Morality and the Philosophy of Science

Science is consistent and integrated because reality is real. Contradictions do not exist. When we meet an empirical fact for which no explanation exists, it is called an “anomaly” until we understand more and integrate the fact into a new or wider abstraction. Astronomy advanced as neutron stars, quasars, and pulsars were discovered. Even the rings of Saturn attest to this in the 250 years between Galileo’s sighting and Maxwell’s complete theory. Against that, scientists feel that it is unjust that private investors will not fund their Christmas shopping lists. So, they turn to requests for tax dollars. The laws of economics are denied as an inconvenience.

The physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project were later to worry about the horrors they enabled. (Edward Teller seems to have been an exception.) As the best known among them Albert Einstein was asked to sign Leo Szilárd’s petition to the American government to build an atomic bomb. They feared that Germany was on the same program. That the Nazis should command a weapon of such destructive power was not merely consequential but existential. So, they gave it to the United States which did what Germany never could have. From the USA, nuclear weapons spread to the USSR, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and (ultimately) Iran. The lesser of two (or twenty) evils remains evil. 

The problem of the Manhattan Project intersects two facts: 

(1)  The Nazis could never have completed a program in nuclear energy. Any progress that they could have made could only have come from giving them what they could not create. Ultimately, it is a fact of metaphysics, epistemology, politics, and economics that regardless of incremental achievements, the final goal was beyond their abilities. 

(2) The small gains came only because people of great ability lacked a correct philosophy to provide moral and ethical guidance. It is a fact of life that you should not work for your own destruction: you should not deliver your mind to your destroyers.

Muscle Mystics

Whether fascists, communists, nationalists, socialists, or some other trending label such as antifa, collectivists deny the validity of human intelligence. Perhaps it is because they have no direct experience with it. The observed facts of history are that they all focus on seizing existing goods or compelling the continuation of existing services. Karl Marx epitomized the mindset of collectivism when he declared that capitalism had solved the problem of production and “now” (1848) was the time to distribute the goods—just when the first electric telegraphs were being adopted by transcontinental railroads, thirty years before the telephone, and fifty years before radios would direct aircraft, and a hundred years before people were putting televisions in their homes. Never knowing of penicillin, sulfa drugs, polio vaccine, open heart surgery, x-ray pictures, CAT scans, or MRI scans, Marx declared that we all could have everything we would ever need to be happy if we just took it from other people. A truly radical sociologist would have asked what is the source of improvement, innovation, invention, and discovery. 

The muscle mystics expect possession of physical objects to imbue them with the knowledge to use the tool. To produce steel, they only need to seize a steel mill. 

Of course, that plan failed. During World War II, the USA shipped to the USSR thousands of tons of raw materials, thousands of vehicles and other manufactured goods. It sat on rail sidings and rusted into uselessness. (See Victor David Hansen’s The Second World Wars  as well as The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, both reviewed on this blog.) After World War II, the USSR uprooted and transported German factories. They did not make Russia rich. It takes at least a modicum of intelligence to follow a pre-defined routine earnestly and conscientiously, making trivial adjustments in response to minor variances. But no one is more conservative than a communist: varying the routine is dangerous. 

Standing Hegel on his head, as Marx claimed he did, still leaves you with Hegel; and Idealism was also the bedrock of fascism. The fascist man of action does not engage in bourgeois logic. He follows the instincts of his nation. Dialectic Materialism is not just a framework. It is dogma. So, Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity were not accepted in communist China. (See “Organized criticism of Einstein and relativity in China, 1949–1989,” by Danian Hu, HSNS (Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences Volume 34, Issue 2 March 2004; and “The Reception of Relativity in China” by Danian Hu, Isis, Volume 98, Number 3, September 2007.) But it is known that the Nazis rejected “Jewish physics” and insisted on pursuing nuclear energy according to some theories different from quantum mechanics. 

Regardless of the destruction of the heavy water plant in Norway by British commandos, the Germans were never going to succeed at anything as complicated as nuclear weaponry. The United States succeeded only because LTG Leslie R. Groves ran interference for the geniuses. During World War II, all sides, each some variant of collectivism, only cashed in their intellectual bank accounts. Because American society was less regulated, we succeeded. Having the brightest minds from Europe on the project certainly was the engine, but the Manhattan project required very much more than a handful of Nobel laureates. And once they had the bomb, the government no longer needed J. Robert Oppenheimer or the others. Second-handers could follow in their footsteps.

But even that required another generation of people who were accustomed to thinking for themselves, following their own passions, making their own lives better by whatever personal philosophies they held explicitly or implicitly. That is different from the morality of collectivism. 

