Freedom of Science

This “Doc” linked to this blog making some good points about professional doctors.¹ So I posted a reply but it was caught by his spam filter because I included some nice links. I decided to post it here too:

Hi, I am the editor of the Freedom of Science blog. This is a nice post and I agree with your criticism of professionals’ narrow view of science by defining anything they did not learn in school to be illegal or wrong. When you write “I don’t think people who refuse to take scientist’s word on an issue are stupid at all” you use the word “scientist” to mean “professional.” In that case, your statement makes perfect sense. People refuse to take their lawyer’s or banker’s word as truth, why should they take self-serving theories of professional physicists as truth? But they do? Why? Because of the confusion physicists created about the meaning of the word scientist.

Professional physicists label anything outside legal physics to be stamp collecting or crackpotism. But despite physicists’ propaganda that they are the only true scientists, the fundamental physical quantity of physics, the Newtonian force, is like the missing ingredient in a placebo. Force terms do not enter computations of orbits. From this observation, as a scientist, I conclude that orbits are independent of force. Physicists, on the other hand, eliminate the symbol of force from orbital formulas but claim that force still remains in the formulas in spirit as the active ingredient of orbits. This is the old scholastic casuistry. I don’t see why my questioning of physicists’ casuistic practices should be classified as anything but science. Thanks for letting me see this from a new angle.

Doctors, even today, are among the most trusted of professionals.

This has not always been the case. In the 19th and early 20th century Doctors of medicine were unregulated professionals perceived as butchers who could not be held responsible for killing their patients for their own professional advancement. I recommend George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, especially the author’s Preface, if you haven’t already read it.² Today physics is where medicine was in the 19th century. Instead of killing human beings for professional reasons, physicists corrupt human reason for professional gain.

It seems scientists can get just as rigid and dogmatic as the fundamentalist religionists for whom they express so much disdain.

Again your statement makes perfect sense if we understand your “scientist” to mean “professional.” In the case of physics, the war between physicists and religion is nothing more than the never ending academic turf wars between two types of professional doctors: doctors of philosophy and theology. They have been fighting to save the souls of the same constituency since the beginning of history. Doctors of Theology want to convert them to their organized religion and Doctors of Philosophy want to convert them to their own religion called Newtonism.

1. The title of this post refers to George Bernard Shaw’s observation that all professions “are conspiracies against the laity; and I do not suggest that the medical conspiracy is either better or worse than the military conspiracy, the legal conspiracy, the sacerdotal conspiracy, the pedagogic conspiracy, the royal and aristocratic conspiracy, the literary and artistic conspiracy, and the innumerable industrial, commercial, and financial conspiracies, from the trade unions to the great exchanges, which make up the huge conflict which we call society.” I include physicists in the sacerdotal conspiracy. [↩]
2. Another intersting quote by George Bernard Shaw. I just replaced his “doctor” with “physicst.” “ARE PHYSICISTS MEN OF SCIENCE? I presume nobody will question the existence of a widely spread popular delusion that every physicist is a man of science. It is escaped only in the very small class which understands by science something more than conjuring with retorts and spirit lamps, magnets an microscopes, and discovering magical cures for diseases. To a sufficiently ignorant man every captain of a trading schooner is a Galileo, every organ-grinder a Beethoven, every piano-tuner a Helmholtz, every Old Bailey barrister a Solon, every Seven Dials pigeon dealer a Darwin, every scrivener a Shakespeare, every locomotive engine a miracle, and its driver no less wonderful than George Stephenson. As a matter of fact, the rank and file of physicists are no more scientific than their tailors; or, if you prefer to put it the reverse way, their tailors are no less scientific than they. Doctoring is an art, not a science: any layman who is interested in science sufficiently to take in one of the scientific journals and follow the literature of the scientific movement, knows more about it than those physicists (probably a large majority) who are interested in it, and practice only to earn their bread.” I might as well type in the endnotes: “Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a renowned German physiologist and physicist; Old Bailey is London’s main criminal court building; Greek Statesman Solon (c. 600 B.C.), one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, was renowned as a wise lawgiver; Seven Dials, a meeting point of seven roads in London and a poor area in Victorian times, is an unglamorous locale; English inventor George Stephenson (1781-1848) invented the railway locomotive engine. [↩]

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