Revolutionary Science

There is something called TED talks where authoritative speakers, often with commending British accents, distill a wisdom compatible with the reigning oligarchies, and a clipped delivery. Although the subjects vary, the tone seems to be always the same.

“TED” stands for “Tech, Entertainment, Design”. Anti-plutocrats should be aware that TED banned a talk where Nick Hanauer pointed out that “rich people don’t create jobs”. TED did not find Hanauer entertaining. By design, TED applies the technology of eradication to “ideas worth spreading”. So it gave its grand prize to the pseudo-Christian “Bono” of U2 for becoming a Facebook billionaire, or to Bill Clinton for authorizing banks to invest in financial derivatives, instead of the base material world they used to belong to, before their elevation.

In a book called “Science Set Free” (USA), or: “Science Delusion” (UK) Dr. Sheldrake challenges notions about science that many take for granted:  Sheldrake itemizes what he calls the 10 “dogmas” of modern science, then tries to challenge them in his own special way.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist, author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books.  A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he got a Ph.D.  in biochemistry at Cambridge U.  He was a Fellow in Cambridge, and Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology.

Here is the default world view of science educated people hold, according to Sheldrake. Every of these scientific dogmas is questionable, he says. (As I will show, little does he know…)

1.  Nature is Mechanical.
2.  Matter is unconscious.
3.  The Laws of Nature are fixed.
4.  The total amount of matter and energy is constant.
5.  Nature is purposeless.
6.  Biological inheritance is entirely material.
7.  Memories are stored inside your brain in material processes.
8.  Your mind is inside your head.
9.  Psychic phenomena are impossible.
10.  Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.

(Sheldrake believes in his own weird and unnecessary theory. He does not understand the way units relate in physics, so he went on a flight of fancy from there. He wants young giraffes’ (!) minds to be educated by a mysterious force out there, not realizing that the environment itself is doing so, in subtle and mighty ways.)

What fascinated me, when I came across Sheldrake’s amusing list above, is that the most established recent science itself has thrown many of these dogmas down. So Mr. S. is blissfully unawares of the true state of science. Indeed:  

 1) Nature is Mechanical: we are machines, “lumbering robots” (Dawkins)

What’s outrageous about Dawkins, and many other leading thinkers, is that they do not seem to have a full vision of science. Question: What’s mechanics? It is certainly not about mechanical robots, in the classical mechanics sense. One has to realize that mechanics is Quantum mechanics. And nobody under-stands that. quantum systems have one thing in common with conscious system, namely that they are not completely predictable.

 2) Matter is Unconscious: lots of philosophy of mind in the last century is about proving that we are unconscious.

Right, well…Question: define conscious. Are sleep walkers conscious? Is an electron conscious when it decides to do whatever it’s doing with the 2-slits it seems aware of? Consciousness cannot be experimentally defined.

 3) Laws of Nature are fixed:

Remark: this is under constant check by physicists. When on the moon, the acceleration of gravity, a “law”, has changed. The reason for the suspicion is the fact the universe itself is evolving. Also Conventional Big Bang theory creates universes from nothing; that’s probably why it’s false.

Einstein himself admitted that his theory of gravitation threw down the constancy of the speed of light (be it only because gravitation can make light go around in circle, or come to a stand still).

 4)  The total amount of matter and energy is constant.

First we should know how to detect all the matter and energy, before we assert such a thing. The whole riddle of Dark Matter and Dark Energy is that we can’t do either. So, by astronomy’s own reckoning, right now, we miss 96%, we fail to detect or explain, 96% of the matter and energy out there (WMAP). The WMAP seven-year analysis gave an estimate of 72.8% dark energy, 22.7% dark matter and 4.6% ordinary matter.

This science is so official that the discovery of Dark Energy has already been rewarded by several Nobel Prizes.

 5)  Nature is purposeless.

Question: Are we part of nature? Some of us have purpose.

 6)  Biological inheritance is entirely material.

Question: What is material? Is information material? Is a photon material? If it is, and it is, then information is material. Much of biology is a mix of the inherited, and the informed. Both come from material processes.

 7)  Memories are stored inside your brain in material processes.

What else?

 8)  Your mind is inside your head.

We don’t know what “inside the head” means, because we don’t know how many dimensions the universe really has. Some contemporary physicists have tried to depict gravity as a leak, in three dimensions, of a stronger phenomenon, in higher dimensions. It goes without saying that the same could apply to minds.

 9)  Psychic phenomena are impossible.

I don’t know what a “psychic” phenomenon could be. Control of object by pure thinking has already been achieved in the lab by animals, including Homo.

 10)  Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.

Well the placebo effect really exists, and that’s pretty spiritual. Speaking of revolutionary science…

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ARE REMEDIES FOR THE PLUTOCRATIC PLAGUE GETTING FINALLY APPLIED?

It’s not clear the placebo effect will save plutocracy, though. The illusion that bankers and oil men created for us the best of possible worlds is fraying fast. (In spite of desperate counterattacks such as those orchestrated by Sheryl Sandberg, a creature of Larry Summers, soon to be adressed appropriately on this site.)

Real, mechanical, old fashion remedies against the plutocratic plague are on the way. The European Union ordered Cyprus to levy a 10% tax on plutocrats’ bank holdings. Otherwise, the EU will let Cyprus go bankrupt. It goes without saying that Cyprus’ days as a tax haven are over, should Cyprus’ Parliamentpass the law it has been ordered to pass. Meanwhile, ATMs are blocked.