Today, as never in the 19^th century or most of the 20^th centuries formal, professional science is informed, guided, and ultimately controlled by a single ideology. I am an Amateur Affiliate member of the American Astronomical Society. I serve as an editor in the History of Astronomy Division where I am responsible for a monthly column. I also serve on a committee to develop collaborations between amateurs and professionals. The AAS is actively engaged in ensuring that you have the right to insist on your own personal gender pronouns. Your right to question the claims of anthropogenic global warming is somewhat less secure. As a backyard astronomer, I am sorry that my night skies are more degraded by light pollution than they were a year ago when we were shut down because of Covid. I also know that if you want really dark skies at night you can go to some wilderness or desert or North Korea. That fact has not been integrated into the sociological perspectives of the AAS which lobbies for dark skies and against constellations of communications satellites. The muscle mystics of science want the material benefits of industrialization without understanding the engine of creation which delivers them.

Murray N. Rothbard penned Power and Market: Government and the Economy (free as a PDF from the Mises Institute here: https://mises.org/library/power-and-market-government-and-economy). His thesis was that political decisions are necessarily unprofitable. Ignoring and denying the facts and theories of economics, political decisions are always net losses of value. 

The integration of knowledge in accordance with facts of reality requires that every scientist who is funded by government grants is making your life harder, shorter, and poorer.

Astronomy does have its uses. Timekeeping is fundamental to coordination of efforts across continents in a complex global society. Launching communications satellites is cheaper than laying wire over jungles and under oceans. Economic justifications for advanced scientific research do exist. 

And, personally, I understand the insight of John Arnold: “What comes out of a team or a committee is the most daring idea that the least daring man can accept.” (“Space, Time and Education,” Astounding Science Fiction, May 1953, pp. 9–25. Introductory remarks by John W. Campbell, Jr., editor, pp. 9–10.) But the government works largely by force (occasionally by fraud). Forcing people to give you money against their will makes you a thief. Taking it by fraud defines you as a con artist. When it comes to sales and marketing, it is a necessary fact that selling science is hard work because it requires using logic and evidence to appeal to people who live by logic and evidence.

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An Amateur Astronomer’s Credo

The January 2021 issue of Astronomy magazine presented “Studying Galaxies with Amateur Images” by David Martinez-Delgado and R. Jay GaBany. The article credited sanitary engineer Andrew Common with the first photographic record of the faint structures in the Orion Nebula. The year was 1883. Non-astronomers Karl Jansky at Bell Labs in 1933 and ham operator Grote Reber working alone in 1937 invented radio astronomy. 

Founded in 1897, the American Astronomical Society originally served all astronomers, but starting in the 1920s, amateurs drifted away and the AAS became a society for academics. Exploration beyond the Earth using rockets and the attendant creation of astronautics brought in other professionals. But the AAS, numbering about 2000 members, always had some amateur members, about ten to 15% or so. In 2016, the AAS Board of Directors created an initiative to reach out to amateurs with a new Amateur Affiliate membership class. Then, in 2019, the Board decided to take action. In 2020, they appointed a manager, their publicist Rick Fienberg, to head the effort. 

 

Meanwhile, AAS Amateur Affiliate and eclipse-chaser Rik Yeames decided to see if other AAS amateur affiliates would join his effort to publicize the upcoming solar eclipse, April 8, 2024. That’s where I came in. When I joined the AAS as an amateur affiliate in 2020, I saw that they wanted an assistant editor for the Historical Astronomy Division. So, I volunteered and was accepted. Tomorrow, February 1, 2021, I become the editor. At the 237^th meeting of the AAS, January 15-21, 2021, an Amateur Affiliate meet-and-greet was held. The AAS wanted to know what they could do for us. Ahead of that, I began to map out some ideas.

 

Rick Fienberg said that he found my ideas “confrontational.” I admit that what follows largely defines what a professional astronomer is not. However, that was consequential to the fact that the paradigm I started with was the NCO’s Creed of the U.S. Army here, which I learned while serving as a petty officer in the Maritime Regiment of the Texas Military Department. It begins, “No one is more professional than I. I am a noncommissioned officer, a leader of Soldiers.” It closes, “I will not compromise my integrity, nor my moral courage. I will not forget, nor will I allow my comrades to forget that we are professionals, noncommissioned officers, leaders!” Based on that, I wrote this:

 

An Amateur Astronomer’s Credo

 

My love of astronomy is its own justification.

I am motivated to practice the science of astronomy by my enjoyment of the activity.

 

I choose my own research projects.

I can change (or abandon) my research programs, goals, and methods.

My funding and my spending are my own.

I schedule my own time.

I choose my own instruments and equipment.

I schedule my own instruments and equipment.

I choose when and how to share my instruments or equipment. 

 

My amateur colleagues and I call each other by our first names. We also have cool usernames. 

