Consensus or Truth?

The Purpose of Academic Journals

(Originally published 2010 in response to an article in New Scientist)

In both the editorial and in a Special Report in New Scientist (2764), the issue of the moderated publication of scientific papers was addressed. The main emphasis in both these contributions was about the relative ease or difficulty involved in getting your contributions published in Journals, and they concluded that it is much easier to do so in the USA than elsewhere. Their main figure is shown below.

The main discussion around this figure is interesting and worthy of study, but there is another quite different and significant slant on the data presented which was not addressed in the New Scientist article. That unrevealed content is just how the consensus in a particular research area gets both established and maintained. It will, of course, be initially generated in conferences and with department discussions, but such collaborations are both too local and too personal to achieve any significant weight and momentum.

Surely then, the main areas for the establishment of a consistent view must be via the Journals and their implicit imperatives evident from what is accepted for publication. It will therefore be, both in what are the commonest positions, but also in how such “agreements” affect what is expected of researchers attempting to get their “foot in the door”.

A colleague of mine in submitting research for his Doctorate was returned to the task several times to “inflate his references”. Without solid evidence of his having addressed ALL the “relevant authorities”, his contribution would not be accepted.

NOTE: Now I have to add here that I have known this colleague for 40 years, and in a long career, he is by far the best teacher I have ever come across, and his methods are both exemplary and innovative. His thesis was on his remarkable contributions in his specialist teaching area, and as usual was a masterful and significant effort, but in spite of all this he was directed to “do it right”. He had to establish his credentials within the relevant body of contributions worldwide before his work was accepted.

Now this seems eminently reasonable, but when I am reading anything, I do not constantly have to make sure that “all possible alternatives have been included”: establishing value is not done by a measure of comprehensive attention to all accepted alternatives.

In contrast I have been writing in my current areas of research for some five years, and include very few mentioned references to other contributors in the same field, and there are very sound reasons for doing this.

The most important process involved in integrating externally sourced ideas into your own coherent World View, cannot be by mere additions. If it was the constant adding-in would make the overall result not more understandable, but indeed a great deal less! The only purpose of including new ideas is that they correct, or extend and deepen what you already understand. NOTE: I didn’t say “know”, but “understand”!

And such a process isn’t a map with flags showing all the places you have visited, but an ever more understandable and coherent part of a general World View. You don’t mention all your teachers and exactly what they taught you in establishing your overall understanding, do you?

If a researcher is presented with an impressive network of mutually referring authors and their contributions in the chosen field, each with an individual slant, and many cross-qualifying or rejecting arguments, it becomes very easy to be sucked into a closed network of assumptions and arguments.

In my recent work on Zeno, I came across an anthology of writings on this remarkable Greek philosopher gathered together by Wesley Salmon, and was duly swamped with a thousand possible lines to follow. But chasing all of these was NOT the way to go forward: only a way to join the club! 

So. I did what I always do, and alighting on something which evidently threw new light on my current concerns (and even difficulties) , in this case Plurality, I set about first understanding what was meant by this philosophical term, and then integrating it into my own work.

But such a process should never be merely a selective rationalisation! Nothing could possibly be gained by such a blinkered undertaking.

Though, from my earlier comments, it may seem that I was cherry-picking, taking only what I could massage into my previously constructed fabric of ideas that would only be possible if you were merely constructing your own personal world. That couldn’t be further from constructing a World View, which attempts to explain all things: to be both coherent and comprehensive!

You can rest confidently on the work of many others, as embodied in the prevailing consensus, or you can attempt to actually understand, piece by piece and as a coherent and holistic whole all that you can choose to experience or access. Such is a much more demanding mistress! You don’t merely collect and remember. You have to inter-relate and begin to understand the necessity of these relations.

When very young, you have no choice but to take on the consensus penumbra of the work of others. You simply do not have sufficient experience or techniques to wrest everything for yourself from this complex World. But as time passes, you begin to be troubled by inconsistencies, gaps and evident uncorroborated assumptions, and you begin to make connections on your own account. But, of course, even then, you find yourself at a major disadvantage, and have to establish your initial small truths and build outwards.

Indeed, you are very soon aware of the flaws and indeed weaknesses in your own position and constantly seek to remedy them whenever and from wherever you can. Whatever it is that you are reading, it will always present considerably less than is the result of your own constant efforts and the supreme arbiter for anything you consider has to be YOURSELF!

