The Reality Oriented Mathematician Dennis P. Allen Jr.
Dedication This book is respectively dedicated to the Holy Spirit of God, Source of All Wisdom and Knowledge and the Spirit of Truth, together with His Most Chaste Spouse without Whom this book could neither been conceived nor written!
Copyright © 2012 Dennis P. Allen Jr. All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-4752-2211-4 ISBN-13: 9781475222111 LCCN: 2012907378 CreateSpace North Charleston, South Carolina
Acknowledgements The author would like to than his old friend, Tom Phipps, for allowing him to quote from his excellent “Heretical Verities” and for his good advice through the years, and also his partner in deterministic electron modeling, Dave Bergman, who introduced him to Creation Science.
Introduction The author finds himself near the end of his career and feels the need to share some of the mathematical insights he has obtained beginning at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied under (the now) Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, John Rhodes and wrote his doctorial thesis in the algebraic theory of semigroups of the automata variety in that M. Rabin and D. Scott reduced the study of automata to this algebraic theory in an important, groundbreaking paper which appeared in the “IBM Journal of Research and Development” (1959). Now, by a finite state automaton is roughly meant a machine that is designed to study the notion of efficiency together with that of a task, where I avoid the term algorithm here because that notion is too closely tied to the idea of a (computer) program where it is tacitly assumed that the programmed computing machine (i.e. Turing machine) has an unlimited amount of scratch space, unlike a finite state automaton, of course, as its states are the scratch space. The efficiency notion is that there always exists a unique and minimal state set being a partition of the states (perhaps one state in each equivalence class) such that the automaton does not become confused knowing only the equivalent class of its cur-
rent state is in as far as outputting the correct output symbol is concerned, and the task notion is that of the set of input alphabet symbols, each inputted to the automaton, always resulting in the output of the correct output symbol corresponding to the symbol inputted and its current state, even if the state set is reduced to the unique minimal one (the output symbol depending only on both the input symbol and also the current state of the automaton). Of course, the inputs change the states, in general, too, (the next state being only a function of the present state together with the input symbol), and they do not generally result (upon inputting them) in a permutation of these states, whence one obtains a semigroup of state transformations (driven by the inputs), but not usually a group. But, later on, the author began also to become interested in the alternative physics of J.P. Wesley and the anomalous gyroscopic results of the British inventor Eric Laithewaite (who invented the high speed trains that float on magnetic fields in Germany and Japan), and found he could apply the automata style thinking to these fields. And he soon came to realize just how inbred, corrupt, and power hungry the physics establishment actually was. And that they felt both qualified and justified in taking the love of God out of their students’ hearts based on extremely dubious, so called “scientific arguments” which might better be referred to as “scientism rationale” or really “scientism propaganda”. And so he has decided to reveal the les-
sons he has learned to the mathematicians interested in reality, and hence this book’s title. The author prays that the reader can profitably learn from this little book!
