The LHC experiment at the European Nuclear Research Center is presently being continued in defiance of a public proof of danger \u2014 that the planet will be shrunk to a diameter of 2 cm in perhaps 5 years\u2019 time with a probability of up to 8 percent if the experiment goes on. The continuation occurs in defiance of the recent public appeal by a court to allow for a scientific safety conference first.<\/p>\n
No public voice on the planet acknowledges this critical situation \u2013 even though simultaneously another survival error unfolds before everyone\u2019s eyes. The perhaps most cynical situation of history. What has gone awry?<\/p>\n
Is \u201crational science\u201d a myth that was imperceptibly abandoned? The scientific members of CERN cannot possibly believe that they are acting in accord with the rules of rational science, one feels. Nevertheless they are being held in high esteem across the planet \u2013 so high in fact that the world\u2019s media appear to voluntarily observe the first global press curfew. How can the manifest irrationality \u2013 if it is one \u2013 be explained?<\/p>\n
The reason has to do with opinion power \u2013 who would argue with 8.000 scientists? But suppose the mentioned proof is really on the table (as it is to the best of my knowledge): What would be the explanation, then? One would be forced to conclude that outdated science, if held fast to, is not science any more but rather the opposite: the most dangerous enemy of the future. We know this from medieval times where dogmatism took over under the mantle of orthodoxy (in the good sense). Did we re-arrive there again with the burden of a much more dangerous arsenal of instruments, acquired in a preceding period of rationalism? <\/p>\n
Pursuing this tantalizing thesis could be a rewarding pastime in the last years of a doomsday-conscious planetary society once it will be too late to do anything about it. The present period of \u201cafter-science\u201d will then be diagnosed as being characterized by a global intolerance toward novel scientific results \u2014 an intolerance profound enough to let the whole planet prefer dying to accepting any qualitative (\u201crevolutionary\u201d) scientific advance as necessary to uphold the premises of rationality.<\/p>\n
A single individual is unlikely to have enough experience to spot such an overall trend in the broad scientific endeavor should it really exist. Has science been abandoned at more than one point, and so for years or decades in a row so that the diagnosed attempted suicide would be a symptom in a broader development? <\/p>\n
In the following, I will attempt to put together a few examples which jointly could support such a diagnosis. It will be of interest to learn how others see this, and how we might be able to create a consciousness of what is happening here, so as to have some theoretical fun in our \u201clast hour\u201d on the planet (to quote Sir Martin Rees) in the worst case. Or to put it more hopefully: Being joint victims of a spirit of anti-progress, the planet\u2019s citizens may take an interest in learning about an individual\u2019s subjective experience with other cases in point. In this way, other \u201cspecialists for non-specialization\u201d might feel encouraged to contribute their own experiences \u2014 so that at the last moment a new blossoming of an outdated spirit of progress can perhaps be triggered on the planet. The following personal selection of ten points might, in spite of its subjective character, prove to be \u201cbetter than nothing\u201d as a starting point. <\/p>\n
1) Following the downfall of the potentially deadly East-West competition (which apart from this inherent risk also had some good sides to it like the development of space travel), the most striking example of \u201canti-progress,\u201d if I may use this term, was perhaps the historical refusal by planetary protagonists to install \u201cLampsacus hometown of all persons on the Internet.\u201d Vannevar Bush, Stafford Beer and Francois Mitt\u00e9rand had already had the same idea before the age of the Internet. Ezer Weizmann was then ready to do it jointly with Saudi Arabia, but got deposed at the worst possible moment. All other leaders and governments and churches and big foundations waived the opportunity. No billionaire loved his fellow human beings enough to give them this affordable present, and not a single country wanted to reap the immense fruits (in terms of friendship and economic connections) gained from installing this science-born and science-promoting progress on the planet, a progress necessary to make the planet a bearable place for every inhabitant. An information-science based progress which, by the way, had been made a practical option by CERN\u2019s inventing the Internet (Tim Berners-Lee worked there). A whole new science \u2013 \u201cthe pyramid\u201d- representing every knowledge on all levels of resolution and making all connections across levels, got consciously rejected. Only some maverick kids who invented some sub-elements of Lampsacus soon after (like Google, wiki and iPud) could not be prevented from giving a few crumbs to the world, a fact for which most everyone has grown grateful ever since. <\/p>\n
