Dumber Than a Second Coat of Paint

Posted by Andrew | Filed under Lost Geographies

For some time now, this author has been pondering a discussion about UFOs. Why? Because he has had a lifelong interest in them . . . hardly surprising, considering that he was raised on a steady diet of Star Trek, various Gerry Anderson TV series and Doctor Who (among other things . . ) from a tender age.

But time is against him, and writing his long essays is a time-consuming business . . . this time, getting started proved to be really difficult until an idea from a previous blog (he realised) meshed together with this new theme in a surprising way . . . and so it begins . . .

My dear readers will recall that in a previous blog, I picked faults in the general Korean way of doing things. This was not intentionally offensive; actually it was intended to be humorous. The essential point was that when a foreigner arrives for a long-term stay in a place like Korea, they cannot function properly without what we might call correct "orientation", by which we mean not just tools for doing the job they are here for, but also things like some minimal communicative ability in spoken Korean as well as directions about how to behave properly. Otherwise, they have to learn everything the hard way, all the time; and if this is the case, then the Koreans really only have themselves to blame for what happens.The foreigners do not have the time or the capability to do everything themselves.

If the foreigner is forever occupied not only in their day-to-day work but also with non-work essentials in their spare time, then unless they are very well-organised, things like learning the local language become marginalised, and this is a tragedy, because (again, as stated in a previous blog here) the foreigners need to have as much empathy and understanding of the Koreans as possible. When they leave here, they become ambassadors for the Koreans and (one might hope) their defenders against illogical prejudice and stereotyping by non-Koreans.

I was thinking about this the other night whilst trying to figure out exactly how to start a blog about UFOs. This might seem a strange point of departure for such an exotic and oft-maligned theme, but there are facets of human behaviour which link the two areas together. The most important of these is how the conditioning of our minds affects the way we perceive the new and the strange. This is important because its direct effect is upon our behaviour during that first encounter – which is to say that our interpretation of something newly observed is strongly affected by our existing knowledge schemas (which in turn are little better than a kind of prejudice). It is only when we finally realise that much of what passes for "knowledge" at home actually manifests itself as "prejudice" elsewhere that we begin to perceive things as they really are.

We really need to understand right from the get-go that what we usually refer to as "knowledge" is really little more than a set of instilled prejudices. The institutions which dispense knowledge are primarily interested in self-preservation – preservation of their prestige and most importantly, preservation of their income and lifestyle. The downside of this is that we have (for example) scientific institutions essentially representing falsified hypotheses as facts when they should have been thrown out and replaced long ago; but because of connections with big businesses and involvement with government lobbying, the constant fear of losing their wealth and prestige forces them to hold the line they have established, come hell or high water, until circumstances or the accumulation of contrary evidence forces them to change instead in order to survive.

We should therefore be asking ourselves exactly what science is supposed to represent, and just how it should be conducted in a proper manner. In theory, at least, "normal science" begins with syllogism – a phenomenon is observed on a number of occasions and an hypothesis is proposed; this is then tested against the behaviour of the same phenomenon to determine its predictive accuracy (or, perhaps, its lack thereof).

Over time, alteration (or replacement) of the hypothesis leads to increasing verisimilitude (10), i.e. successively more accurate predictions lead to hypotheses with greater predictive power and which therefore, it is hoped, represent reality more accurately. However, problems start to arise when progress is retarded by practitioners and/or institutions with vested interests who are happy with things being the way they are, a state of affairs which is usually convenient for them. The trouble with this is that they become overtaken by circumstances, meaning that by the time they are replaced, they are truly and completely redundant (think of Joseph Priestly and his "phlogiston" (12), for example, compared with the atomic analysis of Antoine Lavoisier (13)). When a new paradigm emerges, it is likely that only fragments of its predecessor will be retained, a situation which the priesthood of the old paradigm finds hard to handle.

As an example of untenable science, consider the curious case of stars. The current model we have of the birth, development and death of stars is largely inherited from the Swedish scientist and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1) and the later English astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (2). In his day, stable radioactive elements were still being discovered and their properties were still being characterised, so there was intense interest in them.

One side-effect of radioactive decay is the production of heat – hence the usefulness of radioactive elements such as uranium in power generation, be it via superheated steam in a nuclear power station or a NASA radiothermal generator (RTG) on board spacecraft such as the Pioneers or the Voyagers. It was Eddington who propounded the idea that the intense heat of stars was generated internally and since it was known that heat could be generated by nuclear decay, this fitted in nicely with the observation of heavier elements in the spectra of stars, which were thought to be created by the fusion of monatomic hydrogen into successively heavier elements. And since heavier elements will obviously take longer to produce than lighter ones, it was assumed that this was a reliable guide to the ages of stars, i.e. the heavier the elements detected in their spectra, the older the star had to be.

