend, that the science that under-girds what I just described is reliable and that it will always be reliable because it has both internal (theoretical) and external (experimental) consistency when I use my telescope. What will the Cartesian say about that same event under the same conditions?
Video igitur possum intelligere,
SkyBoat
![Image](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S5--pzjNEK0/VmTJdWwIOsI/AAAAAAAAFs4/vgw_hbBHFj8/s512-Ic42/David%252520With%252520100%252520Inch%252520Hook.jpg)
This is me standing with the 100 inch Hooker Telescope on Mt Wilson (Above Pasadena, California), which Edwin Hubble used to make his discovery in 1929 that the universe is expanding and the Milky Way Galaxy is but one among millions. (Photo taken in 2009)