Alfred Wallace’s scientific curiosity that drove him for over forty years is nowadays considered proof that he was an “eccentric”. In the French Encyclopedia Universalis, esteemed by many as a reliable source, in an entry on Alfred Russel Wallace by Jacqueline Brossolet, "archiviste documentaliste à l'Institut Pasteur", she comments on this curiosity of his in just one sentence:
“At the end of his life, he became interested in sociology, anthropology and human evolution: On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1875), Studies Scientific and Social (1900), Man's Place in the Universe (1903). In 1905, he wrote his autobiography My Life.”
Alfred Wallace’s first publication on the subject of paranormal appeared in 1866 – hardly at the “end of his life”, since Wallace died in 1913! If Encyclopedia Universalis is supposed to represent the position of “mainstream science”, in this case it is doing it well - by ignoring inconvenient facts and distorting the truth. But isn’t that what Science accuses Religion of doing?
We will see that a similar fate has been bestowed upon another curious scientist, a contemporary of Wallace, William Crookes. Therefore we will be justified to be become curious as to whether, by some chance, we are not dealing here with a rule rather than with an exception?
Whom to believe?
Our beliefs do matter – whether we are a scientist or a priest. They influence our choices, conscious and unconscious. Our choices influence our reality; they influence the choices of other people. The “butterfly effect” may be at work, when one flap of a butterfly wing dramatically changes the weather pattern on the planet according to Chaos Theory. Assigning a very small probability to such an effect may depend on our insufficient knowledge of causes and of circumstances.
We have seen that we should not believe Encyclopedia Universalities in everything that we find there. So, whom to believe?
I like to say: “I do not want believe. I want to know.” Isn’t knowledge better than belief? And yet things are somewhat complicated. Why? Because in some cases when I believe that I know, in reality I do not know. On the other hand I may know that I believe that I know which prevents me – to some extent – from making errors.
There is an error in Encyclopedia Universalis – does it mean that we should not rely on encyclopedias in general? Never? But then, what should we rely upon? Experts? Which experts? Experts make errors as well. Experts often do not agree with each other. Sometimes they fight and they fight violently. Example: In the book “The Neanderthal Enigma”, p. 89, James Shreeve relates a story when, during a conference in Zagreb, one anthropologist, who had dated an archaic sapiens skull to more than 700,000 years, started yelling and charged the podium when another anthropologist (the one speaking at the podium) claimed that he had dated to less than half that age. A third anthropologist had to use physical force to separate the two, one of whom obviously intended to do bodily harm to the other. Similar fights between “experts” are usually hidden from the eyes of the public, yet they do occur, especially during conferences. The public at large, however, is mostly exposed to a relatively stable “mainstream science” point of view, one which, now and then, undergoes dramatic revolutions.
What to do?
So, what should we believe and whom should we believe? Let me quote here the advice given by Bertrand Russell:
There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed; the dates of eclipses may serve as an illustration. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein’s view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts twenty years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this:
(1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
(2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and
(3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.
This may seem like a reasonable approach, but should we believe Bertrand Russell? Russell was certainly a first class philosopher, an expert in his domain, but what do other experts have to say on the same or similar subjects? Do experts agree on the subject of believing?
P.S.1. 26-03-2023 18:15 From my reading list:
1. Time-energy uncertainty and relativistic canonical commutation relations in quantum spacetime
Foundations of Physics volume 12, pages 555–564 (1982)
It is shown that the time operator Q 0 appearing in the realization of the RCCR's [Qμ,Pv]=−jhgμv, on Minkowski quantum spacetime is a self adjoint operator on Hilbert space of square integrable functions over Σ m =σ×v m , where σ is a timelike hyperplane. This result leads to time-energy uncertainty relations that match their space-momentum counterparts. The operators Qμ appearing in Born's metric operator in quantum spacetime emerge as internal spacetime operators for exciton states, and the condition that the metric operator should possess a ground exciton state assumes the significance of achieving minimal spacetime 4-momentum uncertainty in fundamental standards for spacetime measurements.
2. Information-theoretical aspects of quantum measurement
International Journal of Theoretical Physics volume 16, pages 321–331 (1977)
We present criteria for comparing measurements on a given system from the point of view of the information they provide. These criteria lead to a concept of informational completeness of a set of observables, which generalizes the conventional concept of completeness. The entropy of a state with respect to an arbitrary sample space of potential measurement outcomes is defined, and then studied in the context of configuration space and fuzzy stochastic phase space.
