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REPLACING THE BOSS

November 1, 2022

Boris Johnson has just been defenestrated by his own MPs, and Liz Truss has rapidly followed him out of the window because she couldn’t command Parliament. Rishi Sunak has been elected more or less unopposed to form a new cabinet. What does that tell us about the British Constitution – in so far as there is one?

During the Civil War of the 1640s Parliament roundly defeated the Royalists and executed the king Charles the First. Oliver Cromwell, head of the Parliamentary forces, ruled the country through Parliament but died unexpectedly of malaria in 1658 leaving no arrangements for his succession. In the chaos which followed the monarchy was restored in 1660 in the person of Charles the Second basically because no one could agree on anything better. It was generally understood that the new king’s powers would be vastly curtailed compared to his father’s, and certainly that no more papists would rule the land.

Charles II was a dissolute creature raised in France in the Court of Louis the 14th in whose pay he probably remained throughout his life. He had no discernible morals and very few interests beyond seducing other mens’ wives for whose favours he gave away the titles and lands of his father’s most faithful supporters. Fortunately he left no legal heirs and the succession(1685) passed to his younger brother James II who was openly Catholic and therefore unacceptable to the majority of Brits. In 1688 we had the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in which the Dutchman William of Orange ruled jointly with his wife Mary, protestant daughter of James’ first wife, who had died young. That in future all successions would be settled by Parliament was enshrined in The Bill of Rights (1689), the founding document of our ‘Constitutional Monarchy’. William, a belligerent Protestant was more interested in liberating Holland from the talons of the Pope than governing England, leaving Parliament to do that job, which it has done ever since. It was a messy start for a form of government which was to make up its own rules as it went along. It was empirical , full of compromises, adaptable to the times, but in the long run remarkably successful. It saw off four Continental tyrants : Louis XIV (1715), Napoleon (1815), the Kaiser (1918) and Hitler(1945). It built up a huge trading empire; fostered The Industrial Revolution; abolished transatlantic slave trading (1809); greatly extended suffrage at home; brought enlightenment to most of its colonies and invented most of the modern word in which we all live now. Of course it made many serious mistakes the worst of which were: the invention of Economics, snobbery, Free Trade, snobbery; tolerance of parasites, snobbery, Baducation, snobbery, over-centralised government, inequality, snobbery, mass immigration and failure to recognise the United States as its principal treacherous adversary.

It’s not easy to compare governmental systems if only because different nations have very different natural advantages and disadvantages. With its island status just off the coast of Europe, it’s geology, its tides, its seismic stability; its climate and its fertility this is undoubtedly the best location on Earth for humans to thrive, and that has to be taken into account when making comparisons. For instance escaping the poisonous talons of the Roman Church so early wouldn’t have been possible without them.

But to really compare governmental systems one first has to be define PROGRESS on the basis of truly fundamental principles. Starting from “Fitness to survive” on the one hand, and. “Common-sense thinking” on the other I have devised six independent but indispensable measures of Progress, which are:

Curiosity

Honesty

Adaptability

Numeracy

Tolerance

Literacy

Democracy

Sustainability. [ CHANTLiDS for short]-

Judging by those measures one can then compare nation-states, both yesterday and today, and assign them to different classes. Table 1 shows a small selection as judged by their progress over the past century. There is a mark of 1 to 5 for each measure, the marks are all multiplied together and divided into 6 classes with each class a factor 5 lower in total mark. Britain certainly gets into the first-class whereas the so-called ‘Superpowers appear much lower down[US near bottom of 2nd. class, Russia in the 4th. and China in the 5th.] If you don’t like my list, you can devise another – but first define and defend the philosophical principles on which it is based

TABLE (1)

13 NATIONS RANKED BY THEIR PROGRESSIVENESS

Nation

Curio.

Lity.

Demo.

Tol

Hon.

Adapt

Total

Rank

China

1

3

1

2

1

1

6

5

Congo

1

2

1

1

1

2

4

6

Denmark

2

5

5

5

5

4

5000

1

France

4

5

3

3

2

3

1080

2

Germany

4

5

2

2

2

4

640

2

India

1

2

2

2

2

2

32

4

Italy

3

4

2

2

3

3

432

3

Japan

3

5

2

2

2

3

360

3

Russia

2

4

1

1

1

1

8

5

Spain

1

4

2

1

3

4

96

4

Switz.

3

3

5

3

3

3

1215

2

UK

5

5

4

5

4

5

10000

1

USA

3

5

2

3

2

4

720

2

Smoothly changing a nation’s government to better reflect the desires of its people appears to be a challenge quite beyond most states: look at much of the FSU, at Asia and, above all at Africa. Only a few Western European nations can do something which appears to be beyond the United States even when it is lumbered with the rogues like Nixon or fools like Trump. So we should congratulate ourselves on our recent defenestrations as a sign of progress, not decadence. `By defintion any progressive government must stir up a lot of opposition.

The other parties are naturally calling for a general election in the name of’ “Democracy” hoping to sneak in when the elected party is in some disarray. But it is not the composition of Parliament which is in question just now, but the leadership of the existing majority, a much lesser matter which can be quickly fixed. In 1827 we changed it 4 times, not 3, to no ill effect. And who is to say that the Opposition would be any more unified than the existing majority of MPs?

