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History’s Biggest Con

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The world’s most successful con man is not in finance or politics. He is the scientist that runs the world’s biggest machine. He has defrauded the US taxpayer of tens of billions of dollars, and he’s not done yet.

This is the story of particle physics and its kingpin, Carlo Rubbia.

A Field Forged in Fear

Particle physics is the study of matter and space. Newton and Einstein are the most famous scientists in this field. For centuries, physicists went about their business largely unnoticed by the public. Then came nuclear weapons.

History’s most famous equation was given to us by Einstein. E = mc2. To military planners, the equation is important because it says that matter can be converted to pure energy. Prior to World War II, chemical munitions only used a billionth of that explosive potential. The atom bomb showed that chemical munitions could start a nuclear reaction that achieved a million-fold improvement. A decade later, atom bombs were used to trigger fusion in a hydrogen bomb, achieving another factor of forty improvement.

Naturally, after World War II, politicians recognized that particle physicists were the most dangerous people in the world. A single hydrogen bomb can wipe out a city like London. Particle physicists were organized under the Department of Energy and told to find out whether even greater horrors were possible. That mission was sustained by the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

This work was done at particle colliders. Over time, these became the world’s largest machines, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate.

Fortunately for the survival of the human race, by the mid-eighties we knew that the hydrogen bomb was the limit. Everything discovered by the particle colliders was unstable, lasting at most a millionth of a second. However, this was bad for particle physicists. They needed a new marketing message to convince politicians to give them billions so they could keep on building and running colliders.

Given that the researchers were inspired by the prospect of blowing up the world, perhaps we should have expected what came next.

The Final Theory of Everything

Every politician knows that politics is a contest of wills. In the halls of Congress and in the White House, palpable energy is generated by these contests. Politicians know that spirituality is real.

Could that energy be tapped? Well, not according to physics. In fact, Einstein’s theories seemed to prove that spiritual energy couldn’t exist. Remove all the matter from space and there is nothing left.

Physicists knew better. Richard Feynman, the quirky theorist from Cal Tech, spoke about going to Princeton to speak before the “Monster Minds.”

This, then, was the pitch: “We know that our theories of matter and space are incomplete. Give us money so that we can find the final theory of everything. Then we’ll know how to harness the power of will.” Now, this was absurd from the start. Will is generated by the human mind, which needs to avoid explosions at all costs. But it worked for a while. Congress is a creature of habit, and it wasn’t too much money, at first. Only a couple of hundred million dollars a year.

Then, in the mid-eighties, came the supercolliders. These were billion-dollar machines. Finally, the international particle physics community banded together into coalitions. In Europe, researchers at CERN promoted an upgrade to their collider. In the US, states competed to host the Superconducting Super Collider. Not surprisingly, George Bush Sr. picked Texas as the winner.

As the price tag went up and up, the particle physics community realized that only one candidate could be built. And this is where the con started – the con that left the US giving billions of taxpayer dollars to CERN.

Nobels Oblige

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and arms merchant (alas, explosions again) who bequeathed his fortune to fund the Nobel Prize. Winning the Nobel Prize in any science is one of the few ways that a scientist gains public notoriety. With that stature comes access to politicians that funnel taxpayer dollars into research. Universities and laboratories, naturally, compete to hire Nobel Prize winners. When they can’t hire them, they try to create them.

Inevitably, the Nobel Prize is a highly political award. It’s not just the ideas that count.

The Nobel Prize for Physics is dominated by fundamental physics. Discovering a new particle or force is almost guaranteed to be followed by an invitation to Stockholm.

Motive: billions of taxpayer dollars for the next particle collider. Opportunity: given that politicians don’t understand a single thing about particle physics, winning a Nobel Prize establishes prestige that could determine the flow of those dollars. Means: the existing collider at CERN. Sounds like a recipe for crime.

Exposing the grift is difficult because particle physicists speak an arcane language. I will try keep it to a minimum, but to be able to confront the perpetrators of this crime against the American taxpayer, we need to understand some of that language.

As well as particles of matter called fermions, the universe contains fields. These fields come in packets called bosons. Bosons allow matter to interact. As a practical example, when you chew food, the atoms of your teeth are not mechanically breaking the food apart, but generating bosons called photons that break the food apart.

How do physicists prove that they have discovered a new fermion?

The concept is built upon Einstein’s equation. E = mc2. To achieve perfect conversion of mass to energy, physicists discovered that they could make antimatter that, when combined with normal matter, annihilates completely.

