EXPLAINING P-OLOGY
Posted by anthonynorth on March 8, 2007
When evolutionists discovered Piltdown Man in the early years of the 20th century, Darwinian natural selection won the day over the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ world of Creationism. The ascendancy of science was assured and scientists rubbed their hands in glee. This situation has not changed today, even though Piltdown Man was soon found out to be a fraud. Could it be that the scientific ascendancy is a similar fraud?
Not exactly. But it doesn’t have the right to be as assured of its correctness as it claims. Grand theories are constructed to explain the Big Bang, yet when we go to the birth of the theory we find the singularity at its centre is nothing more than a mathematical point of infinity. Big Bang, it seems, was born out of mathematical formula and went on to be the creator of the physical universe. Mathematicians are happy with this, but they cannot even prove that 2+2=4.
Science can ignore such problems because they work with logic within a strict scientific paradigm. Theories are offered to explain a phenomenon and then data is amassed to confirm or reject the theory. The problem of rejection of data because it seems of no concern to the theory can be ignored because the whole system is based around a strict logic. But how much reliance can we place on this logic?
The philosopher, Russell, spent most of his life attempting to validate logic. He failed miserably. For it is a simple fact that every stream of logic can be traced back to an axiom, or self-evident truth. From the creation of the axiom, science is thoroughly logical, but we cannot evade the fact that all scientific enquiry begins with a belief. And 2+2=4, so there.
Within this scientific religionism, theories eventually go on to shape our world. And to guard such theories, and the way of life they create, all societies produce an establishment. Yet, if ‘the establishment’ is so correct, how is it that all societies throughout history have overthrown every establishment that has ever existed?
Establishments defend the perceived order with an almost missionary zeal, and in many ways this has to be so for they are the guardians of order. But if science is correct in its view that science is an-going process, forever learning new tricks, then a rigid establishment cannot truly exist. And in understanding the anti-scientific nature of ‘the establishment’, we can identify just what ‘establishment’ is.
An establishment is the guardian of old knowledge. For by the time an establishment has been created to protect a particular knowledge-form, the science behind that form has moved on, and what they are defending is old hat. Hence, it becomes, today, the central role of thinking man to devise an on-going mode of inquiry which subverts the ‘establishment’ without upsetting the order that is essential to any society. Or at least, that is what should be happening.
In actual fact, the entire history of thought has been concerned with grasping knowledge from patterns within life and the universe. Before the rise of scientific man, such knowledge created religions. But beginning with Pythagoras, intelligence came down from upon high and resided itself in man’s head. Such intellectualism had its crowning glory in the Renaissance Man; an intellectual who could look upon the whole field of information available and turn it into knowledge. But following the Renaissance, it all went very, very wrong.
During the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution that is on-going today, science realised that there was too much knowledge for one man to handle. Thus, Reductionism became the perceived scientific approach, reducing everything to its simplest component parts and creating the physics, chemistry and biology of today, with its dozens of sub-¬disciplines, and psychology and sociology to take our scientific understanding into society and the mind itself.
The scientist is more than happy with this. But in having such narrow-sighted scientific disciplines, the role of intellectualism to grasp knowledge from the information contained in patterns is destroyed, leaving us with a knowledge system and society which is fragmented and compartmentalised.
Patternology is my attempt to redress the balance. For at the heart of Patternology is the idea that a working knowledge of all intellectual disciplines can allow a thinker to identify broader patterns that the specialist misses. If you imagine the whole of knowledge as a jig-saw, with each discipline as an individual piece, then Patternology is an attempt to complete the picture.
Most scientists would be horrified with such a thought process, for it is counter to what science, with its reductionism, has become. But the point is, Patternology is closer to the original spirit of inquiry which birthed science, than today’s science can profess to be. Yet, to ease their minds,
we can see Patternology working within strict rules. First of all, it would be seen as a bedfellow to specialisation rather than a new way of thinking. And second, any theories arising from Patternology must never be considered truth. The discipline is aimed solely at throwing up possibilities for debate, and can never do more than that.