There is much more on these matters in my book HISTORY OF THE BRITS: see under “My Books” Category

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ADVENTURING WITH A PEN

April 27, 2022

I love writing — spending several hours a day in solitude with pen and paper because it can be the most enchanting activity imaginable. But why is it so? Daniel Boorstin the historian admitted “I write in order to find out what I think.” Writing is a form of exploration which can take one on the most exciting journeys to meet unforgettable characters you never knew existed, until you encounter them emerging, like ink, from your pen. In some magic sense they must have been inside you all along, hiding just out of sight, waiting their chance to have their say and become part of your family. Many storytellers will attest to that. I will never forget finishing my first novel in rather dramatic circumstances. I was camping utterly alone on The Bay of Fires in remote Tasmania. I had taken my stool and writing table to the edge of the surf to commune with Griff, with Salome, with Elephant and Naomi — my main characters, and my only companions at the time, seeing that my flesh and blood family were still busy back in Britain. I uncapped my pen, looked out across the turquoise sea towards the rising sun and let my characters write the end of their story — which had very little to do with me. Three hours later they were done. They had finished with me, rising up into the sky and vanishing back from wherever they had come. I burst into tears, abandoned, desolate, like a tiny child dumped without warning at boarding school.

That was 20 years ago but I have been writing novels ever since as more and more characters come down to join me and my pen on any number of vivid adventures. To my regret I have never had a flesh and blood daughter : no problem; Petrel came down in “Crouching Giant” and she’s been with me ever since, while my fictional step-father Bob Salt badgered, inspired and entertained me every day throughout the 4-volume saga “Written in the Stars”, claiming to have written much of it himself.

But explorers, as I claim to be, ought to make discoveries. But how could one possibly make discoveries with just a pen? That turns out to be a very profound question linked to an even greater mystery — why can we humans think so much more successfully than our primate cousins in the wild who share 98 % of our genes? Natural Evolution is a painfully slow process whereas we have transformed from Cave Man to Space Man in a mere few thousand years. It cannot be biology — it has to be technology — which kicked in not much more than 3000 years ago. And I’m pretty sure of the answer now.

3800 years ago in the Sinai desert not far from Phoenicia , some turquoise -miners invented the ‘phonetic-alphabet’ which could translate language, any language, into written words. It was such a valuable trick that it spread from Asia Minor across the Mediterranean to Greece, Rome and far beyond, literally transforming everything — but why and how? Here comes another private adventure — even further afield than the Bay of Fires. For my living I was an astronomer obsessed with ‘Hidden Galaxies’. The figure below shows a montage of galaxies — colossal islands of stars in Space. They are the basic units of the Cosmos — and we live in in one such spinning island ourselves — The Milky way.

A gallery of galaxies first found with a radio telescope and then followed up with a big optical telescope to see what they looked like. As you will notice they are a very mixed bunch. Some are giant Spirals like our Milky Way 100,000 light across and containing 100 billion stars whilst others are so dim one can barely see them. But there’s not much connection between their true nature and their appearance. For instance the most luminous and massive galaxy is the dim ghost middle of the second row up. It’s not hard to imagine therefore that the eye and the optical telescope could miss most of the galaxies in the sky altogether.

As you can see some are bright whilst others are so dim as to be virtually invisible. Back in 1975 I collected some pretty convincing evidence suggesting that the Cosmos was probably packed with with completely invisible, that is to say ‘Hidden Galaxies’ (‘HG’s). If that sounds implausible you must remember that, because we live right next to a bright star called the Sun, even the darkest sites on Earth are still 5,000 times brighter than they would be from a typical point of cosmic Space. My suggestion sparked off several large-scale campaigns to either find, or rule out this hypothetical “Hidden Universe”. Strong pieces of evidence both for and against the proposition turned up — but conflicted. That led to furious debates within the profession. To reconcile the two sides I decided to consult “The Scientific Method”, the underlying philosophy to which all of us scientists subscribe. Easier said than done. The harder I looked for the Scientific Method the faster it danced away. Almost none of the people who wrote about it endlessly were scientists themselves, but philosophers or statisticians, while we scientists were suspiciously mum about the whole topic. Einstein had said that: “Science is no more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” but admitted: “The physicist cannot proceed without considering critically a much more difficult problem (than physics), the problem of analysing the nature of everyday thinking.”

It eventually dawned on me that no one on Earth qualified to know had any idea what the Scientific Method was or is, or whether it existed at all. So, when I retired I decided to track down dozens of historical scientific discoveries to find out how exactly they had been made. They clearly revealed that Common Sense Thinking (CST) was at its core, and that implied weighing different clues against one another and against the hypothesis under debate. Now here comes the point: to do that effectively and reliably ONE MUST BE ABLE TO WRITE. Neither animal nor human memory is large enough or reliable enough to do that job. So now we recognise the source of our sudden and spectacular ascendancy above our fellow creatures. Because we can write we can think millions of times more effectively than they can. And when I say ‘millions’ I am not exaggerating . You can actually calculate the height of our leap — far above the clouds — out among the tumbling stars. My favourite fairy story as a child was Jack and the Beanstalk. Now we don’t need his magic beans. We can vault far above the clouds with pen alone. At first I couldn’t believe these new found powers to explore and to think. It felt more like a fantasy dream than sober reality. I never expected it, but when you think of human-kind’s miraculous ascendancy there has to be a rational explanation. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo painted God reaching out to inspire Man with celestial fire. But notice , their fingers don’t quite touch — as if the artist wasn’t quite sure.

