Metamorphoses

Radically Transforming Interludes

We have many assumptions and indeed principles, which we truly believe accurately reflect Reality, and they, therefore, underlie absolutely all our explanations and theories.

But, do they address the really important phases in any actual qualitative changes – in the actual development of Reality, or do they merely deal with the local and immanent snapshots of that trajectory or longer exposures of forcibly maintained stable setups, and, therefore, only within one form or another of an unchanging stability?

My contention is that they most certainly do only the latter, and deal with any evident qualitative changes by merely switching between alternative stabilities, and totally ignoring any transformation interludes from one to the other entirely!

But, of course, if these crucial interludes are omitted, such a paradigm will never manage to explain why and how the measured phenomena come to be in place, both in our arranged Domains, and certainly never for totally unfettered Reality.

We may be able to construct analytic and synthesizing methods, within each stability, but they will only encapsulate pattern, and allow prediction thereby: they will be merely technological and certainly not explanatory, for the latter is essential for both true Science and real Philosophy!

And, of course, this is exactly what usually happens, and has done so for centuries.

But, what it means when unavoidable and major transformations occur is that we are then totally ill equipped to either understand them or, indeed, cope with them.

We, in such periods, are tossed about like corks in a stormy sea, and can do nothing to, in any way, intervene.

We are consigned to merely suffer these transformations, and dearly hope for the quick return of our interpretable Stability.

Clearly then, our basic conceptions and methodologies are inadequate to deal with such interludes of qualitative change!

Our achievements are predicated solely upon Stability, and the overall trajectory of any real Development is entirely out of our hands.

We are pragmatic users of stability, yet sufferers of Change!

But, are we congenitally restricted to such a stance?

Can we only do what we do, and no other?

The answer has to be a resounding, “No!

For, to start with, we do not deny these transforming interludes at all. We greet the births of our babies with great delight, and what are such events but interludes of almost miraculous changes?” And we see and recognise the metamorphoses of worm-like caterpillars into devastatingly beautiful butterflies without a qualm. And as a scientist, I recognise these revolutionary episodes throughout the history, not only of all Life, or the development of the Earth, and even of the Cosmos too, and the Life histories of its stars.

We know that these episodes do indeed occur!

Why do we not address such in generality as a natural consequence of the necessary evolution of Reality, and study them all scientifically?

The trouble was, and still is, the unavoidable occurrence of exactly those transformations in Society – the Social Revolutions! For, these can throw out all those who rule or dominate.

They frighten the establishment to death!

So, any serious scientific study of these transformations in general – usually termed Emergences, would also unavoidably have to include Revolutions in that very same remit, and that could be devastating!

Good God! It might equip agitators like Lenin to intervene in a Revolution to work to change its outcome!

Could the establishment ever risk such an occurrence?

The answer is clearly, “No!”

And it has always been so, whatever the establishment consists of. Instead, such researches and methods of investigation, and its resultant theories must be roundly condemned, and even ridiculed, and such people get away with it (most of the time) because they have the old “pluralist science” safely on-their-side.

For that methodology never addresses such transformations – indeed, they are avoided at all costs, and where stability doesn’t naturally exist, it is skilfully imposed to enable successful experiments to be carried out and appropriate laws extracted.

And this can quite adequately produce a galaxy of products, without any recourse to these emergent considerations.

For, their kind of investigation is strictly limited to Stability. And given constrained and maintained Domains, they can find laws that can be used to reliably predict, and hence produce!

The counter to truly explanatory, and, therefore, real Science, is, as always, technology.

For it will work while-ever any system of transforming Revolution does not take over!

For such plurality-determined “science” delivers without addressing any emergent events, except perhaps as “midwives” to the inevitable, or “surgeons” to the catastrophes.

Indeed, this medical-type metaphor is doubly appropriate because more generally, you have to ask -

“How can a profession such as Medicine cope with living people, and all their inevitable health crises that they are bound to undergo, without a standpoint that addresses emergent events?

Surely, they must extend their methods to unavoidably include these events?

For, if not, what you learn and apply must be mere recipes.

If your diagnostic methods, named complaints, and systems of treatment for all possible illnesses are of this nature, then the doctor becomes a database for such a body of knowledge, rather than any kind of investigating scientist

And in a much wider general field, can we call most of what is usually termed “research” (in our society today), Science?

For, it is entirely dependant upon the discoveries, formulations and explanations of other people – scientists who attempt to find laws in given Domains (artificially maintained stabilities).

Those that form the majority of those involved in such “research”, are merely finding the best, quickest, cheapest, most alluring, or most profitable products of already known laws.

They can keep it up almost indefinitely, but it is not Science, but only Technology!

Now, anyone following the current narrative in the media about “Science” will doubtless feel that they have to disagree with this analysis. For, they constantly hear from populists like Professor Brian Cox, Jim Al’Khalili and Marcus du Sautoy of all sorts of phenomena, many of which purport to address qualitative change, but actually do no such thing!

