Phenomenoscience – The Key to the Proper Development of New Concepts in Science

Scientific Paper
Title	Phenomenoscience – The Key to the Proper Development of New Concepts in Science
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	T B Bon
Keywords	Phenomenoscience
Published	2010
No. of pages	26

Read the full paper here

Abstract

There are many today who believe that mathematics is the critical key to theoretical development in physics and that treatises lacking mathematical support are "speculative or philosophical at best, not rigorously theoretical". Mathematics is a wonderful, marvelous tool and can greatly aid in our endeavors – however, it is not, nor can it really ever be, the true key and foundation to good theoretical development. The real key is the careful and effective evaluation and understanding of the actual physical phenomena in Reality. That is because mathematics, and indeed, essentially all of our other tools depend on the completeness and validity of our phenomenological understanding of physically how and why things actually work the way that they do to ensure that they are correlated adequately and accurately with Reality in a correct and appropriate manner. Since there does not appear to be any term in science today which refers specifically to such a careful and focused endeavor, the term phenomenoscience is herein defined and some of the basic considerations of its use are described as well. The goal is to show why phenomenoscience is critical to the proper progression of science, and to provide some indication of approaches that need to be used as well as the care that needs to be exercised in its practice.

Overview

This is a methodological paper rather than a physical one: it argues about how theoretical physics ought to be done, not about any particular phenomenon. T. B. Bon coins the term phenomenoscience — defined as "the art and science of ascertaining a true and correct understanding of the actual physical whys and hows of the processes and interactions that are behind the phenomena that we observe in Reality" — and argues that it, not mathematics, is the proper foundation of physics. The word was invented because "phenomenology" was already taken by philosophy in a sense Bon regards as nearly contrary to what is intended. The paper defines the practice, states its axioms, works through four illustrative examples, and lays out a four-stage procedure for applying it.

The departure from the mainstream account is a claim about priority and about evidence. Bon's central thesis is that mathematics "has absolutely NO inherent ties whatsoever to Reality – except for whatever correlations we manage to imbue it with when we formulate our initial equations", and that consequently numerical agreement between calculation and observation is not proof that the underlying picture is correct. The corollary is the paper's sharpest claim: because more than one mathematically distinct formalism can reproduce the same numbers while implying quite different physical mechanisms, mathematical success cannot discriminate between them, and "only good phenomenoscience holds the potential for a satisfactory resolution." Bon dates the trouble to roughly 80–100 years before writing, when mathematics was promoted to "Queen of science" and, in relativity, quantum mechanics and Big Bang cosmology, "mainstream science effectively decided to abandon the old standards of logic and rationality and thereafter to embrace the 'successful' mathematics – sans intuitive concepts."

The argument

What phenomenoscience is, and what it is not

Bon separates phenomenoscience from philosophy: both recombine observations to reach new insight and both aim at logic, but "with philosophy, one is free to dream up anything that one might be able to imagine", whereas phenomenoscience only permits possibilities consistent with what is already confidently known of Reality, and requires that the final result be consistent with Reality. The claim is turned back on the mainstream: since mathematics can serve philosophy as readily as science, "any mathematics that are developed without the critical understanding that only good phenomenoscience can provide is actually nothing more than mathematical philosophy until proven otherwise."

The practice rests on five stated principles and three formal axioms. The principles: Reality when properly understood is always logical and rational; Reality's interactions make observation complex even where the underlying principles are simple; mathematics cannot come first; conceptual understanding is the only consistently valid foundation; and simplification obscures critical detail, so one must be able to evaluate in the midst of complexity, since "all clues are considered to be important." The axioms: (I) all primary clues must come from Reality, and Reality is ultimately rational and intuitive; (II) Reality is consistent — basic principles hold "at all scales, velocities, and circumstances"; (III) we must not presume that everything that exists can be directly perceived or measured. Bon supports (III) with the Neutrino: inferred from occasional interactions rather than directly measured, yet believed real. He therefore rejects measurability as a criterion of science, offering instead: "Science is the art and practice of observing and evaluating Reality, by whatever means are available and appropriate, in order to discern the truth of Reality as accurately and completely as possible."

A recurring warning concerns mathematical equivalence. Bon's worked case is the wave-function formulation versus Feynman's sum-over-paths for single-electron double-slit interference, citing Brian Greene's discussion. Two conceptually incompatible pictures yield identical numbers; science has treated them as synonymous; at most one can describe Reality — and Bon adds that "it is actually very probable that neither" does. He also warns against "similarities in appearance": two phenomena that produce indistinguishable effects under all available tests, and for which the same mathematics therefore works, are not thereby shown to be physically the same thing.

Four examples of unsound foundations

Time. Bon argues we have never measured time, because time is intangible: "we only mark it – we find some sort of reasonably regular process and then count cycles." The consequence he draws is that Time Dilation has not been verified. Cosmic-ray decay rates and atomic clock oscillations agree numerically with relativity's predictions, but "there is absolutely no means whatsoever for us to validate clearly, experimentally, whether it was some phenomenological effect associated only with the marking process itself, an actual change in intangible 'time', or some combination thereof." Something changed; what changed is not established.

