A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
— Isaac Newton
Every first-year physics student learns about Newton’s laws.
- An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion until it’s acted on by an outside force.
- There is a relationship between acceleration, mass and force. An object will accelerate when force is applied according to the simple formula F=ma.
- Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Since childhood, we’ve pictured Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree, when a piece of fruit falls and hits him on the head. This moment in his life supposedly spawned his curiosity about the nature of gravity. Newton is famous for his laws of motion and for offering the world a version of calculus. More than anything else, however, Newton is famous for his Law of Universal Gravitation. Whether there is any truth to the apple story, large or small, we do know that Newton produced the view of gravity that held for centuries until Einstein upset Newton through his theory on general relativity.
In this book we are going to explore some challenges to the current astronomical models of our universe, and we are going to realize that there is far more to reality than what Newton or even Einstein foresaw. If we have seen farther, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Newton once said, but the greatest giant to give us a boost is the Word of God itself.
This book is the fourth in a series:
In Beyond Time and Space we overviewed Einstein’s theories of relativity and the strange nature of light and space-time and hyperspaces. We talked about the nonlinearities of the world.
In Beyond Coincidence we discussed the anthropic principle and the many remarkable “coincidences” in the laws of physics and nature of the universe that seem to be designed for man. We considered the characteristics of our own planet that make life on Earth not just possible, but comfortable as well. We also considered the deliberate design found in the Word of God. We’ve shown that the prophecies in the Bible demonstrate that its 66 books had to have had an origin from outside our time domain. The Bible is a message system from beginning to end, and it has one Author.
Beyond Perception was an exploration of the microcosm, the nature of matter and the sub-atomic world. We considered the possibility that the visible world is a hologram, and it appears that our universe is a digital simulation, a three-dimensional mask that covers a deeper reality.
In Beyond Newton, we will leave the world of the small and explore space. We will borrow small pieces of the previous three books, but we will expand on them to challenge the myths of astronomy. We will be shocked to realize that much of what we know about astronomy isn’t necessarily so.
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
In his famous 1871 book, Through the Looking Glass, author Lewis Carroll continues the craziness he began in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). On the other side of the mirror, in the world of chess pieces, Alice becomes the imaginary being. She meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, finds the Jabberwocky poem full of strange words, and meets Humpty Dumpty, unicorns and other fantastic creatures. All Alice thought she knew is upended in this strange world on the other side of her reflection.
What do we actually know about our own reality?
Epistemology is the fancy word for the study of knowledge — its origin, its scope, and its limits. The problem with our fallible human knowledge is that it tends to change over time. During the ages, different culture