Garbage in = Garbage Out

Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.

(Leviticus 19:36) KJV

People point to Newton who wrote math which shows that an ellipse can have one focus. Math is theoretical fudge which can be made into any shape you want based entirely on whatever you want to believe.

Here’s something you have to understand about math: it’s like mixing paint. Imagine that we have an empirical observation – white paint. We also have an inductive rationalization of the observation (a theory) which is tailored it to fit our narrative – black paint. We can use math to mix the paint to get exactly the right shade of grey and then say that the math proves our theory. It’s math so everyone believes us. The empirical observation is still white, the theory is still black, but everyone is so delighted by the grey color of the math that they don’t care.

One of the members of the Twitter community went to the trouble of coding their own planetary orbit simulator in an attempt to refute our position that Johannes Kepler didn’t understand his 1st law. He is referring to us in this quote:

Some people find counter-intuitive that the planets follow elliptical orbits with just one object in one focus. Some of these people are really vocal saying Kepler was wrong (or even that Kepler didn’t understand his own laws). What we are going to do is to trace the trajectory of an object subject to a gravitational field, and look if it traces an ellipse.

– FlatSlugBrains

The planetary orbit simulator describes an effect, not a cause. Making a computer model of a desired outcome in order to prove a point is inductive circular reasoning. Computers only know what they’re told. Computers aren’t capable of independent original work. Computer models can only ever produce a result that is a restatement of the assumptions that were used to code the model. If you tell a computer to plot an ellipse around a single focus, don’t declare a philosophical victory when it does, it’s incapable of any other outcome. In computer lingo it is known as: garbage in = garbage out.

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