A Brush With the Dark Side of Science

 How easy it is to join the dark side in our society – I know from my own unfortunate experience, when I was the guilty one.

In 1997, in collaboration with Philippe Blanchard from the University of Bielefeld, I was organizing an international conference “Quantum Future – From Volta and Como to the Present and Beyond”, dealing with some of the fundamental issues of quantum theory. 

We had a lot of first class speakers, famous physicists and philosophers, signed up to attend. Luminaries such as: Howard Carmichael, Bernard.D’Espagnat, Rudolf Haag, Serge Haroche, Klaus Hepp, John Klauder, Roland Omnes, Henry Stapp, Akira Tonomura, William Unruh and others. We also invited Giuseppe Vitiello from the University of Salerno, who gave a talk about Quantum dissipation and brain dynamics”. His talk was not well received by Klaus Hepp who gave a talk on a similar subject: “Towards the Demolition of a Computational Quantum Brain”.

(On this subject see also Michael Abraham, "The Science of Freedom")

When it came time to publish our conference proceedings, we chose Springer Verlag, one of the best known scientific publishing companies. But Springer had chosen Klaus Hepp as their scientific advisor, and I learned, through Philippe, that Hepp had put a veto on publishing Vitiello’s paper! We were told that if we insisted on publishing his paper, Springer was prepared to refuse to publish our proceedings! There was no referee report that could be argued with, just the opinion of one person: Klaus Hepp.

After some discussion with Philippe I decided not to fight with Springer. Springer published our proceedings, the paper of Klaus Hepp is there, but Vitiello is not even listed as a participant!*

Conference proceedings  1999

Quantum Future

From Volta and Como to Present and Beyond. Proceedings of Xth Max Born Symposium Held in Przesieka, Poland, 24-27 September 1997

Editors: Philippe Blanchard, Arkadiusz Jadczyk

It does not even matter whether Hepp was right or not. Even if Vitiello’s paper was too speculative and not convincing, that should have been decided by independent and objective referees, and not just by the opinion of one competitor in the brain research domain! Vitiello had to publish his ideas somewhere else. 

My Double Unveiled

The dissipative quantum model of brain

Author

Giuseppe Vitiello | University of Salerno

What was so dreadfully gut-wrenching about this situation was that I liked Giuseppe, I liked his far-reaching unconventional ideas, and I was in a friendly relation with him. 

Giuseppe Vitiello - Books

By subsuming myself to the manipulations of the publisher I put a burden on my conscience that has never eased, and also I lost a creative and curious friend.

But I learned a lesson about the ways Science works, and also, even more important, about myself, about my own weaknesses. Let me note here that some people get manipulated into these situations and, once they commit an unconscionable act, it just makes it easier to do more and more along that line. Others find it so painful that they never do it again. In this respect, there seems to be another sharp division between scientists – and people in general – similar to that between those who are curious and those who are not.

* Though in our Preface we wrote:

In addition to the papers included in this volume, the following invited presentations were given:

I. Bialynicki-Birula (Warsaw): "Rotational Frequency Shift"

D. Diirr (Munich): "Quantum Theory Without Observers"
B. Mielnik (Warsaw): "Quantum Measurement: Walk in the Dark"
G. Nimtz (Cologne): "The Photonic Tunneling Analogy and Superluminal Tunneling Velocities"
C. Piron (Geneva): "The Quantum Theory as a Theory of the Vacuum Field"
A. Tonomura (ARL Hitachi Hatoyama): "Dynamical Observation of Quantized Vertices in Superconductors Using Electron Waves"
G. Vitiello (Salerno): "Quantum Dissipation and Brain Dynamics"
H. Weinfurter (Innsbruck): "Quantum Entanglement, Randomness and Information"

In addition to these invited lectures, there were also informal seminars given by P. Bussey, P. Gonzalez-Diaz, A. Kracklauer, R. Olkiewicz, A. Orlowski, A. Ruschhaupt, W. Slomczynski, L. Vacchini and F. Winterberg and lively discussions among all the participants.