2) A second example of manifest \u201canti-progress\u201d is in my eyes the strange refusal by the therapeutic profession to discuss or apply the acoustic-smile therapy of primary autism. This harmless idea was proposed in outline in 1968 and in detail in 1975 by the present writer (who apologizes again for the use of personal experience). The apparent reason, in retrospect, for this resilience of a whole profession was the prediction made that the therapy would be so effective as to work also with non-human mirror-competent lovely young creatures (a phenomenon subsequently called \u201cgalactic export\u201d). This heart-moving trait apparently went too much against the grain of contemporaneous science (imagine it would work: what a catastrophe to conservatism). In this understandable way, a new science based on contributions by many workers (like Ren\u00e9 Spitz, John Bowlby, Selma Fraiberg, Konrad Lorenz, John Lilly and Gregory Bateson) proved empirically unwelcome for decades. This may or may not teach us something about our present context.<\/p>\n
3) Example number three would be the tacit abandonment of project \u201cLunatown\u201d by Japan and all cooperating countries for almost two decades already. If it is true that humanity has caught a deadly virus with the invention of systematic science (as can be argued but as I try to counter-caricature here with the thesis that it is only the corruption of the spirit of science that is deadly), then this first step in a \u201clifeboat\u201d type expansion of humankind across other celestial bodies is the only safe chance for its sustainable future. As brave scientist Stephen Hawking independently proposed in books written for his young grandson. <\/p>\n
4) The fourth example of science having ceased to reign without anyone\u2019s noticing is cosmology \u2014 a topic that most everyone on the planet finds fascinating. Edwin Hubble, the 1928 discoverer of cosmological redshift \u2014 that grandiose phenomenon of a systematic frequency change of light with distance which explains why the night sky is dark -, got his Nobel prize denied because he did not believe in the ad-hoc explanation of a \u201cbig bang.\u201d Fritz Zwicky\u2019s timely 1929 discovery of the correct explanation \u2013 a \u201cdynamical friction\u201d suffered by any fast particle traversing a churning cauldron of randomly moving gravitation centers \u2014 got rejected owing to an error in his calculation. The latter got effectively corrected 15 years later, by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in a more limited astronomical context (the braking of fast-moving stars in a globular star cluster as is necessary in order to explain the longevity of these oldest known structures in the universe). Nevertheless \u201cdynamical friction\u201d stayed in-applied to cosmology for many more decades (owing to chemical friction between the protagonists?). It no doubt got re-discovered several times since; the late Ilya Prigogine was open to it, for example. The Tubingen school\u2019s belated arrival at it, 74 years after Zwicky, got apparently never quoted. Why the resistance? The false ad-hoc-explanation of an exploding bomb (\u201cbig bang\u201d) proves virtually in-erasable after its having been married with other falsities \u2014 like \u201cnonbaryonic dark matter\u201d and an alleged \u201ccosmic\u201d origin of the galactic background radiation (whose first discovery by Charles Guillaume in 1896 (as I learned from Andre Koch Assis) got totally suppressed following its re-discovery half a century later by Wilson and Penzias who mistook it for a fingerprint of the putative primordial fire ball). Amazingly, even quantitative numbers \u2014 the famous \u201c13.7 billion years\u201d for a finite cosmic age \u2014 could be erroneously extracted from the most beautiful quantitative data. I do hope that you will get a bit angry with me at this point \u2014 so as to feel ready for a debate. In this way we will understand better how excusable CERN really is with its refusal to argue with a competing much smaller school. And that scientific truth is too serious a business for majority decisions to be accepted. I forgot to add that a numerical proof of the simplest case of the underlying new sister discipline to statistical mechanics (cryodynamics) was published by a hard-working coworker last year. <\/p>\n
5) The fifth example has to do with the many-cuts theory of quantum mechanics. The latter got initiated by Einstein\u2019s writing a letter to a 12-year old boy named Hugh Everett in 1943. The \u201cspooky action at a distance\u201d first discovered (if doubted) by Einstein 8 years before, would then be explained 14 years later by that very boy. But the pertinent crucial experiment \u2013 proving that Everett is right in case of a positive outcome \u2014 which was proposed independently many times since the 1980s (by Susan Feingold, Roger Penrose, the Tubingen group and Anton Zeilinger, to mention only the short list), was never done by ESA to which it had been proposed. The reason was in the last instance, so I believe, that the to be expected further confirmation of the Bell inequalities also here (in a relativistic situation of two mutually receding measuring stations so that each station would make the first measurement in its own frame) \u2014 would have proved Everett\u2019s interpretation to be the correct theory of quantum mechanics at the expense of the reigning Copenhagen interpretation. Since everybody still falsely believes Everett\u2019s theory were a many-universes (rather than a many-cuts) interpretation, the predictable outcome would have been unbearable as a measured fact. In this way, the overdue empirical confirmation of microscopically sharp \u201cassignment conditions\u201d existing in physics besides Newton\u2019s \u201claws\u201d and \u201cinitial conditions,\u201d got missed or