Will “The Scientific Worldview” change your life?

Blog 20160511 Will “The Scientific Worldview” change your life?

Glenn Borchardt, Rick Dutkiewicz, Fred Frees, and Steve Puetz

You hear a lot these days about folks “wanting to make a difference.” As an author, I am extremely gratified when that actually happens. Of course, I knew that “The Ten Assumptions of Science” and “The Scientific Worldview” were special during the seven years it took to write them. But to make that connection with readers is priceless. So I feel grateful about the dialog below, which was unprompted by me. It started with Rick’s outrage over the silliness engendered by quantum mechanics:

From Rick Dutkiewicz, Allegan, MI:

Bizarre fourth state of water discovered

http://www.gizmag.com/fourth-state-of-water/42999/

"a molecule, can overcome a barrier and be on both sides of it at once"

Well that cinches it. We all need to give ourselves over to the dark side.

On a related subject:

I just heard some quantum ex-spurt (actually a physics student, but a future ex-spurt nonetheless) saying that it's a proven fact that the universe only exists because of random fluctuations, and nothing is impossible. Thus, although it is extremely unlikely, it is possible that a toaster oven or even a human brain could materialize out of nothing in the middle of space, with no cause at all.

Wow, man! I've smoked pot many times, but never enough to make me that stupid,... oh, I mean "deep". Wow, heavy man!

I think I "randomly materialized" on the wrong planet. On my real planet, people don't believe in made-up crap. On my planet, there never was any concept like "platonic forms". On my planet, there never was a Kant. On my planet, parents raise their kids to think critically. On my planet, people don't automatically believe what is presented on a platter for them to believe.

From Fred Frees, Studio City, CA:

Well said, Rick!!

From Rick:

Fred,

Thanks for the reply.

I recently had a discussion with a friend (a non-scientist, but a skeptical mind who comes close to my a-religious and a-political views).
He kept saying things like "energy is matter", "time is just a 4th dimension", "space bends", "all this has been proved with experiments", "there are other universes where the laws of physics are completely different than ours", and on and on ... I told him that he was living in a sci-fi version of reality. But, I had no easy answers to offer him. I told him I would send him some internet links.

Every TV show or YouTube video that delves into astronomy or particle physics gives strong assertions (along with great music and images), that all of these indeterministic ideas are either "proven" or "quite probable". Like my friend, almost everyone who is interested in science has never heard any alternative or dissident viewpoints. They hear the party line repeated over and over. When you hear something repeated enough times, with no alternatives offered ... even the most skeptical-minded person will start assuming that there must be pretty strong proof for these ideas.

I was in that boat until I read The Ten Assumptions of Science. I felt uneasy about the idea of a star "collapsing to an infinitely dense point with infinite density". I didn't see anything wrong with the idea that gravity might become so strong that light cannot escape. But the rest of it? I had pondered infinity in my religious childhood many times, and I knew something was wrong with the term "infinite density" or "infinite curvature". I didn't buy into the phrase "the laws of physics break down". But I had to tentatively accept these ideas, with no possible alternative viewpoint until Glenn's books came into my life. Reading TTAOS was like flipping a switch in my mind. I immediately dropped all the indeterministic crap. As I read the book on a Florida vacation, I kept saying to my wife, "this book is blowing my mind and rocking my worldview - in a good way".

I am frustrated at not being able to answer my friend's astonishment when I tell him all these ideas are mistaken. I'm reading Steven Bryant's "Disruptive" in hopes of finding some additional ways to explain the reasons modern physics is on the wrong path in many ways. Steven has done a great job on these tutorials on his website:

http://stevenbbryant.com/category/tutorial/

I should also buy a few extra copies of Glenn's new book when it gets into print, because it has a Q&A approach that fits well with today's short-attention-span crowd. I get lots of great ideas from Glenn's blog. He does a good job dealing with inquiring minds there.

We need something like the religious zealot's little flyers that they hand out. A tract that briefly outlines the biggest problems with astronomy, cosmology, and quantum physics. Most importantly, the little flyers would offer the basic alternative viewpoints and suggested reading. Such a tract needs to be aimed, not at true hardcore degreed scientists, but at the sceptically minded folks like my friend and myself, who get constantly bombarded with modern indeterministic nonsense. Young science students especially need to hear the dissident views offered by Universal Cycle Theory, Neomechanics, Modern Mechanics, or whatever we finally decide to call it.

I was a hardcore wanna-be-a-priest Catholic until I studied into other religions, along with some study of what psychology has to say about religion, as well as the history of the Christian church and the Bible. All that study primed me to finally leap out of the Catholic mindset. I think we need a similar primer in a short tract that we can give to our friends who express a spark of interest in our dissident views that contradict the mighty Sagans, Tysons, Hawkings, Guths, and Kakus whose faces are seen on TV saying sentences that end with the phrase "where space and time begin to break down".

From Steve Puetz, Honolulu, HI:

Rick, thank you for all of your work and ideas related to these topics over the years. I agree with you that reading Glenn's book about the Ten Assumptions of Science was a game-changer. Just as you mentioned, after reading the book, I rejected the major astronomical theories that I had previously accepted (even though the theories never made sense from the beginning) simply because Glenn's alternative explanations made a great deal of sense. The Ten Assumptions made sense because no single assumption contradicted any of the others, and after adding infinity into the mix, they took me back to the easy-to-understand days of Newtonian cause-and-effect physics. Since then, I have applied the Ten Assumptions to my research, especially focusing on why cycles are found virtually everywhere we look.

From Fred:

Rick, it's fascinating that from different starting points, we end up in concert. Not knowing anything else in science but the party line, I accepted indeterminism, all the while wondering why most of it made no sense to me. I assumed I didn't know enough to dispute it, so there must have been something I was lacking. In 2000, I began a personal journey to illuminate the schism between evolutionism and creationism. By 2007, my journey led me to The Scientific Worldview and the 10 Assumptions. As I continued reading, it was as if Glenn had entered my brain, and was giving me the answers I so desperately craved. After a lifetime of searching for "clear, scientific thinking," I breathed a glorious sigh of relief that I had finally found it. The greatest gift from Glenn was the understanding that it wasn't my short-comings that prevented me from comprehending things like Relativity Theory, or the Big Bang. But, rather, it was the concepts themselves that are nonsensical and therefore incomprehensible.

The most mind-blowing side effect to all this, was the awesome privilege of meeting and getting to know (and working for) Glenn (and subsequently Steve).

I am honored (on a daily basis) to be a part of the UCT Group and PSI.