June 27, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 9

How to Separate Science and Nonsense

by Dr. John Schoonover

"The transfinite quality of the human mind, inventing new ways to alter
matter and energy to reveal new aspects of its infinite malleability, is the seed crystal for creating universal phase changes." Gottfried Leibniz (r.) and Plato as portrayed by Raphael.

The ground rules for separating science from fraud are quite simple; they were clearly enunciated in Plato's Timaeus more than 2,000 years ago. In modern terminology, the primary substance of the universe is development itself. Particular phenomena are only moments in the universal process of self-perfection. That this is the case can be most readily seen in the well-known progression from an inorganic (nonliving) world to the living things that the inorganic world creates from itself. In turn, these living things create beings (humans) whose primary characteristic is the ability to carry out deliberate species evolution by creatively altering their relationship to the rest of the universe. The relationships, often designated as the fixed laws of nature, are actually a product of the self-developing process; they, too, are subject to lawful evolution shaped by the primary process of development.

To state this conception in geometrical terms, the fixed laws of nature represent a relatively appropriate description of natural phenomena, to the extent that they can be confined to a single manifold. They are a reflection of the metric on that manifold. However, the actual condition in nature is that at any given instant there are a number of manifolds. These manifolds are describable by different types of lawfulness within them but, most important, they are efficiently connected to each other by the multiplicity of couplings across manifolds. The governing principle that shapes the lower order of lawful behavior within manifolds is the selfdeveloping tendency alluded to above. The role of science is to determine the ways in which the mind, the embodiment of the universal creative process, can accelerate the pace of our species' self-evolutionary process through technological achievement. Science, then, is the creation of new orders of "fixed laws," rather than the observation of a set of laws presumed to exist independently of human intervention. This perspective is not simply a matter of opinion, but the only way to rationally understand the universe. Fixed Laws Vs. Development That this view of the matter may seem strange to some, especially to practicing scientists, is a testimony to the success of the 20th-century descendants of Aristotle, Plato's arch enemy, in subverting the healthy tendencies in European science from the tradition of Leibniz, the Ecole Polytechnique founded during the French Revolution, and the Gottingen School created by Gauss in the early years of the 19th century. These Aristotelian logical positivists hold that the only real things in the world are the facts of scientific experiments that can be observed. From these facts, one can derive a set of accounting relations, the fixed laws, the Aristotelians say. Because of the falseness of this approach, however, Aristotle's friends continually find themselves running into paradoxes and singularities that will not fit into this fixed scheme. As a result of this predicament, the logical positivists have developed such notions as the big bang origin of the universe, quarks, and the idea that the universe, is inevitably running down an idea that makes human life futile. When all other avenues fail, these logical positivists do not hesitate to invoke the supernatural, proclaiming that this is necessary because their

science has shown the limits of rational explanation. It was in this spirit a few years ago that the American Association for the Advancement of Science recognized parapsychology as legitimate scientific inquiry. A lengthy example of the degradation of scientific research appeared recently in the British weekly The Economist (April 12). In an unsigned article, The Economist reported that modern cosmologists have gathered a great deal of information that indicates, at least on the surface, that the galaxies are currently receding from each other and that, in fact, the universe, is, in some sense, expanding. From this it follows that at some time in the past, the galaxies should have been closer together than they now are and that ultimately, they must have been compressed into an exceedingly small volume. Using Einstein's general theory of relativity and extrapolating backward in time, cosmologists have arrived at an era between 10 and 20 billion years ago when all the natural laws fail; it was at this time, the cosmologists proposed, that the universe began. "According to modern physics, the universe began with a big bang, in which space and matter made a sudden explosive appearancefrom literally nothing," The Economist proclaimed. The author then invoked evidence from Olber's paradox to bolster the case for a universe that began at some time in the finite past. If, according to Olber, the universe is ageless, then the whole sky should be filled with stars: or, stated differently, the surface temperature of the earth from the buildup of stellar radiation should be about 6,000 degrees Celsius. A universe that is only 15 billion years old would not, however, suffer these problems. But here's the real clincher in The Economist's case for a universe created in a single explosive, recent event. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a universe that has always existed would have run down, would have "died" by now. The universe, like a clock, should be gradually but inexorably unwinding, depleting its reserves of ordered energy. Stars die, depleting their fuel after a few billion years. New ones can be bornbut only so long as there remains material available. Eventually, nearly all the material of the universe should be burnt out, its reserves of energy dissipated into (disordered) radiation.