Most of Cox’s qualitative excursions are about things, which cannot be interfered with, far away in the Cosmos, while those from du Sautoy are diversions into Chaos and Fractals (with a substantial addition of the condiment of Pure Chance) to “explain” various Emergences in Mathematics.

But his narratives are a fraud, they are never about Reality, but about the mathematical World of Pure Form alone – what I insist should be called Ideality.

NOTE: In fact his position was put very succinctly by Stanislav Lem when he said:- 

“Let us imagine a mad tailor, who makes all sorts of clothes. He does not know anything about people, birds or plants. He is not interested in the World; he does not examine it. He makes clothes but does not know for whom. He does not think about it. The tailor is only concerned about one thing: he wants to be consistent. [….] He takes the finished clothes to a massive warehouse. If we enter it we would discover that some of the clothes fit an octopus, others fit trees, butterflies, or people. We would find clothes for a centaur and for a unicorn, as well as for creatures they have not even been imagined yet. The majority of his clothes would not find any applications.

Mathematics works in the same way. It builds structures but it is not clear of what. These are perfect models (i.e. perfectly accurate), but a mathematician does not know what they are models of. He is not interested. He does what he does because such an action has turned out to be possible."

Summa Technologiae – Stanislav Lem



Indeed, no one actually addresses such questions.

Finally, we must come to the science that first did actually address Emergences – namely by Charles Darwin with his Origin of Species. With such an epoch-making contribution, surely of all the sciences, Biology must be the one to pursue what Darwin began and go ever deeper into Emergent Events?

But, I’m afraid you will, sadly, be disappointed.

The touchstone was the second brilliant piece of holist science carried out by Stanley Miller in his famous Experiment, in which in a totally isolated experimental set-up, containing what were then considered to be the substances dominating the atmosphere of the early, pre-Life Earth. He designed and constructed his apparatus to emulate what was likely to have happened in what might reasonably be called the “Weather Cycles” from that period, and set the system into action by the addition of just heat and lightning (via electric sparks).

In only a week, the water in his closed system had turned reddy-brown and later analysis was found to contain amino acids – the crucial building blocks in all known living things on Earth today.

It was as revolutionary as Darwin’s contribution, but the majority of scientists were not satisfied, and asked, “Well, what exactly was going on within this set-up. What were the various processes going on and in what order?” And they universally concluded that, “Without knowing these things, the experiment had no consequences. It was a dead end!”

And, in spite of some improvements by Miller, the technology of that time did not allow him to answer their crucial questions, without, in the usual pluralist way, intervening to analyse, and so destroy each and every sub-process of the self-moving, holistic system.

The line of research was dropped.

And that is symptomatic of all modern biological research. They too do not address Emergences!

Now, though these wholesale criticisms are correct, there would naturally still be some scientists, who would indeed address crucial transformational episodes in new and imaginative ways. For example Hunt in studies into how, why and when the cells of fertilised eggs divided, for he developed a technique, which neither stopped nor interfered with the natural process of cell divisions, but also enabled him to separately analyse the chemicals present during successive phases of the process. He cracked what was initiating cell division, and for this brilliant work was awarded the Nobel Prize for Biology.

While in a very different and surprising area, Pagel studying large numbers of fossils, was able to show statistically that Species Origin had to involve a single event, and not the usually assumed set of small incremental changes over an extended period. Species Origination was an Emergent Event, and definitely then needed an explanation for what actually happened during this remarkable multi-phase Event.

Finally Ryan with his work on viruses and their penetration into other organisms, not only on the well known symbiotic type of relationships, but also in unifying single but unrelated organisms - a virus and a much higher living thing into a single amalgam, the results of which could be crucial in explaining alternative forms of genetic mutation other than the usual “random damage “ version.

The title of this paper was chosen as Metamorphoses for very good reasons. Can we just study the caterpillar and the butterfly totally separately, and in great detail, and ignore the amazing metamorphosis in between?

The answer has to be a resounding, “No!” What on earth is going on within the chrysalis and why? It is almost as if two species have been merged – one with the idea of eating its way to nirvana via leaves, and the other perfect for the reproduction of the species with the added and miraculous facility for flight.

Think what actually occurs!

A soft bodied, worm-like creature gets fat enough and then retires into a chrysalis, wherein the most radical transformations occur.

It is like a re-invention of the organism.

Instead of being soft-bodied, it transforms into a hard exoskeleton-encasing insect, with elaborate wings. Instead of eating leaves, it now switches to sucking up nectar from flowers, and, instead of being camouflaged, it erupts into a galaxy of colour to signal its presence to potential mates.

It usually only lives long enough to copulate and lay eggs before dying. (The mayfly (another relative) actually emerges in the adult stage without mouthparts, for it doesn’t even need to eat during its very short life).

So, what on earth happens inside that chrysalis?

