Bear with me in what follows it has a point to it. Empiricism seems to comes second to the current paradigm. It shouldn’t do but that’s the way it usually ends up. Empiricism is the belief that all knowledge is based on real experience derived from observation or experimentation rather than theory. This thinking was stimulated by the rise of experimental science, which developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. But as time passed and presumptions flowed from the original experience, unsupported assumptions occasionally diverted from the observed facts and errors swayed the latest beliefs.
I was reading an article on a website dedicated to the history of archaeology, and I was interested to note that during the 19th and 20th century there were numerous finds of early man-made tools. The archaeologists involved included both professional and amateur scientists. They published literally hundreds of papers in all the most respected archaeological journals of their time and they are still available. These finds number in the thousands. The articles were peer reviewed and the dating of the finds were, in the majority accepted. But guess what? At some point in the last century a huge number of those finds were either described as fraudulent or mistaken.
The reason for this volt-face was that in almost every case that was rejected, the date assigned to the substratum in which the tools were found along with the remains of apparently modern human bones, was said to be too early for them to have been genuine man-made tools - therefore their findings have been dismissed. This did not fit in with the paradigm accepted throughout the world of archaeology that modern man could not have existed so long ago therefore the finds were fake or mistaken.
The article was written by a highly respected and knowledgeable expert on prehistoric man-made tools and, using the latest scientific methods to re-examine a number of these tools which lie in dusty cupboards in many museums around the world, he declared the finds genuine and argued that the current paradigm was wrong and modern humans had existed many thousands of years longer than the current archaeological system allows.
The reason I have mentioned this, reminds me of our own case. The archaeologists rejected those early findings because they didn’t agree with what they had been taught. Modern science rejects our finding because doesn’t fit in with what we have been taught. We believe that the evidence that Johann Bessler’s perpetual motion was genuine and there is excellent evidence in the form of direct observation supporting this conclusion, but this evidence was dismissed because it didn’t fit within the current belief both then and now.
JC