 

I do not need approval from anyone to engage in and practice astronomy.

My advancement does not depend on approval from another person or group.

When I publicize my work, peer review is after the fact, not as permission to publish.

My publications stand on their own merit, independent of my name or ascribed status.

 

My learning is continuous and informal, an integrated aspect of my life and lifestyle.

I decide when and how to extend my knowledge, drawing from an open market of learning platforms including self-paced and self-directed studies offered by accredited organizations. I also benefit from public libraries and bookstores. Through social media, I ask questions. My love of the learning is its own justification, motivation, and reward.

 

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THE DRUNKEN ASTRONOMERS

This year’s vernal equinox brought a solar eclipse that was visible across northern Eurasia. To view totality, you had to be on the Faroe Islands, 62° north between Scotland and Iceland, or the Svalbard group between Norway and the North Pole at 74° to 81° north.  I missed it entirely, and only saw the news the next day.  But I kept my head, unlike the drunken astronomers of ancient China.

(This is expanded and revised from an article published by The Sidereal Times (April 2015) of the Austin Astronomical Society.)

The story of Hsi and Ho came to my colleague Bradford S. Wade and me while we met often at The Tower Inn Cafe in Ypsilanti, across the street from Eastern Michigan University.  We had a class together, Ethics in Physics with Dr. Patrick Koehn.  After a few meetings or maybe only after a few beers, we took up a joint publication, a review of Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins by Marshall Faintich.  We placed that in the Bulletin of the Society for the History of Astronomy, Issue 21, Spring 2011. 

As for the drunken astronomers, the stories vary and are often retold, especially by sky gazers, but the teaching point is easy.  Hsi  (also given as Hi or He) and Ho were the court astronomers.  Among their duties, they were responsible for predicting eclipses so that people could beat gongs, shoot arrows, and otherwise scare off the dragon that was eating the sun.  However, they spent most of their time drinking rice wine, so they not only failed to predict an eclipse, but they also slept through it.  Fortunately for all of us, the common people rallied and chased the demon away.  Hsi and Ho were executed. 

The story comes from an ancient manuscript known as The Book of Documents, which has been variously rendered as Shu-king, Shu Ching, Shujing, and Shangshu. (Wikipedia has an entry, of course: Book of Documents.)  The story of Hsi and Ho comes from the fourth part, fifth book, thirteenth chapter.  There, the chancellor, prime minister, or “prince” Yi Ying exhorts government officials not to be derelict in their duties as were Hsi and Ho. All of that happened in legendary times.  (The earliest attested date in Chinese history is equivalent to 831 BCE.)  The most likely date for the eclipse in question is October 22, 2137 BCE.

You can find some reliable modern detail at the Astronomy Today website.  Put “ancient eclipses” in the search box and it should come up first after the Google Ads.  The story of Hsi and Ho is in Part I. The story is embellished in Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, by Mark Littmann, Fred Espenak, and Ken Willcox (Oxford 1991; also on Google Books).  A brief note about the drunken Chinese astronomers, ending with an original poem, appeared in The Journal of the Astronomical Society of India, vol. 4. No. 3, Jan. 1914.  It was cited as coming from The Observatory for December 1913.  Indeed, it did appear in Volume XXXVI, Number 468, page 478. The author was C. Thomas Edgar

The pages below are from The Chinese Classics, Volume 3: The Shoo King or Book of Historical Documents by James Legge, first published by the author at Hong Kong in 1865, then reprinted with errata and corrigenda by Clarendon Press, Oxford 1893-1895.   Below these lines are lengthy glosses on the nuances of the grammar and syntax  of the ideograms.  A modern version (with only a few notes) was edited by Clae Waltham and published by Gateway Editions from Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1971.  You will see that at first Hsi and Ho are the family names of two sets of brothers.  Then, they became individuals.  Also, Legge's translation was before even the Wade-Giles system and is far from the modern Pinyang rules.

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Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins

Book Review: Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins by Marshall Faintich; McFarland & Co., 2008, 232 pages, $55.00

Working with fellow student Bradford S. Wade, whom I met in “Ethics in Physics,” at Eastern Michigan University, I placed reviews of this book in The Numismatist (Vol 124 No. 1, January 2011), The Mich-Matist (Vol XLVI No. 4, Autumn 2010), E-Sylum(Volume 13, Number 45, November 7, 2010, Article 4), The Centinel (Vol. 58 No. 3, Fall 2010), The Celator, and the Bulletin of the Society for the History of Astronomy (Issue 21, Autumn 2011).  They ran in a range; and as a consequence of our criticism, we exchanged some emails with the author who demanded retractions which we did not publish.  We stand by our work – as he stands by his.  This is science.  Overall, the book is important and valuable.  It does have its weak points.  They do not detract from the major thesis: astronomical events appear recorded in the long history of coinage. 