rather postponed. The assignment conditions are different for each observer in his own quantum world, if Einstein\u2019s provocative prediction that two non-commuting observables can be measured in physics in defiance of quantum mechanics is the empirically confirmed alternative interpretation of the predicted outcome: that two observer-specific quantum worlds in the sense of von Neumann have become manifest empirically) is adopted. But the latter is too scary even to be contemplated owing to its religion-rehabilitating character. So it was \u201cwise\u201d in a sense on the part of the physical community to forget about Asher Peres and Susan Feingold and the rest of the crew? Such a scientific tactlessness \u2013 to arrive at an empirical clash with the common sense of a century \u2013 is the hallmark of Einstein\u2019s proposals. This time around, its empirical verification got eschewed for more than two decades, mostly for subconscious reasons I would expect. Copenhagen \u2014 Einstein\u2019s dearest enemy \u2014 therefore still reigns to date even though it most likely is no longer alive. <\/p>\n
6) The sixth case in point is the classical explanation of Planck\u2019s constant as a classical Sackur-action in statistical mechanics, published 26 years ago. Any momentarily closed classical statistical mechanical system (like a gas or fluid or composite system chemical structure like a brain) contains a phase-space volume described by the Sackur-Tetrode equation which contains Planck\u2019s constant in the denominator \u2013 but not as a constant, only as a unit. So a system-specific unit action can be calculated. In the case of the brain, it empirically coincides with h-bar to within a factor of less than two when calculated roughly. This fact may or may not be a coincidence. Evidence in favor of the second alternative was later unexpectedly found in the course of pursuing the new science of endophysics. The prospect of better understanding both quantum mechanics and relativity on this basis has come into view. Yet so, of course, without catching any one\u2019s interest in the scientific community. Our question here is: Why the \u201cof course\u201d?<\/p>\n
7) The seventh case in point that I had the good fortune to come in contact with is the classical Pauli cell. The topic of \u201cclassical indistinguishability\u201d has an incredibly long history, going back (via Hans Primas, Hermann Weyl, Wolfgang Pauli, Josiah Willard Gibbs, the Leibniz-Clarke-Newton correspondence, Spinoza, the Mutakallim\u00fan and Gregorius of Naziance) to Anaxagoras in ancient Greece and the town of Lampsacus (Lapseki today which is still famous for its giant cherries). The physical existence of indistinguishable particles entails a rationally explicable miracle: an instantaneous jumping of particle identities at well-defined mutual positions in space in their common frame, in between two or more particles provided they are \u201cabsolutely\u201d (transfinitely exactly) equal. No one takes notice for more than two decades of this mathematical fact as an element of quantum mechanics explained classically. Chemistry relies crucially on it. It in addition teaches us something about our own nature: Consciousness appears to be attached to an anatomically localized subset of such \u201ctransfinitely exactly polished\u201d particles in a certain part of our brain \u2013 if the Feingold experiment has the predicted outcome. Such proposals in the footsteps of Einstein and Pauli are hard even to be made plausible today. <\/p>\n
8) Number eight is the brain equation of 1974. If it had not been consistently ignored, the robots that are so desperately lacking to humankind today in an ongoing emergency would long be available. On the empirical side, there is a matching fact: Lack of support for the \u201cPandaka pygmaea Brain Research Institute\u201d first proposed in 1990. Here the smallest biological brain functioning like ours, that of Pandaka (and that of a close relative, Gobius niger, that already is halfway in size between Pandaka\u2019s and ours) would have been investigated in maximum detail in the footsteps of Werner Reichardt\u2019s who had devoted his life to the house fly\u2019s brain at age 27 (as he once told me). The prediction that many nobel prizes would be forthcoming had no charming effect on the scientific community \u2013 which is the point of interest in our present context. <\/p>\n
9) Example number nine is a confirmation of Einsteinophobia again \u2013 directed against the young Einstein for once. It refers to the experience, collected over two decades, that it is not allowed any longer to draw new conclusions from Einstein\u2019s old findings. Equally disallowed are deviations from ingrained conclusions derived from the latter by other workers (like the famous horizon-eliminating transformations which although mathematically admissible are unphysical). The gravitational time-slowdown of clocks (T), found in the equivalence principle by Einstein in 1907, has since acquired three natural-born twins (L, M, Ch) for length, mass, charge; the whole bunch therefore got nicknamed \u201cTelemach\u201d (after Ulysses\u2019 son Telemachus). The implied improved understanding of black holes has, far from triggering a wave because of its beauty, become a planetary taboo topic. Einstein\u2019s theory \u2014 a taboo, both in quantum mechanics and in relativity? <\/p>\n
