THE LAST OF NEWTON

If worshippers at the shrine of reductionist materialism were in any real sense pursuers of the avowed noble cause of ‘science’, they would feel no need to exclude anything from what purports to be a truthful and all-embracing subject.

Their purview would be infinite, and their practice that of continually observing and re-evaluating the subjects thereof in the light of those observations.

That it does nothing of the kind is due in no small part to the passing on of orthodox dogma by popular priests, such as David Attenborough and Brian Cox. Just about everyone believes in a mish-mash of Darwinian and Dawkinsian evolution because these trusted clergy treat it as a proven given; certainly not because there is any convincing evidence for it. And to make sure they continue to so believe, in a crime against free-thinking redolent of Joe Stalin, tame educators have been forbidden to discuss or examine any other possibility.

Anyone who made it to the end of a BBC documentary on Isaac Newton entitled The Last Magician, in defiance of the epic efforts of the cloth-eared music editor to prevent it, would have made out among the cacophony someone honestly admitting that science still has no idea what constitutes life and is nowhere near having all the answers to anything.

Yet the very title of the documentary spoke volumes about what hamstrings dogmatic science in the twenty-first century. Calling it by that title was apposite in pointing up the arbitrary and semantic nature of what is considered the proper business of science and what isn’t.

Newton would not even get a job in a school science department these days, because his views on science, as those on other religions would be considered heretical. He was no great respecter of persons, and never believed anything he was told even, and perhaps especially, by those claiming some authority. When his work and discoveries were subjected to the system of so-called ‘peer review’, he realised at once that he was without peers.

The programme described him as a magician because he investigated phenomena and relationships which today’s ‘rational’ science simply rejects. The universe is not by nature rational. Rationalising is the effort to impose order upon it. It is almost inevitable that this course of endeavour would tend to reject the apparently disordered and seek a fixed theory that, if it didn’t explain everything, at least had the agreement of other rationalisers.

Creation is an irritation to such people, because it does not conform to the so-called laws of physics. Laws fixed for all time can only introduce entropy to a subject. But, no matter how deep they delve, or how far they reduce matter, they are always going to come up against it.

Creation-denial infers that the Mona Lisa painted itself. It permits the denizens of Cerne’s Hadron Collider to operate on the principle that if you completely stripped down an old Cortina, you would come face to face with Henry Ford.

Creation is not dependent upon religion. Indeed it is not dependent upon anything, because, by definition, it pre-exists everything.

If, as we are expected to believe, the universe was produced from something like a multi-multi-zillion megaton gobstopper, who or what packed everything into the gobstopper? And who put it there – if there was such a thing as a there in those days; that is, if there was such a thing as days?

If the so-called Big Bang happened, it would, in any case, have been a Big Silence if nobody was around to convert the vibrations into a sound effect and be conscious of the result. That aside, what was the difference between the gobstopper and the resulting celestial firmament? Space, is the obvious answer. Though physicists would claim the mass is identical, there is a lot more apparent nothingness in the latter than the former.

Reductionist material science doesn’t notice space; doesn’t know anything much about it – just looks through it at its precious matter. Yet space is not an absence of things; is not empty; is not just a place in which things occur – although without it nothing would. It is the thing (or non-thing) that makes the gobstopper into a universe, that hosts and bounds the vibrations of molecules, atoms and the infinitesimal (by comparison) elements from which they appear to be constituted.

Above matter, beyond it and within it, defining it, permitting its motions and reactions is this intangible ‘nothingness’ that physics can’t bottle, act upon or even measure.

When Newton went beyond laws of matter, he became a magician in the eyes of the faithful. In fact, he was being a true scientist, boldly going into that which was not yet known or dogmatically promulgated. If blinkered materialism provides no answers to the riddles of life, it just may be that what science is looking for is beyond the arbitrary barriers it has itself set up.

Seeking to prevent people looking beyond those barriers does not put science above life and creation, except in the sense that a jailer can keep someone from sunlight and air, but cannot convincingly claim that they do not exist.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

This article originally appeared in THE MENSA MAGAZINE

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘SCIENCE’?

The Venerable Bede.

 In the earliest stages of its development, the word ‘science’ embodied connotations of ‘truth’ and ‘knowing’ – a sense of assimilated understanding and perhaps the application of art or a methodology based thereon.

At that distance, its subject was that which could be perceived or experienced, limited only by the immediate purpose, or angle, of the perceiver. The forerunner of the modern ‘scientist’ viewed the world directly, without specialism, preconception, preselection, ritual or exception. That he did so in a world held to be created and ruled over by a god, or gods, mattered little. It was perfectly possible to study and comprehend the ways of the weather, the pattern of the tides and the harvesting of the soil without coming into conflict with what we now think of as the church.

Indeed, most of the basic processes necessary to life were discovered and formalised before the advent of dogmatism, at a time when it would have been hard to differentiate between science and faith; when ‘faith’ could have been defined as ‘that which the adherent held to be true’. What he held to be true was from his own perception. He had no education or indoctrination. He had no weather forecasters, cook books or gardening manuals; he even had to manage without recourse to the National Curriculum.