(c) Anthony North, Feb 2007
Ed Darrell said
Piltdown Man may have had more influence in Britain than elsewhere — it was, after all, a singularly British sort of fossil, with its millions-years-old cricket bat — but in the rest of the world it was held as an anomoly. It was scientists, rechecking it, who discovered the fraud. We should offer more respect to processes that are so self-correcting.
Big Bang was discovered by mathematics working on the physics of how a universe could be created, but it was confirmed by the discovery of the “echo” of Big Bang. Like the aerodynamics of the bee’s flight until recently, science can’t exactly explain it. However, science has detected that Big Bang occurred, and we have actual photographs of shortly after Big Bang. Denial of such hard evidence does not make Big Bang any less real, less true, or less “proven.”
We should have learned from Darwin that detection of a pattern is not discovery that intelligence is responsible for the pattern. Simple natural laws of physics and chemistry often explain what once appeared to be a mystery. We should not attribute to design that which can adequately be explained by either physics or chemistry, or both.
anthonynorth said
Hi Ed,
Good to hear from you again. The ‘echo’ of the Big Bang? Quite possibly true, but are you saying there can be no other explanation of the evidence? ‘Photographs’ of shortly after Big Bang? Aren’t they really interpretations of the data as it fits our theories?
I keep pointing such things out because science itself is not an exact discipline. There is no such thing as absolute proof of anything.
Yes, most of science’s accepted discoveries and theories could well be right. Yes, science is the ultimate in man’s ability to think. Yes, science deserves its place. All I ask is this:
Is it possible that science could miss things, get things wrong or at times be too narrow-sighted because of its methodology?
If your answer is ‘yes’, then what is the harm of a system of thought to go alongside it that puts forward possibilities, and possibilities alone?
Ed Darrell said
Ralph Alpher died just last month. He was one of George Gamow’s graduate students at George Washington U who took the laws of physics (and chemistry) and calculated how the universe began. Their calculations showed that, if the universe was formed with a rapid expansion (which Sir Frederick Hoyle, an advocate of Steady State, derisively named “a Big Bang”), there would be several signs of the expansion, including remnant radio signals at a particular temperature. Alpher went into other work, but Robert Dicke worked for years to build a radio telescope to find the vestige radiation. Wilson and Penzias were hoping to use the radio telescope at Bell Labs to scan the universe, but they had this nagging “interference” at a particular frequency. When Dicke looked at their setup and their static noise, he pointed out that it was exactly what was predicted a decade and a half earlier.
Could there be another explanation? Probably. There is none now. Steady State could offer no explanation for the echo, which is why it was determined to be falsified by the Wilson and Penzias find.
It’s no interpretation of the data. Either the signal is there, or it isn’t. That it came in exactly where it was predicted to be was a nice corroborative touch that contributes to the understanding that the universe generally (but not specifically) is not a place where things happen randomly, but instead a place that follows laws of physics and chemistry that apply everywhere, equally.
The methodology isn’t the problem. As I noted, either the predicted radiation is there, or it isn’t. Since it is there, since only the Big Bang model predicts radiation at that frequency rather uniformly through the universe, it’s quite fair to say that this very precise measure disproved Steady State. If you have another model to propose, propose it. In the meantime, Big Bang theory is verified by the observations we make in the universe, and it nicely explains why we see what we see. It has high predictive value, as demonstrated by the prediction of the radiation at precise frequencies.
Possibilities? Sure, put them out there. Wild guesses? No, those don’t help anybody understand anything, and when dogmatically claimed to be “equal” to science, they confuse people unnecessarily.
The photographs also are not subject to interpretation — they show the distribution of matter through the universe (I’m referring to the COBE project).
Anyone can duplicate the measurements. The tests are replicable (and students in colleges replicate these measurements often).
What do you think is being missed? How does one know, if one is not at least familiar with what is already known about the universe?