How to make new kinds of matter? In this regard, the most interesting bosons are the W and Z. Through these so-called weak interactions, any kind of matter can be created. The only requirement is that enough energy exists to run annihilation in reverse. This is called “pair creation.” From the pure energy of the Z, matter and antimatter are created.

To find a new kind of fermion, a collider first manufactures antimatter. It then takes the antimatter and matter, pushing them through voltage that adds energy of motion, creating beams. Finally, the beams are aimed to an intersection point at the center of a detector. Randomly, annihilation occurs. Both the energy of mass and the energy of motion are available to create new fermions.

The process is rote. Build a collider. Use the acceleration to control the energy of the collisions. Analyze the data coming out of your detectors. When you get to the power limit of your collider, go to Congress and ask for more money.

The challenge is that sometimes beams collide without producing anything interesting, filling your detectors up with noise. Fortunately, there is a specific signal that occurs most frequently when creating a new kind of fermion. The detectors will see two photons moving in opposite directions.

Remember that last fact. When a new kind of fermion is found, we see two photons moving in opposite directions.

From the start of particle physics until 1987, eight fermions were discovered. They first six showed a definite generational pattern: a light lepton followed by two heavier quarks. The first triad is known as electron, down, and up. The second generation contains muon, strange, and charm. In the third generation, colliders had detected the tau and bottom. The field was racing to find the third member of that generation, the top.

Along the way, there was another important discovery. The weak interactions are weak because the W and Z themselves have large masses. On the way to finding the top, the bosons were confirmed, at energies of 80 and 93 GeV. (The units are not important. Remember the numbers.) For purposes of understanding the fraud, I emphasize that the W and Z do not produce two photon signals.

The W and Z results confirmed theoretical predictions, convincing politicians that the field was on a solid footing. For this, Carlo Rubbia was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984.

I was in my last year of my graduate studies in 1987 when CERN announced the discovery of the top, publishing its claim in Physical Review. One of my thesis advisors, Mary Kay Gaillard, had come to UC Berkeley through CERN. That connection brought researchers from CERN who described the result. I was shocked to hear that the data did not demonstrate the required two-photon signal. Furthermore, the accelerator energy during the study was 346 GeV, exactly twice the sum of the W and Z masses.

I trusted Mary Kay. In my presence, she denounced the evils of nuclear weapons. I went to her and voiced my confusion. How could this be a new particle? It looked like a collection of four weak bosons, exactly at the energy that you would predict.

Her answer amounted to, “Go home little boy. The adults are playing politics.”

As the leader of CERN, winner of the Nobel prize, and lead author of the top paper, Carlo Rubbia was the kingpin of particle physics. And CERN won the competition for the next collider.

Higgsy Pigsy

Let’s return to the political context now. Remember: the Cold War was ending. Everyone knew that no new bomb technology was coming out of particle physics. The goal was now a theory of everything. How long would that political motivation last?

Given the abstractness of the motivation, the field needed a long runway in its next accelerator. This was part of the strategy with the top announcement. The heaviest particle to that point was the bottom quark, at 4.2 GeV. That the fraudulent “top” was all the way up at 173 GeV suggested that there was much more to come, if only politicians would fund the work.

The proposed upgrade of CERN was not modest. It set a 20-year goal of attaining a sixty-fold increase in the collider’s power. Bedazzled by Nobel prizes and the pretty pictures produced by taxpayer-funded science propagandists, the politicians were persuaded to comply.

Then came turn-on date in 2012. The machine was ramped up through its energy range, scanning for new particles all the way up to its limit.

Nothing. Zero, Zilch. A ten-billion-dollar boondoggle, funded in no small part by the American taxpayer.

Except then, after a summer spent scanning higher energies, the machine was turned down to 125 GeV. Be clear: this was an energy accessible by the earlier collider. At that energy, the detectors showed a two-photon signal. Detecting this signal is a primary design criterion for every detector. As it occurred at lower energy than the signal announced as the “top,” it must have been known before that study.

Demonstrating their impenetrability to shame, the 125 GeV signal was published in Physical Review and announced as the long-sought after “Higgs particle.”

“Really,” I though, “you are going to double down on your fraud?”

Remember: two photons is the signal for a new particle. The “Higgs” is what the top should have looked like. In fact, by the standards of the field, I should be awarded the Nobel prize for recognizing that it is the top.