Yet, he knew when to sow and when to reap, he knew what was edible, he knew how to combine, how to cook, how to preserve, how to husband (everything from pigs to bees), and he knew how to make ferociously strong and plentiful drink.

He, or at least someone of his acquaintance, knew what to do if he poisoned, burned or otherwise injured himself, if he was stung by his bees, or had one jug of mead too many. Cures and treatments, like other survival knowledge, were the property of all. Anyone who would hope to raise a family would have a passing, if not expert, knowledge of natural remedies.

In essence, most such remedies have remained with us – although, like weather-forecasting and animal husbandry, they have largely been given over to designated ‘authorities’. Some less generalised treatments have also persisted here and there without finding their way on to the recommended list, such as the practice in France’s Sologne region of treating headaches by strapping a dead rabbit to the patient’s head.

Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

But all of these conclusions and practices were borne out of the individual’s observations and evaluations in direct contact with those elements upon which his survival and increase depended. He saw the life in everything around him; he came to understand its properties, its own purposes and behaviour; and he learned to respect it and adapt what he learned to his own needs, and those of his fellows.

Recognising the inherent life and will in those things with which he was forced into contact, he saw that some exchange, some payment was called for rather than mere theft of what they had to offer.

So we get the idea of propitiation, of giving something back, that would later be corrupted into worship of deities or ransoms and taxes for rulers, and would ultimately form the basis of the ritual that is now often mistaken for religion itself.

Early man’s science was his religion, and his religion was his science.

What qualifies as a science? That depends on your definition and frame of reference.

If a science is defined as an impulse or research toward the discovery of truths in relation to some aspect of knowledge, it would allow for a wide-ranging qualification. If, however, it is to be a form of writ – an authoritative proclamation that is unchanging and unchangeable, it must be rarer and more esoteric; submissable to more arbitrary tests of agreement with established norms, or simply without connection to the irritating ‘real’ world of variables.

Public perception of the practitioners of science has itself changed dramatically over the years. Right up to the early part of the twentieth century, scientists were considered eccentric – not part of any respected and worthy establishment, but slightly loopy mavericks who ventured where angels feared to tread. Far from setting prevailing opinions, they were in the business of overturning them, or at the very least, testing them to destruction.

Archimedes, The Venerable Bede, Bacon, Newton, Ashmole, Darwin and even Einstein were observers and testers, not of disciplines and theorems, but of the universe itself. Unhampered by the scientific method, or the need to seek approval or funding from monolithic conservative bodies, they followed their own lights and drew their own conclusions.

These ‘fathers of science’ looked outward for those conclusions, and they also looked across the board. No one had yet labelled them as ‘physicists, ‘chemists’ or ‘botanists’. They were permitted to gaze beyond such arbitrary barriers at the whole picture.

The sons and daughters of science look inward, going ever deeper into the data and propositions already extant. Pre-regimented into arbitrary divisions, they are content for those divisions themselves to be proscribed, not only sticking to their own fields but declaring whole areas of knowledge or speculation unworthy of investigation.

Darwin endeavoured to unravel the complexity of life forms that existed before and beyond ‘science’; Dawkins laboured to heap significance and complexity on the work of Darwin: science feeding on itself, investigating itself, trying to prove itself without going back to check the original observations.

Meteorology is a science – the study of atmospheric phenomena and climate; weather forecasting isn’t. At best, it is an interpretive art. As more data is recorded, the odds as to what will happen next might seem to get shorter, but more data also exposes more variables. Repetition of identical conditions is virtually impossible, so you can keep stuffing data into computers ad infinitum without ever doing more than model what went before.

In essence, weather forecasting, no matter how ‘scientific’ it believes itself to be, is the art of predicting the past – which bit of history will repeat itself?

Little wonder then that, despite the ever-increasing conglomeration of impressive hardware and observations, the proclamations of all the weather forecasters on all the radio and TV stations of the world are about as reliable as hanging up a piece of seaweed.

Of course, the whole flim-flam suits both parties – forecasters and forecastees.

The former can go from being earnest isobar-watchers in some backroom to media ‘personalities’, trotting out off-the-peg phrases (‘spits and spots of rain’, ‘cloud bubbling up’) from beyond the blue-screen horizon for a day job and opening fêtes at the weekend.

The latter jumps at the chance to abandon responsibility for knowing anything to a properly constituted authority. He knows the forecast is nearly always wrong, but depends upon it utterly, not so much as a useful tool, more as something to blame when the picnic goes pear-shaped.

When a bear sniffs the air, looks about him and decides to go fishing, explore the woods for honey or batten down the hatches for three or four months, ‘science’ tells us it’s just ‘instinct’.

Maybe they’re right. The bear’s survival depends on it. Lucky for him, perhaps, that his inherent intelligence and perceptions have not been buried under mountains of musty data or vested in some formalised system of cloud-mapping. 

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository