Neither Venetians, nor Empiricists, can Handle Discoveries:The Scientific Environment at the Time of Gauss’ Determination of the Orbit of CeresBy Peter Martinson May 15, 2007 Carl Friedrich Gauss’ explosion onto the stage of history in 1801 shocked the world. His emergence causes one to ask the old question, where do geniuses come from? Can genius be taught, or must they be born that way? Since the mission of the LaRouche Youth Movement is to create a society which will produce an increasing density of geniuses, these are important questions. Part of the challenge with Gauss, though, is that he wouldn’t release a scientific work unless it was scrubbed free of evidence of how he made the breakthrough. We have two keys with which to unlock the mind of Gauss, though: Abraham Kästner (1719-1800) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). What follows is a look at the scientific environment at the time Gauss made his famous determination of the orbit of the asteroid Ceres. Of course, that means we’ll have to take an excursion into the murky underworld of the British Royal Society, and how they created their golem, Sir Isaac Newton. We will also have to look at what happened to the works of Kepler, and how Europe responded to his launching of modern experimental astrophysics. Europeans during Gauss’ time were living in a world dominated by the British East India Company. While this empire tried to exert its dominance over Europe, especially after 1763, the American conspiracy had cast their challenge with a revolution inspired by the great statesman and scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The optimism unleashed by this worldwide, was crushed in Europe when the French Revolution, run by the British top-down, turned into a nightmare.[i] People don’t know much about the 18th Century, because the true history has been obscured by the misnamed “Enlightenment.” This Enlightenment was not the product of the so-called “scientific revolution” from Copernicus to Newton,[ii] but a response against a true revolution launched by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464),[iii] and his followers Kepler and Leibniz. Attempting to replace true scientific advance by the occult beliefs of the Newtonians, is hardly enlightening. Moreover, it doesn’t last unless the target population is either brainwashed, or beaten down under conditions of police state. The non-science qualities of Newtonianism, along with that of other empirical cult beliefs, are regularly challenged by phenomena from above. Gauss and KästnerAs soon as the 18 year old hotshot Carl Gauss arrived at Göttingen University in 1795, he headed to the library and used his new library privileges. Among the books checked out, were the Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. As he told his former teacher, Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann (1743-1815), it made him somewhat unhappy to read these papers, since he found that almost all of his personal discoveries in mathematics had already been made by others. But, “What consoles me is this. All of Euler’s discoveries that I have so far found, I have made also, and still more so. I have found a more general, and, I think, more natural viewpoint.”[iv] Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), then chairman of the Mathematics department at the St. Petersburg Academy, was the world champion of Newtonian mechanics and mathematics. One of his teachers, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, was at this time nearing the end of his life, and was preparing to produce the first ever complete history of mathematics. This was not intended as an academic exercise, but as a sharp political intervention. Kästner was a sworn enemy of not just Euler, but of the entire imperial apparatus that had been used to uproot the legacy of Leibniz and Bach, and rewrite European history from the standpoint of Newtonianism. In this capacity, he launched the German Renaissance with Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, and led Göttingen University to become the scientific counter-pole to the Newtonian nest that had taken over Leibniz’s Berlin Academy. He was also the leader of the pro-American conspiracy in Germany, and had hosted the visit by Benjamin Franklin to Göttingen.[v] His mission was to prepare the German people for an American style revolution, instead of the British countergang operation known as the “French Revolution.” Soon, Gauss had the opportunity to tell Kästner that he had proven the constructability of the regular Heptadecagon, which he would hold until the end of his life to be his most important discovery. At first, Kästner was unimpressed, much distracted by his other projects. But then, after Gauss showed him how the construction worked, Kästner became suddenly shocked, peered at Gauss, and told him, that he himself had already discussed the issue in his Anfangsgründe.