So instead of such an approach being local and superficial and definitely NOT to be trusted, with these criteria and approach, the opposite is the case. If you can’t satisfy yourself that you understand something, then you don't. Such imperatives will always be much more objective than those which test your ideas merely by their closeness with some scarcely understood consensus.

Finally, let us be clear just how permanent is the already acquired core of ideas to which new material can be inserted and integrated. It is open for abandonment, at any time, if something better can replace it.

As a long term student of Emergences, I am aware that all “conclusions” will only be temporary stabilities and that every one of them will in time be undermined and dismantled in the process of an Emergence, which will establish a wholly new and higher Level on its conclusion. Knowing this, you can't defend your personal position to the death, but, if it is proved to be wrong, you then undertake its replacement by something wholly better.

The yawning slide into Postmodernist eclecticism was ever presented before my feet, in this large Anthology, if I had succumbed and attempted to check out, and deal with, the vast numbers of ideas contained within Salmon’s offering. There is a method of travelling which says you cannot know in what direction the Truth lies, so you must find the best place from which to survey the maximum of the surrounding landscape, before you make a move. That position is best achieved by my integrating method.

It doesn’t necessarily take me in the optimum direction, but it does ensure that when I achieve my next temporary summit, I will make the most well-informed decisions as to where to go next.

I feel I have to ask what the purpose of an Anthology such as Salmon’s is for! It certainly aims to be “comprehensive”, but in the classical philosophical way, that presents ALL the options (within a general consensus) and seemingly makes no real conclusions, and takes on no resolving responsibility. As a teacher I know that the latter must be addressed. Otherwise no real help is involved, and hence as a contribution no real progress is proffered.

It is a contribution in Philosophy not unlike that of Tycho Brahe’s contributions in Cosmology: which delivered no answers, only facts? So, if the researcher in his chosen area does NOT address this “consensus body of ideas”, you will be rejected out of hand!

As your “lack of required ticks” on the checklist of necessary mentions grows, it becomes increasingly clear that you do not qualify as a serious researcher, but are more of a self-indulgent selector of “conducive scraps” and will be rejected as “unworthy” of inclusion.

You will be assumed to be wrong, merely because you do not supply comments or arguments to everything across this significant consensus.

It turns out to be an easy way of rejecting the majority of contributions. The assessors use the criteria of the consensus to judge whether you are worth considering. Now this is a very surprising criterion!

It's like saying that the Truth is that opinion held by the most people involved in that particular area of study. “You must be wrong because most people do not agree with you!”

The position of mine expressed here may seem to be a very unfair damning of a system of peer-review that has grown up over many years to make the assessment of contributions both fair and “disinterested”, so such comments as I have stated here may seem untenable. But, let us be clear, most scientists while wanting to find their own special area, will, at the same time, find security in settling into the most widely-held basic consensus position. They will basically agree with the consensus (to ensure acceptance), while vigorously seeking barely-trod outposts to establish their own "unique" contributions.

The imperative ensures, on the one hand, a highly conservative and conformist position, while on the other hand, specialising to an extremely thinly-spread area.

For a new member of any group of scientists working in a given area, such a heady and hard-to-integrate overall range of material will, of necessity, demand a great deal of work, merely including the minimum number of meaningful mentions to inflate the final references list to acceptable proportions. The new man will be sucked into the current debate and also, and significantly, into the hidden, but universal assumptions of the group. One has to ask, “With such a forming environment and demanding schedule of legitimising work, will, of necessity, put our freshman on the right road, or will it do the opposite – and wed him to the prevailing consensus, with little chance of breaking through to a better position?"

My contention is that it will, most certainly, and for the vast majority of fresher scientists, lock them into the prevailing consensus.

Important aside: In quite another area, I have been researching the trajectory of qualitative developments of all kinds – not only in the ideas and theories of Mankind (both in Science and further a-field), but in self-evolving Reality itself. And what has become very clear is that such growing changes are NOT merely incremental extensions or additions, but, on the contrary, and most crucially, occur in rather rapid changes of a quite revolutionary nature, generally termed Emergences.

And, after more than a decade of studies in this area, I have discovered that the significant changes are never, ever the results of progressive, incremental developments within our agreed consensus. Quite the reverse is true, in fact, and the initial phase of such an Event is always an initial major crisis, which results in an inevitable cataclysmic dissolution of any previous stable and continuing state. The whole edifice collapses because the structure was based on and maintained by things which though for a period did keep things stable, they were always temporary and are never eternal systems.