None-the-less, the shameless perpetrators began their pressure campaign. They leaned on the Nobel committee to recognize Peter Higgs, the developer of the field’s minimally coherent theory of particle mass. In the background, Marco Rubbia, CERN’s prior laureate, went to the funding panels, demanding, “You know, this Higgs is kind of weird. We need more money for another collider.” The Nobel committee, having acceded to the Higgs award, heard of this and protested, “We are about to award the Nobel Prize for this discovery. Is it the Higgs or is it not the Higgs?” Rubbia backtracked.

Only temporarily, however. Read the popular science press and every week you will see a propaganda piece promoting the next collider at CERN. After all, the full-time job of their taxpayer-funded propagandists is to secure funding for that collider.

Omerta

The question, in any massive conspiracy, is how the community maintains discipline. This is a matter of leverage.

You see, university posts in particle physics are not funded directly. They are funded as an adder on collider construction and operation budgets.

For twenty years, I have been trying to get particle physics out of the rut of superstring theory – a theory that is certifiably insane for its violations of everything that we observe about the universe. In the one instance that I was able to get into dialog with a theorist, I was told “I know that you are right, but if I work with you, I will lose my funding.”

CERN is the only game in town. Anything that does not build to more construction is not funded. Pure and simple, Rubbia is the godfather of particle physics. If you don’t play, he won’t pay.

It is time to stop the grift. The next machine will cost the US taxpayer tens of billions of dollars. Enough is enough. Call your local congresspeople and demand that they investigate and shut this down. We have more pressing problems to worry about.

Einstein Led Us into Mass Hallucinations

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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.

Einstein and Mental Illness

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For more than a century, psychiatrists have been trying to solve mental illness by changing the brain. They have failed, and that failure has harmed the lives of many, many people.

Psychiatry was driven to emphasize the brain because Albert Einstein declared that if we removed matter, space would be empty. This was a death knell for the soul, leading to conceptions that people are just machines. Treating mental illness was therefore like changing a spark plug.

In this paper, I prove that Einstein was wrong. The physical world that we observe is actually more gracefully and accurately explained if space is filled with a lattice of infinitely slippery polygons. Within that sea, there are loops of spirit that become a soul. Loops that attach to the polygons are understood in Einstein’s physics as “charge.” It is through this attachment that the soul connects to matter. Our “minds” are therefore the brain plus our soul.

Mental illness is not just a problem in the brain. It is a problem in the soul. In this new vision of reality, damaging the brain to fix the mind is clearly understood as counterproductive.

The paper is not an easy read. Please, if you know a young or aspiring physicist, get them to look at this. Physical Review X refuses to publish this paper, so I am putting it out to the public through social media. I have explained to PRX that I am trying to clear up a critical public health problem, but the old guard is afraid that they are going to lose their research funding.

Are We Alone?

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Universe Today summarizes a study that concludes that we are probably the only “advanced” civilization in our galaxy.

The result is reached under assumptions of materialism: intelligence is an emergent quality of large brains. Large brains arise from biological evolution, which requires certain chemical conditions on the host planet (water, minerals and carbon in narrow proportions) and stability of the star about which it revolves.

Of course, what I propose here is that intelligence is the play of ideas between souls, and the brain is only an interface. On vastly larger scales, galaxies are civilizations. They just evolve new forms more slowly than we do – which makes us incredibly dangerous.

But galaxies “think”, and store experience. I trust that we’ll know whether we’re alone when we’re mature enough to receive the answer.

Quantum Inversion

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In modeling large-scale systems, wave equations are often useful approximations. So, while water at the quantum scale is made up of molecules that bounce around like billiard balls, in our swimming pool waves look perfectly smooth, and we can predict their behavior using wave theory.

A researcher at Cal Tech has applied this approximation to the modeling of very large astronomical objects: super-massive black holes and their entourage of stars and planetoids. In pursuing the mathematics, he discovered that the system behaves according to a wave equation that looks just like the equation that governs slowly-moving subatomic particles: Schrödinger’s equation.

But the equation alone does not generate “quantum” behavior in the objects described by the equation. That is generated by Fermi’s “exclusion” rules. In Fermi’s rules, the particles that make up stable matter all obey this rule: all particles of any one type (such as an electron) are indistinguishable, and therefore the equation describing the behavior of the system must be the same if any two particles are exchanged, with one exception: the amplitude of the wave changes sign.

Going back to our swimming pool, this is like saying that if we exchanged any two water molecules, the wave would turn into its mirror image: where there were peaks in the wave, now there would be troughs (and visce-versa).

