Brian D. Josephson on Censorship in Science

 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. 

Brian Josephson – Nobel Prize winner

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.

Academic freedom ‘doesn’t really exist’

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.

Brian Josephson's home page at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University

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P.S.1. Caught my attention today (and NOT "by chance"):

The Truth Summit