This increasing "metallicity" (3) of stars also fits nicely with the idea that a star has a limited life, and that the heaviest elements must also be the result of processing through several "generations" of stars. Some time after Eddington propounded his theory, the idea of the "Big Bang" (4) (so named by cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle (5), who preferred the "Steady State" (6) theory) became a prevalent dogma even though – as we shall see later – there is little evidence to support it, or rather, the supposed "evidence" can be interpreted in more than one way according to which cosmological framework is used. Stars and galaxies were supposed to have begun forming some time after the "Big Bang" due to localised gravitational effects, as hydrogen atoms clumped together and eventually became so massive that their heat "ignited" as stars. There are many faults in this argument, but we will look briefly at just one.

There is one simple flaw in all of this: it is quite impossible to observe the interior of a star. Therefore, none of the above can be asserted with absolute certainty; maybe there is another mechanism at work which explains the formation of stars and the "metallicity" of stellar spectra. Vast theories have been constructed (and detectors too) on the basis of particulate and electromagnetic emissions from the sun, for example. But you would never know this from the constant, dumber-than-a-second-coat-of-paint type of presentations of this "knowledge" in the popular media. Everything is presented as if there is no possibility of questioning its veracity in a proper scientific manner; it's all a fait accompli and it's always the same. Why, even when actual research is discussed, its only presented purpose is to bolster a possibly redundant hypothesis – or be derided because it fails to "fit in" with the prevailing dogma.

The result is "soundbite science", and in no way can we assert that this assists us in approaching a state of verisimilitude; all that is really happening is that newer (and more accurate) representations of reality are being suppressed to prevent the prestigious and lucrative status quo from collapsing. And this phenomenon – of institutionalised prejudice masquerading as "knowledge" – is used to great effect to obfuscate and demean the study of that strange set of phenomena known as UFOs.

Let's be perfectly clear about this: "normal science" is supposed to be an enterprise in which, by the slow supplantation of older, less provably accurate theories by ones which lead to both a more accurate representation of observable reality and a better theoretical framework according to which phenomena which have yet to be observed can be predicted with at least some degree of accuracy, we approach a better description of that reality. When a so-called "scientist" says something dumb like: "We never expected this," he or she is really saying: "Our existing theory could not account for this, so really, it's falsified, but we can't possibly admit it!"

And this is the sorry state into which modern, so-called "science" has fallen. It has ignored huge swaths of data simply because they do not fit into the existing framework of prejudice; if anyone tried to fit all of the pieces of the puzzle together at once, it would be impossible because the new data would present sufficient contradictions – "anomalies", to use Thomas S. Kuhn's (11) famous term – to make the whole thing collapse. Even though writers such as Kuhn have pointed to this periodic behaviour as a healthy characteristic of "normal science", scientists themselves seem to fear it – and the more established, prestigious and financially-dependent they are upon the old paradigm, the more stubbornly they seem to resist the rise of the new.

If we were to seek prime examples of entrenched scientific stupidity, we should look first at the long, slow and agonising demise of the so-called "queen of the sciences", cosmology. Now, when a paradigm shift finally hits the cosmologists between the eyes like a lightning bolt, would common sense not tell us that suddenly – literally "in a flash" – a whole new vista of knowledge, understanding, prediction and verisimilitude would open up before them? Surely, this must be something to be excited about?

Err, well, actually . . . no. They clearly fear the arrival of that new paradigm, because they (and everything they have been working for) will (they think) suddenly become redundant. But it is only the theory, the hypotheses and the paradigm which become redundant. Knowledge remains knowledge; it does not simply disappear just because a new interpretative framework has arisen, but instead takes its rightful place alongside other sets of information which the adherents of the old paradigm felt ought to be ignored. One of the greatest crimes of modern "science" is that it accepts only certain types of information; it especially ignores written and oral evidence in the form of narratives of past events, be they legends or actual written accounts. Apart from the deliberate destruction of anomalous evidence, this is one of the main "filters" by means of which possibly important information is simply ignored.

As an aside, we might note that (for example) the acceptance of the Mitchell Chemiosmotic Hypothesis (7) as an explanation of mitochondrial function did not suddenly lead to mass redundancies among biochemists; instead, it led to (among other things) a better understanding of the functions of whole cells, probably a whole new class of pharmaceuticals (and therefore profits), and fitted in well with the rise of the "Endosymbiont Hypothesis" of Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (8) (ex-wife and son of Carl Sagan), according to which what we now call "eukaryotes" developed from ever closer symbiosis and integration of function of what were originally prokaryotes, because analysis of mitochondrial proteins showed strong evidence of common ancestry between widely diverse groups of organisms.

It is difficult for someone like myself to understand this reluctance to traverse the gap between one paradigm and another; after all, previous observations do not necessarily become redundant, unless they were actually in error or wrongly interpreted; when the new paradigm comes along, they are reinterpreted in its light and acquire new significance within the whole. There should be no anticipation of danger on the part of practising scientists, but excitement in anticipation of the new vistas soon to be beheld.