Here’s a story on Ralph Alpher, with more links:
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/science-history-slips-away-ralph-alpher-and-big-bang/
Here’s a link to the explanation of Wilson and Penzias’ discovery:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/press.html
anthonynorth said
Hi Ed,
Your comment was held in moderation by WordPress, presumably because of its length and the links. I say this based on the fact that similar comments have similarly been gobbled by the Great WordPress Comment Eater. But I could be wrong. I do not have absolute knowledge of how WordPress works, so I can merely present a theory that seems to fit the data.
Let’s have a mind exercise. Presuming that Black Holes exist, the idea is that they ‘eat’ matter (unscientific terminology, I know). This prompts the following series of questions:
If black Holes exist, do they have to have a role in the universe?
Where does the matter go?
Could Black Holes redistribute matter back into the universe?
Is it possible that this redistribution could produce something akin to the ‘echo’?
Is it feasible that this redistribution could give the effect of ‘moving apart’?
As I say, just a mind exercise. Not exactly a wild guess, but a question from ‘outside’ the system.
Ed Darrell said
You’re right — it’s probably the links. I set my blog at five links. I think the default setting is one. Any post that goes beyond that total gets shipped to the spam holding area.
Thanks for rescuing the post!
Yes, black holes exist. Among the more interesting experiments proposed for the next little while, U.S. researchers will be making tiny black holes at Fermilab. You may want to look that stuff up.
Role in the universe? Hmmmm. Dunno. I’m no physicist nor expert in black holes. The big expert in black holes is Steven Hawking, but even he has changed his mind about certain aspects over the last couple of decades, based on observations.
On hypothesis is that black holes form the center of galaxies. Many galaxies, including our Milky Way, appear to have a massive black hole at the center.
Quantum theory breaks down at the event horizon of a black hole. Nobody knows, really, what happens to the matter. One of the more interesting controversies has been whether “information” is preserved in a black hole — that is, while a star, for example, is caught in a black hole, is it still distinguishable as a star? When the black hole dissolves, does the star pop out again? Another hypothesis is that all matter is reduced to energy. Observations beyond the event horizon of a black hole are difficult or impossible. We don’t know at this point.
If the matter is reduced, it’s reduced to energy — remember Einstein’s equation showing matter and energy can be converted, one to the other.
Some black holes may redistribute matter back into the universe.
No, that cannot account for the radiation echo of the Big Bang. Wrong frequency, wrong temperature, wrong distribution.
No, the redistribution would not give the red shift effect — you’re getting close to Hoyle’s Steady State hypothesis with that question. Hoyle presumed matter was destroyed somewhere (this was before black holes were known), and then regenerated, somehow, magically, at the “center” of the universe. But now we know there is no center, and that there was a beginning to the whole process.
NASA has a good short description on black holes, and Hawking has his website. His book, A Brief History of Time, is very accessible, and should be in every decent library.
anthonynorth said
Goog morning Ed,
I read Hawking’s book when it first came out and it did nothing to overturn my doubts on scientific method on its own.
Science creates theories, or mind models, of how things work. On the one hand, this allows data to be placed in the theory, or rejected if it doesn’t fit. This, in itself, could be shortsighted.
Alternatively, with a theory, we look for data within the confines of the theory. Sometimes we observe things on the edge of ’sight’ which surprise us – cause the theory to be re-modelled. But could this mean that we don’t see everything there is to see, but simply the bits that fit?
Now, I accept science can only work like this, but it is so easy to miss data and, most importantly, connections.
Yes, my above questions were purposely heading towards Steady State, not so much that I think it is a reality, but because science is so convinced it isn’t.
Have serious studies been done within the theory to back-up certain statements that it cannot be? If not, then we must ask whether the denial of it is really science, or good old-fashioned consensus thinking which occurs in every other area of thought?
For instance, do we know enough about black holes to discount any process of matter regeneration that could have an aftereffect that appears to be an ‘echo’? Could our present understanding of Big Bang be a ‘local’ event within a re-designed Steady State Theory? If this were possible, would the theory allow red shift?
I suppose the central question here is this: has enough research been done to totally discount this idea with science, or merely human presumption?