The Ten Assumptions of Science: Toward a New Scientific Worldview

The Ten Assumptions of Science: Toward a New Scientific Worldview
Author	Glenn Borchardt
Subject	Scientific philosophy
Published	2004
Publisher	iUniverse
Pages	125
ISBN	0-595-31127-X

The Ten Assumptions of Science: Toward a New Scientific Worldview is a 2004 book by Glenn Borchardt setting out the philosophical foundation on which his later work — neomechanics, Infinite Universe Theory, the Neomechanical Gravitation Theory and Universal Cycle Theory — is built. It is the shortest and most fundamental of his books, and the one everything else in his programme depends on.

Its argument is that science does not rest on proven absolutes but on assumptions; that every assumption has an equally unprovable opposite; and that most of the confusion in modern physics and cosmology comes from mixing deterministic and indeterministic assumptions without noticing that a choice has been made at all.

Method

Borchardt takes his criteria from the philosopher R. G. Collingwood. A genuinely fundamental assumption has two marks: it always has an opposite, and it can never be completely proven. When more than one is adopted, a third requirement applies — they must be consupponible, meaning that assuming any one of them permits assuming all the others without contradiction.

He presents the ten as satisfying that test as a set, and their indeterministic opposites as forming a rival consupponible set which is the foundation of belief in the supernatural. His claim is not that his assumptions are proven, but that they are coherent, that they are the ones science actually needs, and that the alternatives cannot be held together without contradiction. The assumption of infinity is the thread running through all ten.

The ten assumptions

Materialism — the external world exists after the observer does not. An idea may be tested by interaction with that world through observation or experiment.
Causality — all effects have an infinite number of material causes.
Uncertainty — it is impossible to know everything about anything, but it is possible to know more about anything.
Inseparability — just as there can be no motion without matter, so there can be no matter without motion.
Conservation — matter and the motion of matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
Complementarity — all bodies are subject to divergence and convergence from other bodies.
Irreversibility — all processes are irreversible; it is impossible to travel back in time.
Infinity — the universe is infinite, both in the microscopic and the macroscopic directions.
Relativism — all things have characteristics that make them similar to all other things, as well as characteristics that make them dissimilar to all other things.
Interconnection — all things are interconnected; between any two objects exist other objects that transmit matter and motion.

Consequences

Several of Borchardt's better-known positions follow directly from the list rather than from any physical argument:

No origin of the universe. Conservation plus infinity leaves nothing for cosmogony to study. If matter and motion cannot be created, and the universe is infinite in both directions, it cannot have begun.
No matterless motion. Inseparability rules out motion as a thing in its own right, and with it the treatment of energy or fields as substances. Energy, on Borchardt's account, "neither exists nor occurs"; it is a calculation describing the motion or potential motion of matter.
No perfectly solid matter and no perfectly empty space. Infinite divisibility forbids a smallest indivisible particle, and interconnection forbids a genuine void.
No time travel and no reversible processes. Irreversibility is assumed rather than derived, and time is understood as the motion of all things with respect to all other things.

The book's target throughout is the Big Bang, which Borchardt argues requires the opposite assumptions — finity, creation from nothing, and matterless motion — while presenting itself as the deliverance of observation. He writes that adherence to his assumptions "will contribute to the rejection of the 'Big Bang Theory,' which has surpassed the flat Earth theory as the greatest embarrassment to serious thinkers everywhere."

Place in Borchardt's work

Borchardt has described the book as the seed of everything that followed. Apart from the introduction, which covers the necessity of fundamental assumptions and the method for discovering them, its content was absorbed as Chapter 3 of The Scientific Worldview (2007), which added univironmental determinism. The assumptions are restated in Infinite Universe Theory (2017) and underlie the whole of neomechanics. He presented the argument to the Natural Philosophy Alliance as "Ten Assumptions of Science and the Demise of Cosmogony" (2004).

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