Why was there such a revolutionary transformation?

Where did the imperatives for resorting to such a two-phase life and its absolutely essential transformation event come from?

All these questions are valid and definitely need answers.

In other areas, there are organisms (some incredibly simple – even single celled), which, in very hard times, transform themselves into a dormant and maximally protected state to “see-out” the bad-times (the seed being the simplest example), but it also happens to multi-celled animals too, and they can survive for truly remarkable periods of time in these defensive, totally-inactive states.

But even there the process from original organism – to dormant version – to fully-functioning organism again, is never merely “shutting-down”. It is always a major and profound re-organisation into “something else”. Clearly, there must be resonances between those defensive transformations and the much more short-term and functional metamorphosis of the caterpillar/butterfly.

One area that may be revealing can be seen in the study of developing embryos. For, it is evident that to some significant extent, these tend to pass through similar stages to what happened to prior species in the evolution of the present–day organism to arrive at its current state. It seems to indicate that prior phases in evolution are not lost, but are still present within the genetic material of the current organism, and in fact function as before, but only in the embryonic development stage

Could it be that reversions under extremely damaging conditions can take place, to put the organism in a more survivable prior state, and that when conditions improve, the organism can re-instate its current development path (within the safety of the chrysalis) until it can emerge as the final version of the current organism.

When we talk of a blueprint in the DNA of an organism, it is usually interpreted as a single trajectory through the various necessary phases of development. But several things would be essential even for such a seemingly” simple” plan.

For, the necessary “instructions” are not available in that DNA as a linear, physical sequence – starting at the beginning and going through each successive phase in turn.

It just isn’t like that!

The instructions are arranged in no particular physical order: they are dispersed throughout the DNA.

So what determines the actual sequence to be followed?

Each phase produces along with its primary functions the necessary chemical trigger for the immediately following phase, by producing a unique “key” that alone can “turn-on” the next phase, wherever it turns out to be. And these can be anywhere in the DNA, for the necessary key, being a chemical molecule, can bathe all parts of the complex molecule, but only act upon its target area(s) that initiate the required next phase. So, the whole sequence is elicited one at a time by the products of each immediately prior phase.

Indeed, the assumption that the overall sequence is the only one coded for, would, therefore, also be inaccurate.

In fact there could be alternative sequences that are almost never switched into action, including many redundant vestiges from past incarnations of the organism. And some of these might be triggered by adverse circumstances, which push the organism to the limits (and maybe beyond) of its normal envelope of survivable conditions, which would act as emergency solutions. A fairly common example in plants might be that which produces seeds – still the living organisms, but nothing like the fully-functioning adult plant. And in the same way a whole variety of similar “dormant” defensive forms might be triggered as the only way to maintain the spark of life.

Once such a set of alternative possibilities is considered, we can then consider that old (not usually still used) plans can be triggered, which could help a species in difficulties with impossible conditions to return to such a sequence as a survival alternative. Indeed, they might have been common in the very earliest scraps of life in the most demanding of circumstances of the early Earth.

And once we see that, much of the usually considered to be “junk DNA” is in fact still functional, but never triggered in normal sequences of a given organism, then we can view mutation very differently indeed. For whatever the cause of the mutation, it will respond initially to this unused storehouse of sequences, which might make the difference between success and failure for that change.

Also, situations such as metamorphosis may be a special case wherein two phases not originally run as a one-after-the-other sequence, might well be not only triggered in hostile circumstances, but regularly, as a superior alternative.

Quotes and Inferences from The Wonders of Life

What is Life?

Let us consider some of the direct quotes, or occasionally the recast statements that infer certain positions uttered by Professor Brian Cox in the What is Life first installment of his Wonders of Life series for BBC TV, which commenced on Sunday 27^th January 2013.

Elsewhere, this writer has written a review of this programme, but the exact meanings of part’s of Cox’s narration really do need to be revealed as exactly as possible as he delivered them, because they do reveal exactly where he is coming from, and what he actually believes, not only about Life, but about the true nature of Reality in general, which he is certain resides primarily in his own specialist subject – Physics.

For Brian Cox is most certainly a fully paid up member of the current consensus in Sub Atomic Physics, He agrees completely with the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, originally put forward by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and this puts him, and all his colleagues, into a particular and surprising philosophical position.

For the whole group are what are usually termed “shamefaced materialists”, who have steadfastly embraced a purely idealist philosophical position, beloved of such people, which has physical Reality being wholly determined by abstract, disembodied and purely formal laws. These are so pure that they can be most perfectly represented by mathematical equations.

Now, let us be quite clear exactly what is involved in such a position. These laws have to be eternal – in existence throughout the duration of our Universe, and act as driving essences, actually making the concrete material World behave as it does. Now, you may find it hard to believe that there is anyone at all who subscribes to such a position, and especially professional scientists, but I assure you, it is entirely true. They do have reasons, of course, for such a profound retreat from the once steadfastly maintained materialist standpoint, but that will become clearer as this exercise proceeds, along with just a little history of 20^th century Physics.