God, off screen right, is seen here powering up Adam in Michelangelo’s famous fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But as you can see their fingers didn’t quite touch, as if Michelangelo wasn’t quite convinced. I don’t blame him. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Now we know it wasn’t God but some ingenious turquoise miners in the Sinai desert trying to leave decipherable messages for their successors scratched on rock walls, 3,800 years ago. The history of Science turns up other stories of momentous but unintended developments like that — though none quite so dramatic: Johannes Kepler understanding that the darkness of the night sky implied the finiteness of the Universe; Darwin in the Galapagos Islands realising that the diversity of finches beaks from island to island implied the Evolution of species; Alfred Wegener recognising that identical fossil-beds on opposite sides of the Atlantic meant that continents must drift. The problem though with such serendipitous discoveries is that they are so improbable and therefore so hard to believe. .Who is going to believe that Common Sense Thinking (CST) is millions of times more effective than any other scheme simply because of writing — though Einstein did remark “My pencil and I are are smarter than I am”. But think of puzzles like crosswords and Sudoku — they would be impossible without writing. So it is with CST and the Scientific Method. Which brings me full circle to Hidden Galaxies. It took over 20 conflicting clues, 40 years and a great deal of writing to settle that issue. Hidden Galaxies certainly do exist and Fig 3 shows one of the first — pinned down using the Westerbork Radio telescope in Holland.

Fig 3.The first convincing Hidden Galaxy, Virgo HI21 . It was found by Dr. Jon Davies and his team from Cardiff University back in 2007. The banana shaped radio source in the Left hand image is a massive edge-on spinning disc of Hydrogen first found with the Jodrell Bank radio dish in Cheshire, and here seen projected upon a negative optical image of the famous Virgo Cluster of galaxies of which NGC 4254 is the brightest, most massive spiral. As you you can see, something has dragged out a bridge of Hydrogen gas from it towards the banana. To have done so VirgoHi21 must be very massive itself although it appears to be totally dark. The right hand image is a velocity-map of the Hydrogen observed with the Westerbork radio telescope in Holland. The twitch in the banana signifies that it is spinning rapidly like a plate seen edge on, and indeed must be very massive to prevent itself spinning to bits. All the evidence was published in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal in 2007, and although several sceptics have tried to undermine the arguments none has remotely succeeded. Hidden, even totally dark galaxies exist. And , thanks to writing, we know they do.

The more one thinks about Thinking the more fascinating puzzles the subject raises. If, as I am suggesting, Common Sense is the way even scientists like Einstein use, then why didn’t they teach us about the subject at school? I believe I know the answer — but I leave it as a fascinating puzzle for you. IF either of us can solve it we might, like those turquoise miners 3,800 years ago, take humankind on another journey far beyond the visible stars.

NOTES: 1 The Tasmanian novel is ‘Pterodactyl’s Blood‘ ,see ‘My Books’ Category. 2 For Hidden Galaxies see several Posts this Blog in ‘Astronomy ‘Category . 3 For Virgo HI21 see Minchin et al,2007, The Astrophysical Journal, 670, pp 1056-1064. 4 For CST see many Posts this blog under ‘Thinking’ Category. 5 For history of writing see “The Secret History of Writing‘ a series of 3 wonderful films made by Hugh Sington and shown on BBC ch. 4 in 2021.

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PARTICLE THEORISTS POISON COSMOLOGY

November 4, 2021

Despite three decades of effort and tens of millions of dollars spent on accelerators and their like, it looks as if Particle Physics is coming to a sad end. No new particles beyond those such as the Higgs Boson proposed 50 years ago, and in particular none of those Supersymmetric particles which theorists had hoped would explain that greatest of all scientific mysteries — Dark Matter. Of course there will now be cries for more money and even larger machines, after all the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva is a mere 27 kilometres in circumference. But wait! Perhaps there is something far more interesting and fundamental at work: Perhaps Particle theorists have misled themselves, and everybody else , through neglecting a philosophical principle at least a thousand years old called ‘Ockham’s Razor’ (OR), named after a mediaeval monk called Friar Ockham.

At the heart of the Scientific Method is the business of Hypothesis Testing, which is where OR comes in. It states “Always prefer the simplest hypothesis first” and that, I suggest, is where Particle Theorists went so horribly wrong. Their “Standard Model” — as they call it, is fiendishly complex — what with its Quarks, Gluons, ‘Asymptotic Freedom’ and so on and so on. How do we measure complexity in Science? By the number of ‘Free Parameters’ (FPs) needed to describe a theory. One way you can think of them is to say they are arbitrary numbers brought into a theory to force it to fit the experimental data. A ‘good theory’ doesn’t need many FPs because it fits the experimental world naturally(for instance Newton’s very successful Theory of Gravitation has only 2 FP s) The so called Standard Model of Particle Physics needs no less than 18 FP s which has always suggested that it is an ugly and unnatural construct. It should be no surprise then to find now that it actually looks to be wrong.