10) Example number ten makes the bridge to our topic proper (the LHC). A doctoral dissertation containing an early corollary to Telemach (a rotating frictionless wheel when lowered onto the surface of a neutron star is radially enlarged by 34 percent to conserve angular momentum) got rejected by the faculty in charge, despite two A grades granted in the absence of any other graded report. A nobelist asked our forgiving for his not daring to help us. It took us two years before getting a glimpse of the motivation: The result touched on the dogma of Hawking radiation and, with it, on the safety of the LHC experiment. <\/p>\n
The absence of Hawking radiation, demonstrated by our group, does not automatically mean that there is no remaining safety net for CERN. Two important safety factors need to be taken into account: The continued existence of neutron stars in the cosmos, and an possible slow (non-exponential) growth rate a inside matter. Both are sold to the public as life insurances by CERN against better knowledge.<\/p>\n
Case 1 (neutron stars): CERN claims that the ultrafast natural cousins to the ultraslow human-made miniature black holes, hoped to be generated in Geneva, would long have eaten all neutron stars inside out if the human made ones posed any risk to earth. However, while it is true that natural miniblackholes will get stuck inside a neutron star, the alleged high growth rate so the star will be eaten, is false: Any beginning growth in the crust comes to a standstill when the black hole sinks into the core. This is because the superfluid coreis frictionless according to quantum mechanics so the black hole cannot accrete matter there. The quantum guardian angel was communicated to CERN in time and published ahead of their (silent) \u201csafety report.\u201d<\/p>\n
Case 2 (non-exponential growth): CERN claims that inside ordinary matter, black holes grow non-exponentially (just the opposite of what was assumed before). Thus while the fact that earth is going to be eaten inside out as the consequence of the experiment if successful is conceded, death allegedly will come slow. 50 million years was an estimate for which BBC conducted an opinion poll 4 years ago \u2013 with appallingly low approval rates by the public. In its subsequent \u201csafety report,\u201d the number was increased more than a hundred-fold. Although the corresponding paper was sent to CERN long before their safety report appeared, it remains unquoted up to this day. The fact that a chaotic attractor (a \u201cKleiner attractor in real space\u201d) is formed inside matter as an exponentially growing miniature miniquasar so the eating time is reduced to the order of years is taboo.<\/p>\n
The point in our context is not these details (or any accompanying cover-up) \u2014 it is the silence of the scientific community. Our topic proper is loss of rationalism on a suicide-prone planet. I am not sure I could convince you of an overall decline in the disciplined spirit of science with my ten points. Or of the persisting truth of Francis Bacon\u2019s claim that nature is humankind\u2019s enemy posing booby traps that become the more dangerous the more advanced the technology is. This healthy rationalist attitude has evaporated from the planet, or so it appears. <\/p>\n
My friend C. Andy Hilgartner is not so optimistic. He thinks there is a virus \u2013 a lethal assumption \u2013 contained in rationalism itself. Or more specifically in the way post-hunter-gatherer societies are \u201clanguaging.\u201d He is the first to have written an artificial grammar derived from explicit premises (the \u201cnon-Aristotelian premises\u201d proposed in 1941 by Alfred Korzybski). From those premises, he with linguist Ronald Harrington generated a \u201cLet us keep track of what we say\u201d notational language. It avoids the crucial mistake which Hilgartner sees in the pretense, implicit in the usual generalized grammar underlying the Indo-European languages among others, that unlike verbs, nouns (maps) are implicitly identified with what they stand for (territory). This amounts to a built-in dishonesty in our languaging and hence in our thinking. <\/p>\n
I hope that this advanced level of rationalism (Korzybski\u2019s 1941 book is titled \u201cScience and Sanity\u201d) is not really needed for the planet\u2019s survival, in the present short-term situation. For as we saw even the traditional rationalism called \u201cscience\u201d is violated by the current lifeboat-defying collective inactivity of the rest of the globe in the face of CERN\u2019s activity. But I cannot rule out that Andy has caught the real culprit so everything placed before your judgment above was na\u00efve since the real met\u00e1noia needed remained unaddressed. The existing urgency would be my only excuse. <\/p>\n
Let me close proposing an opinion poll in case anyone cares to reply: Please, add a Y or an N to your name and\/or text answering the following question: \u201cShould CERN take a break and allow the scientific safety conference to be convened? Yes or no?\u201d The N answers will be of special interest to every reader.<\/p>\n
I thank Bill Seaman, Ken Hiwaki, Artur Schmidt and Martha Bartter for discussions. For JO.R. (042711) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The LHC experiment at the European Nuclear Research Center is presently being continued in defiance of a public proof of danger \u2014 that the planet will be shrunk to a diameter of 2 cm in perhaps 5 years\u2019 time with a probability of up to 8 percent if the experiment goes on. The continuation occurs [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-existential-risks","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}