[vi] But, he said, if Gauss could develop the theory of the general case, he should write an essay and submit it to him. The first summary of the general theory of the equal divisions of the circle was presented by Johannes Kepler, in the first book of his Harmonices Mundi, where the excited reader can follow his constructions of all possible regular figures. Here, Kepler proved that the only constructible figures are the triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, pentakaedecagon, and all of their doubles, because everything else has sides whose lengths are unknowable by a human mind. This included the 17 sided figure, which Gauss had just shown to be constructible! Gauss had just proven Kepler wrong, and had expanded the realm of knowability into what Gauss would later call the Complex Domain. Kepler would have been excited, and Gauss’ general development of the theory formed the basis of his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Gauss had discovered that the underpinnings of everything he had yet discovered in numbers and algebra, lie in the domain of geometry, as had been known and demonstrated previously by Kepler and Leibniz. Gauss issued his discovery publicly in his 1799 doctoral dissertation, as an attack on Euler, Lagrange, d’Alembert, and the rest of the Newtonian priesthood of the time. Kästner had brought Gauss into the conspiracy. During his time at Göttingen, Gauss would discover the hidden legacy of true European science. As Gauss would find out, science had become so polluted through the promotion of Newtonianism and related reductionist confinements, that many of the top scientists were either aiding the promotion, or felt obligated to bow to the pressure of the scientific priesthood. True scientific progress was being suppressed. Only a small group of revolutionaries were fighting to keep alive the spirit of scientific discovery in the tradition of Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz. What was Kästner’s beef?Elsewhere in Kästner’s Anfangsgründe, he launches a direct attack on Newtonian mechanics. In section 237, he says, “Kepler found from the observations, that the planets go in ellipses around the sun, which lies at the focus of these ellipses. Regarding this, Newton showed that this would happen if the planet were driven or pulled around the sun by a force which varied inversely as the square of the distance. I consider his proof of this to be inadequate.” He proceeds to derive Newton’s “inverse square law” from the principle of elliptical motion. He then says, Newton had assumed a conic section, and derived his law from that (as Kästner had just done), but he had not shown that an inverse square “force” would produce conic section motion.[vii] Kästner goes on, “This criticism was justly made by Johann Bernoulli, who gave the first general solution to the problem … [this] latter was not accomplished until Bernoulli, by means of his discoveries, had considerably expanded the integral calculus… [John] Keill translated this discovery into the expressions of the fluxion calculus, and, here also, Newton was not defended more successfully against Bernoulli’s criticisms than before.” [emphasis not in original] To the layman, this might seem like just some academic disagreement. Hey, we all have disagreements, right? Wrong. In the late 18th Century, these were politically explosive words, because Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was held by the dominant world empire as the high priest of science. It was generally known, that Newton had claimed that he could derive all of the discoveries of Kepler with his principle of gravitational attraction. Newton claimed further, that the primary cause of all motion in the universe, was this force of attraction between two bodies along the straight line between them. Newton’s first book, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, began by proving that this law of attraction, combined with his “Axioms of Motion,” caused planets to move in conic sections around the Sun. When Newton was asked how he had discovered such a remarkable law, that things fall towards the Earth, he gave the story that an apple fell and hit him on the head while he was staying at home with his mum in Woolsthorpe in 1666. He might have been joking, but he could never explain how he made not only this discovery, but any of his discoveries. Many theories have been developed, even beliefs that the discovery came out of Newton’s occult beliefs. But, Newton would never speak publicly about it. It was as if Newton did not know how he’d made them. Perhaps it was he, himself, that had been dropped on his head. Likely unknown to Newton at the time, England was in the process of becoming the new home of the Venetian oligarchy. The Dutch King William of Orange invaded in 1689, and installed himself and his wife, Mary, as joint monarchs. Holland had been the cockpit of Venetian finance up to this time. This “Glorious Revolution,” as it was called, resulted in the immediate creation of the Bank of England and the launching of a huge financial swindle called the South Seas Bubble.