I am absolutely certain that this makes as little sense in describing the behavior of supermassive black holes as it does in describing the behavior of pools of water.

That a working physicist could so casually misrepresent the nature of the system reflects the subtlety of quantum concepts, and the tempting ease with which those concepts are used to manipulate public fascination.

Rock of Egos

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NASA’s New Horizons probe is flying through the Kuiper Belt (home of the Solar System’s comets) and about to survey a large rock. The rock is named “(486958) 2014 MU69“, which would sound nice when tweeted from R2D2, but is a terror for newscasters.

So NASA is running a contest to select a name to attach to the rock for their PR campaign. Recommendations include “Mjolnir” (Thor’s hammer) and certain mythical cities in the heavens.

My suggestion is “Ziggy Froid.”

The rationale? In honor of David Bowie, of “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Because “Ziggy” is a diminutive of “Siegfried” and “Sigmund” which ties in to the Norse mythology of the Arctic Circle through Wagner’s series of Ring operas. And because “Froid” – French for “cold” – is a near-homonym of “Freud,” evoking my sense that it’s crazy to attach names of power to the first rock that we happen to encounter in the Kuiper Belt.

Though there’s no purpose served, you can visit the contest site and vote for my entry.

The Big Bang Collapses

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Yet again.

One of the challenges confronting astrophysicists is figuring out how galaxies form. The problem arises in kind of a round-about way.

The space the fills our universe is remarkably uniform. That’s surprising, because it formed from an extremely violent context. We would expect it to be warped, in the mode of Einstein’s general relativity, causing light to “bend” as it traveled the great distances between galaxies. In addition, until a couple of years ago it was believed that the universe was coasting to a stop. In other words, the mass of the universe appeared to be just enough to keep the galaxies from flying apart forever, but not so much that they would turn around and collide together in a “big crunch.”

These two questions were reconciled with Alan Guth’s “inflationary universe” hypothesis. This holds that the universe was created with an invisible, uniform background energy that dissipated very early, creating most of the matter that we see around us.

One consequence of this model is that matter should be distributed uniformly in the universe. This is a problem for galaxy formation, because if matter is distributed uniformly, there’s no reason for it to start clumping together. There have to be little pockets of higher density for galaxies to form. When only normal matter is included in the simulations of the early universe, galaxies form way to slowly, and don’t exhibit the large-scale structures that we observe in the deep sky surveys.

Worse, when we look around the universe, we can’t actually see enough visible matter to account for the gravitational braking that slows down the rushing apart of the galaxies.

One way of solving these conundrums is “dark matter.” The proposed properties of dark matter are that it does not emit light (it’s dark) and that it has a different kind of mass that causes it to clump together to seed the formation of galaxies.

Today we have a negative result from an experiment designed to detect dark matter. This won’t deter the theorists for long – they’ll just come up with new forms of dark matter that are invisible to the detector (this is an old trick, which caught out my thesis adviser back in the ’80s).  But it does seem to make Occam’s razor cut more in the direction of the generative orders proposal for the formation of the early universe. That model doesn’t need inflation or dark matter or a multiverse to work. It anticipates just the universe that we see around us.

*sigh* Just saying.

Galactic Asymmetry and the Big Bang

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The reigning model of cosmology (the history of the universe) holds that it formed as a cooling bubble in a super-heated stew. It proposes that a lot of energy was stored in the fabric of space (whatever that means), and what we recognize as matter was created as that energy was released. That matter slowly coalesced to form concentrated seeds that eventually grew into galaxies. It’s a model not too different from the model we have for the formation of the solar system.

The model is notoriously called the “Big Bang” theory, but it’s not really a bang, nor is the universe really big in absolute terms. In fact, in that super-heated stew our universe is just a little tiny bubble that only looks big to us because as energy is released from the fabric of space signals travel more slowly through it, much as a violin string vibrates more slowly when it is loosened. In my book Love Works I coin another term for the process: the “Expansive Cool.”

The problem is that this model of gradual accretion is very difficult to reconcile with the structure and sub-structure  of the universe. This was first apparent in the distribution of galaxies, which is non-uniform. A more recent study of the age of stars in the Milky Way also shows some surprising structure.

It will be interesting to see if the cosmologists can come up with an explanation. I have to hand it to the astronomers, though: they sure know how to use pretty pictures to make a point!

 

From the Earth to the Sun and Back Again

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One of the hazards of engaging in epistemological debate is that they almost always become religious. We look back through the haze of history, trying to understand the practices by which knowledge is revealed to us, hoping to glean insights that help us heal divisive intellectual conflicts in the present.