Chapter 1
Where We Are Now Dr. Thomas E. Phipps, Jr. in his excellent book “Heretical Verities” in discussing mathematics says: “People who value cactus cannot be prevented from seeking it out and wallowing in it.…People like G.H. Hardy (‘A Mathematician’s Apology’, Cambridge, 1969), who form the chief role models for modern pure mathematicians, have charted just this regrettable course—with a cost to mathematics that can never be reckoned. Hardy incidentally uses the word ‘significance’ where I use ‘fruitfulness’. His ‘mathematician’s apology’ consists in dividing mathematics into two disjoint halves, one ‘trivial’ or ‘useful’ which he consigns to perdition, the other ‘real’, useless, and incomparably superior on both aesthetic and moral grounds. Writing in 1940, he says that ‘No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity’, and by such reasoning places these superior subjects on the moral plane of the angels along with all ‘real’ mathematicians.” But, of course, relativity’s consequential E = m c2 played a singularly horrific role in the mighty, mighty U.S. Air Force’s campaign in the Pacific during WWII, commanded by a true warrior (if there ever was one) by the name of General Curtis Le May. And these forces, un-
2 der Le May’s leadership, dealt a fiery death to countless fanatical, yet hapless Japanese, both in and out of the military, as such weapons as napalm and magnesium incendiaries do not distinguish between the two, nor, of course, do deadly, deadly nuclear weapons. Further, Hardy’s philosophy as set forth in his above mentioned book is fanciful in other ways too, as for example in his (with E.M. Wright) “An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers” (fourth edition) on page 39, he ascribes the proof that the square root of two is irrational—this being the first irrational number to be discovered—to Pythagoras. However, history disputes that claim, and assigns this discovery that not all numbers are rational to the Greek mathematician Hippasus of Metapontum, who was a member of the Pythagorean sect or religion. This religion’s creed was heavily dependent on their numerology involving rational numbers, unlike the Hebrew numerology which only concerned integers. And, of course, the “priests” of this sect had thoroughly drummed into their worshipers that all numbers were rational as a cornerstone of this rational number numerology. Thus this surprising and momentous discovery was immediately viewed as a deadly heretical threat to their religion by its leaders. They conferred and decided on a two step program. Step one was to execute poor Hippasus, and step two was to swear themselves to secrecy concerning the matter. And, indeed, history records that they actually succeeded in keeping the existence of irrational numbers secret for centuries! Now, of course, this execution should not surprise anyone for, as Stephen F.
3 Hayward points out in an article in ‘National Review’ (May 16, 2011) “Tyrants understand themselves quite well—this is one of the clear teachings of Xenophon whose Heiro tells Simonides that the tyrant lives night and day as one condemned by all human beings to die for his injustice.” And, by way of example, he mentions that “Poland’s foreign minister and former ‘National Review’ correspondent Radek Sikorski reported in 2005 about a conversation at a diplomatic dinner in Havana involving Fidel and Raul Castro, during which the former rebuffed a speculative suggestion from his brother that Cuba consider liberalizing its economy, arguing that they’d both end up swinging from a lamppost in a matter of months.” But getting back to Hardy, the whole very sordid story of poor Hippasus obviously did not “fit” into this vision of a morally and aesthetically superior utopian society of pure mathematicians engaged in “useless” pursuits such as number theory… as the school of the Pythagoreans proved to be a ruthless pack of murderers intent on preserving their mealticket numerological religion at all costs…even the execution of one of their sect who had greatly advanced their number theory, but in a way that threatened their very comfortable and extremely convenient life-styles!
Chapter 2
Will Mathematics Lead Physics Out of the Wilderness and Into a Theory of Everything? Nowadays the theoretical physicist is often really an applied mathematician and the mathematics texts he uses in his research are many times really ‘cook books’ rather than math books, unfortunately. And it is generally felt in the physics community that mathematics will lead physics out of the wilderness and into a theory of everything any time now. Thus the feverish search for the Higgs boson, for example. However, it seems to the author that this is pie in the sky, and that this may be illustrated by an analogy as follows: historically, the explorer in a strange land often made use of a compass, because this compass pointed north, but—needless to say—this did not mean that to the explorer that he should actually go north! But it ap-
6 pears that many modern physicists have made a similar error: they have not used mathematics as a tool, but rather as a guide. And the trouble with this is that the application of high powered mathematics opens up so many possibilities that, in order to get through them all, certain simplifying assumptions must be made; and, unfortunately, these assumptions generally make much more mathematical sense than physical sense. Here, it would hardly be possible to give a better example than the assumption of ‘universal covariance’ that, of course, comes from Einstein’s special relativity theory. This assumption facilitates computations in (for example) electrodynamics…making many of them much, much easier than otherwise would be the case, and so is now almost universally accepted and taught in universities throughout the world. But, unfortunately, however useful mathematically, the elementary and robust Hooper-Monstein experiment (this can be Googled) shows that one of the four Maxwell-Einstein equations of relativistic electrodynamics, namely Faraday’s law of induction, fails in general, although (needless to say) it certainly does hold in many important cases of interest. And this may well, of course, be the reason that the various (hot) hydrogen fusion devices have not been successful as expected (thus resulting in vast sums of money and considerable valuable time being wasted) as there one is confronted mainly with plasma and not so much electricity flowing through wires.
