One of the features of the two big crazy C’s (climate and covid) is this notion of “settled” science. Some scientists (who ought to know better) even seemed to push this kind of thinking. We had (and still have) assurances about “consensus” and are frequently told not to “do your own research”.
I was lucky enough to be able to write a paper during the first year of my PhD. My supervisor had set me looking at the simplest, fully-quantized, model of an atom-field interaction. It was a model that had already been extensively studied (for nearly 25 years by the time I got to it) and the ‘consensus’ was there wasn’t all that much new to be found in it and that it was well-understood.
He set me on this for two reasons. It is a great way to actually get to grips with the fundamental bits and bobs of quantized fields and, secondly, he had some ideas about using this model (suitably adapted) to explore the boundary between classical and quantum when it came to chaotic systems. We never did get round to the chaos bit.
I got lucky. I decided, more by accident than any great insight, to use quantum entropy to characterize the dynamics. I had been fascinated by the concept of entropy and information theory for some time, and thought “Hey, why not approach things from this angle and see what pops out?”. I found, from the quantum entropy, that the consensus view was “wrong”; the standard picture/explanation of the dynamics was incorrect/incomplete and something much more subtle (and interesting) was happening.
It was my first real personal exposure to the notion that there can be new things to be found in even the most well-studied systems and that the “consensus” can be misleading, or incorrect.
The whole history of the development of quantum mechanics (QM) is a kind of case study of the upending of consensus.
Broadly speaking, there are 2 ways to teach QM. You can take the historical approach and look at why certain ideas became necessary at each stage, or you can just dive right in with the axioms of QM and see what they produce. I tend to prefer the historical approach, but it’s not without its problems, either.
In order to take the historical route you have to have already come to grips with an awful lot of ‘classical’ physics. The axiomatic approach is more mathematical in spirit (the maths, initially, being paradoxically easier) and you can start with simpler systems and build from there.
But if you want to understand why QM was such a huge departure from the previous consensus, you pretty much have to have some decent awareness of what that previous consensus was.
In general, when it comes to a highly technical scientific discipline, it’s not such a bad idea to go with the consensus1. Most scientists are not trying to fool you - at least I think not, but am not as sure as I was (pre-covid) on that score.
In my own field, physics, we don’t believe stuff just because we are told. We work through stuff, if we can. So, for example, when we first learn about special relativity we go through the maths, line by line, and check everything. We don’t just think “Oh, Einstein wrote it, so it must be right”. No, we work it all out again for ourselves and see why he was right.
So when we favour consensus in a field we don’t know much about, we assume the people pushing the consensus have also done this necessary hard work.
The problem is that when “the consensus” fails, it can fail spectacularly. Do we need any more recent example than the whole disaster surrounding the covid “vaccines”?
Part of the problem with covid is that, because of the extreme censorship that was applied, because of the anti-scientific clampdown on asking questions, we ended up with a manufactured and illusory consensus. It was an utterly disgraceful period - and shamed the name of science.
You can’t have science without inquiry. It’s all about asking questions. There’s a real skill in knowing what questions to ask that will generate interesting results if you’re good enough to be able to answer them. Sometimes you just get lucky, like I did, and hit upon a way of questioning that yields results.
This spirit of inquiry is implicit in the scientific method itself. You ask “questions” of the idea you’ve come up with - the most rigorous question, of course, being whether it passes the trial of experiment. It’s a case of :
Nice idea, but is it true?
That’s pretty much the whole shebang right there. When you are prevented from even being able to ask this basic, but necessary, question in the first place you don’t have science any more, you have religion.
To be more accurate, we do not really investigate the “truth” of a claim with this process. If an idea fails an experimental test we can say, for sure, that it is untrue2, but we can’t ever say some idea is “true”, only that it has answered all the questions we’ve so far been able to ask of it.
How many times were we told to “trust the science” during the covid fiasco?
Well, you can just fuck right off with that - not even scientists should trust the science. They should, of course, trust the scientific method, which is a different thing.
You’ll notice that a lot of ‘woke’ or ‘progressive’ ideas fall into this unquestionable category. White privilege, intersectional oppressions, generational trauma, rape culture, gender identity, and so on. Nice ideas, but are they true?
Try asking whether white privilege exists in one of these grievance studies departments and you’ll be out of a job faster than you can say cisheteronormativity.
Woke ideas take on the status of unquestionable axioms. Their truth is never questioned, whereas truth itself is turned into some subjective mess of lived experience as everyone’s ‘lived’ truth clashes with everyone else’s.