For, this position has been around for some considerable time, and is usually termed as Positivism when applied within Science. But, a much more descriptive label is the philosophical term Agnosticism (“I do not know”), for though the position purports to be materialist, it also says that there are many things not only that we do not yet know, BUT that we can never know: things that are “Unknowable Things in Themselves”.

Clearly, this was the stance made famous by the philosopher Kant, though it has resurfaced several times – a fairly recent interlude being at the end of the 19^th century, with what were sometimes called the Empirio-Criticists. This group included both of the scientists Max Ernst and Henri Poincaré.

When, a little later, something like this position was considered necessary to paper over the ever widening cracks in 20^th century Sub Atomic Physics, there was already in existence (and fairly “modern”) a body of philosophical suggestions that these physicists could subscribe to, and indeed tailor to their particular needs in their very esoteric area.

Now, in taking what Brian Cox actually says about The Wonders of Life, you certainly must see clearly where he is coming from. He is “in one way” a materialist, stressing the development of Reality without recourse to any spiritual or supernatural input, while, at the same time, rejecting the longstanding purpose of Science to explain why it is as it is. And, to cap it all, he surrenders all impetus in development entirely to a set of eternal Natural Laws – abstract relations (or Forms), which he insists actually “cause” the World to behave as it does, and even develop as it has.

So, nice easy put-downs will not suffice in dealing with such post-modernist eclecticism. The positions taken do NOT form a single coherent standpoint, but a variously based one, with either omissions (not spoken about), or a papering over the cracks (spoken about at length). So, the reason for these extractions from the programme should be clear. If you think that this universally commended paragon has been misquoted by this critic, you can make up your own mind by studying these important quotes. You may find many of his throw away lines more than a little difficult to accept. This fairly extensive collection will reveal many questions, which Cox does not answer, and many arguments that are certainly invalid.

The Quotes:

1. “Are wonderful products of evolution like dragonflies simply complex machines, for when they die nothing remains of what would be called Life?”
2. “The idea of the Spirit is understandable, because otherwise we would have to accept that Life emerges from an inanimate bag of stuff”
3. “It is incumbent on Science to explain what animates Life”
4. “What is the difference between a lump of rock and me?”
5. “It is only recently that Science has begun to answer these deepest of questions”
6. “Life is the result of the same laws which govern everything else”
7. It is how Life uses energy!”
8. Energy is indestructible: it only ever changes from one form to another”
9. “What is true for the waterfall, is true for everything in nature. It is a fundamental law of nature. The First Law of Thermodynamics – the conservation of energy law!”
10. “Energy is eternal!”

11. “The story of the evolution of the Universe, is just the story of the transformation of eternal energy from one form to another”
12. “And at some point that transformation of energy led to the Origin of Life on earth!”
13. “Volcanoes transferring energy from the very depths to the surface can produce chemicals and their reactions, which are very similar to those that produced the Origin of Life”
14. “Hydrogen ions (H⁺) instead of balancing the Hydroxyl ions (OH^-) as in neutral water, can be increased in number by energy, hence storing that potential in the heightened number of Hydrogen ions.”
15. “And such a produced proton gradient can do work, and it is through that, somehow, that early Life was able to use that source to drive its necessary processes”
16. “Now there are alkaline sub-ocean volcanic vents, and it is thought that, at the time if the Origin of Life, the oceans themselves were mildly acidic. Hence there was the possibility of a ready source of energy for Life to exploit.”
17. “And the vents are also rich in the chemicals that Life needs”
18. “Now, the energy currency for Life even today is still in that same sort of proton gradient, and it occurs in Mitochondria in every cell of every living thing”.
19. “So, if you are looking for a universal Spark of Life this proton gradient is it”
20. “But, Life doesn’t use energy up. So what does it do?”
21. “The evolution of the Universe involves the changing of energy from one form to another. But, that energy becomes less and less useful. It becomes more and more disordered. It’s the quality of energy that is changed. Light can be absorbed, but it is then re-emitted as Heat. The energy of a lower quality: it can do less. It becomes Heat which is of a very low quality of energy indeed”
22. Life takes highly ordered, high quality energy from the Sun, and converts it to an equal amount of low quality, disordered energy”
23. “This descent into disorder is happening across the entire Universe”
24. “Everything is converted to Heat, and the Universe cools down to absolute zero, and with NO ordered energy left, and everything comes to a halt, and everything decays away”
25. “Yet, while the Universe is dying, everywhere you look, Life goes on”
26. “How can it be that Life continues to build increasingly complex structures, while the rest of the Universe is falling to bits – decaying away?
27. (It is) “according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics!”
28. “The key is to look at the energy Life takes in, and the energy that it gives out. Heat is a highly disordered form of energy, and that is what Life gives out, but Life can hang on to a tiny amount of order, just enough to resist the inevitable decay”
29. “Living things borrow order from the wider Universe and export it again as disorder, but they have to export more disorder than the amount of order that they import.”
30. “Living things, being physical structures, must obey the laws of Physics, so they must obey the Second Law.”
31. “Just by being alive, we are part of the energy transformation that drives the Universe.”
32. “All living things share the same fate. Each individual will die, but Life itself endures!”
33. “Something separates Life from every other process in the Universe”

Now, I originally thought of countering every single quote, but let’s face it, they do speak for themselves! I cannot imagine many reading them with a genuine realisation of their truth, and with real pleasure. I am sure that they don’t need me to explain which orifice he is talking out of.