As an example of a truly great scientist, one should look at the story of Dmitri Mendeleev (9), the Russian chemist who was largely responsible for giving us the Periodic Table as we now have it. In his time, carbon, silicon, tin and lead were well-known, but one element was missing between silicon and tin. It was Mendeleev who correctly characterised the missing element and since it had not yet been isolated, gave it the provisional name of "eka-silicon" ("eka" in Greek meaning "below"). This element was later identified as the semi-metal germanium, which has since become an indispensable part of semiconductor technology. When we use the term "predictive power" in the same breath as "scientific method", this is what we are talking about!

If all of the foregoing is true, how should we characterise the current state of science? It is afraid of data which do not agree with, or flatly contradict, the prevailing theoretical framework; its popular outlets are obsessed with little more than the slavish and dull repetition of alleged "facts", many of which can be either disputed our outright falsified; and it has a huge number of "hangers-on" of various degrees of luminosity who depend on it for their career, reputation and income, and of course, it is these latter three things which are most threatened by change.

Now, what does this really sound like? Why, it sounds like a . . . like a . . . a religion, yes, that's it, it's the religion of . . . scientism (10). And let me be perfectly blunt with you, dear reader: more than anything else, this is why, after five years as a mature undergraduate and a string of jobs in different types of chemical analysis, plus the publication of one book on chemical analysis and four articles published in New York and Germany, I just gave up on science. It's a terrible, terrible fraud, expensive and pointless, because it has become lost and doesn't really want to find its way home, because it likes the way things are and resists change like a child being dragged off to see the dentist. Like the dead dodos and solitaires on Mauritius, it found its safe little niche where there was no competition and felt no need to change further – except, perhaps, to become bloated and flightless. History ended for the dodos and solitaires when the Europeans arrived, and there was nowhere to run away to . . .

You see, the ideal state of science, which was promulgated for so long but seems to have been buried somewhere, was one in which differing theories competed to predict phenomena more correctly (again, as an example, Priestley versus Lavoisier). But modern science has degenerated into an addled, self-deluded, narcissistic blob of a thing, whose head goes round and round reciting the same nonsense over and over again. It pays no attention to new data and when it does pay attention, consistently misinterprets or outright dismisses them. For the phenomena I want to discuss in this and future blogs, we need a different framework and a different viewpoint.

Now, we come to the irony of the situation. The framework I intend to use here is not unscientific in its origin; the problem is that the data which led to it were misinterpreted due to a false paradigm. This is what we are really faced with: "normal science" has already produced all the data we need, but these data have been deep-sixed, maligned or outright denied and vilified.

When we start to discuss the subject of UFOs – and "unidentified flying object" was never an official term for these things – we are bound to disambiguate it into perhaps several subject areas. For example, the usual implication of using a term like "UFO" is that it is an aerial craft piloted by beings not of this Earth; yet there is good reason to believe that many of these phenomena do not involve "aliens", but are instead entirely natural and originate within the body of this planet. Then there is the conspiratorial side of the phenomenon – the idea that natural phenomena of this type could be used to hide the activities of human agencies who would prefer not to be recognised by a wider audience, and take steps to misdirect and disinform both direct (but otherwise accidental or casual) observers and those with a genuine interest, who are more determined to investigate the subject more deeply. Plus, of course, "vested interests" in the form of multinational corporations whose income would be threatened by any reasonable alternatives to what they offer.

This area is a whole can of worms, but it remains that way because of the interests of those for whom it is a convenient cover story. It involves rich and powerful people – those who have been enriched at the expense of ordinary citizens, who are put into a position of being forced to accept what those in positions of political and economic power have foisted upon them.

And it involves the discussion of a cosmological paradigm which makes no sense to the acolytes of invoking purely Earthbound phenomena as explanations of off-world phenomena; they are simply myopic. I am personally afraid that this is a by-product of an ancient prejudice, according to which the Earth (and the people on it) are considered somehow "special" and more important than the rest of the observable universe, when in fact we are part of it, rather like a resistor or capacitor in a vast computer circuit. There are those among us who see such a diminution of their importance as a threat, but frankly, their opinions are worth little in the discussion which follows.

We are just a very small part of the whole. FACT. Now just get over it, will you?

In the next instalment we will begin to look at this probably new (but perhaps actually very old) paradigm and at its predictive power compared with others, but we will set the stage for this by making one suggestion: the apparent predictive power of a paradigm lies in its ability to fill in lacunae of knowledge which other paradigms cannot. And it does this because it is able to incorporate data and other evidence from more sources, thus making a more complete picture of reality.

I leave you for the moment with this thought in mind.

References:

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Stanley_Eddington

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity

(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang

(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State_theory

(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemiosmotic_hypothesis

(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiosis_theory

(9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeleev

(10) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism