1.  Here is a basic commonsense question. Do bodies anywhere travel in straight lines? Evidently not. Everyone knows that when a ball or any other object is thrown, it follows a curved trajectory. Even balls on a billiard table and pucks on ice would be seen to travel in curves if the surfaces on which they travel were long enough. (For a billiard-table to be level both here and over the horizon it would have to be curved to fit the earth’s  surface at every stage along its length, and billiard balls would naturally follow those curves.)

Why, then, in physical science, has it been assumed, for three centuries, that the underlying natural state of motion for a freely moving body lies in a straight line? The answer contemporary physics gives, based as it is on the ideas of Newton, is that all bodies would travel in that way if it were not for the presence of hidden forces, like those of gravity, electrostatics, magnetism and so on. These inscrutable in vacuo forces, we are told, are present everywhere, preventing everything from planets, stars and galaxies down to atoms, electrons, protons and nuclear particles, from travelling in straight lines in the way Newton’s First Law of Motion dictates. So the consequence of this unempirical assumption of naturally straight-line motion is to manufacture a theoretical panoply of invisible in vacuo forces being responsible for the fact that nowhere do bodies move in the way Newton assumed they should. So Newton gave us two forces which completely cancel each other. One is the so-called ‘centrifugal force’ which, allegedly, makes bodies seek to travel in straight lines, and the other is an equal and opposite ‘centripetal’, or ‘gravitational’ force, each of which ‘forces’ completely negates the other.

2.   Nor is that the only assault that contemporary physics makes on commonsense. There are many others. For instance, who could accept the statement: ‘All dogs are quadrupeds, so all quadrupeds are dogs’?  Complete nonsense, eh! Yet despite the obvious fallacy in this form of reasoning, there are scientists who, from the fact that the light from any receding body is Doppler-shifted towards the red, on seeing the light from distant galaxies shifted towards the red, throw commonsense to the winds and leap to the conclusion  that  it is  an incontrovertible ‘fact of observation’ that those galaxies are receding from us. From this entirely fallacious assumpti0n they conclude that those galaxies must be receding from us and from one another in a primeval explosion (the so-called ‘Big Bang’   [footnote 1])    that created the whole universe of space, time and matter from something less than the size of a pea, some thirteen billion years ago! This, of course, begs the question that if the whole universe of space, time and everything is expanding, then what is it ‘expanding’ into, and with reference to what can it ever be said to be ‘pea-sized’ or huge? These questions are unanswerable, which makes nonsense of the whole hypothesis. And yet, billions of pounds and dollars are spent on building massive machines, such as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN designed to recreate the first moments of that hypothetical ‘Big Bang’. The  results of that experiment, highly anticipated and publicised as they were, have, predictably, been negative, creating what will undoubtedly be the biggest and most expensive non-event in the history of science.   [footnote 2]   If modern science had not abandoned its classic logical integrity, this bizarre conclusion would be seen as what it so obviously is, a reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity) of the  premise on which it depends, namely the fallacious  ’receding galaxies’  assumption. Relieved of the conceptual straitjacket of that all-consuming conceptual dogma, modern Cosmology would be free to explore the logical consequences of interpreting  the redshift phenomenon in other, much more sensible, ways. At least one such interpretation has been proposed as part of the POAMS synthesis, as may be seen in due course.

3.   Here from many others is another example of logical fallacy. Textbooks and encyclopaedias of physics describe the quantum of light-energy as a ‘particle’ of light, called a ‘photon’, travelling at the finite and constant speed c with respect to the vacuum of space.   [footnote 3]    However, the received Theory of Relativity tells us that the mass of anything travelling at the ’speed of light’,  c ,  is infinite. But the mass (e/c2) of a quantum of light-energy is absolutely miniscule, being in the order of 10-35 kilogram for visible light. How can this possibly be?

Some physicists seek to gloss over this paradox by assuming that the ‘photon’  has zero mass in its own ’stationary rest-frame’. But, in relativity, it is axiomatic that light – hence the ‘photon’ – has  ’the velocity c ‘ in all reference-frames, bar none, so that the ‘photon’ is never stationary but always travels at ‘the speed c‘.  And so the paradox goes round and round in a logical circulum. No attempt to make sense of this conundrum of the ‘enigmatic photon’ has ever succeeded.

The commonsense thinker might suppose that the answer to these paradoxes and conundrums would be simply to cancel the presuppositions that led to them. That is how reason works in ordinary commonsense and forensic workaday situations. People come up with various theories as to how, say,  a particular crime scene may be interpreted in order to get at the truth, and in logical discussion these theories are all pared-down in favour of just one that explains the situation satisfactorily. Not so, however, in Physics, where – in modern Physics, especially – theories that were temporary inspirations of their day but are now long past their sell-by dates,  have become enshrined in the annals of Physics, no longer to be questioned. The fact, for instance, that Newton became famous for inventing the present plethora of inscrutable in vacuo forces meant that these had to be written into physics for students to inculcate as a condition for graduating in the subject. In this way, in order to pass their exams and be accepted into the profession in perpetuity, students  have to become more  the victims of the Educational System rather than its beneficiaries. 

In this way, the fact that Einstein (in a moment which he himself regretted) embraced the idea of a ‘photon’ as a quantum particle of light, meant that from then on the ‘photon’ had to be regarded as a ‘fact of nature’. This was despite the true fact that not only has the assumed  flight in vacuo of this alleged ‘light-particle’ never been detected but also that it is undetectable even in principle.

4.   Another abortive notion is that of the so-called ‘black hole’. This altogether bizarre idea was an invention of purely Abstract Mathematics which became popular in the 1960s, especially with the mathematical work of Roger Penrose, in an  equation that explained how (allegedly) everything was sucked into a black hole, a kind of ‘plughole’ into which matter, light and energy disappear. It was Hawking’s idea how to reverse this mathematical abstraction, so that instead of everything being sucked in, everything had burst out in a primordial big bang. Putting this ‘big bang’ idea together with the ‘black holes’  hypothesis has been claimed as leading to the ultimate  ’Theory of Everything’ . This is in the realm of Pure Mathematics, of course, which has no bearing whatsoever on common experience and understanding. POAMS repudiates any suggestion of physical reality in this claim, on the basis that all angular momentum systems, from cyclones and whirlpools to spiral galaxies, have barycentres which, in themselves, are empty of matter, hence are ‘holes’ which neither emit nor reflect light. In this sense they may be fairly described as  ‘black holes’, without any mystrery attending them. As these physical systems lose energy – by radiation or whatever – they shrink, so that  the objects in the system are ’sucked in’ towards the centre. POAMS shows  how  this happens with all angular momentum systems, from hammer-swinging and whirlpools to spiral galaxies. This is a Physics explanation as opposed to one of pure, arcane Mathematics. 

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[footnote 1]       The ‘Big Bang’

The term ‘Big Bang was used as a derogatory term  by Fred Hoyle in a radio broadcast in March 1949. He  regarded it as being not really a scientific theory. Here is what he said in his broadcast:

“The Big Bang hypothesis is much the less palatable of the two (i.e., either the Steady State  or the Big Bang). For it is an irrational process which cannot be described in scientific terms. On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me to be in the philosophical (sense) a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by direct appeal to observation.”

Please note that the Steady State theory of Bondi, Gold and Hoyle is virtually the same as that of POAMS.  The only difference is that in the POAMS hypothesis, as studious readers may appreciate, there is no need to incorporate the  ’Expanding Universe’ assumption in this Steady-State theory .

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 [footnote 2]     The LHC (Large Hadron Collider at CERN).  This experiment was designed to recreate the so-called ‘God Particle’ that is supposed to have appeared in the first moments of the ‘Big Bang’. If, as POAMS avers, there is no meaning to this ‘Big Bang’ assumption, then that albeit hugely expensive  experiment is abortive. It may be taken as a predicti0n of POAMS that this experiment will, unfortunately, continue to fail.

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[footnote 3]     The ‘Photon’‘

This is an impossible concept, see the  ‘Ten Proofs in the  ‘The Non-Velocity of Light’ page on this site.