NOTE: For those who might like to hear a more explicit alternative to Brian Cox’s conception of Life, this author has written another parallel paper attempting to do exactly that.

Brian Cox’s Theory of Everything

“How Everything in the Universe arises from the

Universal Laws of Physics”

I was aghast!

Last night, Brian Cox, professor of Physics, and a staunch disciple of the standpoint of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, put out the first episode in a proposed TV series on The Wonders of Life.

Now, as a physicist myself, I know that our subject in its current state is totally incapable of dealing with such questions as Life. And having therefore spent a good proportion of my own life redressing the inadequacies of a purely Physics-based position, via a prolonged and detailed study of Geology, Biology, Palaeontology and Philosophy, I wonder how he, a very narrowly defined type of physicist, feels he can tackle such an important subject with such a clearly inadequate grounding. It can only be that he obviously feels absolutely certain that his grounding (in Physics) actually covers Everything!

He has presented many TV programmes, and even series, on Physics over several years now, but here he has presumed to “apply” his very biased and even distorted philosophy on the one area, which has, in the main, successfully held out against the nonsense that is currently perpetrated and even defended in Modern Physics.

He, along with a majority of his fellow physicists, have surprisingly felt able, for almost a century, to insist upon the Copenhagen retreat as some sort of progressive revolution, because he, and they, always considered Mathematics as the distilled essence of Reality, and hence the Queen of all the Sciences, and, without any regrets, he and his ilk had switched the emphasis in Sub Atomic Physics from Explanation-via-Causes to Formal-Description-Only – from Theory to Equations.

But, the one area where such nonsense could never win, was in Biology, and particularly in that Key area concerning its most profound question about the Origin of Life on Earth and its Subsequent Development. And, once more, he also seems to have the audacity(?) to take the questions attempted (with predictable, abject failure by many of his kind in the past (Schrödinger and Gell-Mann come to mind). Indeed the very philosophical basis of Physics guarantees that it cannot add anything of value to the Only Real Questions – “How did Life emerge?” and ”Where does it dwell?”. Can they really just be a subset of Physics?

Yet here was Physics’ pretty-boy-professor putting all those “shallow”, “soft-science” biologists right, and making it absolutely clear that Life was an inevitable outcome from only the Laws of Physics and nothing else.

Now such authority has always been impossible from such a group, and ever since the victory of Bohr and Heisenberg at Solvay in 1927, their Copenhagen position has woefully emasculated Physics, and backed it unavoidably into a purely formal and, at best, pragmatic cul de sac.

All attempts at explanation were condemned by this tendency as merely self-kid. Some things at the Sub Atomic Level were deemed “”Unknowable Things in Themselves” and all that could be relied upon instead as the real driving truths were the formal laws that the physicists have “fitted up” to extracted data. The fact that their position was full of contradictions was considered unavoidable, and the only course was to formulate formal relations that could be used, without any accompanying explanatory narrative.

Yet, here was their pin-up-boy crossing the Rubicon, and extending the realm of his subject to the whole of the sphere of Life! It was, as you would expect, a travesty!

He didn’t deliver any sort of breakthrough. On the contrary, he instead, via a dubious set of arguments, intimated that when the physicists have finally completed their known and defined tasks, they would explain, not only the Double Slit Experiment and Nuclear Physics, but also, indeed, the whole of Living Reality too. Yet, such a path is impossible!

It was nonsense when Laplace defined it physically in terms of knowing the positions and velocities of all particles and their limited set of physical laws of inter-relation, and thus being able to deliver Everything in Reality thereby. And, it is just as useless in the way that Cox has presented it today.

He does, of course, use lots of facts to bolster his speculations. But that doesn’t wash either! Showing us wonders from across the Earth, with enthusiasm does not in any way prove his claims. Indeed, they do the very opposite! His attempt to add his twopennyworth to the Origin of Life with proton gradients in volcanic situations proves nothing! As the fact that complex crustaceans were also found at these present day vents, proves that Life could get there from elsewhere, so no matter how many primitive types were found in those situations CANNOT prove the Origin had to be there!

