ble 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 cultures have “known” that the earth was flat, that the Sun and other planets revolved around the Earth, and that Newton had an apple hit him in the head.
In the 17th century A.D., it was believed that all combustible substances contained a particular material that was released when they were burned. In the early 1700s, one Georg Ernst Stahl called this burnable material “phlogiston” and he promoted the idea that wood was made of wood ash and phlogiston, while rustable metals were made of metallic ash and phlogiston. Whether phlogiston was an actual physical thing or just a principle, the air involved was considered merely responsible for carrying off the phlogiston freed by the burning process.
Within a hundred years, however, phlogiston was cast aside as an explanation for why things burned. In the late 18th century, Antoine Lavoisier carefully measured the weights of various substances that went through oxidation or reduction reactions, and he demonstrated that oxygen was the culprit involved.
Wrong ideas often last longer than they should because we humans tend to get hooked on ideas rather than on truth. People in history who believed that the Earth was flat should have read the Bible:
It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
— Isaiah 40:22
Wrong Ideas – Geocentrism
For millennia people believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system. Ptolemy of Alexandria developed the geocentric model in his works Almagest and Planetary Hypotheses. His picture of the solar system was known ever after as the Ptolemaic Model. For the next 1400–1500 years, people believed as a matter of course that the Sun (and the rest of the sky) revolved around Earth every day. The Sun rose in the morning on one side of the planet and set on the other side in the evening. It took quiet Copernicus and loud Galileo to point out facts that required the alternative: Earth and other planets 