So why did theorists construct such an ugly model in the first place, mostly back in the 1960’s and 70’s? Probably because they didn’t understand just how fundamental OR is. And there’s some excuse for them — because the Philosophers of Science, the self-appointed arbiters of the Scientific Method, didn’t understand OR themselves. Even Einstein, who relied on it extensively, waffled about some plastic ‘God’.

As I see it Hypothesis Testing works like this. You have some data-points, with error bars of course, and you have your hypothesis which generates a smooth curve which you must try to fit through those points. If there are lot of points the Odds on your hypothetical curve fitting them all by chance must be small. So if it does so fit then the Odds are that the hypothesis is probably right. If it doesn’t fit then you can always complexify your hypothesis ,so twisting your hypothetical curve until it does fit. But you can see that’s not a very convincing way to proceed, because eventually you are always going to force a fit. In that case the Odds in favour of it being actually right vanish. And that, I would suggest is what happened to Particle Theory, starting half a century a century ago.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with modifying a theory to fit the facts, after all that’s how science progresses. But you have to be very frugal in doing so. Only introduce a new concept (FP) into your theory if it fits at the very least two more data points than its simpler predecessor. And that’s hard to do, but it won’t degrade the Odds on it being right. But if it only fits one more data point the Odds will generally degrade dramatically. And that’s what Particle Physicists were tempted to do; making names for themselves at the expense of undermining the Odds on their so called ‘Standard Model’ theory. And that’s why almost nobody believes in their theory anymore. It’s as if they’d undermined their currency by printing too many notes. It works for a while — then collapses!

I am not a Particle Physicist, thank God, I am an Astrophysicist. And what worries me is that those same Particle theorists have dragged their own dodgy practices into our subject, with predictably unhealthy consequences. Take “Dark Energy”, an entirely artificial concept dragged into Cosmology by a particle theorist called Ed Turner from the Fermi Lab (and the University of Chicago). Now astronomers are raising hundreds of millions of dollars to chase this fantasy around the cosmos when there’s no justification for doing so, none at all. It was a thoughtless quick-fix extra Free Parameter to fit the apparent acceleration of Cosmic Expansion inferred from Supernova measurements in 1998. Had its introduction explained TWO or more discrepancies between theory and observation we might have welcomed it in. But it didn’t. So it should never have been introduced in the first place. Never!

PS Actually the situation is far worse than I am implying because the bloody particle theorists who have undermined their own subject actually introduced two more unnecessary FPs into Cosmology before Dark Energy: ‘Inflation’ to cure Isotropy and nothing else, and ‘Dark Matter’ to fix the Cosmic chemical abundances. We need to throw them out too.

So where do we go from here? Cosmology should chuck out Dark Energy, Inflation and Dark Matter and start again without them. As for Particle Physics I suspect that they may have to go back 50 years and try to reconstruct a more parsimonious theory of particle interactions than the ‘Standard Model based on quarks and gluons. In his wonderful book ‘Constructing Quarks’ Andrew Pickering (Univ. Chicago Press 1981) suggested that that theory was a social construct anyway, the product of trendy acclamation, rather than sober assessment.

More generally all of us need to understand the process of Hypothesis Testing on which the modern world of ideas is entirely built. Because if that isn’t sound ,God help us all.

For much more on Ockham’s Razor see our post “Fuzzy Thinking and Ockham’s Razor’ under the ‘Thinking’ category here on our blog. For a detailed explanation of Ockham’s Razor and why it works go to the url:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/AMSCI4-copy-1.pdf

But if you want to go into the whole business of Common Sense Thinking (CST) , of which Hypothesis Testing is only a part, try my book “Thinking for Ourselves” publ Amazon (2020) which is described in the ‘My Books ‘ Category on this site.

‘t

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AMERICA – HOLLYWOOD TIGER

October 20, 2021

America is not, and never was a real Superpower. It was sucked into the Second World War by the KGB but made a vast fortune out of it by picking the pockets of Britain and Russia, which did almost all the real fighting. It managed to defeat Japan only by dropping Atom bombs, which the British had largely taught it how to build. It’s Marshall Aid to Europe was miniscule and, although it did get to the Moon first, it was put up there largely by von Braun and his Germans. And it certainly didn’t win the Cold War as so many have claimed. The Soviet Union (another faux Superpower) broke up for other, more interesting reasons which had nothing whatsoever to do with the USA.

Why does it matter? It matters because the world cannot , and must not rely on the US to do more than it is capable of — for instance lead us away from Global warming, or defend us against threatening dictators like Chi and Pu. All the US is capable of is dropping bombs– a singularly ineffectual, but dangerous method of waging war (viz. Vietnam and Afghanistan).

For my detailed case here either go to my book “HISTORY OF THE BRITS (from a scientist’s point of view)” under category ‘My Books’ elsewhere on this site or go to the url:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Superpowers-are-nothist21.pdf

Incidentally this was written weeks before the recent humiliating pull out of Kabul. Hollywood was never much good at fighting, not off the screen, where of course it was deadly. Just think what would have happened if John Wayne had gone out to Afghanistan.