[viii] But, the reborn empire had to stupify the population, in order to make this work, therefore a key part of the Glorious Revolution, was the pumping up of the Royal Society’s Isaac Newton, as the champion of science.[ix] One of Newton’s handlers, was a notorious plagiarist named Edmund Halley (1656-1742), who believed the Earth was hollow. Halley had already gotten in a huge dispute with the Royal Astronomer, John Flamsteed (1646-1719), over the trajectory of a comet. Flamsteed demonstrated that the comet of 1682 was the same that had appeared in 1680, having traveled in an orbit around the Sun. Halley and his cronies didn’t believe him, but when Flamsteed intimated that it was the same comet that had been observed by Johannes Kepler in 1607, Halley publicly claimed the hypothesis for his own, and predicted a return of the comet in 1757. Two years later, according to an
account by Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), Halley met one night in 1684 at a
London bar with two of his Royal Society cohorts, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and
the President of the Royal Society, Christopher Wren (1632-1723), and told them
he was searching for someone who could prove that a planetary elliptical orbit
was created by an inverse square force. Both said they could, but neither would produce the proof. Later that year, Halley reportedly asked
Newton if he could produce a proof. Newton said he could, and Halley pushed him to publish a book on it, to
be promoted widely. Newton was reluctant
to publish this, as his “discovery” had been made while in the heat of alchemy
experiments.[x] The “law” of attraction had excited many academics in England, including David Gregory (1659-1708), who wrote a textbook on astronomy, completely couched in terms of Newton’s inverse square law and his fluxion “calculus.” Gregory’s uncle, James (1638-1675), who ceded the University of Edinburgh’s Chair of Mathematics to his nephew upon death, had been in correspondence with Newton, and had done much of the number series work that later appeared in Newton’s fluxion “calculus.” The younger Gregory, after inheriting his uncle’s Newton material, read Newton’s Principia in 1687, and moved down to Oxford to become the Savillian chair of Astronomy. He brought his student, John Keill (1671-1720), down with him, who became so enthralled, that he wrote his own “Newtonian” astronomy textbook. Isaac Newton did not discover the Calculus. Newton actually wrote very little on the Calculus. Leibniz wrote several letters to him, each more skeptical than the last, asking for more than just a mathematical derivation of Newton’s formulas, but only got two unsatisfactory answers in reply.[xi] The first public references to his “fluxions” were in a book by John Wallis (1616-1703), who printed the two letters Newton had sent to Leibniz, as an appendix to his own algebra textbook. Additionally, there is no evidence of any work done leading up to any discovery by Newton, previous to 1684, besides his extensive writings on alchemy and black magic. Either Newton did not know how he “made his discovery,” or he didn’t want to reveal the true story – that he was a raving priest of the occult! Newton retired from science after his friends pushed him to a nervous breakdown in 1693. As an attempt to put him back to work, Lord Halifax and Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Montagu gave him a new job as Warden of the Mint in 1698. Montagu would later become the President of the Royal Society, the Prime Minister, and then the British ambassador to Venice. Interestingly, Halley and Gregory both also became Wardens of the Mint for both Chester and Scotland, respectively, in the Glorious Revolution’s project to cut the circulating currency in half. During this period, the great high priest of science Newton would tell his admirers that he no longer wanted to be bothered by pesky stuff like mathematics, because it always made his head hurt. He then wrote a book calculating the precise date of the Armageddon based on the prophecies in the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John. In 1708, John Keill submitted a paper to the British Royal Society, publicly accusing Leibniz of plagiarizing Newton’s calculus. When Leibniz saw this attack, he wrote to the Royal Society demanding a formal apology, but Keill just upped the attack. At this point, Leibniz most likely recognized that this was an institutional attack, coming from the Venetian entity that had taken over the English government. Newton might not have understood the operation, as he was quite busy in his new “Alan Greenspan” role, but he was pushed into the conflict by Keill, Montagu, Locke, and the others. They told him that his calculus was being paraded in Europe under Leibniz’s name, and that Leibniz was saying that Newton was guilty of plagiary. Since Newton couldn’t tell one way or the other, the Royal Society set up a committee, with Newton at its head, to investigate the matter. They put out their report in 1715, called the Commercium epistolicum,[xii] which appears to have been written in the hand of Newton himself. Written like a little kid’s tantrum, it claims that the efforts of Leibniz to reveal Newton’s method of discovery, were actually done so Leibniz could write a calculus under his own name. It was published anonymously, since everybody on the committee, including Halley and de Moivre, thought it was such an obvious hoax.