Paradigm Shift in today’s Science

I discuss Paradigm Shift in cases like phlogiston , caloric or electricity . No such shifts have occurred since about 1825. The first two took about 25 years to be effected. At the time, science was largely the hobby of rich industrialists. Relatively few people were involved. In today’s science, a paradigm shift would severely damage the careers, salaries and reputations of too many professionals – professors and text book writers – and so is not possible. The evolved mechanism which blocks any future paradigm shift is complex and sophisticated, and does not involve conspiracy, and is without instruction. The behaviour of all parties in defence of ruling paradigms is extremely predictable. This includes students, text book writers, professors, journalists of every colour, none of whom even reply when I approach them. The obvious long term great benefits from major paradigm shifts like phlogiston or caloric means that this kind of combined operation is needed to block such an event today, and is in operation. Paradigm shifts like Phlogiston or Caloric will definitely not occur under today’s professional science, well into the future. However, the evolved impasse extends beyond the banning of paradigm shift to the blocking of lesser advances, for instance on self resonant frequency .

All parts of society put someone who even hints at paradigm shift into the “crank” or "nutter" category. I tried to sidestep this problem by merely asking questions , or attempting to publish experimental results, which threw doubt on an entrenched paradigm, to no avail. No professor or text book writer or student will make any written comment when he senses that the ruling paradigm is under investigation, even if it is merely an effort to establish what their ruling theory is. He knows he must not get involved in any way in outlining the details of the ruling theory that he is defending against a crank.

The Whig attitude, that all past developments inexorably led to the present, ideal (or at least better than anything in the past) situation, extends worldwide beyond professional scientists to all branches of today’s educated culture.

Wikipedia’s "Whig History" includes an interesting item on "Whig History" in the history of science , but does not go further to assert, as I do, that all the other satellite disciplines of science are also Whig. Apart from “History of Science”, these include “Sociology of Science”, “Philosophy of Science”, and my speciality, the developing “Politics of Knowledge”, which last has 9 million Google hits. No members of these communities will study my research findings, or even reply when I approach them.

“mathematics is the language of science” has 200,000 hits on Google. A Google search for “electromagnetic theory” + “vector calculus” gives 25,000 hits. Would-be students of electromagnetic theory, reading an introduction to the subject, will be told; “Before studying electromagnetic theory, the student must have mastered vector calculus” 1 . What follows is the mathematicisation of what is properly a subject relating to physical reality, not mathematics. The Engineering student in Cambridge University receives a copy of lecture notes on the “Transverse Electromagnetic Wave” (which should contain Figures 4 and 5 , but does not ), containing an array of formidable mathematics which does not relate to the TEM Wave , but merely convinces the student that he is not bright enough to master the subject, which he is taught is mathematical, not physical; not about physical reality. Further, even professors and text book writers have a poor grasp of Figures 4 and 5 , which they do not know, because these figures do not appear in any text book. This irrelevant mathematics, coupled with the lack of my Figures 4 and 5, prevents professors and text book writers from gaining physical insight into the TEM Wave 1 , which is at the heart of electromagnetic theory. The TEM Wave is the signal from one logic gate to the next, and also the signal travelling at the speed of light along a USB cable. Because the mathematics imposed on electromagnetism uses the = sign which ignores causality, rather than the arrow —> used in chemistry, relevant professors are unable to understand the (causality based) distinction between classical theory, that electric current causes field, and Heaviside's theory , that field causes current. Nobel prize winner Professor Brian Josephson , a mathematical, or “theoretical”, physicist, says it is unimportant, merely “a matter of opinion”.

A Google search shows that “Galileo’s famous statement”, “mathematics is the language of science” has 200,000 hits. “Galileo + mathematics” has 2 million hits. So if we want a science which is based on physical reality, we are up against at least one big hitter, Galileo, a man whom I strongly support in general, particularly in my dialogue with Harry Ricker over “the truth that there are no truths”. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x231.pdf . Both parties in the Galileo debate, in which Establishment Modern Physics is on the side of the church, not the side of Galileo, feel very strongly indeed about it. I think dissidents like you should be on the side of Galileo. Unlike the Establishment, you do not have to prevent scientific advance (pursuit of the truth) from obsoleting your text books and lecture notes.

Ivor Catt August 2014