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ABOUT MY BOOK TFO&&&

August 21, 2021

UPDATES ON A LIVING BOOK

This post is so titled because it stands for “THINKING FOR OURSELVES-ADDITIONS” where “Thinking for Ourselves” refers to my book with that title originally published in 2020 and updated in 2021 (For details see elsewhere under ‘My Books’ Category or under Tags on ‘Thinking’.) But from now on I want the book to become live, so that it can be continually updated here on line. Here you will find Exercises with Answers, corrections, images, calculations, supporting data, more detailed and improved arguments, readers comments with my responses to what is intended to become what I call ‘A LIVING BOOK’.See at the bottom of this Post how to make such Comments.

All the additions are shown below, mostly under a Chapter number and page number in the paperback book, version 2021.

GENERAL

EXERCISES WITH ANSWERS can be found at;

at the following url:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/tfoexans.pdf

AUTHOR’S MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT TFO (as of Aug 21)

         I finished the book 3 years ago with the surprising but triumphal discovery of Categorical Inference – which connects the whole scheme for Common Sense Thinking so naturally and necessarily with Animal Thinking and Evolution. And IF it’s right it could change the world.

         At that point I sometimes get struck with what  I believe they call ‘Imposter Syndrome’– how could little me have unearthed a powerful scheme entirely missed by giants such as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein? It doesn’t seem likely does it?

         But then I look at some of its manifest achievements such as:

  • Explaining Humankind’s dramatic leap in mental capability around 1000 BC.
  • Its unique mechanism for balancing conflicting evidence, as illustrated with its success with Hidden Galaxies.
  • A first transparent and convincing explanation for Ockham’s Razor.
  • Its powerful mechanism (PAW) for dealing with Systematic Errors, which have kept us back so many times  for so long.
  • It’s perfect dovetailing into Animal Thinking and Darwinian Evolution.
  • The multiple new insights which spring from it – see this blog and my other book “History of the Brits’ [HOB ch.5]. For instance  it comes up with the keys to human Progress, what I call ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ .

So then I am reassured. But, but……Why little me again? All I can say to myself, and to potential readers is :

 “It was bloody minded doggedness more than anything else. I started out with the modest ambition to find out what I believed was already known  –  the Scientific Method, only to find to my surprise that it was not, but that it probably had something to do with Common Sense, but that hadn’t been defined either. So I asked myself a different question: ‘How could animals think?’ and thereafter progress became relatively rapid  because now I could entirely  ignore Philosophy, Mathematics and Religion.

So I didn’t have to be a genius, which I definitely am not. And one doesn’t have to be a genius to make a great discovery. Look at Darwin – he spent the first  30 years  of his idle life slaughtering wild creatures for fun. Basically he was an illiterate lout – but he stumbled upon the greatest scientific discovery of all because he happened to be in the right place at the right time – the Galapagos Islands  in 1838. But he was only there because his exasperated father had sent him out there as a punishment, saying “You wouldn’t even make a decent rat-catcher.” Indeed there’s little evidence of ‘genius’ in science more generally [ See Chapter 3 of TFO to see how great discoveries have been made in history] – so even if I’m not a genius , TFO  could still be right.”

CORRECTIONS.

As of 21/8/21 there are only 2 because I have just made two dozen corrections to the original paperback edition.They are

P 302: replace ‘Sherman’ with ‘Pershing’.

P 456, line 7: replace 13 with 23.

But the most important of those for purchasers of the older editions are at:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/tfocorrsjun20.docx

ADDITIONS AND MODIFICATIONS BY CHAPTER

CHAPTER 1 (‘Can we learn to think better?’) p 15

CHAPTER 2 (‘Different kinds of Thinking’) p25

CHAPTER 3 (‘How do Scientists Think?) p46

CHAPTER 4 (‘Natural Thinking and Bayes’ Rule’) p95

There are several Posts on the fascinating subject of ‘Galaxies’ , including ‘Hidden Galaxies’, in the ‘Astronomy’ Category here, with many images.

CHAPTER 5 (‘The Detective’s Equation’) p132

CHAPTER 6 (‘Numbers and Thinking’) p154

CHAPTER 7 (‘Woolly Thinking and Ockham’s Razor’) p170

There are several posts here on ‘Big Bang Cosmology’ — which I use as a case study in dodgy thinking, under the ‘Astronomy’ Category’.

CHAPTER 8 (‘Common Sense’) p198

CHAPTER 9 (‘Error Analysis’) p236

CHAPTER 10 (‘Systematic Errors, The Elephants in the Room’) p268

CHAPTER 11 (‘Statistics – or Terror Analysis’) p294

Statisticians turned themselves from humble clerks into a dogmatic priesthood based on several misunderstandings, on their part. They need to be put firmly back on their stools. Having spent 30 years trying to teach Statistics at university, I gradually came to realise that the profession has got itself hopelessly lost in the No-man’s land between Induction and Deduction. Look what confusing advice they have given to the government over the Covid pandemic, They’re not scientists, they’re mostly priests, who hide behind higher mathematics when they are challenged. See Post “Statistics: exposed at last” under ‘Thinking’ Category.