Symbolic Messengers webpages here

Today, we are not always certain about the motives of the people of those distant times.  The indicators that we easily read as conjunctions and eclipses – and not so easily as comets and other events – may be the mint master’s controls, or a simple statement of time, or (as Faintich hypothesizes) claims of divine grace and heavenly favor.  Read them as you will, “stars” of many kinds have appeared on metal monetary media since the invention of coinage 2600 years ago.

That is the first challenge.

Common to both Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises is the hilarious presumption that coinage evolved from bullion, which evolved from bartering for commodities.  Those who do not question this fantasy have not investigated the problem.  The earliest records written in cuneiform on clay – which, according to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, evolved from tokens for debt – indicate divinity by placing a star above a person or the name of the person. That seems natural to us who place our God(s) in Heaven.  (Those who identify their goddess with the earth have another narrative.)  Thus, when coins were issued as bonus payments to mercenaries about 600 BCE, they often carried stars in many forms.  In addition to the obvious “floral bursts” the coins of Croesus (Kroisos) show a bull confronting a lion.  (Other coins of the same time show a "hairy wart" on the nose of the Lion.) Does that symbolize Taurus and Leo?  And if so, in what context?  And where is the Scorpion?  The Bull, the Lion, and the Scorpion were the first points of the so-called “zodiac” of the ecliptic that was finalized only in Roman times when the Claws of the Scorpion became Libra to make 12 Constellations, analogous to the 12 months – and the 12 Olympians. 

But none of that is in Faintaich.  His focus is the European Middle Ages.  Strong evidence supports the choice.  First, we have the coins.  In the years between Charlemagne and Columbus, perhaps a thousand issues are known.  Many have astronomical symbols.  Moreover, rather than being a “Dark Age” these were times when events were recorded in books stored in monasteries.  Those events also appear recorded on coins as a common medium of communication.  Therefore, it is only desk work to rely on modern astronomical software to run the clock back and look at the sky in medieval England, France, and Germany – and then compare those results to the attested times and places of mintage for coins with astronomical symbols.

Faintich builds a strong case.

At times, he over-reaches. And with good reason. Brad Wade and I talked this out in the context of the ethics in science. On the one hand, Faintich’s thesis is not completely defensible: some of his facts are not facts. On the other hand, he would have been remiss in not citing all the evidence, in only presenting the “points” that fit his “curve.”

“For example, he speaks entirely of secular authorities: counts, dukes, princes, kings and emperors.  Never does he address the bishops (including the bishop of Rome and the archbishop of Canterbury) who issued coins.  Faintich repeatedly states his major premise by referring to “the divine right of kings” a concept alien to the Catholics of the Middle Ages, but nicely enunciated to the English Parliament by the Protestant statesman, King James VI of Scotland.  By not examining coins issued by ecclesiastic authorities and by ignoring the actual conflicts of church versus crown, Faintich undermines the theory that pellets, annulets, stars, mullets, crescents, combs and bars were intended as symbols of divine favor for mundane rulers.”   Bulletin of the Society for the History of Astronomy (Issue 21, Autumn 2011.)

Trained in mathematics (BS) and astronomy (MA and PhD), Faintich does more than argue his point. He offers four criteria that must be met to show that the astronomical events correlate with the intent of the coin.

“First the date of the coin bearing an astronomical symbol must be ascertained. Second, the astronomical symbol must be the first such occurrence for that coin design or a reintroduction of the symbol after a substantial period of time to rule out immobilization of the design. Third, the occurrence of the astronomical event must be established. Fourth, and most difficult to ascertain, historical evidence must be presented that supports the observance and importance of the event.

"Generally, he succeeds. Philip Augustus was king of France 1180-1191; and in 1186, the five planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – were in a close conjunction, a cluster of only 6° at sunset; and we have a coin of Philip Augustus with five pellets in the center of the obverse. Faintich does this repeatedly for eclipses of the sun and moon, comets, and conjunctions." (The Mich-Matist (Vol XLVI No. 4, Autumn 2010)

Astronomy and numismatics are both fields where accomplished amateurs contribute alongside academic professionals. This book intersects both studies. Correlating celestial events with terrestrial history may be the best path for reconciling the calendars of the past. In other times and places New Year’s Day might have been what we call Halloween, or Christmas, or Easter. In the 16th century, “April Fool’s” were behind the times, though May Day had been New Years elsewhere and elsewhen. Midsummer’s Day is actually the Solstice, not August 4 (Walpurgis Night). So, when medieval women and men recorded their lives in diaries, we can too easily misunderstand their statements of time. Comparing their skies with their coins can help us bring everything into alignment. That is just one potential use for this overlooked but significant work.

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