Currently, these discussions become religious because our era suffers from an extreme bifurcation in our pursuit of knowledge. In no other era of human history have the two great pursuits of understanding – religion and science – been perceived as diametrically opposed. The linear causality of Einstein stands in contradiction of the gift of prophesy, and the power and predictability of dumb matter seduces us into believing that we can achieve all of our desires right here on Earth. Conversely, science denies us the comfort of meaning, to the extent that some denounce the search for meaning, or go even further to propose that this reality is evidence of a malefic creator.

Given this modern myopia, in looking back at the great episodes of resistance to truth, we tend to focus on the conflict between science and religion. Consider, for example, the succession from geocentric models of the solar system to the heliocentric models. The oppression of Brahe and Galileo is characterized as resistance by a religious elite threatened by the destruction of a Platonic universe whose geometrical perfection (circles moving within circles) was advanced as proof of the existence of the Christian God.

In fact, the history was rather more subtle, and its consideration brings a great deal of insight into the intellectual resistance to the program of this blog, declared on the title bar: “Unifying Science and Spirituality.”

The Greeks advanced both the geocentric and heliocentric models. If the ancients had been capable of building the instruments used by Galileo, they would certainly have settled on the latter. They resolved on the former for entirely practical reasons: they were concerned with using the positions of the stars to calculate the calendar date and the position of objects on the Earth’s surface. Culturally, their needs were absolutely geocentric. To solve this problem, they correlated geographical position with stellar observations and the progression of the seasons. Next, they sought methods for compacting this large body of data in a form that could be used by voyagers. The technology most adaptable to that purpose was the mathematics of circular revolution. Not only was the mathematics of circular revolution relatively simple, it was easy to translate to mechanical form as instruments containing rotating dials.

The “geocentric” model of the heavens was not in essence a philosophical proposition, but a proposition of practical technology. The principle motivation for upending the model was that over the centuries, the circular approximations began to fail. Designs specified in the first century produced the wrong answers in the eleventh century. A more reliable model was necessary, and the application of the new mathematics of elliptical analysis revealed that the heliocentric model fit the data more reliably than did the geocentric model of circular revolution.

As for the resistance of the Church, Galileo insisted on publishing an insulting parody of the Pope with his observations. He made his science a political issue. This was not an idle matter: the Church used the feudal compact to constrain the rapaciousness of those with a monopoly on the instruments of war. Those scientists were well accepted that chose to engage with the Church with the aim of minimizing the social disruption that always comes with new knowledge.

In my own intellectual adventures here on this blog, I find myself confronted by those that tout modern cosmology as proof that the universe is a machine unfolding without purpose from its initial conditions. The foremost intellectual challenge to that conclusion has been “fine tuning” – the delicate balance of the fundamental constants of nature (specifically the relative strengths of the four forces) that must be preserved if life is to survive. The solution to this conundrum has been the “multiverse” variant of the Big Bang theory (the name itself is a mischaracterization). The multiverse proposition holds that universes exist with and without life – we just happen to occupy one in which life is possible.

The random generation of universes in the Big Bang, however, results from the proposition that we can explain all of nature by using two branches of mathematics: group theory and Fourier analysis. Both of these methods are relatively susceptible to hand calculation. What is little understood by the public is that the theorists trumpet their successes and ignore their failures. The application of current theory to study of the hydrogen nucleus is summarized here, and the results are incredibly ugly.

Why is the theory not abandoned? For the same reason that the geocentric theory was not abandoned: physicists and astronomers have used the current theory to justify the construction of multi-billion dollar observatories. As the Church did, they oppose any idea that might destabilize the social order that pays their salaries.

What is scandalous is that the interstellar navel-gazing saps money from problems here on Earth that desperately call for the full commitment of our best and brightest minds. The scientists need to get the heads out of the stars and back onto the Earth.

My Background in Particle Physics

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I earned my B.A. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1982. That spring, I was asked by the undergraduate adviser where I had been accepted for graduate studies. I told him that Princeton had rejected me, and that Harvard expected me to find $10,000 a year. Face paling, he excused himself to go talk to the department head. When he came back, he said, “Here’s an application for graduate school at Berkeley. Fill this out. I’ll walk it down to the admissions office. If you don’t get accepted, don’t worry: you won’t have to pay the application fee.”

