return to homepage PHYSICS IS CORRUPT
The impetus for this paper came to me, strangely enough, from reading leaked emails by Phil Jones. Before he quit in disgrace, Jones was the head of the Climate Research Unit in England, which has been responsible for controlling and publishing data on global warming. Jones is at the center of the recent “Climategate” scandal, in which leaked emails proved that data was being manipulated. Now, I know that climate scientists are not physicists, but just wait. I also have no intention of taking sides in the climate debate here, since it is very complicated, but it is clear to any honest person that both sides of every debate are now corrupt, making it very difficult to get real data. In the climate debate, big oil and other big business has been caught buying data, as would be expected: their corruption has been a commonplace and a given since the beginning. But now we find that even my old friends at Greenpeace have been caught spinning and pushing data, so we have no one to trust. Everyone on both sides seems to be looking for a way to make money (or other hay) from every issue, and all we are left with is partisanship. I trust Al Gore no more than I trust Exxon. All “science” now stinks of propaganda.
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Of course, this corruption is not limited to science. The modern world is corrupt in all ways, at all levels. Banking, the stock market, politics, education, economics, we all know the stories there. And I have been one of the leaders in exposing the corruption of modern art, with almost a decade of papers showing the precipitous decline in quality, in theory, and in the markets. The field of art has been purposely razed, and it would be unrecognizable as art to Leonardo or even to Van Gogh.
Some of my most jaded readers have answered me that the world has always been such. When was the world not corrupt? Yes, corruption has always reigned, it seems, but there are periods of greater and lesser corruption. Never in history has art been this corrupt, for example. You only have to go back a hundred years to find an era of much less corruption. The 19th century dealers were not above selling fakes or inflating prices, but they were not involved in faking the entire field. In banking, the stock market, and politics, you only have to go back 15 years. The Clinton administration was no high point of anything, and corruption was rampant, but compared to now, it begins to look like an idyll. In 1995, the banks and military and CIA and NSA were content with normal levels of spying and thieving: now they have become like bloated parasites, threatening to kill the host.
While admitting all that, most people would not admit the same of physics. Physics has always been the queen of the sciences, touted from the beginning as the most pure. Somehow this cloak of purity has kept its threads over the centuries, protecting physics from its ultimate collapse. The magazines have run a successful interference for physics in recent decades, convincing the gullible mainstream with press releases and pretty pictures and big claims of relevance. But physics is no different from banking or art. I have shown that it has suffered the same precipitous decline in quality and scruple. We may assume its Watergate or Climategate is just around the corner. The Large Hadron Collider may be the required scandal.
The problem is that physics exists without a foe. There is no monied interest to publicize the scandals of physics. There is no one to break a story, even if there is a story. In the global warming debate, we have two sides, and these two sides prevent the biggest lies from being believed. In politics, we have two parties, and each party's greatest good humor seems to be in exposing the other party. But physics, like art, has no balancing interest. It exists nearly unilaterally, with no powerful counter-interest. In both art and physics, almost no one cares whether the statements are true. Almost everyone wants the published statements to be true, whatever they are. Everyone in both fields benefits financially from the publishing of the statements, so there is no reason to check them and every reason not to check them. In such a situation, truth becomes a hollow word. It remains in the masthead, but it is a flag with an empty fluttering.
The emails of the physics departments and journals have not yet been hacked (since no one would benefit from this hacking, I suppose), so I will have to work by analogy. Phil Jones said, regarding peer review:
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!1
Despite being caught suppressing data, Jones' dishonesty is not abated one jot. After stepping down from his position at CRU, he went to Nature magazine and said this:
I don’t think we should be taking much notice of what’s on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process.2
Yes, Phil, it is blogs that are the problem. If you get caught with your pants down, point to the other guy and tug at his trousers.
Now, Nature also publishes many physics papers, acting as a mouthpiece for the standard model, so my analogy between climate science and physics is not a long reach. It is not as if peer review is one thing in one field of science and another in a different field. In fact, I myself have been “kept out somehow” via peer review, as you can see by my correspondence with the American Journal of Physics. And anyone who frequents any physics forums will see that my site is treated like a blog: I am dismissed as someone who is “hijacking the peer review process” simply by criticizing it. As in the climate debate, mainstream physics has predefined anyone who does not immediately accept its pronouncements as a crank and a crackpot. When that method fails, they resort to censorship and outright lies. When the editors and referees at American Journal of Physics could not show any flaw in my math or logic, they fell back on grandstanding and authoritative dictats. In the peer review of my paper, the editor Jan Tobochnik actually defined physics as self-evident truths:
Review#1
Jan: I hold these truths to be self-evident to any practicing physicist:
1. The Lorentz transformation transforms events and can be used to compare the description of the motion of a particle as observed with respect to two reference frames in uniform relative motion.
2. The conventional Galilean transformation used in all modern texts, whatever its historical source, is the limit of the Lorentz transformation when all relative speeds are very much smaller than c. In that limit it also can transform events and describe motion of a particle as observed with respect to two reference frames in uniform relative motion.
Physics as self-evident truths? How about physics as wrapping yourself in allusions to the Declaration of Independence? How about physics-as-a-censor-of-science posing as a freedom-fighter? So much for the modern definition of physics as some sort of empiricism. So much for experiment. Who needs experiments (or reason) when physics is composed of self-evident truths?
