PSI Blog 20200113
Financing the birth of regressive physics and cosmogony
Last week I hinted
at the relationship between ideologies and economics. Like everyone else, regressive physicists and cosmogonists do not live on air. In the USA, money for science must go through Congress, the executive branch, or rich
donors almost all of whom are extremely or at least moderately religious. The
USA government is not going to finance the downfall of religion, which
patriotically supports their military endeavours.
Here I once again present the interesting anecdote by John Chappell, who is widely regarded as the “founder of
dissident physics in the USA”:
Here is part of #3
in the founding principles of the Natural Philosophy Alliance written by Dr.
Chappell:
"DO NOT
ASSUME THAT IF SPECIAL RELATIVITY WERE INVALID, THIS FACT WOULD LONG AGO HAVE
BEEN DISCOVERED WITHIN ESTABLISHMENT PHYSICS.
The reason it has
not been is that almost everyone with a sufficiently bold and critical view of
the subject to develop sound arguments against SR has not been allowed to
flourish within the establishment. Great numbers of reliable accounts of such
intolerance have been told.
One of the most
recent comes from a new NPA member who, when doing graduate work in physics
around 1960, heard the following story from his advisor: While working for his
Ph.D. in physics at the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1920s,
this advisor had learned that all physics departments in the U.C. system were
being purged of all critics of Einsteinian relativity. Those who refused to
change their minds were ordered to resign, and those who would not were fired,
on slanderous charges of anti-Semitism. The main cited motivation for this
unspeakably unethical procedure was to present a united front before
grant-giving agencies, the better to obtain maximal funds. This story does not
surprise me. There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics of
Einsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in 1985, when
I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that year’s International
Congress on the History of Science. After I finished, the Danish chairman made
some courteous remarks about dissidents he had learned about in Scandinavia,
and then turned to the audience for questions. The first speaker was one of a
group of about 4 young physics students in the back. He launched immediately
into a horrible tirade of verbal abuse, accusing me of being entirely wrong in
my analysis, a simplification of the Melbourne Evans analysis–” Evans is wrong;
you are wrong,” he shouted. He accused me of being way out of line to present
my “faulty” arguments on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him
“Then how would you explain…”, he loudly interrupted me with “I don’t have to
explain anything.” The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by all this, that
the question session was essentially destroyed."
Financially, this
has worked out extremely well for U.C. Berkeley, which is arguably “the best
public university in the USA” where the Physics Department is famous for developing
nuclear weapons and filling out the periodic table with the heavier elements
(e.g., californium). It has been in the forefront of propagandizing the Big
Bang Theory. This from the former chair of the Astronomy Department:
Silk, Joseph, 1973, Cosmological theory:
Science, v. 181, p. 1038-1039.
Silk, Joseph,
1980, The big bang: The creation and evolution of the universe: San Francisco,
Freeman, 394 p.
Silk, Joseph,
1988, The Big Bang (2nd edition): New York, Freeman, 485 p.
Silk, Joseph,
2002, The big bang (3rd ed.): New York, W.H. Freeman, 480 p.
Those financial
constraints still hold. I doubt U.C. Berkeley will drop its support of
creationism any time soon:
‘Saul Perlmutter,
of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National
Lab, said that a breakthrough in dark energy research “feels like a natural
thing to occur soon.”’ Credit: R. Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab
The philosophical naivety
of cosmogonists knows no bounds. Here is the latest on how your tax dollars are
being wasted by U.C and Prof. Perlmutter:
Readers know dark
energy does not exist. Welcome to the latest cosmogonical goose chase!
