Technocrats ask us to “follow the science.” But what happens when that leads into mass hallucinations?

Ever since Einstein published his theory of gravity – General Relativity – physics has been in pursuit of a theory of everything. In this post, I will explain where Einstein went wrong, and how mass has been used to paper over all the evidence that disproves their theory of everything.

Einstein’s work depended upon the assumption that we can’t tell whether we are moving. Consider: sitting on your chair, you don’t feel like you are moving. In fact, you are carried along with the surface of the earth as it spins, completing a revolution each day. That cycle is embedded in larger cycles: the earth rotates around the sun, and the sun rotates around the center of the galaxy.

Of course, during an earthquake, we know that we are moving, because we can feel acceleration. Even here, however, Einstein said that we don’t know whether the earth is shaking or whether gravity is changing. Both shaking and gravity create acceleration.

To enshrine the principle that we cannot tell whether we are moving, Einstein declared that, should all matter be removed, space would be empty. Once matter is added, it causes space to deform, and the relative positions of particles begin to change. This relativity of motion is declared in the names of his theories: Special Relativity and General Relativity.

Once General Relativity was announced, other physicists considered how its principles might apply to other forces of nature. Eventually, we had three complete theories covering electromagnetism (most of engineering and chemistry), color (that keeps atomic nuclei from flying apart), and the weak force. In trying to extend General Relativity to those forces, a certain perspective became popular. Einstein was interpreted as having said that gravity exists to allow matter to change its position. In trying to build a theory of everything, then, physicists thought of forces as means of allowing any and all of the properties of a particle to change.

Before explaining how that ambition led to mass hallucinations, I will observe that to the spiritually sophisticated, Einstein is clearly wrong. In my career, I have worked with many spiritually sophisticated scientists. They are troubled by the failure of physics to explain spirituality but can’t see their way out of the trap that Einstein built. I have offered them that escape, but to accept it is to admit that everything published by particle physics and cosmology over the last forty years has been wrong. They aren’t ready to accept that humbling.

Pride comes before the fall.

Fortunately, I don’t have to explain the last forty years of journal articles to you for you to understand the mass hallucination.

Let’s start by counting the number of particle properties. We have:

• Three positions (although some add time as a fourth property)
• One electric charge
• Two weak interaction charges
• Three color charges
• Spin (some particles act like turning tops)

That’s a total of ten. Mathematically, the equations that describe the effects of interactions between these properties cannot be bolted together, however. To unify them, we have to allow the possibility that there are other particle properties, currently hidden from us.

This is now an open-ended search. If we currently cannot see the other particle properties, how do we test our theories? This led the theorists to rely upon the principle established by Einstein in General Relativity. Forces exist to allow particles to influence other particles. The properties of one particle change the properties of another particle.

To theory starts, then, by putting all of the particle properties into a single bag. But how big a bag? Now we confront the constraint of analytical feasibility. The theorists needed to choose a bag that was subject to mathematical analysis. They turned to telecommunications, which had learned how to encode twenty-six channels of data into a single stream. Twenty-six is obviously more than ten, so this seemed an acceptable place to start.

Given this scheme of describing everything as the intermingling of properties, the problem was then to figure out how to test the theory. Here we come to the first of the delusions that follow from Einstein’s assumption that space was empty.

When Edwin Hubble began his survey of galaxies, it was obvious that light lost energy (“red-shifted”) as it traveled to us from distant galaxies. If space was filled with a substance, that could be explained as light bouncing off that substance. Given Einstein’s authority, however, that possibility was rejected. The only explanation available was that distant galaxies are moving away from us. From this explanation, we are led immediately to the conclusion that the universe formed in a huge explosion called the “Big Bang.”

Physics uses its theories to predict the history of objects. Here on earth, conditions are too complicated to support a test of theories of everything. But the Big Bang, conceived of first as starting at a single point and then as a small bubble in a super-heated soup of particles, simplified the starting conditions so that predictions could be calculated. This linked the theory of everything to cosmogenesis – the early history of the universe.

As that work progressed, the following problems arose. In each case, the problems were made to go away by introducing a “vacuum potential” to the theory. In what follows, I give that mechanism the degree of respect it deserves by substituting “pixie dust.” The outrageousness of its application demands the concession that the theory is no longer a theory of everything, because it cannot explain its own pixie dust.

1. If we limit the properties to three positions, the equations predict that space should be filled with black holes and other “topological defects” that are too complicated to describe here. To avoid this, the theory has to allocate ten positions. This obviously contradicts our everyday experience, so the theorists sprinkled pixie dust to make the extra seven dimensions curl up and disappear.
2. With ten positions, we still have sixteen other properties whose interaction we need to describe with other forces. Today we only see seven properties. To make the other nine go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust.
3. The early, super-hot universe is turbulent (think of an airplane in a storm). The universe we observe, however, is smooth. To make the turbulence go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust. In fact, they use so much pixie dust that almost all of the matter we observe arises from the pixie dust. Unfortunately, that matter comes with anti-matter, which should annihilate all of the matter. The theory still cannot explain how matter survived.
4. In all of these calculations, the theory ignores mass. To create mass, more pixie dust is sprinkled (the “Higgs boson,” a fraud that I will expose in a post to come).

Even with all of this pixie dust, the theory still does not guarantee that the universe will come out as we experience it. In fact, there are tens of millions of other possibilities. The chance that we exists seems impossibly small. To avoid this problem, the theorists gather all the remaining pixie dust, declaring that we live in a “multiverse” that contains more universes than there are atoms in our universe.

The definition of insanity is an inability to align our beliefs with the reality we share with others. On all of these grounds, the current theory of everything is insane. The delusion is sustained by the use of pixie dust in the form of vacuum potentials. The effect of the pixie dust is to disappear anything that disagrees with observation. It is a “mass hallucination” because the effect of the pixie dust is to use mass to prevent the disagreements from lasting beyond the earliest stages of the Big Bang.

The characterization of “mass hallucination” also applies in the psychological sense. Physical Review has a whole section dedicated to arguments over the theory of everything. The pursuit of evidence to prove the theory funnels tens of billions of taxpayer dollars towards construction and operation of earth- and space-based detectors. The largest machine in existence, the supercollider at CERN, itself costs more than a billion dollars a year. To that we must add neutrino detectors, space-based telescopes, gravity wave detectors, and others.

To protect that funding, these projects hire science publicists that flood media with what, given the pixie dust identified above, is pure propaganda.

As I indicate above, I have offered physics an escape from the delusions that follow from the dogma propagated by Saint Einstein. To the rest of us, this is not an idle matter. As I have explained, psychiatry was led into a dark corner by Einstein, to the suffering of tens of millions of our children and neighbors. It is time to stop funding this delusion.