[xiii] Abbè Antonio Schinella Conti, another one of the “Newton handlers,” appeared at around this time. He had contacted Leibniz in 1715, claiming to be one of Leibniz’s followers, and offered to ferry letters between he and Newton, personally, to smooth the waters between them. Conti’s more immediate project, though, was to help Newton’s doctor, Samuel Clarke, brainwash Leibniz’s former student and wife of the future King George II, to believe in Newton. Leibniz’s letters back and forth with her form the body of the “Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence,” and begin with Leibniz illustrating the effects of the Venetian psy-war on the English academics. At one point, Caroline complained to Leibniz that Conti had “lost” key sections of Leibniz’s letters.[xiv] After Leibniz died, Conti would lead the charge to set up “Newton salons” all around Europe, in cahoots with Voltaire and other agents, in order to attempt an erasure of Leibniz’s legacy. This operation was at issue when Kästner issued his counterattack, which demolished the main accomplishment of Newton’s Principia. Kästner’s counterattack was just one of many that made up the standard mathematics textbook at Göttingen University. Johannes KeplerThis Newton Operation was not a scientific issue, but a continuation of a Venetian policy launched at the end of the 16th Century to finally crush the Nation State, and to return the population to a mental condition of herded cattle. Some in Venice were unhappy that the scientific legacy of the 15th Century Renaissance had not been eliminated by the horrors of religious warfare intentionally unleashed by the Spanish Inquisition. Science was still moving forward, as exemplified by the work of John Napier (1550-1617), William Gilbert (1544-1603), and especially Kepler. So, a new policy – empiricism – was designed by the Venetian teacher of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and also the organizer of the 30 Years’ War, Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). In Lyndon LaRouche’s words:
Kepler had sent copies of his work to Galileo at the University of Padua, and had asked him to publicly support the Copernican view. Galileo not only did not publicly support the heliocentric view, but failed to mention Kepler even once in his 1632 Dialogue on the Two Sciences, a “non-biased” comparison of Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’ models of the Solar System, which was printed two decades after Kepler communicated his discoveries to Galileo. Perhaps Galileo was too frightened by his persecution by the Roman Inquisition to respond to Kepler adequately,[xvi] but many of the “discoveries” reported in his later works are to be found in the books Kepler had sent to him. Galileo’s job, as given to him by Sarpi, was to come up with axioms of physics, from which Kepler’s results could appear to follow, as if deductively. A later follower of this policy, the Dutch-trained René Descartes (1596-1650), designed more axioms of physics.[xvii] He was infamous for his battles against Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) over the speed of light in a medium. Descartes said, light speeds up when passing into water, Fermat said it slowed down, and Descartes then attacked him. As part of his work, Descartes formulated what is today called “analytic geometry,” which attempted to represent various curves as the products of algebraic formulas. He claimed that all phenomena of physics were created by mathematical equations, and could thus be investigated by those equations. He plagiarized Fermat’s method of graphic representation, poorly, to look at the effects of the equations. He ran into a problem, though, with a class of curves he called “mechanical curves,” such as the cycloids, logarithmic curves, and logarithmic spirals. These curves all represented relationships between incommensurable magnitudes, such as the relationship between the circle and its diameter, as studied by Nicholas of Cusa. Since these curves couldn’t be represented by algebra, Descartes banned them from the universe.
But, this was just the type of problem Kepler had left for the future after his death. Among Kepler’s breakthroughs in his Astronomia Nova, was the demonstration that the equant doesn’t exist. There is no fixed point in the universe.[xviii] On the other hand, there are principles of the universe. One effect of these principles, as discovered by Kepler, was that a planet will speed up and slow down, such that the area swept out by a line connecting it with the Sun is proportional to the time in which it is swept out. As overjoyed as Kepler was when he discovered this, he also showed how the area cannot be found directly.
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