Censorship

More on Censorship.

By Professor Post;

Most of the alleged debate is words and algebraic
expressions passing past each other without collision,
due to differing metaphysical stance.

Off the top of my head, oversimplifying greatly, but
for the umpteenth time in this email colloquium, the
standard stances are:

(1) Platonic/Pythagorean Idealism: Math is all there
is. Minkowski space, tensors, Klein bottles, e, pi,
triangles, categories, inaccessible cardinals, Hilbert
space, are more real than thee, me, and the galaxy;

(2) Formalism: Mathematics is devoid of meaning. It
is a game played with scribbles by pen and pencil and
chalk, or ink in shaped blots on schooped flattened
bleached woord pulp.

(3) Social Constructionism: Mathematics, and Physics,
are cultural domains where people and shifting
associations of people duel with each other for
wealth, power, attention, and sex.

(4) Realism: for deeply mysterious reasons,
Mathematics sometimes (not always) helps us to
understand observations, to design experiments, and to
make predictions which sometimes come true.

Two people with different stances can argue until the
sphertical cows come home, and never convince each
other of anything.

Like the man and wife fighting and throwing bowls of
alphabet soup at each other, hot words pass between
them.

I find much in Catt's work which fascinates and
perplexes me, both in his experimental brilliance and
in his acute meta-observations of Social
Constructionism in Physics. Forrest Bishop, also an
inventor of genius, is equally unhypnotized by the
Authorities.

However, George Hockney, Josephson, and Geoff Landis
are deeper, more imaginative, and less
establishmentarian than their detractors paint them.
This is also the case with t'Hooft and some others
who've drifted in and out of this group.

There are real and important debates here, but angry
and confused pseudodebates reduce the signal to noise
ratio.

I thank everyone fro helping to free my mind from the
cage that universities have so deviously constructed.
I know less now than I did when I started. But that's
because some of what I thought I knew, I did not
really know. And some of what I knew that I knew was
wrong.

The great majority of men and womnen are sleepwalking,
with their eyes open, but seeing and thinking nothing.

As a magician character puts it in "Tye Amazing
Adventures of kavalier and Clay", to paraphrase
slightly:

people see only what's in front of their noses, and
then only if you tell them to look, and even then only
if you remind them what they saw.

Best,

Jonathan Vos Post , 17 July 2007

--- Forrest Bishop <forrestb@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> Geoff, another "essay"-
>
> Reason is condition precedent thrice over. First
> comes observation,
> then comes deduction, then maybe a cartoon model can
> be constructed out
> of math concepts, or computer animations, etc.
> Almost any such model can
> mimic some aspect of reality, to some constricted
> degree. To turn that
> around and say the ideal math (or animation)
> "governs" the material,
> natural world is to argue the consequent, a logical
> fallacy.
>
> By way of example, we observe the readings of
> Dayton C. Miller's
> remarkably comprehensive interferometer experiments.
> We observe a
> shifting of the interference pattern (fringe shift)
> that depends on the
> azimuthal orientation angle of the instrument. We
> deduce an anisotropic
> component to the speed of light. We chart these
> readings over time. We
> then observe an undulating, sine-like variation that
> is of the same
> period as a sidereal Earth day. We then deduce that
> the effect, or some
> part of it, is not associated with the Solar System.
> To fine-tune this
> deduction, we could then turn to a more complex
> math, involving things
> like trig functions and so on. This provides a
> supporting argument, bu
> can in no way be considered the condition-precedent,
> primary argument,
> which is based on common sense, logic, reason.
>
> Forrest
>

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

"Why do so many of these cranks also make predictions which the proper people fail to make? Is that why they have to be suppressed?" - Ivor Catt

Back in Feb 1997 I started "Science World" magazine ISSN 1367-6172, to try to publicise Catt's work in an efficient way, having failed to get some articles into other places. This failed totally, since the New Scientist (which is about 50% job adverts) has got a complete monopoly of the market. It would take a large marketing budget before any rival would even get distribution, plus of course professional printing (I was using a high street print shop, which pushed up unit costs and did not give the professional finish of trade printing). It was a waste of time. None of the review copies sent to newspapers and other magazines were picked up as news stories. Newspapers will fall for Piltdown man, Cold Fusion and String Theory, but not the hard facts. So I was interested to read the following article:

http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-10-t-000059.html :

"Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?

by [Professor] Frank J Tipler

Abstract- The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually respectable until it has first appeared in a "peer" reviewed journal did not become widespread until after World War II. Copernicus's heliocentric system, Galileo's mechanics, Newton's grand synthesis - these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books, reviewed prior to publication only by their authors, or by their authors' friends. Even Darwin never submitted his idea of evolution driven by natural selection to a journal to be judged by "impartial" referees. Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of Darwin's friends. And Darwin's article was completely ignored. Instead, Darwin made his ideas known to his peers and to the world at large through a popular book: On the Origin of Species. I shall argue that prior to the Second World War the refereeing process, even where it existed, had very little effect on the publication of novel ideas, at least in the field of physics. But in the last several decades, many outstanding physicists have complained that their best ideas - the very ideas that brought them fame - were rejected by the refereed journals. Thus, prior to the Second World War, the refereeing process worked primarily to eliminate crackpot papers. Today, the refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy. I shall offer evidence that "peer" review is NOT peer review: the referee is quite often not as intellectually able as the author whose work he judges. We have pygmies standing in judgment on giants. I shall offer suggestions on ways to correct this problem, which, if continued, may seriously impede, if not stop, the advance of science."

" Frank J Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity Information and Design."

Notice that the very first time Einstein ever underwent peer-review was in 1936, and he blew his top at the CONCEPT of peer-review, refusing to ever again submit to the journal (it was the Physical Review):

"... the final [gravitational wave denying] manuscript was prepared and sent to the Physical Review. It was returned to him accompanied by a lengthy referee report in which clarifications were requested. Einstein was enraged and wrote to the editor that he objected to his paper being shown to colleagues prior to publication. The editor courteously replied that refereeing was a procedure generally applied to all papers submitted to his journal, adding that he regretted that Einstein may not have been aware of this custom. Einstein sent the paper to the Journal of the Franklin Institute and, apart from one brief note of rebuttal, never published in the Physical Review again." - Abraham Pais, "Subtle is the Lord: the Science and the Life of Albert Einstein", Oxford University Press, 1982, quoted at http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-6/p9.html

(In this case the peer-reviewers were actually correct and Einstein was wrong. The point is, Einstein felt that his paper should have been published, and critics should have been able to criticise it later. Einstein did not feel it was right to censor publication because of alleged errors.)

nigel
http://quantumfieldtheory.org/

.

Homepage | Electromagnetism1 | Old Website