7 Another example of making the wrong mathematical simplifying assumption is illustrated by Eric Laithewaite’s (mentioned in the introduction) anomalous gyroscopic experiments which can be shown to be at odds with Newtonian mechanics itself, and very much at odds too. The author has written a short paper (scheduled to appear in the 2012 Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance) containing a strictly Newtonian analysis of a gyroscope steadily precessing in a horizontal plane that suddenly experiences a constantly decelerated precessional angular velocity until it ceases precessing altogether. The special case where the gyroscope of this type is stopped dead (say by stopping it with ones hand) is studied via Euler’s equations of motion, and it is shown that Newtonian mechanics demands that there be an apparent increase of the spinning rotor’s inertial mass; which, however, is not observed experimentally. On the contrary, an apparent loss of considerable mass is observed in practice, and an American inventor and Cal Tech grad (who studied under and worked with Richard Feynman, believe it or not!) has obtained a patent (U.S.Patent No.7,900,874 B2) utilizing this non-Newtonian effect to construct a working model of a pulsed power device that produces thrust without ejecting any mass, contrary to Newtonian conservation of momentum (which says that you can’t lift yourself by your bootstraps). The author has also developed a Neo-Newtonian theory to generalize classical mechanics by only no longer assuming that mass is an invariant in the case of non-relativistic velocities, with the rest of the (original) Newtonian me-
8 chanics all being retained. (For a copy of either, please email the author at the email address given at the end of this book; there is an earlier version of the latter paper on the NPA web site, but it contains errors, unfortunately.) Thus the faulty mathematical assumption here was mass invariance in high rotational motion that is non-relativistic in nature.
Chapter 3
Euclidean Immortality The question often comes up in mathematicians’ minds as to why the world of physics is becoming so mathematical to the point where those such as the string theorists and the inflation theorists (to mention only two examples) are so removed from the old world of physics which regarded the reproduction of experimental data as its primary goal. And it appears to the author (at least) that this is really a theological or religious effect. The typical modern physicist has, of course, thoroughly trashed his God, and often appears to feel the he is here now, and so Almighty God’s services need no longer be retained. And this seems to be especially true of famous scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Peter Singer, both of whom preach that (in effect) God is dead. But Hawking’s forte is general relativity which itself is quite dead in that the GPS people have deep-sixt it and gained much accuracy. It turns out that the very trendy notion of the “relativity of simultaneity” has been found to be non-productive and the GPS people have returned to Newtonian absolute time…although length contraction and time dilation have been retained. (A very readable article
10 concerning this is a 2007 paper by Ronald Hatch entitled “A New Theory of Gravity…” which appeared in Physics Essays.) And Singer advocates an ethics which, when boiled down, reduces to pleasure is good but pain is bad, whence pleasure should be pursued and pain avoided. This is, of course, a very mathematical sort of abstraction in that such intricate and delicate questions as right and wrong are approximated almost to nothing as little remains of their complexity after such a coarse approximation. Newborn babies, you know, can be “disposed of” should their mother find herself troubled by the prospect of raising them to adulthood, for example. “Homo sapiens” has become “Homo mindless”’ it seems. However, to continue, the modern physicist then begins to long for the immortality that he used to feel he had as a child of God, and begins to be obsessed by the prospect of “leaving his mark” as after he dies (as we all must), he fears that “no one will know that I have lived!” and thus is always looking for a way to win what the author refers to as “Euclidean immortality” in that Euclid’s Elements has been for thousands of years and most probably will continue to be the basis for elementary geometry instruction indefinitely, and so Euclid has achieved a certain and very real immortality through this work. And so it is to a lesser extent with all creative mathematicians, but not so physicists whose theories tend to last at most for several decades and then comes along a better theory that replaces it and makes it obsolete. In the author’s view, herein lies
11 the reason for the big push in modern physics toward a “theory of everything” and it explains the rather strange fact that so many of them are convinced that, for example, when the Higgs boson is finally discovered, then physics will be all but over. But the so called “standard model” of physics, ever since the time of Paul Dirac, has been founded on special relativity which, however, the GPS people have discarded in order to procure a 15—18 inch accuracy in the GPS units that may be found in many cell phones. Therefore this must be all utopian pie in the sky! But, nevertheless, it serves a very important function for the typical modern physicist in that it, on one hand, makes him feel that this theory won’t ever go into the dust bin and, on the other, that he will be remembered as one of the elite who solved all of physics, and hereby will have achieved (at least) the Euclidean immortality he so craves. And, in view of the second chapter, this also explains the reason that so many physicists nowadays are counting on mathematics to “lead them out of the wilderness” to physical truth. Because, mathematics is viewed as the bestowed of immortality and hence assumes the role of Holy Writ…as only God can bestow true immortality…even though it is clearly understood that it is only Euclidean immortality that mathematics can bestow. This is paradoxical, of course, but very similar to the oft made observation that, in the final analysis, so many physicists (and others) are “mad at God for not existing”. And, it certainly then goes
12 without saying that the “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” approach to physical discovery—which is the basis of the scientific method in as much as careful experimentation is the ground that it rests upon—is laughed to scorn by these physicists whom we are talking about. But, fortunately, the hard economic times we are entering will make the weeding out of these people expedient, and soon very many will be gone from even the academic scene with (stimulated) early retirements…not correctly indexed to the burgeoning inflation that is already beginning, and so will have to get jobs (if they can) in which they produce something useful…rather than merely hot air.
Chapter 4
The War Against Cause and Effect The opening shot in the war against cause and effect reasoning in modernity in physics was (as far as the author knows) the rise of quantum theory with the attempt to replace this way of looking at things with probabilities and their correlations. Of course, this began in atomic physics but has spread in many directions since then. Even though Albert Einstein clashed with Neils Bohr by asserting that he could not accept the view that “God played dice with the universe”, it was his notion of the “relativity of simultaneity” that did so much to advance this war in that if it were impossible, in general, to determine absolutely whether or not two events at different locations in space were simultaneous or not with (perhaps) one deemed to occur before the other in one system of reference, but the reverse in another, it became very difficult indeed to advocate causality in a relativistic universe…especially in the public mind But most scientists believe (mistakenly) that all this was forced on physics by necessity, not by choice.
14 At this point, the author hopes he will be forgiven if he relates a (true) anecdote concerning Scandinavia. While he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, a fellow Swedish student (also a mathematician) told him all about what a nanny state Sweden was becoming (in the 60’s) and then he remarked that the Swedish students he knew had a saying: “A man can get more for his money by being rolled in Copenhagen than by frequenting an expensive nightclub in Stockholm.” From this amusing remark, the author concluded that life was considerably more Bohemian in Denmark than the nanny Swedish state, and, of course, this doubtlessly led to many hangovers and their associated guilt trips in that former country…just as that philosophy does on college campuses (for example) here. But evidently the Copenhagen quantum theorists decided to actually do something about these night-afters in that they attacked causality directly, correctly perceiving that the guilt trips were a consequence of the prevailing belief in causality; after all, why would one feel guilty after a bit of drunken revelry if he no longer thought that his carousing was the cause of his hangovers or (especially) that there would inevitability come a time to pay for all this? Of course, there were instances in the history of science, in the European world, where the reverse took place, and perhaps the most noteworthy was the rise of energy physics and the notion of conservation of energy. In an excellent book “The Science of Energy” and subtitled “A Cultural History of Energy Physics in
15 Victorian Britain”, the author Crosbie Smith relates in considerable detail how the hallowed principle of “conservation of energy” originally had its origin in Calvinistic theology and that the Scotch Calvinists led the charge to make it Holy Writ among the physics of the time…even though it was actually Gottfried Liebniz, himself, who introduced the concept of energy under a Latin name Unfortunately, however, many scientists are so ignorant of the history of energy physics that they attribute the notion of energy to Newton instead, and consider it to be an integral part of Newton’s original mechanics. Nor is it generally known that Michael Faraday, himself, strongly criticized the notion of energy conservation from the point of view of electrical theory. Needless to say, there is no longer any real doubt that energy is conserved in (say) steam and internal combustion engines, but few realize that (for example) John Searl, an English inventor (who has emigrated to America) seems to have discovered what is known as the “Searl [magnetic] effect” that apparently yields electrical power in violation of this hallowed principle. (See his web site.) And the difficulty with introducing theology to physical theory is evidently the extremely poor track record this technique has. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas’s many failed attempts in this area are well known and they (sadly) led to many of his followers attacking science unreasonably, and this, in turn, led to a schism between religion and science whose unfortunate effects are still quite visible today. But the twen-