Which amounts to:

Do We Have a Quantum Entangled Brain?

Previous post: Dangerous to be Curious? Quantum Future - Gossip and Censorship

Next: Brian D. Josephson on Censorship in Science

P.S.1. Caught my attention today: Andreas Ruschhaupt and Reinhard F. Werner, "Quantum Mechanics of Time" in  "The Message of Quantum Science: Attempts Towards a Synthesis"

Lecture Notes in Physics 899

ISBN: 978-3-662-46421-2

Ed. Philippe Blanchard, Jürg Martin Fröhlich

P.S.2 14-04-23 Reading McGilchrist - "The Matter With Things":

"Not  ignorance,  but  ignorance  of  ignorance,  is  the  death  of knowledge." 

P.S.3 17:43 Caught my attention today:

My own recipe for faster than light communication is:
The Theory of Kairons: here (DOI 10.1007/s00006-008-0119-2)

But my reason for "no time-travel paradoxes" is different than that spelled out by Sabine. It has to do with the complexity of the Universe - everything is connected with everything. The only problem is: how? How exactly? And here the devil is in the details - I am fully aware of, and  I acknowledge this fact.

P.S.4 15-04-23 Reading McGilchrist - "The Matter With Things":

"SHOULD ONE GO ‘BEYOND THE FACTS’?

And there is another. Some people get uncomfortable if, as they tend to put it, one goes ‘beyond the neurological facts’. This is, to be sure, an important point to raise: for where do the data cease and where does  an  understanding  begin?  What,  we  might  ask,  count  as  the ‘facts’  of  the  difference  between  the  cat  and  the  mouse?  Is  it  just what you see from a neurological diagram, or is there more to it than that?

There is no hard and fast distinction here; it is matter of judgment to  what  degree  we  bring  an  understanding  to  bear  on  data.  It  is possible,  then,  to  go  too  far,  but  also  not  to  go  by  any  means  far enough. The human brain is where the physical world of measurable ‘things’  most  intimately  meets  the  rich  complexity  of  human experience; when science is dealing with how consciousness brings the  experienced  world  into  being,  it  is  not  possible  to  avoid philosophy,  including  the  history  of  ideas.  Indeed  the  neglect  of philosophy  by  science  has  been  a  disaster  for  science  –  and therefore for us all.

What  counts,  then,  as  going  too  far  depends  on  a  number  of things,  including  the  extent  of  the  various  hemisphere  differences, whether there is any pattern or overall meaning to those differences, and the context in which you view them. If you don’t know the extent of the differences (and very few people do), and if at the same time you can’t see the overall picture (viewing the differences as just so much lab data, not something with significance for what it means to be a living person), then, yes, the argument has been taken too far. If you do and can, however – not far enough. Hence this book.

There’s  a  world  of  difference  between  ‘going  beyond’  the evidence,  in  the  sense  that  your  facts  are  wrong,  and  seeing  the philosophical implications of those facts – how they hang together to

create  something  greater,  which  inevitably  ‘goes  beyond’  them. That’s  what  intelligent  science  is  supposed  to  do  –  to  progress beyond  the  mere  accumulation  of  facts  to  an  understanding  of  the question:  ‘who,  then,  are  we?’  Amassing  facts  on  their  own  is  not enough.  Having  said  that,  looking  at  an  enormous  amount  of evidence is vitally necessary. "

P.S.5 15-04-23 And on a similar subject:

Brian D. Josephson, The Truth of Science: Physical Theories and Reality (Review of the book by  Roger G. Newton, "The Truth of Science: Physical Theories and Reality"). And there, in particular:

"A better book could have been written if the central theme had been not scientific truth but scientific progress, and the question of what it is about science and its methods that allows it (sometimes) to make clear progress by resolving inconsistencies in a widely acceptable manner."