Science makes top ten worst ideas of all time

The Washington Post, famous for its outside-of-the-box thinking on scientific matters, has published a list of the worst ideas of the last one hundred years (sorry for the hyperbolifics in the title). Not surprisingly, science shows up not one, not two, not four, but three times. First, medical science, then technology, then geography.

The sciences better start getting serious, or else they will be relegated to the same mystical voodoo cesspool as Astrology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, and the feisty offshoot of Cultural Studies, Wicca.

Here’s my list of the top ten worst ideas of the last one hundred years (considering not just science, but all ideas):

(1) NASA (QED, QED)
(2) Nuclear Physics (QED TBA)
(3) The Apollo Program (QED)
(4) Special Relativity (QED)
(5) Quantum Mechanics (QED TBA)
(6)  Bayes theorem (QED)
(7) Asia (QED, QED, QED)
(8) Bombing the moon (QED)
(9) Micro-Evolution (QED, QED)
(10) Dark Matter/Anti-Matter (QED, QED)
(10) More-than-three dimensional space (QED)
(10) Brian Greene/Stephen Hawking (QED)

I don’t yet have QED links for all of these, but you can find additional expliceration of these ideas, such as Brian Greene, in my comprehensive Science and Math Defeated Glossary of Terms.

Brian Greene on How To Make Your Own Universe

According to this radio broadcast, Stephen Hawking’s butt boy, Brian Greene, claims that humans are very close to being able to “create their own Universes.” Readers of this blog shouldn’t be surprised that Greene’s (probably Salvia-induced) hallucinations have reached this new low. But fans of Greene’s might be disheartened. At least now they can know the truth.

Greene’s idea has a couple of premises. One is his mythological view of history, that the beginning of the Universe happens “over and over and over again.”

He also talks about – get this – a “cosmic bubble bath.” If you listen carefully enough, you’ll notice that he admits his theories are a “mental exercise.” Indeed. So basically Brian Greene is doing Yoga, not physics. I ask you:

Interestingly, Brian Greene also justifies the Holocaust in this broadcast. He says, “I don’t think it’s a good guide to use our senses and our intuition to determine what we think is right or wrong.” Well Brian, that’s what Hitler said. Don’t worry, you just think genocide is wrong. Really the math works out quite nicely!

Without further ado, here are Brian Greene’s instructions for how to build a Universe:

If you want a manageable way of building a Universe, what you want to be able to do is build something pretty small. But a small thing is not a Universe, so it has to expand. For something to expand, there’s got to be some outward push, there’s got to be some repulsive push. And that’s where this repulsive side of gravity come into the story. There are conditions, which according to the Laws of  general Relativity, the laws Einstein wrote down a long time ago, well tested, those laws tell us that in this context of the right energy density carried by the right substance, you will have repulsive gravity, which means, if you can build this little seed, this little nugget, it will on its own start to expand, grow, faster and faster and faster, begin tiny and sprouting into a gigantic Universe. You can calculate that the nugget that we believe perhaps gave rise to our unvierse – maybe someone created it in their aprartment in some other universe – was about roughly, mmm, ten to the minus 26 cneitmeters across, weighed about ten pounds. That’s small! You wouldn’t really think intuitively you could build the whole universe from ten pounds of stuff. … But it turns out that that’s all you need, because the repulsive side of gravity is so powerful that it actually injects energy from gravity itself into the expanding space. So from that point of view all you need is the seed and the gravity takes over and does the rest of the work.

Now Mr. Greene thinks this “seed” needs a black hole. But how to get a black hole? As always, Greene has the answer.

It turns out that black holes don’t have to be big. You give me any object, and if I squeeze it sufficiently small … it will be a tiny black hole. There’s nothing that you could give me that I couldn’t turn into a black hole by squeezing it sufficiently small.

And if you’re worried that the Universe would expand and kill everyone, don’t be.

This Universe that you create would in essence create its own space. It wouldn’t encroach on your space by expanding into your domain, your house, into your region. It would expand by creating new space, space that hadn’t existed before. So it would be off on its own, if you will, creating its own bubble universe. What you’re creating on the other side is there, and in principle you could go there.

If you feel like after that primer, you’re still not quite able to make your own Universe, don’t feel bad. Greene’s instructions are border-line incoherent, and where they are coherent, they are impossible. For example, everyone knows that creating a black hole would cause Planet Earth to be sucked into itself. And so on.

Gravity and the Myth of 0mph

It’s long been an axiom of physics that everything is constantly in motion, due to the cosmic background stretching of the Universe. At least that’s what Brian Greene tells us, and in this case I’m inclined to believe him. No matter that everything he concludes from this fact is not even false.

Yet, al a cartes Thomas Kuhn, we know that old washed up ideas die hard. This is the case with a little gem I was taught in high school physics concerning an object falling toward the Earth, after been thrown away from it. Specifically, if you throw an object straight up, gravity will cause its acceleration/speed to decrease until reaching 0mph, at which point it will begin increasing its acceleration/speed in the opposite vector. Your immediate reaction should be that the phrase “at which point” is inherently ambiguous. Yes it is, and that’s half the problem. Let’s look at a chart provided by a propaganda website.