3. From E. Prugovecki Biography:
He left for the U.S.A. in 1961 because he had the opportunity to study under Prof. Wightman. Actually, in 1962-63 he helped with proof-reading of the Streater-Wightman monograph PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That. I mention this because Prof. R. F. Streater was my supervisor during my work on a Ph.D. thesis at Imperial College in London.
At that time Prugovecki thought that the Wightman School stood for ideals to which he strongly subscribed (and still does): the kind of mathematical rigour and basic honesty in science that he found sadly lacking in contemporary theoretical physics, dominated since the mid-1940s by questionable "renormalization schemes" and other techniques that, he personally felt, were doing a lot of harm to a great tradition in science.
In the meantime, his interest in physics had diminished because of an interest in pure mathematics and philosophy of science for which, he thought, there was no possibility of study at the Institute Ruder Boskovic. At that time and later he was deeply attached to the principles of mathematical soundness and beauty in his work, as always advocated by Dirac. Many quotes from Dirac are used in his last two monographs.
By the mid-1960s it became clear to him that all that Wightman and his followers had to offer was simply another fundamentally unsubstantiated form of dogma, advocated by means of sheer techniques rather than by a truly critical analysis of the foundations of quantum theory.
So, he decided to move to Canada since he thought that there he would be far enough from the centers of power in US to pursue his own program unmolested, and yet close enough to be able to exert some influence once he began to effectively develop it. Unfortunately, it turned out that he was very wrong in those assumptions.
Once he began having some real measure of success with his program, things began happening to him. He got the feeling that competition in science in North America was not pursued in the same ethical manner as in Europe. Therefore, he gave me the following sincere and succinct advice for those young Croatian theoretical physicists for whom science is not just another way to acquire influence and power at any cost: stay in Europe!
P.S.2 27-03-2023 10:11
Eduard Prugovecki describes today's Science, as he experienced it, in his futuristic novel "Dawn of the New Man" (Xlibris 2002)
For, fortunately for me, it turned out that I had a brilliant intellect and remarkable academic aptitudes. It also turned out that I could be as single-minded in my chosen pursuits as my father was in his, so that I eventually managed to acquire a doctorate in quantum cosmology while I was still only twenty-one years of age. Hence my father eventually not only became totally reconciled to my not following in his footsteps, but by the time I received my doctoral diploma he could no longer hide his pride in my academic achievements.THE TOTAL DEDICATION AND intense concentration required to compress course requirements and the most creative type of research, which would normally take ten years or more, into a mere five years, had left me no time while I was a student to observe the mundane features of the academic life that was unfolding around me. But after I had been offered, on my own merits, and without any kind of intervention from my father, a research position at the internationally most distinguished research institution in quantum physics and cosmology at that time, I was suddenly confronted with the everyday realities of life in the world of what had become by that time known as Big Science.To my utter dismay, I soon discovered that behind the idealistic facade of the world of contemporary science, there lay hidden an incredible amount of pettiness, of short-sightedness, of lack of social conscience, of crass favoritism, and of unprincipled self-promotion. I also discovered kinds of machinations were required for the achievement of professional reputation, and that excellence in research alone was not sufficient nor a necessary condition for professional success.In fact, the scientific community that was eventually revealed to my eyes had practically nothing in common with that described in the biographies of great scientists that had inspired me in my teens. Instead of honest and objective Pursuers after Truth and Knowledge, by the time I became a scientist myself, the leading figures of contemporary science were by and large mediocrities who had reached their prominent status by using and manipulating their professional contacts rather than on merit alone. Their inconspicuous but all-pervading “networking” was reflected in the exchanges of professional favors; in the acceptance of positions on committees that dispensed research grants, lucrative research positions, academic prizes, and so on; in the shameless advertising and “selling” of their own ideas; in the control of the editorial boards of scientific journals, so that no papers that did not support the often poorly conceived pet theories of the top members in the scientific establishment could get published; and in a plethora of other devices meant to enhance the reputations of those members, and that of the various power cliques to which they belonged.Those cliques protected and defended what they saw as “their turf” with well-disguised but ferocious determination. For scientific truth no longer mattered. What exclusively mattered was professional glory! And when on rare occasions young idealists like me tried to come forth with worthwhile research that contradicted the ossified and sometimes patently false pet theories of “leading” scientists, thereby threatening their privileged positions, those young scientists soon found out that they could not get their papers published in well-known journals, that they could not get adequate grants, and that if they did not quickly join the conformist crowd of their colleagues, their careers might be ruined by most despicable means, ranging from the denial of well-deserved academic or research positions to downright character assassination.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comment..