Checking in at De Bates Motel

It might not quite be the Hotel California, but you might have similar difficulties in leaving.

One of my scientific heroes is PAM Dirac (Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac).

He is not as widely recognized (by the general public) as someone like Feynman, but amongst physicists he is every bit as revered. He was, by all accounts, socially awkward and wasn’t highly regarded as a lecturer by his students.

Stories about Dirac illustrate his character very well, although my favourite is the reference Hans Bethe is supposed to have written for Feynman after the war. Feynman worked at Los Alamos and Bethe headed up his division. The secretive nature of the work meant that you couldn’t really put it in on your CV.

Bethe’s reference is said to have been very short and sweet :

Feynman is another Dirac - only this time human

This illustrates the extremely high regard in which both of these brilliant men were held. It also highlights the very significant difference in character between them.

Dirac was largely responsible for putting quantum mechanics on a secure and rigorous footing. His book The Principles of Quantum Mechanics which was essentially his PhD thesis, is still, to this day, required reading if you want to understand QM at all. It’s kind of the Principia¹ of QM.

In the early days of QM when the brilliant physicists of the day came up with some new thought or discovery about it, they would “ask Dirac”. He was to quantum mechanics what Newton was to classical mechanics.

He was a man of few words and not given much to small talk. There is a story about a student at Princeton when Dirac was a professor there. This student found himself sat next to the great man at lunch. He was a bit overawed and didn’t quite know what to say. Struggling, he asked, “the weather’s nice today isn’t it Professor Dirac?” whereupon Dirac immediately rose and left the table.

The poor student was distraught and wondered what he’d said to offend this almost god-like figure. After a few minutes Dirac returned and sat down again only to say “Yes, it is”.

It’s entirely possible that Dirac would have lost a ‘formal’ debate on the foundations of quantum mechanics because a ‘formal’ debate is not about deciding the truthfulness of an issue but is really about judging a performance.

Theoretically one could ‘debate’ the proposition that in order to alleviate world poverty we should nuke Africa, and win the debate².

There has recently been a very public and interesting call for a ‘debate’ between a scientist who amassed much media capital during covid and a politician. You will all know to whom I’m referring. Will Hotez and Kennedy check in at De Bates Motel?

I’m in two minds about the principles of this. It all very much depends on whether the asked for ‘debate’ is structured like one of those formal debates whose purpose is to judge a performance, or whether it’s the kind of ‘debate’ that is structured to arrive at the ‘truth’ of a matter (as far as possible).

Politics is all about performance and perception, and almost nothing to do with ‘truth’.

Almost everything the politicians told us about covid and how to ‘deal’ with it was a steaming pile of horseshit - but they weren’t interested in the ‘truth’ were they? They may have actually believed the utter garbage they spouted, they may not have, but they were not even slightly interested in figuring out the ‘truth’ of the matter.

I have to confess that I never really paid much attention to this Hotez character before. I tended not to bother too much with media figures during covid. Would it be too arrogant of me to suggest that I already knew the ‘truth’ and so listening to these morons would simply have been a waste of my time?

Probably.

And so I finally got round to viewing a few Hotez clips.

Oh.

Just, oh.

I’m afraid I can’t really write down the kinds of words that went through my head. Words that rhyme with ‘shunt’ and ‘mother plucker’ being probably the least offensive.

The most probable reason Hotez is declining the offer of a ‘debate’ - whether it’s the kind that judges performance or the kind that judges truth - is that he would lose to Kennedy - and badly. I’m sure he has been advised of this by those who are interested in maintaining the narrative.

And the dutiful ‘mainstream’ media are playing defence (of course) by running articles about why he shouldn’t engage in this debate.

I know I’m a bit of an oddball, but surely there must be thousands and probably millions like me who once accepted the benefits of vaccines unquestionably and with absolute faith.

The whole clusterfuck known as the covid ‘vaccines’ has deeply, and probably irreversibly, shaken our faith. I know it has for me.

We’re no longer swayed by the mere claims of the experts - no matter the degree of passion with which those claims are espoused. We’ve all seen the clips - “the vaccine is a dead end for covid” type clips that came from the ‘experts’. We know they were lying. They claimed the “data” showed this - but no such data ever existed and the data we did have pointed to quite the opposite.

The once free-flowing blood of trust we had has been irredeemably clotted by the spike of their hubris and duplicity.

So, here we have an ‘expert’ on vaccines - it’s his research area for eff’s sake - declining the chance to influence the millions of ‘vaccine hesitant’ people out there. He’s no Dirac - either intellectually or in character. If he was as apparently diffident as Dirac do you think he would have gained such media prominence?

Of course not. He had such a high media profile precisely because they liked what he said and the way he presented himself. This is not someone who we would expect to easily lose a debate of the ‘performance’ kind. Being a scientist actually researching vaccines we might also expect him to have all of the data and arguments at his fingertips - and so we wouldn’t expect him to lose a debate of the truth-seeking kind, either³.

If the covid vaccines, and vaccines in general, are as obviously good as they claim, if the science was as clear-cut and irrefutable as they claim, then surely debating the issue with a non-scientist would be a bit like the proverbial taking candy from a baby?

IF the case is so clear cut, if the ‘anti-vaxxers’ are as deranged as they are made out to be, then this is a golden opportunity to utterly destroy them in a very public forum that would reach millions, maybe billions, of people world wide.

A real-life, bona fide, expert debating a politician on the ‘science’ related to his actual field of expertise? It should be a no-brainer surely? The politician ought to be comprehensively routed. IF, IF, IF, the pro-vaccine arguments are as solid as claimed.

Hotez, and doubtless his advisors, have done the cost-benefit analysis and decided they have more to lose by checking in to De Bates Motel. They clearly fear that the beautiful figure of vaccine science is going to be savaged in the shower by the knife of truth wielded by the psycho anti-vaxxers.

1. This is a reference to Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica which stands as one of the greatest scientific masterpieces of all time, and maybe the greatest, and is usually simply known as The Principia

2. This was an actual proposition (the students brought it up ad-hoc in a class about argument techniques) ‘debated’ in class in my sixth form between the students and their teacher. The poor teacher was hopelessly outclassed by the students and got somewhat frustrated because he was ‘losing’ the debate.

3. Assuming that the official narrative on vaccines is true