I’d like to propose Rigger’s First Law of Science
When we abandon the scientific method, as we did during covid, we are adrift on the Creek of Ordure without paddling implements.
There’s a reason why so many woke ideas are just shit - they don’t use the paddles of the scientific method.
It’s one of the best things we ever did, to take authority away from the ‘priest’ class. Unfortunately, we’ve sort of gone full circle and are back with pronouncements from on high from a credentialed priestly class known as the Experts™
And as we saw during covid, even Experts who questioned the Experts™, were derided and mocked and described as being on ‘the fringe’. Thou shalt not question us!
What did they achieve by this? Well, they made people like Bourla very rich. But they also managed to devastate the reputation of science. I only have one word for them. It’s an anagram of TUNCS.
You might have figured out that I’m very annoyed by all of this. I love science. I love what we’ve been able to achieve. Despite all the misuses and abuses of technology, I think the last 300 years or so has been incredible, almost miraculous. I love those dead white men.
In 2020 we decided to throw it all into the Creek of Ordure, without paddles, and without even a fucking canoe.
But it’s important not to be too fanatical in your devotion to the consensus, here. It should always, always, be a provisional acceptance of the consensus.
In some sense. It might mean, for example, that our idea didn’t take every important factor into account. We might then say our original idea was incomplete, rather than being wrong or untrue in a strict sense. This is, in fact, vastly more typical of what happens in practice. Real ‘paradigm shifts’ are exceedingly rare in science.
Professor Rigger
Concerning the subject of physics, I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about, but concerning Covid and the rushed, experimental “vaccine” I have little doubt.
Covid was not the plague. It was a relatively mild virus which mainly affected the old and the obese. HCQ and gargling with salty water were effective treatments. You coined the perfect term to describe the reaction to it. It was a PANICDEMIC.
The rushed, experimental “vaccine” wasn’t necessary and didn’t work. There is no evidence it saved anyone. It has however weakened immunity and has killed an unknown number of people.
The pharmaceutical industry captured the medical profession and turned the vast majority of doctors into obedient morons.
We need to support the courageous doctors, politicians and influencers who are fighting back.
In History-class, our teacher warned us to never just trust a source outright, not even if it was a first-hand account of an event.
1) Knowing if it actually is a first-hand account can be difficult; stringency in matters like sources, sourcing, referencing and so on is very much a post-1850s invention when it comes to recording history, and trying to give an objective or at least factually impartial recounting of it - well, that's post-1900.
2) The farther away in time and space, the harder it is to properly understand events (guess it's the same with astro-physics?).
3) Investigating "what" is only important as to how it relates to "why" and "what happened due to the initial what" (and that "what" will of course always be the point we chose, for some reason or other).
4) New finds can invalidate old truths.
5) Never confuse what you believe, feel or want with what sources and finds shows.
She used the example of how lots and lots of learned experts tried to prove where Atlantis was, and where Noah stranded with the Ark, and so on throughout the centuries, just so the kings and lords of their time could claim kinship with the legends.
Kind of how today's Eggspurts do it, no?
Example of 1): (Heavily summarised from memory) That Old Norse sacrificed children. It is a lie dreamed up by Medieval christians long after christianity started making headroads into Scandinavia. The lie they based on a fifth-hand recount of the Great Blot at Uppsala; a german merchant wrote down what a sailor who had worked on a merchant vessel sailing on Gotland had been told in Visby by a gotlander having business with a man in Småland who sometimes did business in Birka, and there this smålander had heard that in Uppsala they sacrificed children to the old gods.
And on that single note, christians for centuries (and to this day, in the US) repeat the lie of child sacrifice.
The only (and circumstantial at that) evidence of human sacrifice comes from the danish Glundestrup-kettle, a huge silver cauldron from the 2nd century BC (so "only" 500 years before the viking era), after forensic analysis of its insides showed residual human remains.
I think it is a psychological trait, a personality-one, that activates in some humans. They must be right and for some reason their brain/psyche does not allow them to be wrong or to admit being wrong, so they will eternally rationalise unless they can use force to make their might right.
And some societal and cultural systems of organisation stimulates, rewards or even necessitates it, creating cumulative selection pressure until we arrive at Medieval Christianity and present-day Islam (or nazism and communism for that matter): One way, or no way.
Which every evolutionary psychologist, biologist and neurologist could tell you is a Bad Thing(tm). Just look at the dodo, the panda and the koala: superspecialised and certainly experts in their field. And endangered or extinct.
Meanwhile, roaches, ants, rats, gulls, fleas, cats and dogs and humans thrive.
I think I lost the plot somewhere.