Challenging Scientism

– Collagen Molecule

I want to share with you excerpts from several items I’m reading, more or less unfiltered. It goes like this:

We’re all connected, right? Everybody says so – somewhere beneath the surface, we’re ‘one,’ part of a single organism, being, entity. Everybody’s had an experience – touching, sensing, feeling, knowing – transmitting information, thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, across a room, in the presence of a friend, or someone you’re just meeting, or in a place, or waking from a dream, or in a dream itself… We’ve all had bits and images of feelings of connection and knowing and transcendence despite our rational selves…. Despite our ’scientific, modern’ idea of an accidental, mechanical world – something we inherited from the 17th Century, caught in the wake of René Descartes’s Enlightenment discoveries of logic and method.

But to prove it? You can only say it, know it, feel it. Share it with people who understand. But prove it? Is there a ruler, a graph, a measuring stick for this sort of thing?
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I quote her with care, as she derails easily, but it’s a well-stated opinion:

“If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any form of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind–and against a single enemy: the innovator.

The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group, is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such  a monopoly, is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.”

- Ayn Rand, “The Return of the Primitive”

Take that, peer review…

On that note, and after years of observing it, I can agree that the value of peer review truly seems to be to repress movement. “Reproducibility” should be the measure of success in any venture, and reproducibility can be seen by any 3rd grader…

by Liam Scheff
Jan 1, 2010

– The Big Scam

The first thing you should know is that I don’t really believe in the Big Bang. I mean, no, I don’t believe in it at all, for a variety of reasons, which I’ll boil down into a singular potato for you:

I don’t believe it because it’s not true.

Okay, I’ll do better. But it requires some explanation of my particular philosophy.

I am of the opinion that the sciences have taken the place of the religions of the past. That they have inherited the position of ‘answerer of existential questions,’ that used to fall to the Church elders, before the Church was up-ended by Galileo, Bruno and Copernicus – but really, by the relentless march of technological progress by the human species.

Today’s sciences now hold the place of dispensers of great truths, and of great mysteries. “Why are we here? Where do we come from? What are we made of? Why do we get sick? How do we get better? Why do we think these thoughts? Where does our creative spirit come from? Where do we go after we die? What is the meaning of it all…?”
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The NASA folks need their money! So it’s time to tap dance out another song of hope and promises for a deeply disoriented and poorly-informed public.

Have a glance at Dr. Krauss’s mini-essay on Dark Matter and let me know if you find anything that you can hold in your hand:

Dark Matter and Other Magic Unicorns.

No, no, it’s really called:

A Dark Matter Breakthrough?
New evidence of the invisible matter that could make up 90% of the universe.

But, well. Read it and let me know if you see the flying ponies.

Here is my comment, left at the WSJ website:

Oh, the pain, the pain.

How much money has been spent to date on Georges Lemaitre’s neo-Christian pseudo-scientific jaunt into astrophysics (otherwise known as “The Big Bang”)? Yes, it was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest who combined the very (very) little known about outer space, with the very, very well traveled tale of creation ex-nihilo (“first there was nothing, then, Poof! Bang! There was Everything”). And gave us: The Big Bang. A hardly subtle slight rejiggering of Genesis.
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Or will you?

Science, Politics and Global Warming
by Wal Thornhill

The unpleasant reality is that modern science is an inverted pyramid of hypotheses and beliefs teetering on a foundation of surprising ignorance and historical wrong turns. For example, the ideology of climate science is based on the story of the history of the solar system and the Earth. However, the usual story is a fable based on gravitational theory while gravity itself remains a mystery. Many-body gravitational systems are inherently chaotic, so that it would be a miracle if the order we see in the solar system today were long established, according to that model. But the climate change models take for granted an undisturbed Earth. The models also rely on steady radiant energy generated in the interior of the Sun. But what if that global-warming plasma ball in the sky is powered from the outside? Would not all the planets share in some of that energy? And if so, there is no climate model that accounts for it.

I wrote in February 2007, in Global Warming in a Climate of Ignorance, “Like Darwin’s theory of evolution and Big Bang cosmology, global warming by greenhouse gas emissions has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory is promoted to a secular myth. When in fact, science is ignorant about the source of the heat — the Sun.”

Climatologists rely on astrophysicists for the basic assumptions they employ in their climate models. In particular, it is assumed that the Sun is a steady source of radiant energy and that the Earth and its atmosphere have been a closed, undisturbed system for longer than man has walked the Earth. However, the theory of how the Sun works is of Victorian vintage. It was formulated in the gaslight and horse and buggy era, long before the space age showed that space is not empty.

Read the rest…

At any decent social gathering, you will run into one or more boys or girls, men or women, who will tell you that the reason we are currently dangling on one hook or another is the government. Or, “The GOVERNMENT.”

– It’s just a movie! (No, it isn’t!)
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by Liam Scheff
Thunderbolts.info

Astronomers may have discovered the cause for a long-sought and troubling mystery - the cause of small bright fires in low to mid-sized mountainous regions worldwide, especially during warmer seasons.

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No, I’m not talking about A.I.G. or Wall Street bailouts – those Black Holes are quite real… I’m talking about the giant objects in space, whose gravity is so strong, “nothing, not even light can escape.”

Real and Genuine Pictures of Black Holes*:

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When I was a boy, I was told that the Sun was a big, giant, enormous bomb going off in the sky… a chronic nuclear explosion hanging in space…

Ka-BOOM! But, sort of forever, or almost…
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Here’s a question you don’t get asked every day:

Did the Big Bang happen? You know, the “Big Bang.”

No, no, I don’t mean the first time you had a decent sexual encounter.

I mean, “First there was silence on the face of the deep, and then “BOOM! WHAM! Ka-BANG! SHAZAAM!”

That “Big Bang.”
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The Dawkins Delusion
Salvo Magazine, Spring 2007
by Liam Scheff

Everybody’s favorite atheist has been on the road selling his new book, The God Delusion. I’m talking about sharp-witted author and Oxford scholar Richard Dawkins. This is his latest in a long series (starting with The Selfish Gene in 1976) sharing a common theme – to expound the truth about life, the universe and everything, according to Richard Dawkins. Read the rest of this entry »