16 tieth century French philosopher Etienne Gilson in a recently published translation “Methodical Realism” points out (while thoroughly castigating St. Thomas concerning his failed attempts at physical theorizing) that he had actually laid the foundation for a complete refutation of Rene Descartes and subsequent modern philosophers (such as Immanuel Kant) in that he identified their fatal flaw, namely, the starting with thought and the proceeding to observation instead of the reverse procedure. It is this flaw that results in the modern physicist always thinking, or rather imagining, that he is in possession of eternal truth…even in the face of the above mentioned fact that physical theories come and go, and Euclidean immortality is thus reserved for mathematicians, for example, and not physicists. This, then, is the philosophical origin of the modern physicist’s delusional problems while the theological origin of these problems is his determination to jettison his God in an attempt to eradicate cause and effect reasoning in order to minimize his guilt which, needless to say, is extremely toxic in that it cries out for punishment (as in the case of all felt guilt, of course)!
Chapter 5
More on Etienne Gilson’s Philosophical Work It occurs to the author that he might well say more about Etienne Gilson’s philosophical work…as it explains so many pathologies in the realm of physics, and especially in today’s world. One of his main theses is that, following St. Thomas Aquinas, one should not begin with thought and then, using the concepts forged by thought, to analyze observations. But this is precisely what Rene Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, actually did in that he began by doubting everything, then to asserting that “I think, therefore I exist”, and he went on from there. Here the key word is “think”…because he evidently did not feel that one should tailor ones tools of thought (i.e. concepts) based on the phenomena being studied or observed, but rather that these phenomena should be (somehow) forced into the Procrustean bed of his (present) concept system. But, if I understand Gilson here (and his work is not an easy read), then the physicist should emulate the tool and dye maker (sadly a vanishing breed), and first
18 analyze the part (phenomenon) to be manufactured (analyzed) in the light of cost effectiveness (utility) and then design the needed tools (concepts) for optimal productivity. But, unfortunately, the modern physicist does just the opposite in that (for example) Max Jammer’s important work, “The Concept of Force” concludes by discussing the efforts of modern physics toward eliminating the force concept completely, even though it has served the physics community well for hundreds of years and was the very foundation of Newton’s mechanics! But, of course, this is just what mathematicians are always doing, namely, reducing mathematical notions to simpler ones, showing that the axioms of their axiom systems are all independent of each other, and so on. And the author has done this too in that he discovered just what actually is the root origin of the first digit phenomenon (in a paper that may be downloaded at the Natural Philosophy Alliance’s web site). So then, is the author talking out of both sides of his mouth here? No, because this phenomenon is shown to actually be a mathematical one, not a physical one! Now, it’s true that in the case of selecting a tool kit for (say) a lunar rocket flight, then, of course, one does have to reduce the astronaut’s tool kit to a minimum because of weight limitations. But surely the reader can see clearly that this is an exceptional situation and one that does not really apply at all to the present discussion! To continue, concepts (the tools of thought) must be tailored to the physical phenomena under investi-
19 gation, and the physicist must renounce any and all pretext to discovering or achieving absolute physical truth in his theory; rather his aim should be to provide useful formulae for the engineers. This will, then, free him of all the baggage he carries, or rather drags, nowadays…as his hubris (described herein in terms of his delusion of discovering or obtaining absolute truth via his physics) is found to seriously interfere with his mission of reproducing experimental data and accurately predicting further such data as set forth by Newton using his key notion of force: “For the whole difficulty of philosophy seems to be tied to find the forces of nature from physical phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces.” And here the author might mention that being questioned concerning his Universal Law of Gravitation, Newton remarked that he had no idea how gravity actually worked or why his gravitational constant was what it was found experimentally to be; this because he was an honest man and knew his gravitational effort was only a predictive one—he did not claim to be in possession of absolute truth in this theory of his! Yet, it certainly does not appear to the modern physicist that the ability of Newton to travel so far so fast was heavily dependent on his traveling with such a light load of hubris; but, then, that particular vice has, ever since the time of the ancient Greeks, been well known to be extremely adept at throwing sand in the eyes of the intellects of those who have the misfortune of laboring under its baleful influence!