You may ask yourself how physics reached a state where it could browbeat authors with such drivel. How could AJP be edited by people who would say such asinine things, not realizing they were asinine? You may also ask yourself why Nature printed its interview with Phil Jones. Jones had been caught red-handed and there was nothing really to say. But Nature tried to limit the damage as much as possible, since they were also caught in the snare. Jones had used the term “his Nature trick” in one email, explaining how to fudge data, so Nature had been caught printing pushed data. In this sense, it is Nature that is trying to hit back at blogs, as much as it is Jones. Blogs, like all open sources of information, are dangerous to the status quo, and in every field the push is on to limit or outlaw or suppress information. We see this in bills before Congress to control the internet, and we see it in propaganda published by the mainstream media, whether it is at Nature or Newsweek: blogs are dangerous, the internet is dangerous, uncontrolled information is dangerous.
Who is it dangerous for? Not for science, which should be able to sort through this information. Not for you and me, who have powers of reasoning. No, open information is a danger to the entrenched powers in all fields. It threatens their publishing monopolies.
Just as astronomers and Egyptologists could not allow someone like Velikovsky to have an opinion in the 1950's, and mathematicians could not allow someone like Marilyn vos Savant to have an opinion in the 1990's, physicists cannot allow someone like me to have an opinion now. Literally nothing is beneath them, from threatening editors and publishing houses to actual book burning. Physics is quite happy with its unilateral “debate”. With a unilateral debate, no has any reason to leak emails or create any scandals. The only debates we see in physics are debates like those between Hawking and Penrose3, where Oxford and Cambridge discourse on how many angels are dancing on how many pinheads at the center of a black hole. Huge unanswered questions in basic physics are buried and ignored while these two figureheads debate the finer mathematical structures of theoretical entities. The magazines and journals fall over each other to report on the latest absurd wet dreams of string theorists, while at the same time they admit to blocking papers on existing problems like Bode's Law or satellite anomalies or Relativity. They claim that because they have received some poorly written papers they must close the book on certain topics, but this explanation doesn't wash. It doesn't explain why they have published decades of poorly written papers from mainstream scientists. It doesn't explain why entire library shelves of absolute garbage are published with their full consent and happy imprimatur. Peer review is just a euphemism for gatekeeping.
The reasons given by the mainstream for shutting off research are pathetic, really. They say they are tired of getting papers from the Flat-Earth Society concerning the wall at the end of the Earth, or papers from Hare Krishnas telling them that the Moon is further away than the Sun. Therefore they can't accept any more papers on topic A, B, or C. But that is about as reasonable as Harper&Row saying, “Oh, we were getting too many book proposals about lambs dancing with unicorns, so we had to stop publishing children's book altogether.”
Frankly, I don't buy it. I now think that these high-profile cranks and crackpots are just plants. MIT and Harvard probably maintain the Flat Earth Society website as a foil. They manufacture or underwrite the physics forum fools as Punch to their Judy. Why? So that they can say, “This is what our opposition is!” And when anyone from anywhere decides to disagree with the standard model in any way, the mainstream can paint him away in one broad stroke. “The Flat Earth Society disagrees with us, so if you disagree with us, you are like the Flat Earth Society.”
Yes, this is the state of science. This ploy actually fools the majority of people. It would appear that the majority of scientists and science readers cannot see the false syllogism in that last quote. That quote is not a tactic that is beneath anyone in science. Rather, it is the go-to first tactic of debate in all fields. It is taught to mainstream scientists as an effective way to deal with opposition. In politics, you have the race card; in science, you have the tin-foil hat card. The Bill O'Reilly school of debate.
In this way, our problem is not just the corruption of the mainstream scientists. One expects them to be protectionists, frankly. And, likewise, you would expect the majority of debaters to use whatever tactics work, since most modern people have no scruples. The problem is a corruption of the general intelligence of the general science reader. These readers, like the average voter, cannot spot a trick even when it is done in slow motion in front of their face. They cannot spot a lie or a liar, even when all the traditional warning signs are present. The problem is that this sort of debating trick works on most people. A Bill O'Reilly could flourish only in a world where people had little or no ability to spot a lie or a liar. But, remember, all those who flourish flourish in the same world Bill O'Reilly flourishes in. If they flourish to the same extent, it may be that they flourish for the same reason. Hawking and Penrose flourish more by misdirection than by gross lies, but misdirection is a debating trick as much as any gross lie. It is a tactic of sophists, not of scientists.
You would think in a time of general corruption, corruption would be easiest to see. Someone lied to every day of his or her life should know a lie. But this appears not to be the case. A lie surrounded by a thousand other lies is not easy to discriminate. A lie surrounded by a thousand truths tends to stand out; but a lie in a sea of lies is like a glass of water thrown into the ocean. It has no outline. It cannot be recaptured, even with a beaker handy.
I would recommend some time spent in the company of truth and honest people, as a remedy to all this. Even a single truth, fully comprehended and handled personally, would act as a counter-spell to the modern world. This truth, of any shape or size, from any field of endeavor, could be carried in a constant pocket or hung from the neck or braceleted lovingly about the wrist or even worn as a fillet on the brow, as a visible sign to all liars. They would then avoid thee like a cat avoids the water.
1http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt
2http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100215/full/news.2010.71.html
3http://books.google.com/books?id=LstaQTXP65cC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+nature+of+space+and+time&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false