B M Hegde

What is science, anyway?

An inventor is a person who makes an
ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and
springs, and believes it civilization.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Me

thinks that science is ONLY one of the

many ways of understanding this Universe
while admitting that there are many other
ways of doing so. The present craze and
teaching that unless one has a scientific bent
of mind this world can not progress looks
like pure propaganda by the vested scientific
lobby. Real scientific temper is a part of
living; that is trying to look at every thing
critically before accepting it. Scientific
temper does not simply mean studying BSc,
PhD etc. Their misplaced emphasis on
evidence base in science is also shaky as the
evidence itself is not pure and is based just
on the five senses of the scientist. The whole
world out there can not be grasped with our
five senses alone. Unfortunately, today
science seems to have acquired a new
meaning of trying to teach nature a lesson
or two. In the bargain, scientists look for
methods to make money-big money at that,
in the form of sponsorship by vested
interests, funding by research organizations,
patenting their findings and fattening their
CVs, huge sums of money from the industry
for
advising
them,
and
of
course,
occasionally the great Nobel Prize, thanks
to big money involved in technology which
applies these faulty scientific principles to
make money. In addition, the star
performers in the area get social status,
media projection and many other perks.
The worst part of the enterprise is the fight
over intellectual rights. If one gets an idea
how can one call it as his/her own? Cell
biology tells us that ideas do come to our
antennae from the universal consciousness
and they do not belong to any individual.
The same ideas might have occurred to
others at other times. One has only to look
at the famous PhD thesis of 1956 written by
Lakatos published as Proofs and Refutations,
which is one of the greatest twentieth
century contributions to the philosophy of
mathematics which forms the basis of all
sciences as is known to the present
generation. It was published and supervised
by Karl Popper who ruled London School of
Economics those days. The greatest thinker
on science was Popper himself. He was very
fond of his pet theme Conjectures and

Refutations which will show science of today

just as hypothetico-deductive. A proposition
is scientific ONLY if it is falsifiable, as
otherwise, it becomes metaphysical. One
could sum up today's definition of science by
quoting two of their thought leaders-Marie
Curie and John von Neumann. Science is
measurement and measurement is science
was Marie's idea while Neumann defined
science
as
making
models,
mostly
mathematical constructs, which, with verbal
jargon, are supposed to work! Even the
great Einstein wrote that when it comes to
reality mathematics is not applicable. (1)
Science has become too powerful, too pushy
and too dangerous to be left on its own. We
need to have controls or else we will have
more moon missions in preference to saving
dying children in thousands in India from
starvation
and
Nutritional
Immune
Deficiency Syndromes (NIDS), grand total of
sixty seven million in all.
Two examples of how knowledge, including
scientific knowledge, is universal and not
personal are here. Keinzel, at Professor
Rustum Roy's laboratory at Penn State, was
working on radio waves to kill cancer cells.
Serendipitously, the rays passed through
one of the test tubes containing salt water.
That test tube could burn like a flame from
water. It was then confirmed by Prof. Roy
that what came out of water when radio
waves pass through it are hydrogen atoms
(not molecules). The water still remained as
water and the hydrogen that came out was
fully hydrogen atom. Prof. Roy, in fact, was
inspired by the Vedic saying poornam idam;
poornam adaha which simply means
that this is a whole and that is a whole. If a
bit comes out of the whole the bit becomes a
whole but the whole remains a whole!
Prof. Roy used to quote another sloka
(stanza) from the Rg Veda- Oorj-which
graphically describes water as the mother
and father of fire! Amazing all time wisdom
indeed! They are able to run engines on
water thus. This technique does not leave
nascent oxygen behind like when one
removes hydrogen molecules from water.
The nascent oxygen would destroy any
engine. Hans Peter Durr, another great
physicist who propagates E=M hypothesis
calls the same as aduality. Hans, our coeditor in chief, who is the Emeritus Director
of Max Planck Institute, in his paper Matter
is not made out of Matter, takes pride in
mentioning that the Indian sages of yore
knew about this when they coined the term
advaitha!(2)