CHAPTER 12 (‘Persuasion’) p342 t

CHAPTER 13 (‘Poor Thinking’) p357

CHAPTER 14 (‘The Extraordinary History of Thinking’) p407

CHAPTER 15 (‘The Peculiarities of Science’) p451

In Sect (15:12) ‘What about Mathematics’ I only gave some modest examples because I didn’t want to frighten off non-mathematical readers but on this site its maybe worth drawing attention to some more spectacular examples. For instance on pp 471-472 I then failed to recognise the full and dramatic implications of mathematics when applied to immigration: basically because immigrants arrive every year, while children arrive only a couple of times or so in a female’s life, immigration is no less than 160 times more significant than natural birthrate when it comes to population increase! Thus immigration into the UK at present is equivalent to 3 British mothers out of 4 having an extra child! If you don’t believe me, and I found it very difficult to believe it myself, you should consult the url:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/immigmaths-copy.pdf

Then the modern world, including radio, broadcasting, television, Relativity, satellites, mobile phones, the internet…. were all implicit in a set of equations derived by two Brits in the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell and Oliver Heaviside. You don’t have to understand the equations in detail but one can certainly admire a human artefact millions of times more momentous than either The Rosetta Stone or Tutenkamun’s Tomb. See:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MAXWELLSEQUATIONS.pdf

CHAPTER 16 (‘Consequences and the Ascent of Mankind’) p476

On p486 there is a very brief discussion of Time. If you want to see a deeper discussion of a profound topic see the Post “WHAT IS TIME?” under the Category ‘Thinking’. Those who want to look deeper into TIME can look at the Post ‘MAXWELL’S EQUATIONS’ (under ‘Thinking’ Category )which explains why Relativity has changed our view that Time is absolute; it’s not, according to physicists. Even so Time is still a great mystery; there seem to be several different kinds of time. all mistakenly labelled with the same four lettered word.

GLOSSARY p513

REFERENCES p526

APPENDICES pp 547 to 604

INDEX p612

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HISTORY WITHOUT SCIENCE IS HOPELESS.

June 26, 2021

In his famous essay on ‘The Two Cultures” CP Snow pointed to the yawning divide in British Culture between Science and the Humanities. It’s still there, just as crippling as it was 60 years ago.

I was reminded of this when I started reading “The Boundless Sea – a human history of the oceans” by David Abulafia a professor of history at Cambridge University (Penguin 2019), a book which has attracted extravagant praise as well as The Wolfson History Prize for 2020. It’s a subject that has fascinated me since, as a boy, I read Thor Heyerdahl’s account of the Kon Tiki expedition — his raft trip across the Pacific in 1947 to explore his hypothesis that Polynesia might have been settled from South America.

That hypothesis gradually sank into disrepute following accumulating anthropological and genetic evidence suggesting that Polynesia was in fact settled not from the East but from the North by navigators of Asian descent. But then in 2020 came better DNA evidence showing that at least some South Americans had arrived in the Marquesas with their plants around 1150 AD. What has Abulafia to say about this evidence? On p 29 he writes that it:”… indicates that Polynesians from the Marquesas interbred with people from Columbia around 1150, most plausibly suggesting that Polynesians reached and returned from South America bringing Columbians and their seeds and tubers along with them.”

Heyerdahl’s balsa raft Kon Tiki sailing West from South America to Polynesia down the West Wind Drift powered by the Coriolis Force . Notice she’s got the wind behind her, as well as a current of 50 miles a day driven by the wind. Courtesy the Heyerdahl Museum in Norway.

What? Doesn’t Abulafia understand the winds and currents which would make such a hypothetical voyage thousands of times more difficult than Heyerdahl’s journey? Surely he understands the Coriolis Force which drives the Great West Wind Drift and indeed nearly all the voyages of exploration and trade around the globe in the days of sail?

So I skip to the Index, all of 63 pages long containing no less than 9,500 entries . No mention of Coriolis Force, and only one brief one to Trade winds, but not in the Pacific Ocean. But what about the maps, of which there are dozens and dozens? The Oceanic waters are entirely blank, no sign of the all-important currents and winds which drove and circumscribed all navigators in the days of sail.

One can only conclude that Abulafia either doesn’t know, or doesn’t understand the bearing of Science on the Oceans, a bit steep when he is writing a “Human history of the Oceans”. It’s like a geography text-book which omits all mention of mountains and rivers. The result is a timid history without any sweep or penetration, just another record of ‘One damn thing after another’ like his earlier book on the Mediterranean “The Great Sea” which I did manage to finish — just.

One could be more forgiving if Abulafia hadn’t been so condescending towards Heyerdahl , referring to him as a “self publicist” unworthy of his fame in Norway. Thor Heyerdahl wasn’t a timid academic, he was brave man who risked his life to explore his own imaginative idea — which as it happens, — turns out to be substantially right.

Abulafia’s egregious failure illustrates the folly of attempting history without comprehending or even taking notice of Science. And the extravagant praise for his book from other historians, and the award of the Wolfson Prize, can only suggest that such incestuos myopia is widespread in British academe. How can we rely on them when they must be writing for each other, and not for us?

But there’s a more general point here. It’s much easier to spot what is wrong with an argument than to spot what is missing from it. For instance the Scottish National Party is aiming to take Scotland out of the UK, without recognising that Scotland, with its 6000 miles of remote coastline, is indefensible on its own, but secure as part of a united island. How foolish. We islanders all need to sit up and take notice of that!

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LYING ABOUT HISTORY

May 7, 2021

It suits a lot of people’s private agendas to claim that the British Empire was an evil one. But was it? When I went to work in India I was confronted by a six foot, broad shouldered American in a sari who bellowed: ” You Briddish ought to be ashamed of what you did in India, cutting off the thumbs of all the weavers in Madras to protect your Lanka Shire cotton industry!” Naturally horrified I looked into the alleged crime.