There are lots of natural sources and storage mechanisms for energy in the Cosmos, but the mere presence, both in living things and in non-living Reality, does not prove that this was a cause of the Origin of Life, just that whatever did create this wholly new Level of Reality did integrate this energy form within the new state. What still has to be explained is what actually created the Systems of Life, which made use of these available sub systems.

Cox made the usual sleight of hand assumption - that if the elements that Life uses, were established, then, if they were all available at the same place and at the same time, Life would automatically, and indeed, inevitably, appear. Not so!

The mechanist, incrementalist stairway to Heaven is not true at all!

Revolutionary developments, such as that of the Origin of Life from entirely inanimate stuff could never be automatic or even necessary. Believe it or not, such a scenario, if true, would certainly assure that Origins of Life would occur many times in many different places, and would still be happening today. They didn’t and they don’t!

As with all major transformations, they never emerge incrementally, but can only arise out of some sort of System Catastrophe!

What mechanists like Cox fail to realise is that their Stable World never allows such revolutions to occur. The very stability is not some natural lowest energy consequence, but is always the result of the establishment of a self-maintaining System. All new rival proto systems would not last a minute, but would be destroyed immediately.

So, for such revolutionary innovations to appear and succeed requires the demolition of the old Stability completely. And perhaps surprisingly, such calamities are NEVER caused by wholly new emerging alternatives, but by weaknesses within the Stability itself, and due entirely to allowed processes within it.

Perhaps amazingly, the first all-embracing collapse of an old Stability is always a catastrophe of epic proportions, which seems to be heading the whole system towards complete oblivion, but which in sweeping away ALL the necessary maintaining processes of the prior Stability, opens the door to numerous new alternative proto systems, that are no longer subdued or prohibited by those essential defensive, maintaining subsystems of a Stable Level. The creative Phase of such a Revolution always occurs following such a catastrophe.

Stability is NOT the natural, simplest or most easily maintained mode of Reality. It is a state achieved out of an almost chaotic starting point, and involves the emergence of many competing alternative proto systems, ultimately resolved by the victory of only one of these and the demise of all other alternatives. And because of this Rebirth nature, and, of course, the continuing presence of the achievements of past stabilities, the new Level is inevitably an advance upon the prior Level. It, to have succeeded, must have included its own defensive processes to suppress any other possible rivals, so will be not only stable, but necessarily conservative.

Yet, every single such Stability is never eternal. It too will in time undergo a similar crisis and catastrophe, and in the process of another Emergence will create another wholly new and higher Level.

Not much like Cox’s inevitable occurrence is it?

Indeed, Life did not gradually grow from small innovatory gains, to conquer the old Stability, but arose out of a calamitous crisis and failure of a prior stable situation. It has become evident that all major creative developments in all spheres of Reality occur only in this way! Cox’s gradualist and inevitable ever-upwards development of absolutely everything from a few elementary particles and enormous amounts of energy is an invention with NO evidence to support it. Yet, the revolutions of entirely new forms from major catastrophes have a great deal of evidence. Even the current Cosmology that is greatly underpinned by Cox’s Copenhagen nonsense, cannot avoid such happenings. One claim often voiced by Cox is that “We are made of stardust”” – in which he shows how the very elements from which we, as living creatures, are made, were created in the catastrophes of Supernovae.

But, they are eclectic add-ons to a basically stability-dominated process of development. At no time does he include any major crises and calamities in his Origin of Life. And to put it all down to Physics is laughable.

Brian Cox: A Wonder of the Universe and His Reification of Time

As is usual whenever I am watching that shining star of TV Science, Brian Cox, delivering yet another repeat of one his many programmes “explaining” the intricacies of Modern Particle Physics to the uninitiated, I'm afraid that I cannot help but get very angry.

For, in spite of his status as a professor in a prestigious British University, and his high level work both in America and at CERN with the Large Hadron Collider, he continues, in spite of the acclaim he evidently receives, to be a very poor scientist.

But, it is not, I suppose, entirely his fault alone.
For the vast majority of his colleagues and predecessors over the past eighty-odd years certainly believe in exactly the same things and stand upon the very same ground and assumptions as does he.

All of them, when pressed to “explain” their area of study, are sure to resort to the same sort of narratives about what has been going on in the Universe since their (almost holy) Big Bang - the universally agreed Origin of Everything. And, lets face it, such a significant group delivering such a wide-ranging account, is almost certain to steam-roller through almost any possible complaints and queries of a puzzled and uninitiated public.

And these scientists know this.

They are aware that though they are more than satisfied with what they are doing and the way that they are doing it, that is still not sufficient for the general public. The plethora of these TV spectaculars and many similar articles proves that the final establishment of these ideas cannot yet be said to be totally complete.

So, the reasons for my disgust, is not only at this current “scientific consensus”, but also that it attempts to prohibit the very standpoint and method that made Science the Glory it had become in the past. And finally, I get really angry at Brian Cox’s attempt to blind us with his mammoth pile of 20th century “scientific inventions”, to give that final extra credence, to the currently agreed consensus.