Chapter 6
The Enlightenment Professor and the Technique of Student Massacre Many a physics student at even the most highly ranked universities and colleges has found, much to his or her dismay, that it is not good to respectfully but forcefully disagree with your typical Professor of the Enlightenment persuasion (as almost all such are) and has then found that while before he or she was talking to the enlightened, urbane, witty, and learned Dr. Jeckyll, that then afterwards that he or she was talking to Mr. Hyde now. (See “The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson.) Yes, the physics student soon learns that the Enlightenment professor is not to be publicly contradicted or his reputation as an expert challenged in the classroom. And herein lies the reason why paradigm shifts (as Thomas Kuhn terms them) are so rare these days. Quite frankly, it is left to the suicidal student to try to initiate such a shift of theory, and none other need apply. This, of
22 course, results in considerable intellectual inbreeding, but the elite, Enlightenment physics establishment doesn’t even notice at all. Aren’t they just about perfect and incredibly enlightened, not to mention very moral and hence entirely free from the guilt resulting from injustice and (above all) stupidity??? It does not, of course, even occur to them that foolery (i.e. being a fool) is not an important function of intelligence at all. This enviably results from hubris in that these people confuse themselves with God’s Holy Spirit, Source of all Wisdom and Knowledge and the Spirit of Truth. Yes, they are certain that if they don’t (as yet) know everything that they certainly know just about everything necessary to know…without any important exception. Yet, as mentioned earlier, today major parts of establishment physics contain very serious errors and at least one of these has led to, for example, vast sums of money and considerable amounts of time being wasted not to mention lots of egg on the faces of the (hot) fusion people whose efforts could not and can not succeed in generating any electricity at all…as they are using failed relativistic electromagnetic theory that has years ago been shown seriously deficient by the very successful GPS scientists, who do know what they are doing! What then is to be done to rectify this deplorable situation? In the author’s opinion, the physics establishment will (sadly) pretty much all have to go because they are simply way too inbred, corrupt, and power hungry to be rehabilitated. This will, however,
23 not be easy as they are dug in to an incredible extent, but the hard economic times that are now coming will render them subject to increasing scrutiny in that they be forced to compete for their prestige and power as the various universities and colleges come under ever increasing financial pressure and so will be finding it more and more difficult to attract good students. Herein lies their “soft underbelly”, as there is going to be no stopping these winds of economic change that are blowing now in view of the (sad) fact that the economics elite is now (sadly) pretty much thoroughly on the take to government and large financial organizations and simply does not have the integrity nor the will to recommend real solutions to the Western World’s financial woes, unfortunately. But “every cloud has a silver lining”, and all this economic trouble will seriously weaken the physics establishment and enviably render it vulnerable to an intelligently planned assault. Let us not doubt that the Enlightenment physics elite will fall to our final onslaught!