We can not discover the world we

presuppose when proceeding with it.We
need an external standard of criticism, an
alternate set of assumptions, an entire
alternate world-a dream world in order to
discover the features of the real world we
inhabit (which may be another dream
world)the first step in our criticism of
facts must be an attempt to break the
circle., writes Paul Feyerabend in his
classic, Against Method, an epoch making
book, nay a collage. This is better clarified
by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, an English
physicist, in his fish net hypothesis. When
ichthyologists went to sea to study fish
scientifically, they collected samples from all
the seas. Analysing their data they came to
some vital theories. One of them was that
all fish in the sea are bigger than two
inches. The theory became science and the
fish got sold in the market with this scientific
tag. Every one concerned was happy.
Closer scrutiny, of course, revealed the hole
in the theory. If the ichthyologists had taken
a net with smaller holes even smaller than 2
inches fish would have been caught! The
same fish net explains why there are so
many scientists and Nobel Laureates
describing the electron in different ways.
Come to think of it philosophers and
spiritualists like Charles Lead beater,
Babington and Anne Besant, one time
physicists, had come to better conclusions
about the atomic structure without any
gadgets way back in 1920 in India
meditating in yogic trance, described in
Besant's book, Occult Chemistry. The leptoquark, the last bit of the subatomic particle,
has been graphically described in a stanza in
the Upanishads and the Bhagvad Gita,
another point against patenting! (3)
Modern medicine is another one of those
pseudo-sciences, in fact, it is not even
science, and it is just statistical science.
Steven Milloy PhD, an epidemiologist in
Washington DC, calls medical science a
science without sense, in his book by the
same name. Albert-Szent Gyorgyi, a Nobel
Laureate biologist, in his magnificent
publication, Sub-molecular biology, has torn
the medical scientific base into pieces. (4)
One sentence from Gyorgyi would suffice to
show the gravity of the problem. I am not
able to define cancer as I do not know the
difference between a normal cell function
and cancer cell function. Writes Watson, the
Nobel Prize winning DNA man, about cancer
research thus: scientifically bankrupt,
therapeutically ineffective, and wasteful
Another Nobel Laureate, Macfarlane Burnet,
says that a comprehensive and unbiased

survey of cancer research, the surveyor

would end up with a devastating sense of
futility - the end-result of the hundreds of
thousands of man-years of work on the
various aspects of cancer has been precisely
nil.
Our problem in cancer starts from the very
definition. Virchow, the father of cell
pathology, wrote that no man, even under
torture, could define cancer! The medical
sciences of other areas are still worse. I
quoted cancer in some detail as this is the
biggest
research
grant
getting
area
attracting lots of young people who have
only read their textbooks in medical school;
the latter are now known to be ghost written
by the vested interests! Medical scientists
should, for a change, start thinking before
doing. The end result of all the madness in
the medical area, as shown by audits based
on US governmental data, has been that
modern medical establishment in all its
ramifications, is the leading cause of human
death and disability!
Our curse in India has been that from the
time of political independence in 1947, we,
unlike the Chinese in 1948, totally ignored
the vast sea of medical wisdom already
existing in this country for eons in Ayurveda,
and many other systems in preference of the
colonial western science which, in fact, is
like a religion, with a tight knit hierarchy to
keep it the way they want by rigid rules for
publications, a ritualistic research style, and
the so called peer review which is built in
to curb all new knowledge. They are feeling
the heat now in their own backyard.
Lamenting on medical science, the Chief of
NICE, the highest body that keeps medical
science activities under control in the UK, Sir
Michael Rawlins, said that RCTs, the bench
mark of quality in medical research has been
placed on an undeservedly high pedestal. (5)
The whole field of medical science smacks of
a fanatical religion. A great country with
great traditions is subjected to western
domination and is exploited in the customary
way. A new generation recognizes or thinks
it
recognizes
the
material and
the
intellectual superiority of the west and traces
it back to science. Science is thus imported,
taught, and pushes aside all other wisdoms
and
traditional
elements.
Scientific
chauvinism triumphs. What is compatible
with that science should live, what is not
compatible with science should die, writes
Paul Feyerbaend in his classic Against
Method. This one paragraph in Paul's book
tells all that I have been saying for the last
half a century. Nobel Laureate Peter

Medawar, a great medical scientist, in his

book The Limits of Science and John Bockris
of cold fusion fame from A& M University in
Texas, in his book The New Paradigm have
argued more convincingly of the need for a
change sooner than later. Science has
become a boondoggle. (6, 7)
The most ordinary things are to philosophy
a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite
ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or
time and then finds it absolutely impossible
that there be objects in this space or that
processes occur during this time... the
source of this kind of logic lies in excessive
confidence in the so-called laws of thought.
- Ludwig Boltzmann. (1844-1906)
References:
1. Feyerabend P. Against Method.
www.versobooks.com 2010.
2. Durr H.P. Matter is not made out of matter.
vinodmathur.blogspot.com/.../spiritualscience-talk-by-drhans- peter.
3. Besant A. Occult Chemistry 1920. Oxford
University Press, Madras, India.
4. Gyorrgyi. A. Sub-molecular biology.
www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3583585
5. Rawlins M. The Harveian Oration of 2008.
De Testimonio. On the evidence for
decisions about the use of therapeutic
interventions. Royal College of Physicians,
2008. PDF
6. Medawar P. The Limits of Science. Oxford
University Press 1989 London.
7. Bockris J OM. The new paradigm. A&M
University Press 2005 Texas.

Email: hegdebm@gmail.com