But, you might with justice ask, “How can the scientists of the past have been so marvelous, and those of today be so bad?” It is a fair question, and to answer it must involve the exposure of the gigantic Crisis in Physics of the early 20th century, stemming from the discovery and definition of the Quantum.

For 30 years, contradiction after contradiction quickly removed plank after plank of the previously considered banker assumptions, and, in the mounting tumult, two rival groups battled for domination.

One Group, the traditionalists, was led by Albert Einstein and many top physicists, while the other group, the “revolutionists”, was led by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who pressed for a totally “new” approach.
And the acceleration of the decline occurred when the Solvay Conference in 1927 led to the defeat of the traditionalists and the triumph of those led by Bohr.

Amazingly, on the basis of the evident inability of Science to solve the contradictions exposed over this extensive period, the new group suggested that the old approach involving Explanation, must be not only abandoned, but also actually prohibited. The alternative to the inadequacies of the past was proclaimed to be The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory. And, in spite of the obvious prestige of their opponents, this group carried the day entirely upon pragmatic grounds.

“Why did you need Explanation, when you could find formal ways of predicting things adequately for use?”, was their basis. The “new men”, in spite of their “radical” stance, still could not cope with the Quantum in terms of any sort of consistent and coherent explanations: so explanation must be dispensed with! No matter how they had tried, it just didn’t seem to make explanatory sense. Particles could act like waves, and waves could act like particles, and what was evidently exactly the “same thing”, could switch between these two “modes” in merely different circumstances. “The Wave/Particle Duality has killed explanation”, they insisted. And their conclusion was that Mankind would never, and indeed, could never; explain things at this level of Reality. ALL Explanation had to be abandoned as being “beyond our ken!”.

But there were very long-standing reasons why this retreat was lauded as a “Revolution”! For many centuries most scientists had always been content with extracting relations from Reality, and finding Forms that would fit such “real data”, for they knew how to tailor such Forms into useable Equations, with which they could confidently predict for any chosen conditions. If they couldn’t explain but they could predict, that was considered enough! It was certainly the view of the Engineers, during that enormous period of dramatic progress, termed the Industrial Revolution.

And this remained true after the both the Quantum Crisis and the Copenhagen “revolution”.  BUT, and it is a very big BUT, though they could still predict; it was of a very different kind. For the first time NO accompanying explanatory narrative was possible. Only Equations remained! Scientists had to take what these meant on trust, and this released them to use literally any Forms that could be made to fit the data. For example, Wave Equations, which classically could give the amplitudes at a given point at a subsequent given time, were now radically re-used to give probabilities for all possible “particle” positions throughout a whole wave, as to whether it would be there at a given time. It was certainly NOT how such equations had been used before, but it did allow a kind of prediction that could indeed be effectively used.

Probabilities and Statistics had long been developed to do similar things for random sets of events, like the throw of dice, of the turn of a playing card, but these were of very special cases with sets of equally likely events or what would be most probable knowing many prior cases. And it was this pure Mathematics that the New Men of Science integrated into their Wave Equations. As with the Ptolemaic theory of the planets, they had found a mathematical method that could predict perfectly, but was entirely wrong in any associated  “explanatory” narrative! In the very same way, they didn’t know why, but they had a handle on how!

Now, it is quite clear that any dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist may well wonder why this was so reprehensible, and the answer is that all Explanations – Physical Theories, were henceforth being rejected as invention, and mere man-made constructs, and the only way to deal with experimental data was to extract from it Natural Law. And in consequence it was now deemed that such laws, themselves, made things happen. Things obeyed the Natural Laws of Reality: Equations gave you everything that you needed. They were no longer mere descriptions – Pure Forms, but had been transformed into supposedly driving essences that made Reality what it was. The materialist basis of Science had been abandoned for a Kantian form of idealism.

And it turned out to be much worse than even that!
For instead of experiments being devised to deliver new knowledge, relations and patterns, and hence allow major improvements in old explanatory theories, or even complete replacements, things were turned completely around.

The ONLY reliable place to even search for new forms, processes and even “entities” was deemed to be within the Equations themselves! From a Real World based discipline, Science was transformed into one where equations were the sole reliable source for any developments in what was now called “Theory”. And it was from them that all sorts of new properties and even “new” entities were identified and became the contents of new “theories”.

This negated the whole basis of prior Science and theories, which had always involved causal explanations, but these were dumped, and instead equations derived from data, were henceforth dubbed as “theories” in themselves. But, of course, all equations are only overall purely formal descriptions of the patterns displayed, so this New Science was not resident in Reality, but a reflection of it in that very different World – that of Pure Form alone – indeed in Ideality!

Now, though curtailed, the above reasonably extensive preface was essential to establish the ground from which our TV star must be criticised.

