Freedom of Science

The currency of academic physics is authority.¹ Everything in physics is bought and sold with authority. This includes experiments. There is no experiment that a professional physicist cannot buy with enough expenditure of authority. Experiment sounds like a scientific process but in physics experiment is a definition made with a gadget and therefore it is another name for authority.

Experimental physics works like this:

A group of physicists come together and compute their collective authority index, convert it to dollars and double it. This is the amount they will ask National Science Foundation. Next, physicists shop around for a marketable theory that string theorists continuously push to the market and, after some negotiations, pick the best, i.e. the one floated by the group with the most authority, in this case, the extra dimensions. Extra dimensions is good because it is enthusiastically backed by the authority of the Big Media.

Now it’s time to hire a good PR firm and start drafting the press release, which is more physically relevant to the results of the experiment than the measurements. In the mean time, design a photogenic oscillator, have it photographed professionally, build a prototype and submit the proposal to NSF with the price tag nicely maximized to the authority of the experimenters.

When cash arrives, build the oscillator and capture its natural period into a black box data analysis software and run the analysis as if running it through a spellchecker and decide which data to keep and which to dump.

Now compose the paper. Plot the results and skim papers of similar experiments, copy and paste the references and the named potential, in this case, Yukawa, and rearrange and rephrase and have your postdoc TeX it for you. All done.

Don’t forget to associate some circumstantial evidence with the data and claim that you established the lower limit for extra dimensions. Since this was a null-null experiment, it was designed to prove nothing and proved nothing, therefore, it was a great success. 

This is experimental physics for you. As you can see in order to do physics you need authority. You earn authority by slaving as a free labor for the Big School and then you carefully spend it to earn more authority (buy cheap, sell dear) and call exchange of authority doing science.

Authority rules physics:

• NSF gives money only to physicists who have reached a certain level of authority and who are working in an elite research center.
• The internal organs of the physics industry, the peer-reviewed journals, will only publish the results of well funded experiments done by authoritative physicists.
• Once published, the measurements of the oscillations of an oscillator will enter the physics canon as an experimental proof of the floated theory by the sheer power of the authority of the experimenter.
• Rank and file will take the authority of the experimenters for granted and will never question any well funded experiment published in a prestigious journal.

Isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Was this experiment duplicated and verified by hostile independent parties? Negative.

Then this is not a scientific experiment, it is an academic pseudo-experiment. The only thing this experiment verified was the authority of the experimenter. The result of a pseudo-experiment is the opinion of the authors who published this paper.

Physicists who rave about this experiment without even reading the paper are proving that physics is not an experimental science. Academic physics is scholasticism where Newton’s authority still rules. These physicists² used a gadget as a false witness to prove Newton’s sacred authority once again.

This is the 21st century and the same scholastic doctors who ruled the Middle Ages still rule human reason and they keep worshipping an occultist doctor from Cambridge.

Physicists are professionals just like lawyers. The story of this experiment shows how doctors of physics lie to the public about what they do. They lie to the public about how physics is an experimental science in order to obtain funding from the government and they use taxpayers’ dollars to build gadgets to prove the sacred authority of a 17th century British low life occultist whose authority they believe without question.

The government would not fund religious creationist doctors to build gadgets to prove the existence of god, why is it funding religious physics doctors to prove the existence of Newton’s Soul?

Unless academic physics is regulated these scholastic doctors will keep wasting precious resources that would otherwise go to true scientific research instead of yet another proof of Newton’s sacred authority. 

1. This is the paper which inspired this post. Also see this write up at Cosmic Variance. [↩]
2. D.J. Kapner, T.S. Cook, E.G. Adelberger, J.H. Gundlach, B.R. Heckel, C.D. Hoyle, and H.E. Swanson [↩]

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