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Welcome
to The Seventh Earth.
In the section 'Origins'
I have outlined why I started this website and where its premise
came from. Here I would like to define it and cover some of the
broader concepts and questions that it raises and my approach in
responding to them.
The following definitions are
based on entries from Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, from
spring 2007;
‘Original Research’
is research that is not based on the conclusions of earlier publications
on the subject in question. The aim of the original research is
to produce new knowledge, rather than to summarize or re-present
existing knowledge. In some cases, where actual experimentation
or analysis is not carried out, the originality is in the way existing
understanding is changed or re-interpreted based on the outcome
of the research.
‘Protoscience’ is
a field of study which appears to conform to the first stage of
scientific method, gathering information and forming a hypothesis,
but which involves speculation that is not yet falsifiable or verified
by experimentation or accepted by a concensus of scientists. Protoscience
is distinguished from other forms of speculation in that it strives
to be consistent with current scientific models so as to eventually
achieve falsifiability.
Falsifiability and reproducibility
are a crucial part of the scientific criteria. 20th Century thinker
Karl Popper suggested the criterion of falsifiability to distinguish
science from non-science. Statements like ‘God created the
universe’ may be true or false, but they are not falsifiable,
so they are not scientific; they lie outside the scope of science.
These principles for determining the scientific include reproducibility
and intersubjective ( shared by more than one conscious mind ) verifiability,
i.e. the analysis or experimentation can be reproduced by another
group to achieve the same results.
A good example of speculation
through to verifiability is the moment that Charles Darwin, on his
journey to the Galapagos Islands, noticed that finches differed
from one island to the next. He suspected that the different species
of finches must have descended from a single common ancestor. This
protoscientific hypothesis, which became the long controversial
Theory of Evolution, only recently made the transition from protoscience
to science, |
with
modern DNA analysis verifying many of his speculations.
By contrast, ’Pseudoscience’
is a practice or body of knowledge that claims to be scientific
but does not adhere to the scientific method of reproducibility,
and is often in conflict with current scientific concensus. The
term has negative connotations because it is most commonly used
in reference to subjects that deceptively portray themselves as
science, and so those labeled as ‘pseudoscience’ normally
reject the classification.
All of the above terms contain
elements that seem applicable to The Seventh Earth, but I feel its
content and my approach are mostly ‘Original Research’
and ‘Protoscience’. The overall hypothesis, the existence
of somewhere in the region of 600 billion human beings on 6 former
Earths within this solar system, definitely falls outside the scope
of science ( perhaps with the exception of some kind of measurement
of probability ). It is also in conflict with current scientific
concensus and can be regarded as pure speculation, but it is not
‘pseudoscience’ in that I do not claim it to be scientific.
The deceptive element of pseudosciences is not applicable here.
I am aware of what parts of my hypotheses are speculative and which
are more measureable. This is why I have divided the work into two
separate hypotheses, the second of which I regard as ‘Protoscience’,
especially in terms of methodology.
My methodology is akin to the
cases mentioned above, where actual experimentation or analysis
is not carried out, but the originality is in the way existing understanding
is re-interpreted. I simply gather reading material on any subjects
I believe relevant at the level of the layperson with specialized
interests, llike ‘National Geographic’ or ‘Scientific
American’. For every dozen or so of these magazines I refer
to third level textbooks within these fields, like Plate-Tectonics
or Geology. I accept the finer details of the work done in these
fields and generally question the broader interpretations of them,
especially in the areas that they overlap, like the conventional
reconstructions of prehistoric continents being carried out on the
understanding that the sphere has always retained a constant diameter,
determined by research in Astrophysics. This apparent overlapping
of fields is crucial to the pursuit of my secondary hypothesis and
leads me on to my approach in addressing it.
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