Brian Cox is most certainly of the Copenhagen School. And though mammoth experiments are still conducted by this School, they are almost exclusively in High Energy Accelerators, where particles are smashed together at ever-higher speeds and energies, in order to find from among the shattered debris of the consequent destruction, some “new entities”. And these must match to the forms devised by “theorists” from Equations. The “Higgs Boson” is just such an extraction, and the LHC was expressly designed and built to find this crucial and purely theoretically devised particle, which the new theorists say was the basis for the first appearance of Matter itself in the Universe, during the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang.

Now, it must be stressed that this whole group of physicists DO NOT explain phenomena, as they would have attempted to do before Copenhagen. They, when asked, would immediately produce equations and with a series of these alone show that their experiments matched to the Forms involved.

Now, Cox, to his credit, knew that he could not do this in a TV programme.
He knew that his TV audience would not know what he was on about, if all he could offer were equations. They didn’t dwell in Ideality as he was pleased to do, but in concrete Reality. So, he attempted to explain the new physics, and his only available method was to avoid Theory (in the previous explanatory sense), and instead revert to the oldest methods of Science – the use of Analogies.

NOTE: In an episode of the TV quiz show QI, wherein Brian Cox was a member of the panel, and Sub Atomic Physics “came up”, one of the comedians, who were amazed at what Cox had to say, insisted that she only understood anything in terms of Analogies! And that turned out to be Cox’s own solution to “explaining things” too.

Cox also, rather cleverly, looked for his analogies in the most devastatingly magnificent scenery of the Natural World and seen Universe. In “illustrating” what is basically Ideality, he walked through multiple natural scenes, or showed images or animations of elements in the Heavens, and made his various analogies with parts of these breathtaking images, to infer that real ground lay behind his almost beyond-belief ideas.

Crucially, in the episode that I have been watching, he was attempting to explain the origin of all the known elements in the universe via Fred Hoyle’s brilliant theories involving Nuclear Fusion in Stars.

Now, this is certainly very important stuff, but though he knew all the relevant equations he had to deliver some sort of “explanatory narrative” via his analogies. He had to show how all the elements came originally from Hydrogen nuclei in the core of the first stars, and then subsequently in a series of later revolutionary reformulations of such stars. But, it is clear that he was (and usually is) in deep trouble with this. He just couldn’t find an analogy that had any merit at all! So he ended up with attempts that were, to say the least, pathetic.

He initially used soap bubbles created by the usual child’s toy – by blowing through a small plastic hoop that had been dipped in a strong soap solution, Now these individual bubbles would occasionally stick together to form pairs, triplets and higher order collections, which he mapped onto the various nuclei of the elements.
But Hoyle’s mechanism was Nuclear Fusion, and soap bubbles were in NO way at all similar to that process. There was nothing in common with the real thing except arithmetic.

Now, such was never the scientific use of analogy, so it must be said to have totally failed to deliver on this phenomenon. But, he isn’t alone. This generation of scientists can only describe the appearance of things and never explain. So Cox’s soap bubbles were a kind of description, if a poor one. Any attempt at delivering a cause to the uninitiated, was made even more difficult by the prohibition of such things. Handicapped by not being able to use equations, and banned from explanatory theories, Cox could only give a purely descriptive model.

A little later in the same day, this writer caught another of Cox’s Wonders of the Universe episodes, and in this he was exposing the nature of what he called Deep Time.

Now, of course, the everyday conception of things sees such a tiny sliver of time, that what is changing (i.e. everything) appears instead to be totally constant, and Cox correctly exposed that, in many areas, only the study of things over truly colossal periods of time could expose what was actually going on. But, even this could mislead...

As time is expanded, for many iterations, all that becomes evident is “change” – and seemingly in small increments. The really big and radically transforming changes only appear in the record as inexplicable discontinuities. So, it was important that he also correctly showed that studying the Heavens allowed this like no other possible investigation, because the further that you looked into Space, the further back in time was what you saw. [This was because of the finite Speed of Light]. And, by far the most revealing content of studying the Heavens over vast periods of time even though the observer is fixed in NOW, meant that the cataclysmic changes could be actually observed. The most telling of these are, of course, the Supernovae.

But, sadly it must be said, he then went on to ascribe what happened over billions of years to... Time itself(?).

He made Time the cause(?) of the developments.

You may not believe this so I suggest that you look at his programme and notice how he talks about Time in dealing with the evident history of Reality as revealed in the Heavens. For here you cannot use complication and incremental inconsequential changes to “add up” to all major Qualitative Transformations.

Clearly, even with Cox’s own descriptions, the History of Stars is a drama of periodic catastrophe and re-igniting upon an entirely new basis, and finally in Supernovae. Reality actually develops qualitatively via Emergent Events!

Yet he felt he had to subordinate what he was describing to his Natural Laws, which are eternal and are expected to produce everything automatically at every consequent level.

So he settled upon Time itself as the active agent.

Sad isn’t it?