In other anti-plutocratic news, France and Britain threatened to send sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to the rebels fighting the major plutocrat Assad. They gave what boils down to an instructive ultimatum to the rest of Europe.

By instuctive, I mean that, many countries that were clueless when confronting Hitler, are now incited, by France and Britain, in a pedagogical manner, to learn to assume some anti-fascist standing. For some of these countries, it’s like learning to walk. It’s an occasion for them to learn. Obviously, France and Britain will act, and Obama’s admirable USA, quite differently from Roosevelt’s despicable, cowardly and greedy USA, will follow.

Even Conservative PM Cameron had his fill with major plutocracy, so he rolls out the missiles. Nice.

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Patrice Ayme

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Gravitation, etc.

MYSTERIES GALORE…

Abstract: A few basic considerations on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Gravitation, and how science proceeds. For once, nearly no statement here is in any way controversial… (OK, except a few snide remarks on the motivations of some revered physicists, and some tenets of physics requiring experimental proof, rather than blind acceptance…)

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Deep mine experiments look for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). In Europe and the USA, the world’s two largest elementary particle accelerators have targeted their beams towards detectors in said mines, through hundreds of Kilometers of Earth’s mantle. Claims have been made for tentative events. It’s all very tentative, although tantalizing.

The idea for the WIMP search is a bit the same as with neutrino detection: bury deep underground, so that only WIMPs should be left.

Neutrinos are traditionally supposed to have mass zero (neutrino means the small neutral one, an Italian neologism invented by Enrico Fermi, Nobel prize winner, refugee from Mussolini, and scientific head of the nuclear bomb project in the USA; the concept was from Wolfgang Pauli, to explain the continuous spectrum of beta decay). But it turns out that neutrinos have mass, and they oscillate between types. A whole slew of experiments will try to know more soon. So neutrinos are a type of WIMPs, except that they are very light.

It has been known since 1933 (by the Swiss astronomer Zwicky, a supernova specialist, discoverer of the concept of neutron star) that galaxies and clusters of galaxies are missing mass by a factor of at least ten, if one uses straight Newtonian gravity on the observed motions of galaxies or their disks.

Now Newtonian gravity is the first order of the modern ("Einstein’s") theory of gravitation. Both theories differ only at very high speeds or fields. Hence the observed discrepancy would mean that our theory of gravitation is false. A class of modification of Newtonian theory was proposed (MOND = MOdified Newton Dynamics, where the gravitational attraction is the same for high acceleration, proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance, but slips into simply the inverse of the distance for weak accelerations).

But the way science proceeds is to milk a theory to death, until it dies. The Newton-Einstein theory of gravitation is correct in the Earth’s neighborhood, as far as we can see. So the reflex of experimentalists was to look for missing mass under the form of WIMPs. The search was on well before it became obvious neutrino had mass. Now that later fact is a game changer, since supernovas emit copious quantities of neutrinos. Indeed there is less of a missing mass now (maybe only a factor of five instead of ten…)

The apparent Dark Matter is concentrated in strange ways: halos, lobes…

Apparent Dark Matter Ring. Located in the "Fish" galactic cluster, 5 billion light-years away, and 2,6 million light-years across. Gravitational lensing can be seen (by looking carefully) and exhibits the enormous mass of the Dark Matter halo.

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Please remark that in today’s physics, photons have mass zero. All other particles have some mass. The mass zero of the photon has been turned into religion by Relativity theory, but, ultimately, it ought to be considered an experimental fact, to be continually verified. If photons did have a mass, that would be much more of a game changer. It would most probably imply that gravitons have mass too, so gravity would have to be recomputed…

However, for reasons of logical completeness, Pauli (again!) noticed that Quantum Field Theory would work well if and only if each particle had a symmetric partner across the fermion-boson line. This is called SUSY ("SUperSYmmetry"). That would give plenty of WIMPs. So the search is on. 2010 will bring on line plenty of experiments worldwide, and the LHC in Geneva will ramp up in power.

As the preceding indicates, Dark Matter could be something radically new (new WIMPs), or simply explained: say by massive neutrinos (?).

Or then may be gravity was not as we extrapolated it to be, from around our little blue and white spaceship.

But the real mystery is DARK ENERGY. That, if confirmed, is way out of imagined physics (although it could be claimed that the ad hoc "cosmological inflation" used to explain the homogeneity of the Big Bang was just such a possible prediction!). The universe is expanding, as if there was out there a mysterious anti-gravity. There is no mechanism to explain this (although it can be written down in Einstein’s gravitation equation by re-introducing a scalar term, the cosmological constant, Einstein had introduced to make the universe static, before Hubble discovered the expansion, leading an opportunistic Einstein to declare the cosmological constant was "his greatest mistake").

In conclusion, we are extremely far from a final "theory of everything", contrarily to what some physicists have claimed with profit motivated outrageous naivety (there is great profit in books and fame). Profit is most often a bad adviser to the sharpest thinking (something profit obsessed American regressive economists fail to integrate).

Verily, in 25 centuries or so of official physics history, I do not know of one period when so much has been officially not known, and blatantly darkly mysterious. Anything could happen. For example, there is not one force theory, but two, and they do not agree conceptually. The explanatory scheme in gravitation (no force, just inertia), is completely different from the explanatory scheme for forces in Quantum Field Theory (whatever that mystery wrapped in an enigma, shrouded by immense Lagrangians, renormalized by reality turns out to want to say).

Patrice Ayme