Freedom of Science

Louise Riofrio said:

Talking to a brick wall with a PhD hanging from it is still talking to a brick wall…

All doctors behave the same way

The idea is true for all doctors not only for Doctors of Philosophy.

• For a lawyer there is only one kind of relationship with non-lawyers: Attorney-client relationship.
• A medical doctor will not discuss medicine with non-doctors.
• A physicist will not discuss physics with a non-doctor, he will only teach it.¹

Here’s a good example of this doctoral attitude:

We pride ourselves here on being a top-down blog…. Our attitude is, we know what’s best for you, and we’re taking time from our busy schedules to provide it, and you’ll like it or learn to. At Cosmic Variance that’s just how we roll.

Top down hierarchy defines physics

Physicists are employed by the scholastic corporation and they must abide by company rules. The corporation outlives any physicist and no physicist can change the corporation. If they do not conform physicists will be out and unemployed.

Matti Pitkanen makes the same point:

The basic problem of modern science [modern physics?] is that it is understood as building of a career  [accumulating authority?] . . . so that people are talking to brick walls, not to each other.

Physics as a career happened in the 19th century. Before that it was amateurs like Henry Cavendish who studied nature freely. Then, Natural Philosophers changed their name to physicists in order to establish themselves as a professional class in the European society. Professionalization of physics had two damaging effects on science.²

1. The definition of doctrine as truth
2. Self-regulation rules as the scientific method

In a professional industry there must be an unchanging doctrine so that practitioners can be evaluated through standard tests of how well they mastered the doctrine. In order to enforce the monopoly of the profession the doctrine is defined as true knowledge and testing of professionals as doing science.

In physics old experiments are part of the doctrine and they cannot be questioned. Only in a religious field there are no faulty experiments. Physics experiments cannot be questioned therefore they are not experiments but miracles. This is the result of professionalization.

Another result of professionalization is the necessity of regulatory rules so that professional points can be distributed fairly. Without such rules professionals will cheat each other. So physicists impose self-regulation rules and define them to be essential rules of the scientific method. And they declare themselves to be heroic protectors of the scientific method.

Science has no hierarchy

A true scientist such as Thomas Edison does not need the academic self-regulation rule of duplication of experiments! Edison has no need to cheat to to conform to the rules of a hierarchy. He doesn’t need someone else to duplicate his experiments. He duplicates them himself. Ten thousand times.

Edison doesn’t need peer review. He asks his questions directly to nature. And he knows how to ask those questions, he doesn’t try to legislate Nature by imposing Newton’s authority on Nature.

But physicists condescend to Edison. Where are Edison’s laws of motion? Where are Edison’s equations of motion? At least there must be an Edison Principle that one could write some commentary on and test its validity by experimenting in theory with a rotating bucket. There isn’t even a Universal Edison constant for him to be taken seriously…. Well, there is ConEdison! 

Physics wastes precious human resources

Most physicists initially enter physics with hopes of doing creative research. They are lured by physics mythology into the profession. But once in the system they have no choice but become Newtonians. Either they declare their absolute allegiance to the profession and move up or drop out and switch to technology or finance. To move up they must play the game. There is no time to stop and ask scientific questions. And it takes decades to find a job with a crummy pay requiring them to teach freshman physics! Physics wastes the most creative years of human beings by indoctrinating them with the occult teachings of a British Doctor who lived in the 18th century and wore a wig to display his authority. That wall too will come down.

1. I just realized that cheat and teach are anagrams. Where there is teaching there is no learning, so teaching is really cheating students. It is interesting how teaching, cheating and doctoring are all related. [↩]
2. There is a total corruption of language here. It is almost impossible to write a sentence without assuming that physics and science are synonyms. [↩]

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