I hope readers won’t be surprised to find it was nonsense, a canard put about by the Indian Congress party to win an election. But the point of this Post is to warn readers to be very careful before acting or voting on the basis of emotive historical narratives which could easily be lies, and to suggest a way to check them.

This is no small matter The Second World War was started by ‘Ludendorff’s Lie’ which Hitler and many other Germans chose to believe, while Scotland could vote to leave the United Kingdom because of a false historical narrative put about by The Scottish Nationalist Party.

As a Space scientist is wasn’t wise to take complex decisions on the basis of emotive tweets, but how were we to take them, winnowing the grain away from the chaff?

I have tried to apply the ‘Scientific Method of History to the hypothesis ‘Scotland would have fared better outside the United Kingdom’ and come up with odds of 250 to 1 against. see:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SCIMETHHIST.pdf

and have recently published ” HISTORY OF THE BRITS (From a scientists point of view)” 2020,Amazon, paperback £10, in which these ideas and techniques are discussed in a much wider context.The above url is extracted from it .

I would go far as to say that false history is very often a murder weapon far more deadly than shells or mines because it can stir up whole populations to set upon one another. One third of the German population is believed to have died during the religious Thirty Years War. At the present day Putin, Chi, Modi…… are all trying to use it to make their ‘countries great again’ with consequences which might be quite dreadful, even fatal to all of us. If you don’t believe me find out about ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘ , a historical falsehood which lead to tens of millions of deaths because decent people didn’t bother to check its veracity.

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THE LOVELL RADIO TELESCOPE

March 8, 2021

is surely the most spectacular telescope on Earth and definitely worth a family visit to the visitor centre at Jodrell Bank near Macclesfield in Cheshire. Remarkably it can tip all the way down to to the horizon and if you can get close to it you can watch its wheels very slowly turn as it follows a radio source across the sky. In other words you can see the Earth actually turn — which fascinated me when I was privileged to observe with it.

Lovell Radio Dish at Jodrell Bank Cheshire

The 250 foot Lovell Radio Telescope completed in 1957 and named after Sir Bernard Lovell of Manchester University who built her largely out of war surplus, is still the only big dish which can tilt all the way down to the horizon. She has numerous scientific discoveries to her credit including gravitational lenses.

The old girl’s getting on a bit but she’s definitely had her moments. The first pictures back from the Moon’s surface, taken by the Russian Luna 2 spacecraft in 1966, were beamed back to Earth using her unique capabilities at the time. The local Manchester University staff decoded them and rushed them down to a Royal Astronomical Society meeting in London where I was lucky enough to be amongst the audience as a student. We all had to pinch ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming.

Much later in 2004 my colleague Jon Davies and his team used it to discover a Hydrogen source Virgo HI 21 in the Virgo Cluster, which is, in my opinion, the first Dark Galaxy. It’s massive, it’s spinning and it’s invisible. What else could it be?

The source Virgo HI 21 first discovered by a team from Cardiff University who were searching for Dark Galaxies in the 21-cm Hydrogen Line using a multi-beam receiver specially designed for that purpose. Higher resolution radio observations by the same team with the radio interferometer at Westerbork in Holland are shown above superposed on negative optical images. On the left you can see that the source has interacted with and disturbed the massive Spiral Galaxy NGC 4254, the most luminous in the huge cluster. The velocity map on the right reveals that Virgo HI 21 is spinning at about 200 kilometres a second, about what you would expect of a massive disc. But very deep Hubble Space Telescope images of the mysterious disc revealed no light.

The claim that Virgo HI 21 is a Dark Galaxy gave rise to titanic refereeing battles and vicious arguments which are described in Chapters 12 and 13 of my novel ‘Beyond the Western Stars.’ [ which is described here under Category ‘My Books’]. They illustrate that cutting edge astronomy is definitely not for the faint hearted. If you ask me, from a distance of 12 years, much of the opposition was motivated by sour grapes. But why not make up your own mind and look at some of the evidence. Science can be tough, very tough.

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BOOKWORMS ARE IT!

February 22, 2021

The biggest fallacy in Education is that because you have a degree you are ‘Educated’; the second biggest that because you have not, you are not. I argue here that a bookworm may become more than 500 times more learned than a graduate .

Thinking of all kinds works through “The Association of Ideas” . Thus a new idea is valuable in proportion to the number of ideas in your head already, with which you can associate it, potentially leading to new insights. Thus the value of reading a new book is roughly proportional to the number you have read already. If you have read 100 say there are roughly 100 times 99 (divided by 2 to avoid double-counting) or roughly 5000 potential Associations to be made between them whereas if you have read 200 that number rises to 200 times 199 (divided by 2) or roughly 20,000. In general then the value of your knowledge lies in proportion to the number of Associations you can make, which rises with the Square of its size. This is a profound but unfamiliar truth, and the basis of my argument.

Now a typical university undergraduate will need to read something like 2 books/course, which comes to between 100 and 200 over an entire degree. A book-worm on the other hand, who reads 2 books every week, reads 2 times 52 times 50 or roughly 5000 books over the course of 50 years. Taking the above-mentioned Square into account that implies that the bookworm finishes up (5000/200) squared, or 625 times more learned than a graduate; which makes my point.