So I did my graduate work at UC Berkeley as well, receiving a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1987. There were two significant things about this era. First, it was when the fundamental ideas of particle physics and cosmology (the study of the early universe) were assembled.

Particle physics had been pursuing the use of group theory as a framework for unifying our understanding of the four forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravitational). The theory had some really ugly problems. It did not account for particle masses, it produced infinities in its calculations that had to be “renormalized” away, and it had no satisfying explanation for the mathematical structure of the four forces. With the exception of the first, these problems were resolved by bringing gravity into the framework (through a Grand Unified Theory that was finally refined as superstring theory).

With regards to cosmology, the Big Bang had become dogma back in the 30s when Hubble discovered the red shift. The only available explanation for the result was the relativistic Doppler shift. The problem was that the universe was far too smooth to have been created in an explosion involving normal matter. The contribution of Alan Guth was a model of the early universe with ten spatial dimensions heated to the Planck scale, followed by an “inflation” driven by a Higgs-like particle with extremely large mass. Normal three-space and matter would only appear after the universe had cooled enormously, and light would slow down tremendously in the process. However, it turned out that there were tens of millions of possible configurations of the laws of physics in that cooling. Again, there was no way of explaining the mathematical structure of the four forces. This was addressed by assuming that our universe was only one of an infinite number of universes spawned from the original super-heated Plank plasma.

The second significant aspect of this era was the rise of Big Science in these fields. I was lucky to work on a team of eight, and turned my Ph.D. around in five years. Most of my peers worked on far larger projects, anywhere from one hundred to (at the end) a thousand researchers. The projects involved hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Because the work had absolutely no practical utility, the arguments for funding became more and more abstract (often invoking science as a fundamental moral imperative), and then became simply political. To illustrate: the organizational success of the particle physics community, in alliance with the Department of Energy, was scandalous to the material science community, whose funding was drained to support the construction of large and larger particle colliders. The rebuttal came in the form of a proposed designer for a linear collider to study particle zoology at the Plank scale (10^40 electron volts, as opposed the the 10^15 electron volts at CERN). The sarcastic concept drawing showed a linear collider superimposed on the galaxy.

I was offered a job at BellCore (the telephone systems research lab) after graduating, but decided to give Particle Physics one more chance by joining a neutrino mass project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The woman that taught me particle theory, Mary Gaillard, was despondent. I had the feeling that she felt that I was joining the evil empire. Indeed, the nuclear weapons facilities were a vortex that absorbed a lot of talented particle physicists (I guess that DoD was worried that we’d go off and invent something even more destructive than the hydrogen bomb). So the ten years that I spent there were amidst a vital community of theorists, and I was able to keep abreast of developments in particle physics and cosmology.

I chose my position at LLNL because I knew that if particle physics didn’t appeal to me, I would be able to change careers. I did so after three years, entering Environmental Science. Unfortunately, I became married in 1994 to a trauma victim of the Soviet secret police. That trauma made it impossible for my peers to sustain their relationships with me. I was encouraged to leave the Laboratory for industry.

When I made a decision to restructure my personal life in 2000, I went through a period of enormous volatility in my career. My peers at LLNL (some of who had intervened in my personal life with disastrous effect) decided to throw me a lifeline, and I was back there in 2004 and 2005. The latter was the centenary of Einstein’s “anno mirabilus”, when he published his papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. The speaking schedule that year was dominated by cosmologists and particle theorists. I was able, in that venue, to come up to date on current developments in the field. What I came away with was confirmation that nothing had changed, and that theorists were simply adding parameters in order to match data that they couldn’t explain, often with unsatisfactory results. It was so dire that the NSF head of fundamental physics declared that the field needed “revolutionary” ideas.

I had begun to assemble the thoughts presented here in 2000 (see the “New Physics” tab), and offered them to some of my peers. It was then that I ran into political restrictions. I was told “wait ten years,” which was the foreseeable duration of the CERN research program. Well, that ten years is up.

I did receive some recognition while I was there. During a budget cutting exercise, funding of the National Ignition Facility was threatened. I ate lunch frequently at the NIF cafeteria, and one day found myself looking at the promotional poster on the wall, wondering how to make the program work. As I sat there, I had the sense of having a conversation with researchers from a number of disciplines. When I published that analysis (several months later), the budget discussions were resolved with an increase to support new research directions, and I was invited by the Associate Director’s office for a program participant’s tour of the facility. It was the only concrete evidence I received of the political contributions I had made to the laboratory in the eighteen months that I was able to remain there.