The dissolution is then followed by a seemingly chaotic interlude, which turns out to be the only climate in which real, innovatory changes can ever occur, yet also by their “youth” and simplicity, will just as inevitably generate their own immediate challenging, and fairly quick demise. But such a trajectory does not end there. Indeed, what follows is a regular oscillation of developments, both forwards and backwards, though each new temporary stability lasts a little longer than the last, until finally a new, and persisting Level appears which seems to be the end of the process. It certainly is the end of that particular Emergence. The reason for its “success” is always its self-maintaining features, which oppose all other contending possibilities, whether dissolutionary or progressive.

Thus the most remarkable thing about such a New System is that it was born of relatively-free significant change and innovation within chaos, yet to persist it had to become intensely conservative, with a whole galaxy of processes tuned to suppress ALL new qualitative change of any type that pressed in any direction at all.

Now, these trajectories are so strong and universal, that they will certainly apply to scientific bodies of Theory in a given area, just as they seem to apply to everything else. So this must change our prejudices about the generally accepted positions (the consensus) in any particular area, and, of course, the academic journals with their peer assessments will unavoidably be a vital part of this conservatism.

They will suppress non-conformist contributions out of necessity! 

Indeed, it is not far from the truth to state that, “The consensus is always wrong!” Now, this means that to be too strongly determined by the weight of general opinion conforming to a consensus, will certainly have the effect of “drawing your best-teeth”, and in the end, turning you into another member of the “agreeing group” – and hence easily accepted as a “serious contributor”, because you are aware of the consensus and embrace its “collective wisdom”, while thoroughly investigating your own small (usually comparatively non-challenging) part of the general area.

The reader may well get quite angry with all of this (and as with the avid defenders of flawed Democracy – “as the best there is”), and may well demand to know what alternative this critic has to the universally applauded peer-assessment system agreed to by everybody else.

And that would be a very valid point to make. Without some tested and agreed consensus, anybody could say anything and your subject would be more like one of the usual TV channels than a serious concentration of “truth”. I can only make two points to counter such a sound defence:

ONE: I do read what is going on in a remarkably wide range of areas of study, and

TWO: I refrain from being determined by the evident implicit consensus. In other words I take a sceptical position to the consensus, by noticing its evident inconsistencies and philosophical immaturity. I consider it my task to attempt to improve in some way on the current consensus.

It just has to be incomplete, and even erroneous, so my task is to both reveal and correct it where these things occur.

The most significant developments that I ever make come from criticising my own contributions; now this may seem contradictory for my criticisms are supposed to be with the generally agreed consensus.

But, where do you find them? You find them within your own ideas: you cannot avoid them! All knowledge and theories are social (NOT individual), and even when you consider that you are having totally original thoughts, you are mistaken. The bulk of what you “know” is second hand, and cannot be otherwise. But to address such things as they appear “out there” is almost impossible. But, within yourself there is some sort of integration. Without it you would merely be a repository of unconnected “facts”. If you have always tried to understand what you have been taught, read or even found out for yourself, you will have integrated each new morsel into a rich and complex system.

What better place to correctly dig out the socially-passed-on flaws?

So, by now, after a lifetime of doing this, I read both new publications and crucially, my own past papers. And in this latter activity, I always find errors and inconsistencies, that require correction or removal, and my co-ordinating and understanding producing principles are coherence and comprehensiveness.

After a lifetime as a teacher, I realised that NO TRUTH is possible, if localised only within a single specialism. The seeker for Truth must be a polymath, he/she must study all areas of serious research – the search for real understanding has to be completely interdisciplinary.

Now, notice how different that is from my earlier description of “joining the consensus”, while “finding your own niche”. That trajectory only leads to conformism and narrow specialisms, whereas what is required is the widest range of areas and the attitude of the revolutionary. Do you agree?

Addendum

Now I cannot terminate this paper without a word about the diagram from New Scientist that triggered it off. I include it again here, so the comments will at least be adjacent to their subject.

This diagram was provided along with the article The Stem Cell Wars [New Scientist 2764]. Have a good look at how the various contributors are related by cross references. On the non-US side literally all of them refer to a single source (Yamanaka), while on the US side, apart from Yamanaka, there are a series of key contributors who refer to each other as well as who seem to be referred to by a large proportion of the rest of US contributors. You would be hard pressed to consider that the non-US side amounts to a consensus, but what about the US side, some 17 different individuals form a network of cross references. To supply informed peer-assessors would doubtless draw upon this network to judge new offerings.

How do you think that this might affect a determining consensus?

Slavoj Žižek - The Safe and Useful Rebel?

What happens when the writer adopts the vocabulary of the consensus in his society?

It is usually explained as being an attempt to speak in a language everyone can understand – presumably to win him or her to a better and more profound standpoint. But it isn’t, and it doesn’t! Instead, it is bound to pull the writer into the “currently dominant” standpoint, where such definitions have been developed over centuries to fit what basic assumptions and explanations were readily available, and indeed, in common use.

And, the question has to be asked, “Who would have been in a position to both formulate and disseminate such concepts?"

Is it the man in the street? Definitely not!

It will always be the products of those in power: those will have the education to be able to express such things, and the wherewithall to be able to disseminate them through their “owned” organs of information.

Any radical motive cannot be easily maintained in such circumstances, and the prophet, in seeking resonances with an alien readership, and in order to get into print, can very easily become the apologist!

The contradictions in meaning between any revolutionary criticisms and the acceptance of the status quo, can never be resolved, as the words used only make any kind of sense in their currently employed meanings: and who is it that will be doing the using? The dominant standpoint within a society that produced the current meanings of that vocabulary will unavoidably be those of the people in charge, and NOT the mass of the population, who for most of their history couldn’t even read, never mind write!

So, the “radical Marxist”, attempting to make a living in the highest institutions of learning must explain things using the accepted vocabulary of those who will make up the vast majority of his colleagues, though couched in the occasional words that seem to be revolutionary (but aren’t!)

Slavoj ŽiŽek seems to be the perfect example of this!

On reading the Introduction to his book In Defense of Lost Causes, he manages to set the stage for this long book, by excusing the “failures” of revolutionaries, and he does it by revealing their clear good intentions. He even calls their “evident virtues” – idealism – a quality of trying to achieve a better world. But rather than the usual advice to therefore, “Give up now you’ll never do it”, he alternatively says that unavoidable failure is really the best that anyone can ever do!

Isn’t that stimulating?

“NO!” And, if you think that, you are right!

Here is the absolutely-guaranteed, safe revolutionary for you!

Does this self appointed prophet not know what Idealism really is? And it has absolutely nothing to do with Marxist revolutionaries. They are nothing if they are not the most realist operators in the world! Real philosophical Idealism is the direct opposite to Materialism, and Marxists are avowedly materialists! They commit to an entirely materialist standpoint, which takes Matter as primary, and attempts to explain things in terms of the entities present, their properties and their inter-relationships.

And, in case anyone is assuming that these Marxists see everything in purely mechanistic terms – the exact opposite is the case! Their standpoint is the only one that can both deal with real qualitative change, and is also essentially multi-disciplinary!

Indeed, these two philosophical words have very different meanings to what ŽiŽek attaches to them: and his meanings are those of the ruling classes, NOT those of committed revolutionaries.

Instead of the idealism of the status quo defenders, revolutionaries see Idealism as a standpoint that has the whole of reality determined entirely by eternal abstract laws, which can be totally encapsulated in purely formal equations. Contrast this with ŽiŽek’s chosen interpretation as a yearning for something better. And, if he were to be consistent with his chosen language, he would also use materialism to mean chasing after material gain, wealth and position. Not even remotely similar are they?

And yet, such very different meanings were considered crucial by real Marxists. Not only Marx and Engels, but also Lenin took this position, and wrote an important book entitled Materialism and Empirio Criticism to counter an idealist trend within the Bolshevik Party (led, I believe, by Lunacharsky, who after the Revolution became the Minister for Education in the Revolutionary Government)

So ŽiŽek’s introduction establishes an amazing position!

One side of it has already been established above in his choice of language, and the second must be his breathtaking apology for the catastrophes following the Russian Revolution, which he, along with the enemies of that revolution, sees as inevitable, but in his case somehow excusable too!

WHAT?

His "inevitable consequence" was no such thing, for it took Stalin many years, a World context of active hostility, and even military interventions by 14 capitalist powers, and, in addition, there was an externally, as well as internally wealth-sponsored Civil War, with the Royalists and Capitalist attempting to overthrow the Revolutionary Regime.

And, even then for Stalin to complete his proposed transformation, internal dedicated revolutionaries had to be successively removed, imprisoned and executed, or even pursued and assassinated (as was Trotsky) to achieve this supposedly “inevitable result”

It’s an odd kind of inevitability is it not? It’s a bit like the opposite of damning Stalin with faint praise to excuse this traitor to the revolution, both in Russia and worldwide!

Let us put our self professed revolutionary Marxist in his proper context!

You can picture a dinner party in London (say) where the “radical” ŽiŽek had been invited to entertain the gathering where various very comfortable academics could “discuss” ŽiŽek’s ideas without any rancour, and with conclusions such as, “All Revolutions are bound to fail!” and “Their idealism simply doesn’t match with Reality”, not to mention, “The inherent greed and insufficiency of people guarantees ultimate failure.” And, such a group beating up ŽiŽek with their mutually agreed vocabulary, could go home to their own comfortable beds, and sleep peacefully!

And such a description is certainly accurate, for this writer was similarly invited to such a Dinner Party for the same reasons, and with a similar bunch of invitees. The only difference was, that I didn’t speak their language, and if anything they went home worried to death!

Also, watching a discussion programme on TV yesterday, a wholly similar social situation was evident. And in a similar way to how I have described the certain treatment of ŽiŽek, with a similar Aunt Sally as he, it was clear that no matter what were the professed affiliations of the participants they all used exactly the same language, and just as effectively tidied away as ineffectual, idealist and bound-to-fail were all revolutionary threats.

Yet somehow major interventions, or their possibility, were constantly coming up in response to the Arab Spring, and you have to ask, which side they would be on when it came to resolving the situation!

P.S. And this is only in response to ŽiŽek ‘s Introduction!

Addendum

Once more into the breech, dear friends!

For, on thinking about ŽiŽek’s lead-in to In Defense of Lost Causes, I felt that I should do the same with the introduction to his book On Belief.

And it was indeed the right decision. For, he analyses the debate occurring in 2000 on US TV in which clerics from the Jewish, Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist faiths discussed religion and Heaven. The Baptist explained that many “good people” would most certainly end up in Hell, as they hadn’t committed themselves to Christ during their lives.

And such an unwavering “principle”, ŽiŽek likened to that shown by Lenin in his revolutionary activities in Russia, and in his “re-casting” of Marx’s position with respect to political tasks.

[Clearly this academic philosopher is scared to death by such intransigence!]

But, of course, such a supposed resonance, could only be found by a modern “opponent” of Liberal Capitalist compromise, and was totally disregarding of the actual political natures of these two completely opposite men. For it handily coupled the two extremes as essentially similar in their steadfast positions. It is, of course, total and completely irresponsible rubbish, and sees them both as steadfast in their “beliefs”!

And, to thereafter promote himself, as ŽiŽek does, as being on the same side as Lenin, is total nonsense. As Trotsky said when describing such people as ŽiŽek – “They wear the yellow jacket of rebellion, but are still fast asleep in their beds when the factory gates are receiving workers in their thousands”. That would be anathema to someone like ŽiŽek: he is an informed faker, and no revolutionary!

Even mentioning Lenin’s name in a book about belief soils Lenin’s real and significant contributions, and effectively demotes a revolutionary commitment to merely another kind of “idealist” belief! Clearly, this analyser of Society is no Marxist at all, and certainly no revolutionary.

He, though, takes, along with all the enemies of that revolution, a position in opposition to Liberal Capitalism and compromise, which will resonate very well with the Right in US politics.

What a remarkable stance, it is so full of contradictions, it is no wonder he is visibly in constant, jerking agitation when he speaks, but it will certainly get readers. For if he (even if only apparently) took a Leninist Bolshevik stance, he would be crucified as are all such dangerous outsiders, so he wisely appeals to all sorts of people, and he does it from an evidently impotent, yet “clever radical” standpoint. Can you guess which side he will be on when the time comes?

I vividly remember innumerable avowedly “marxist” tendencies in the UK, when the troubles escalated in Northern Ireland, they all supported the sending of troops “to defend the republican Catholics” against the then rampant unionist mobs.

But, whom were they used against?

Any Marxist would know that immediately!

That betrayal, more than any number of written treatises, revealed their real position. Only one tendency opposed the sending of troops and they were the nearest thing to revolutionary Marxists at that time. And I know this because I was in that tendency!

Issue 32 of Shape: Rethinking Physics

Dear Physics Student, You do PLURALIST Science. You “farm” Reality in order to “reveal” and then extract what you assume to be eternal laws. But Reality is not Pluralistic, it is Holisitic.

What do you know about the Science that addresses the Origin of Life and Evolution? The Life Histories of Stars? Revolutions in Society? Are you a real Materialist? What came first, The Laws of Physics or Matter?