According to this diagram, an object will be basically at rest right where you see the a= 0 m/s2. Of course, none of these wizards can tell us how long the object will be at rest. That’s because it’s impossible to tell. Why is it impossible to tell? Despite the fantasies of William Tells, the object is never at rest. We know from contemporary science that nothing is ever at rest! Well then, to paraphrase Hume, whence the cognitive dissonance? Basically people have a hard time conceptualizing an instant change in vector – it makes them nervous. As Kant described, the human mind has to impose mental structures on physical perception in order to make sense of it. Well, in the case of “in between time” (the real culprit here), the structure happens to be irrational. It’s what gives us Zeno’s Paradox – the idea that you must be able to always divide time/distance sequences. This idea turns out to be false, as proclaimed loudly and clearly by Bertrand Russell. Well, it’s also false in the case of allegedly negated vectors. There doesn’t have to be a “zero” in between positive and negative opposite vectors. Hard to rap your mind around, but take a look at this adjusted diagram, which should help (although we can’t ever fully understand physical reality, since we play too many language games).

Alright. The concept of “0mph” can now be put to rest. No matter what science fiction authors say. Very simply, when you throw up an object into the air, it never stops moving. After all, if it did stop moving, how would it ever get back to you, without something to force it back down? Few people think of the most obvious dilemmas in their allegedly scientific reasoning.

Go ahead and try this one out on your physics friends. Have them tell you how long an object supposedly stays at rest for, at the peak of the falling down curve. They won’t be able to. If pressed, they will tell you that it is an infinitely short moment. And by now my readers can’t fall prey to those shenanigans.

Dark matter? (part two)

Many of you read my first post on Dark Matter. Some people, particularly Miss Sophismata, didn’t quite get it. Therefore in this post I’m going to expand greatly on my thoughts. It will include some overlap, but not very much. It is important that I, for example, am more explicit about precisely how the analogy between a frightened child and a contemporary physicist works. I begin with a little history.

A Brief History of Dark Matter

In the 1970′s it was reported that as much as 90% of the Universe doesn’t exist. Physicists had discovered that their theories, hiding behind very confusing mathematical equations, were simply wrong. Contrary to what you or I would do, the scientific response to this startling revelation was not to abandon the defunct theories. Exercising incredible hubris, scientists decided that their theories couldn’t possibly be wrong. But they needed a large amount of non-existent matter to keep the theories going. So physicists instead chose a more insidious route, and invented one of the most ridiculous ideas of the 20th century:

Dark Matter.

In positing the existence of Dark Matter as an escape from abandoning their theories, scientists fell into the same philosophical fallacy as influential philosopher of biology Alvin Plantinga when he stated that the following form of reasoning is “compelling”:

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false.

The X in this instance is the proposition “Our theories are false.” So there’s a little bit of history, explaining how Dark Matter theorists fell into an egregious logical fallacy, on top of an already absurd empirical farce.

Understanding Dark Matter

It is not difficult to understand Dark Matter, because there is quite literally nothing to understand. No one has seen it, felt it, or heard it. Yet because the Universe is such an eerie place, we are supposed to accept on faith the statements of the high priests of theoretical physics. The Pope of science, Stephen Hawking, explains to us – merely on his own authority – that all “cosmologists” think that the edges of spiral galaxies are “dominated by dark matter that we cannot see directly.” His loyal disciple and lackey Brian Greene simply asserts – again on mere authority – that there is “strong evidence” that our world is “permeated with dark matter.” For these thinkers it is inconceivable that their theories could be wrong. Instead, they blame the Universe.

The Child/Physicist Analogy

Physicists, in this respect, are like children who are afraid of the dark. They cannot explain the empty closets opposite their beds. The child reasons thus:

Why is my closet so empty, so dark? Surely there should be something in my closet; closets are after all, according to my explanatory framework, made for things. Indeed I remember putting my toys away just yesterday. And besides, Stephen Hawking says there just must be stuff in my closet. But I can’t see it! Therefore: monsters.

This is exactly how physicists think about Dark Matter. They see an empty darkness, they haven’t any notion of what is happening, and so they create invisible monsters as explanations.

CNN and the War on Science

Anderson Cooper, star of CNN

As a great many of my colleagues have pointed out, CNN is regressing to the Middle Ages of journalism by eliminating all of science from the public discourse, forever. My thoughts on this are as follows:

This is excellent for science.

CNN’s decision, which goes against the grain, is a warning shot across the bow of science saying basically, “Look, you’re not relevant, you’re boring, you’re obscurantist; much of what you say isn’t even true.” I believe that CNN’s decision marks the beginning of a Küngian paradigm shift. The only question I have to ask is, what took so long? We’ve had these contemporary equivalents of witchcraft spouting their dribble all over the press in recent years. First it was that godawful NOVA series, then that New Age mockery of reason What the Bleep do We Know?, and then Brian Greene’s two propaganda publications. One has to thank one’s lucky stars tha such saviors as Peter Woit and Bill Dembski have arisen in recent years. But they aren’t enough without popular pressure. As Noam Chomsky recently noted, progress is won from below, not given from above. And this is historically confirmed by such LaRouchian works as A People’s History of Science, which you can read about here, here, and here.

Basically, what Küng, Hung, Hempel, and others have shown, is that science requires outside pressure in order to progress. Internal consistency is not enough. The trick is overcoming what Chomsky has in another context called “community norms” (cf. Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, 142 ff). Chad Orzel wants to suggest that scientists make progress by yelling at each other. And notice that he fails to cite the “book” he is supposedly reading. Well what Orzel (and, giving him the benefit of the doubt – his book) fails to realize is that the shouting must come from outside.

And indeed this is what Blitzer, Cooper, and the rest have done for us. They have given an ultimatum to science, much like Congress has given an ultimatum to the auto industry. Except there is no one to bail out the scientists but themselves. The one area where perhaps Orzel is correct is in the Creation/ID/Evolution three-way mud-wrestling match, where the latter of the three regularly resorts to ad hominem, and often tacitly admits doing so.

Well, that’s all I have to say for now. Everyone from Whitehead to Reichenbach would be pleased with this development; so then should contemporary scientists be.