Chapter 7
More on the Enlightenment Mentality The classic novel “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad is usually described as a critical study of European colonialism and black slavery; but in the author’s opinion, such things are merely accidental and the real essential message of this work is a terrible indictment of the “Enlightenment mentality”, and thus it certainly would apply to the elite physics establishment in view of the last chapter. It seems that an Enlightenment type by the name of Kurtz sets out into the African wild to simultaneously become an ivory gatherer and a philosopher king in the grand Enlightenment fashion. He has written a silver-tongued dissertation on civilizing the native population in the region of his trading post, based, of course, on Enlightenment ideation, and he confidently expects that the natives will see the light and select him as philosopher king, but he soon realizes that they do not care for his philosophy nor are they buying any. Well, he realizes, too, that ivory has to go down the river on the steam powered craft
26 that brings up his supplies or else these shipments will cease, and so faced with this difficult situation, he does the best he can: instead of becoming a philosopher king (which the natives will not go for), he becomes head witch doctor (which he realizes they will go for). Conrad presents this in a remark by the main character, who is undoublably Conrad himself, by noting that the conquering of the world is not a pretty thing when looked at closely as it boils down to seizing it from people who look a little different from ones self, but what redeems it is the idea only; an idea and not a sentimental pretense! And, needless to say, Conrad realized, too, that the Enlightenment ideation is nothing more, really, than a series of sentimental pretenses as is illustrated by Kurtz’s (Kurtz being the archetype Enlightenment man) sad fall from his ideals and his subsequent disillusion under the weight of his choice of becoming the local witch doctor. Because, this decision wore heavily on the man as he became more and more unglued by the rituals he needed to devise and then initiate among the natives in order to make sure that they did not miss their ivory quotas even though the region was doubtlessly becoming ivory unproductive under all the hunting pressure in view of the fact that elephants do not reproduce rapidly (the gestation period of a female elephant being greater than that of a woman). And this was illustrated by Conrad by using his main character’s observation while repairing the steam ship, which traversed the river to Kurtz’s trading post and back, using a rivet gun that what Kurtz needed was rivets! By this, of course, he meant that
27 it is characteristic of the Enlightenment man to fall apart under pressure and strife because the series of sentimental pretences comprising Enlightenment ideation has no redeeming strength that could possibly hold one together in real difficulty. And so Kurtz took ill with malaria following his spiritual malaise, which left him with no strength of body with which to ward off disease, and thus the main character (Conrad) had to bring him down the river to the coastal colonial base. But he never made it, and died after summing up his whole experience, while staring blindly (the malaria) at a burning candle on the table before him, with the immortal words: “The horror, the horror!” He did, though, leave his typewritten, passionate dissertation concerning his failed plans to civilize the natives, which, however, had a quite different handwritten postscript: “Exterminate the brutes!” And so, in the light of this, it should certainly come as no surprise to find low life Enlightenment types such as Peter Singer seriously advocating the termination of innocent babies after birth simply because he deems their IQ’s to be insufficiently high. Pot Pol and his men, you know, killed people whose only crime was wearing glasses, but Singer, if we can take his words at face value, has reached a new murderous high in his advocating of the extermination of babies defined (by him) to be insufficiently intelligent and hence (in his elitist view) future mindless brutes! So, then, it has come time for the summing up. Well, as the French often remark: “The more things
28 change, the more they remain the same.” And, certainly, as Conrad points out quite clearly: “Beats the Heart of Darkness!”