Did you know that the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory is the biggest retreat back to Idealism in the history of Science? Have you seen the non-Copenhagen explanation of the Double Slit Experiments?

Are you being sold a pup?

We invite you to read our Journal, a philosophic monthly published online. All papers are published with free and open access to all. Its editors are Physics graduates who have both worked at professorial levels in Universities, but crucially Shape Journal rejects the current consensus position in Physics, the position you are currently being taught as fact. It rejects the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory and the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Shape Journal has published original work on new theories on everything from the Double Slit Experiment, the Shape of the Universe, the Propagation of EM Radiation and on Emergence. Shape Journal welcomes debate on all these issues and more. Please join in this vital discussion, if only because you feel the need to shoot us down!

Read the issue

The Wisdom of Youth?

How should we regard old age?

In the latter half of the twentieth century, with rebellions of youth against "their elders", and whole new ideas arising as ever new layers of Mankind finally achieved something of what they needed to begin to be able to make their own contributions and understanding, a positive "Belief in Youth" came to predominate. 

But that has to be a surprising view! For with age people have certainly experienced more, so the long-standing association of wisdom with age seemed reasonable. So why did it happen, and is it a legitimate and better direction to look for answers for the world's problems?

There are good reasons for this change to have occurred, for simply growing older does not automatically ensure increasing wisdom, and crucially, for the vast majority of ordinary people, both their cultural and knowledge deprivation via misinformation from those in control could, and indeed, often did ossify their ideas into ever more conservative, pessimistic and unimaginative ways of thinking. Indeed, the experiences of the majority are rarely of increasing opportunities and success, and much more frequently, of repeated retreats and even defeats of their aspirations. Indeed, their sources of information are quite consciously arranged to have this effect, whether it be in education, news, or even in their entertainment. 

And apart from such personal experiences, it has also mattered greatly how many and how deep were the political defeats endured by working people throughout their lives. Sadly, events like the General Strike defeat of 1929 undermined the political confidence in a whole generation. Old age was directed into disillusionment, privileged service or even quiescence.  

By the time of my own first consciousness of the world (in the 1940s) my working class parents were (as I only discovered later) stuffed full of incorrect knowledge. It was not their fault, of course, they just worked all hours God sent merely to survive and bring up their children. They had literally no education. My paternal grandmother could neither read not write, and my Dad was an unskilled labourer his whole life. My mother was intelligent, but totally uneducated, and though it was certainly she who made me who I was (and am), she could no longer play a role once I got to Grammar School, and into a wholly different world, of which she knew absolutely nothing!

So, it was the reaction of that generation (mine) - which was the first to have a chance of seeing beyond those iron-clad limits of our parents, and who began to learn many new things - to rebel against the conservative and ill-informed views of our parents. Youth knew better!

But, though unavoidable in those circumstances, it could not be a universal truth.

For, of course, given full and unmodified access to Reality in all its aspects, and without political repression, age must certainly grow wiser! How can an inexperienced teenager know and understand more than a pensioner, with a whole life's rich experiences behind him? 

In long gone eras, the situation was the direct opposite. When things didn't change much from generation to generation, there could only be a steady accumulation of wisdom in those who had experienced most and had successfully survived into old age. In the animal kingdom, it is the old matriarchs who frequently lead the herds, and ensure their survival, and certainly not the frolicking youngsters.

So, what has happened to my generation and the rebellion of Youth?

Has it gone from strength to strength and conquered the world? Or has it lost faith and found other things to indulge in, whether sex, or alcohol, or drugs? 

Even the political surge of the 1960s (my generation's surge) was already retreating by the early 70s, and today's students are seemingly more intent upon seeking middle class security, or Hippy escapism! The reaction to the 2008 financial crisis worldwide was pathetic! And things have not improved one iota since then.

So, what is to be done?

Do we just perpetuate this cycle getting nowhere, and in a different way, still end up conservative and disappointed? Or can we put away our prejudices and look for wisdom where it must surely reside?

It will not be in Youth! It will be in the Old who have not been defeated.

Where will we find them?

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?

Class and Consciousness

I have contributed an article on class to my son's blog, The Red Eye Portal.
Click here if you are interested in reading it.

Issue 13 of Shape

Read it here

Building A Consensus

Nice diagram from New Scientist, but I think it communicates more than the original authors intended. It demonstrates how the consensus in a particular research area is established and maintained. I'm currently writing a paper on this subject, and will post it as soon as it is ready...