Big Bangs Ad Infinitum What The Economist article resurrects as scientific principle is the Hindu notion of a cyclic universe. Each big bang is followed by a big "crunch," leading to a new big bang, and so on, ad infinitum. According to The Economist, if this were the case, entropy would still intervene to eventually halt the process, unless "by some miracle, all the degenerating forces in the universe reversed themselves. . . ." The Economist concluded: Modern cosmology, then, is faced with two alternatives. Either some sort of cosmic regeneration, or time-reversal, must be accepted. Or the big bang was the beginning of the physical world as understood by modern scientists. If the big bang did mark the creation, what caused it? Astronomers and physicists do not address that question. Like Hume, they would argue that not all events require causes. If that is so, the big bang, the initial singularity from which the universe exploded, marked the interface between the natural and the supernatural. Whatever preceded it, if anything, is beyond the realm of science. Self-Development and Einstein By banishing the self-creativity of the universe from the field of discourse, the only alternatives left to modern cosmology are, to quote The Economist, supernatural. As for the positivist who now insists: "You can't assume that the universe is self-developing. There is no evidence to support that." On the contrary, the primary evidence that the universe is the way I describe it is that you and I exist to dispute the fact. The preconscious processes of the human mind reflect on a higher level the kinds of self-organizing, antientropic, processes also seen in hydrodynamic and plasma phenomena, to mention a fewwhen they are correctly understood. Stated in another way, the process of universal self-organizing has led to an era in which something vaguely approximated by the fixed laws embodied in the general theory of relativity is the case. However, when we try to extend that order of lawfulness too far forward or backward in time, I we reach a

singularity reflected in the paradoxical or, more accurately, nonsensical formulations described by The Economist. What we observe, then, in these singularities is the failure of this particular fixed lawfulness to account for the actual evolution of the universe from some less-organized state to something approximating its current status. Clearly, then, to ask when the universe began is a foolish question. Qualitatively different modes of evolution generate different time metrics, so that time itself exists as a determined quality of the evolving system. The laws of physics appropriate to any particular mode are subsumed by a higher order process of development that is signaled by the passage of the system from one manifold to another. The space-time metric, and consequently, the laws of physics appropriate to one manifold are necessarily different from, but lawfully related to those of the next. That Einstein's general theory of relativity should, in fact, fall short of a sufficient description of the universe should now be apparent. Einstein's program and that of his followers has considered the universe as a uniform distribution of matter, smoothing out the local inhomogeneities that represent galaxies, stars, and even atoms and subatomic entitities. Having simplified the universe in this fashion, they then develop an appropriate geometrical metric for the manifold representing a smooth smear of matter. No doubt this approach will yield results that reflect certain features of the actual universe, especially over extremely large regions of space. Ultimately, however, the description is confined to a single manifold. If we are to arrive at any appreciation of the actual evolution of the universe, cosmology must take into account the evidence of astrophysics in a way that it is now a priori incapable of doing. The real universe is full of a great variety of energy sources from stars to pulsars, that have a significant effect in determining the course of evolution. The universal manifold (smooth space) is itself shaped by events that occur in the realm of condensed matter; at the same time, the shaping process proceeds in the other direction. A cosmologist might argue that in the immensity of space, such small deviations from absolute homogeneity as even galaxies are insigificant in the order of things. But then, the same could be said of the seed crystal that causes the phase change in a supersaturated solution. The transfinite quality of the human mind, inventing new ways to alter matter and energy to reveal new aspects of its potentially infinite malleability, is the seed crystal for creating universal phase changes.

This concept has been understood throughout history by thinkers associated with the Neoplatonic conspiracy. It has been the basis for positive religion, expressed by such great thinkers as St. Augustine and Philo of Alexandria, and seminal scientific breakthroughs can be traced almost uniquely to thinkers basing their work on this idea, whether it be Leibniz, Riemann, the great thinkers of Plato's Academy, or that unrecorded genius who invented the wheel. If research is pursued vigorously, we will be in an era when much that was previously unknowable about the universe can be discovered. It is now possible, for example, for man to extend his investigations above the earth's atmosphere and to probe the radiations emitted by celestial bodies unimpeded by atmospheric shielding, thanks to the successes of NASA. In particular, investigations of stellar X-rays are providing new information at a great pace. Current discoveries concerning the relative abundances of different isotopes in non-terrestrial materials can lead to a better understanding of the formative processes of the solar system, as well as the mechanisms involved in stellar evolution. Recent speculations on the significance of magnetohydrodynamic processes in the formation of the galaxies could also prove to be quite fruitful. This age of discovery, however, depends on the defeat of those descendants of Aristotle who would transform science into kookery in pursuit of the supernatural.