about truth
some force, like friction, slows or stops them."
Science Verses Scientists
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Not only philosophers but scientists as well, are frequently infected with the idea that true science can be carried out merely by thinking and without actually observing. For such scientists, even demonstration is not proof.
In 1902, Rear-Admiral George Melville, chief engineer of the US Navy, wrote in the North American Review, that attempting to fly was 'absurd'. In 1903, Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University published an article which showed scientifically that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible,' and would require the discovery of a new force in nature. A few weeks later, Wilbur and Orville Wright did the scientifically impossible.
For five years after the Wright brother's first successful flight, most American scientists, science editors, and science writers in the NewYork Herald, the North American Review, and the Scientific American dismissed the many demonstrations of powered human flight as a hoax.
In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered public trials at Fort Myers, which finally convinced the scientists, the Army, and the press that powered human flight was possible after all. The Wright brothers had proved it, five years earlier.
Aristotle Vindicated
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Aristotle may have been a failure at science, but it was because he did not follow the principles of his own philosophy. Hundreds of years later, others would follow those principles, transforming science for all time from a mystic adherence to superstition and authority, into a truly objective science.
Between the end of the sixteenth century and the the early part of the seventeenth century, in defiance of the traditionalists and Galenists of his time, an Aristotelian named William Harvey3, theorized and confirmed blood pumped out from heart, returns to heart. Although his discoveries were still debated by authorities and scientists after his death, he is today considered the founder of modern physiology, and every fifth-grade student takes for granted this fact proved so long ago.
From the World of Fiction
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In Mary Shelley's 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein, the monster was "brought to life," with an electric shock. That it might actually be possible to revive a dead person with electricity, especially one made out of, "spare parts," so-to-speak, is, of course, nothing but wild speculative fiction.
But, today, there are more than a few people walking around with, "spare parts," taken from dead people, and when that spare part happens to be a heart, it was restarted with an electric shock.
Electric shock, called cardioversion or defibrillation, is used all the time to revive people whose hearts have stopped, and are technically dead.
Can it be proved people can be brought back to life by electricity? Try telling anyone who is alive because they have had a heart transplant or have had their heart restarted by electric shock that no one can prove it.
Stationary at 6000 Miles Per Hour
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Another fiction writer, Arthur C. Clark. wrote an article in 1945 stating that communications signals could be transmitted to and from Earth by a relay station launched into orbit around the earth's [next page]