A Postscript
An Unsettling Personal Anecdote While the author was a student at Berkeley, he took a course in artificial intelligence from a Professor Feldman who co-edited a book (with a colleague, a Professor Feigenbaum) on this subject that was very influential at the time when this was all just getting started. He then hired the author to work on a model of human binary choice learning behavior, which he said, was already successfully completed last semester, but he wanted to slightly modify it. However, when the author began to investigate this, he found that it had a pseudo-random number generator (again, new at the time) and was quite opaque. Well, the author flow charted the whole thing, but was still undecided as to just how it worked…until, working late one night, he accidentally pulled a key card (we had punched cards in those days, of course) which should have disabled the random number generator. Realizing this on the way home, he was sick as it seemed to be another in an almost infinite sequence of problems that he was having with this program, but it was late and he decided not to go back until the next day. However, when he got the output from the computing center the next
30 day, there was no significant change in that output… which could not be as the random number generator drove the whole program! So he begin to smell a rat, and following this lead for some distance found that the entire thing was a devilishly clever scam, and so he broke the news to Prof. Feldman who was horrified and questioned him but, of course, he was ready and had all the answers. He told the author that he had presented these results to (at least one and) probably several conferences, and took the author’s printout and all home with him looking like he had lost his last friend. Then, after he had had time to look everything over, he asked the author if he thought he could redo the whole thing before the end of the spring semester (The author was headed home to Michigan for the summer after that). The author told him yes, and did finished up just before the end of the semester, and his correct results were about the same as the fraudulent version’s which, in turn, of course, agreed with the learning model’s intended simulation of the binary choice experimental data. Needless to say, Professor Feldman was quite happy, and (the author believes) simply discarded the bogus final output and replaced it with that of the author’s, and then omitted reporting that there was a scam of any kind. And the author didn’t really blame him as his valid results confirmed his reported results, so why put ones self on record as having presented bogus results when further valid work confirmed his hypothesis?
31 However, then the question arose: why did the author’s predecessor perpetrate this hoax? The scam job he furnished was devilishly clever so it couldn’t have been that he was incompetent and had to finish up successfully somehow. Nor was he in a position that he felt he had to tell Professor Feldman what he wanted to hear…as the professor was quite correct in his learning hypothesis. So after considering the matter, the author came up with the following: (1) Neither in his class nor in private did he mention he had a “plan B”, that is, he had but one hypothesis which was either correct or not, and, if not, then that was about it, and (2) therefore, while Prof. Feldman was in a winlose situation in that his hypothesis was either correct or not, the author’s predecessor was in a lose-lose situation in that, if the professor was correct, then he might not need him throughout the entire semester as he would have confirmed his hypothesis and be finished with this portion of his research, while, if the hypothesis was incorrect, there—as noted above—was no plan B and so then the author’s predecessor’s services might no longer need be retained then either. And, of course, we may surmise that the predecessor was poor like the author and needed to stay employed throughout the whole semester, and the author believes he did graduate at the end of his programming job with Prof. Feldman…and with a good recommendation from him too…for all his good work!!!
32 Now, with this in mind, the author has long suspected that a similar scam—but much, much larger in comparison—has been perpetrated for years by the particle accelerator programming staff at places like the new super-collider in France and Switzerland. Yes, too many brilliant and good men have marveled and wondered about the fact (for example) that the so called “Standard Model” has not long since been overthrown. But, of course, if those programmers are scammers too, then they would doubtlessly reason that, if it were one day overthrown, then the work load might fall way off for a time during which this new development would be assimilated by the theory people and then additionally while new experiments of a perhaps quite complicated nature were brought on line at the accelerator instillation. And so there might be cuts in the number of hours worked per week, and also these new experiments could only be reasonably expected to produce considerable work on all levels to fully and satisfactorily implement (when ready) leading to a surge in work at that point later on. No, far better that the standard model should remain…to the programming staff, at least. And, of course, although he’s sure that the equipment men and women in charge of the accelerator are wonderfully competent and dedicated people—as was Prof. Feldman—the author fears that they are way too trusting as his Professor Feldman certainly was. You see, it’s a proven fact that people— no matter how intelligent—see things as they (themselves) are, not as they (really) are! And these scientists
33 at the helm no doubt really do believe in “the advancement of science” and “the dedication of ones self to scientific progress”, but the author strongly suspects the programming staff (for example), while they may give lip service to such things, actually really believe in things like “survival” and “living the good life” and are actually not really interested in making any sacrifices whatsoever—not for science nor for just about anything else! And as the old saying goes, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play!” What does the reader think? Is anyone really “watching the store” carefully enough at these various accelerator installations? The author’s email address for comments is
[email protected], and please feel free to email him at that address with your (thoughtful) comments. God bless!