Conservation of energy and momentum. Taken as inviolate at all scales by axiom II. Bon therefore rejects concepts that permit violations bounded only by the condition that they be undetectable — "hidden by uncertainty" — since such criteria "by definition, would ensure that we would never actually be able to confirm whether or not such ideas are truly correct." Virtual particles are named as the blatant case, "which has in turn spawned a multiplicity of equally irrational dependent concepts."

Harmonic motion. Bon's most physical example. Oscillation, he observes, is always the signature of an unstable condition in a resonant system relaxing toward stability; "if the initial condition is not unstable – it does not oscillate." Yet Light is held to consist of nothing but a harmonically oscillating electromagnetic field, and it crosses millions of light years with no sign of decay. Bon concludes that the accepted composition of light "is rather substantially inconsistent with this particular property of harmonic motion" and that there "absolutely MUST be more to the picture."

The Aether. Offered as an example of an overstated disproof. The Michelson-Morley Experiment did refute the aether as originally conjectured, and several variants — anything making light travel at different speeds in different directions near the earth's surface. It did not establish that no undetected background environment exists; on that, "good phenomenoscience would recognize that the possibility... yet remains as an open question."

The four-stage procedure

Stage I is foundational and is where Bon places the greatest emphasis: go back and re-examine everything currently believed, including what is believed to have been disproven, since "the tendency is to throw out or dismiss the entire concept as though absolutely all aspects of that particular theory had been shown to be incorrect, when only certain aspects of it might actually have been." Stage II builds on the surviving foundations to clarify more complex known phenomena, and serves as a crosscheck on stage I. Stage III is exploratory and has two interacting aspects: searching all confidently known Reality for clues and parallels that narrow the range of possible mechanisms, then testing each surviving candidate for logical fit with everything else known; Bon expects "a great many dead-end ideas" and multiple iterations. Stage IV is where mathematics and targeted experiment finally enter, as confirmation. Bon is explicit that this final test is asymmetric: numerical agreement "does not discredit the concepts", but only numerical disagreement is conclusive.

Bon also rejects scholarly apparatus as a criterion. "Extensive reference to other's ideas can often actually be more of a hindering distraction than an asset"; the crucial test "is only in how well the final outcome truly matches and correlates with Reality itself." A correct picture, he adds, will "transition across all scales and concepts in an essentially seamless manner", without paradoxes or the "totally disjointed treatments" he sees in modern physics. The paper concludes that "Physics – and therefore, science as well – are off their moorings", and points readers to Bon's own The Theory of Field Interaction for worked applications.

Assessment

The paper's strongest contribution is the underdetermination argument, and it is a legitimate one. That distinct formalisms can be empirically equivalent while suggesting different ontologies is not a fringe claim — it is the standard situation with the wave-function and path-integral formulations Bon cites, and with Lorentzian versus Einsteinian interpretations of the same transformations. His asymmetry point in stage IV is likewise correct as stated: agreement confirms weakly, disagreement refutes strongly. The insistence that a "disproof" be read for exactly what it excludes, illustrated with Michelson–Morley, is careful and fair; the experiment did constrain a class of aether models rather than settle a metaphysical question. The harmonic-motion observation is the paper's one genuinely novel physical puzzle, and it is posed cleanly enough to be worth answering.

The difficulties are structural. The most serious is that axiom I(B) — "Reality is always rational and intuitive" — is asserted, and Bon's supporting evidence is autobiographical: whenever something seemed counterintuitive, further work eventually made it intuitive, and "I have not found that there have ever been any true exceptions whatsoever." As a methodological rule this is unfalsifiable in the way Bon himself objects to elsewhere: any persistent counterexample can always be classed as not yet properly understood. It also does real work in the argument, since it is what licenses rejecting quantum mechanics on conceptual grounds. Second, the paper never resolves how phenomenoscience is to adjudicate between two competing intuitive pictures. Bon concedes that "it might be difficult to find even any two skilled individuals who could reach total agreement", and offers only the stage-IV crosscheck — which is mathematics and experiment, the very tools he has argued cannot settle the question. Third, the treatment of the harmonic-motion example does not engage the standard answer: a free electromagnetic wave in vacuum is a source-free solution of Maxwell's equations, not a damped oscillator, and its persistence follows from energy conservation in a lossless medium — a point that sits awkwardly beside Bon's own insistence on conservation as inviolate.

Where the argument touches measurement, the strain is clearest in the time-dilation example. Bon is right that clocks are marked rather than time measured, but the inference that nothing has been verified goes too far: the effect has been confirmed across physically unrelated marking processes — muon decay lifetimes, caesium clocks flown on aircraft, the Ives–Stilwell transverse Doppler shift, Mössbauer rotor experiments, and, more recently, optical-lattice clocks resolving gravitational shifts over height differences of centimetres. That every independent kind of clock is deranged by exactly the same factor is itself a strong constraint on any "marking-process" explanation, and Bon does not address it. Similarly, virtual particles are dismissed as violating conservation, but in the standard treatment they are internal lines of a perturbative expansion in which four-momentum is conserved at every vertex; the paper argues against a popularisation rather than the formalism. The result is a paper that is valuable as a statement of the dissident case for conceptual priority — and honest about its own limits, since Bon repeatedly declines to claim comprehensiveness — but that supplies a programme rather than a method, and cannot yet show how its central adjudicating step would work in a contested case.