In the next posts I want to briefly address certain issues with contemporary
Science – issues that I have been following with intense interest
and in which, sometimes, I also participated.
Let us start with Brian D. Josephson.
Brian
Josephson, 1973 Nobel Laureate in physics for discovering the effect
carrying his name and used in superconducting quantum interference
devices – used, for instance, in supersensitive magnetic field
detectors.
In 1988 my attention was drawn to Josephson’s paper
(written together with Michael Conrad and Dipankar Home) entitled
“Beyond quantum theory: a realist psycho-biological interpretation of physical reality” When discussing the current status of quantum theory, the authors
made the following comment:
"It should be noted that in the current interpretation we
do not assert that such processes as the state vector collapse
associated with quantum measurement are purely formal or imaginary
and have no corresponding physical correlates. Instead we assume the
mathematical filtering operation to correspond to a real physical
process the detailed nature of which may become clarified when the
biological aspects of the unified theory are taken fully into
account."
That remark
was one of the important starting points for my own research and
consequently led, in 1995, to “Event Enhanced Quantum Theory” (recently partly "rediscovered" by others under the term "hybrid classical-quantum dynamics").
Josephson, after receiving his Nobel Prize, naturally felt that he
had some freedom of choosing his research subjects and he used this
freedom to move in directions that were considered “pseudo-science”
by narrow-minded and non-curious “normal” career-seeking, or just
fearing-to-lose-their jobs, physicists. The topics in question
include things such as “water memory”, “the paranormal” and
“cold fusion” phenomena; all were being vehemently debunked and
the lives and careers of anyone daring to work on these topics were
being actively destroyed by the authoritarian defenders of “we know
it all” science.
In 1999
Josephson invited Jacques Benveniste to the Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge. Benveniste was, at that time, Directeur de Recherches at
INSERM, Digital Biology Laboratory, Clamart. In his talk at
Cambridge, Benveniste described in some detail experiments conducted
at INSERM with diluted biological agents and their peculiar
electromagnetic signatures. He stated that:
"These results strongly suggested the electromagnetic
nature of molecular signaling, heretofore unknown. This signal, that
is "memorized" and then carried by water, most likely
enables in vivo transmission of the molecular specific information."
At the end
of the talk (you can watch it here) Brian Josephson made a comment that the situation in Science is a
kind of a “power situation”, namely, that if the result is
sufficiently unusual, it is just ignored despite the evidence.
Benveniste noted that in the modern day, the situation is actually
much worse than it was in 1920, when you could publish unusual
results in a journal like Nature. Today Nature will give no space for
papers dealing with the electromagnetic carriers of the biological
information.
Brian
Josephson and Jacques Benveniste during the closing part of
Benveniste’ 1999 lecture in Cambridge
In 1997,
when I was organizing the Quantum Future conference, I invited
Josephson, and he agreed to come and give a talk on “The Paranormal
and the Platonic World”. At the last moment it transpired that he
could not come, since at the same time he was presenting his poster
at the First International Conference on Complex Systems near Boston.
Perhaps that was fortunate, since Springer
Verlag, the publisher of my Quantum Future conference would certainly
have vetoed the publishing of Josephson’s talk,
the same way it vetoed the paper by Vitiello.
Forbidden Subjects:
Censorship in Science
Certain
subjects are simply forbidden to talk about in some journals. What
does this sort of attitude, this kind of totalitarian control and
censorship, have to do with the ideals of Science? I think it is a
pure hypocrisy and politics. It may also have something to do with
certain psychological states. Josephson addresses the issue of
censorship in Science with this funny story:
"It is just an ordinary day at the headquarters of the
physics preprint archive. The operators are going through their daily
routine and are discussing what to do about recent emails:
Some "reader complaints" have come in
regarding preprints posted to the archive by Drs. Einstein and Yang.
Dr. Einstein, who is not even an academic, claims to have shown in
his preprint that mass and energy are equivalent, while Professor
Yang is suggesting, on the basis of an argument I find completely
unconvincing, that parity is not conserved in weak interactions. What
action shall I take?
Abject nonsense! Just call up their records and set
their 'barred' flags to TRUE.
And here's a letter from one 'Hans Bethe' supporting an
author whose paper we deleted from the archive as being
'inappropriate'.
Please don't bother me with all these day to day
matters! Prof. Bethe is not in the relevant 'field of expertise', so
by rule 23(ii) we simply ignore anything he says. Just delete his
email and send him rejection letter #5."
Then he goes
on with these personal comments:
"The first portion of the above exchange is fictional of
course, but might well have happened had Einstein and Yang had
dealings with the physics preprint archive arXiv.org, administered by
Cornell University, today. The second part is not fictional. The web
site archivefreedom.org has been set up to document experiences that
innovative physicists have had in dealing with the archive's
secretive operators, and here is my own story.
I have been fortunate in that, unlike the other
physicists involved, I may well be permitted to post preprints to the
archive at this time, though this proposition has not been put to the
test. I was however, very briefly, on the archive's blacklist myself
for doing things that displeased the operators, who permit contact
with them only anonymously via the alias 'moderation@arXiv.org'.
(I must immediately apologise for using the word
'blacklist': the organisation finds the term distasteful, saying
'that is your term -- we have no blacklist'. Let me therefore say
instead that, for a brief period, a flag was set in my archive record
to ensure that in the future when I logged on to deposit a preprint,
I would find myself barred from carrying out the required procedure.
Technically, they are right of course: a blacklist would be
represented on the server as a one-dimensional array listing the
members of the list, and setting a flag in one of the fields of an
array is not the same at all, if one is being pedantic. So I was not,
strictly speaking, on a blacklist, but the fact was, nevertheless,
that I could not upload my preprint to the server at that time).
What I did in response was to write to the
administration saying there seemed to be a 'system error', and would
they mind correcting it? Back came a message saying it had been
corrected and I could then upload my preprint. Was there really a
system error? I think not: Paul Ginsparg, the inventor of the
archive, does not make programming errors. I assume the archive
operators got together and decided that barring a Nobel Laureate from
depositing papers in the archive would create a bad impression, and
they decided it would be best to reinstate me."
I am
devoting so much space to this issue, because Josephson is not the
only one with a red “flag”. Red flags like those used by
arxiv.org are a disgrace to Science. In Science all should be in the
open, referees reports should be open to a public discussion and
criticism. No decisions should be taken behind closed doors. The fact
that openness is not the way things are done in these matters means
only one thing: private interests have taken over and Scientific
ideals are dying, if not already dead and buried.
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