There are of course qualifications. If the bookworm reads only detective novels, or the undergraduate only critiques of Shakespeare plays, neither will become Learned. Some breadth is assumed, the more the better. I would guess most bookworms, because they have no imposed constrictions on their appetites, would be more widely read, generally, but not always , reinforcing the case.

Isn’t that surprising, and interesting? The most learned members of society are not university graduates, not even university professors (of which I am one), but possibly unqualified people who have always got their noses in a book.

What are we to make of all this? I would suggest:

One has no chance of becoming Learned unless one is a life-long bookworm, degree or not.

It must be a primary aim of both parents and educators to see that their charges become bookworms.

A great library in every suburb and school will be an indispensable measure of its Civilization.

All measures which curb or kill Natural Human Curiosity( the main driver of reading), such as bad teaching, or over-examining, must be curbed immediately before it causes life-long damage. What on Earth is the point of turning out qualified but unlearned graduates?

There will be plenty of critics of ‘unfocussed reading’, of mere ‘bookworming’, especially from the Academic professions. All I can say is that I haven’t come to my view lightly. Having made a twenty year study of how successful Science is done, I found it was Breadth that mattered, far more then ‘genius’, for which there was little evidence. Breakthroughs appeared to come mainly from those who could Associate ideas which previously appeared to have no connection. For instance the basis of the modern world is Electro-magnetic Radiation , a concept only born when Hans Christian Oersted (1820), reading about storms at sea, first realised that Electricity and Magnetism must be connected.. If you want to follow the argument you might read my book “Thinking for Ourselves” described elsewhere on this site (under ‘My books’ Category). Here is an excerpt from that book entitled ‘THE VALUE OF LEARNING:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ValueLearning.pdf

So here’s to readers everywhere! Only you can become truly Learned , and capable of leading, or perhaps we should say ‘reading’, our way on up to new realms of thought…

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BIG BANG COSMOLOGY IS WRONG

February 20, 2021

If you wanted to know what to think of some fringe activity such as Spiritualism or Water Divining I doubt one would consult a professional first. After all you know that they must be committed. But what if you wanted to evaluate Big Bang Cosmology? Once again you can’t turn to the biased professionals, although they might argue that unless you are a professional you cannot know enough about the subject to take an informed position. But of course that is a dangerous stance to adopt, and the way in which priesthoods germinate, metastasize and sometimes come to dominate the world. They become immune to criticism because they will admit none but believers as critics. They become malignant, if not necessarily malign.

So what is the wise outsider to do? I would suggest they might consult those whose business it is to know much about the arcane subject- material in question without having to become paid exponents themselves. Cosmology for instance is in practice largely extra-galactic astronomy, so why not consult an extra-galactic astronomer who doesn’t claim to be a Cosmologist? Such an astronomer will know most of the technical arguments – without having to commit to them. That is where I stand with regard to Big Bang Cosmology, or BBC. My passion lies in Galaxies, the largest discrete objects in the Universe. But as they seem to be almost as old as the Cosmos, their origin must be entangled in the early evolution of the Universe itself, so I cannot ignore Cosmology, any more than Cosmology can ignore Galaxies which, so far as we know, comprise most of everything we can actually observe. And as visible galaxies exist in hundreds of thousands of millions, and can be observed in some detail nowadays, they should tell us more about Cosmology than vice-versa. And here is the rub: in BBC galaxies shouldn’t exist. As has been known for fifty years they would have been torn apart by radiation pressure before they could even form. So a desperate fix called CDM, standing for ‘Cold Dark Matter’ was adopted to try and repair the awful hole in the story. But despite many efforts to find out what it is, no one has been able to find any trace of CDM in half a century. Umm.

And there is another stark confrontation between galaxies and Cosmology. In an expanding Universe – the core assumption of BBC – distant galaxies should be totally invisible because of the ‘Tolman Effect’, a test for Expansion, which goes back to 1930. Then we didn’t possess the the telescopes to test it, but now, in the Hubble Space Telescope, we certainly do. And what do we find? That the observed Universe fails – and fails most dramatically – as you can see for yourself. Look at the figure:

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest image of the Universe , taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, which I helped to design. All those tiny dots are actually high redshift galaxies a long long way away. If the Universe is really expanding we shouldn’t be able to see them. But……..

You can see it’s covered all over with a rash of tiny high-redshift galaxies – which simply shouldn’t be there, not if the Universe is expanding. If it was they ought to look no less than ten thousand times dimmer than they appear to be. Surely this is something BB Cosmologists ought to acknowledge? But they don’t. It’s been known since 1993 when we first fixed the telescope’s aberrated mirror, but ever since there has been a conspiracy of silence about the matter. As a designer of the existing and earlier cameras, I was staggered when I first saw the earliest deep Hubble images because I’d been assured by Cosmologists that Hubble would never see high-redshift galaxies. Yet there they were. There they are in their hundreds and thousands.

The only precedent I can think of occurred back in 1610 when Galileo pointed his little spyglass at Venus and found it to be a brilliant crescent pointing towards the Sun. The two-thousand-year-old Geocentric picture of the Cosmos was quite wrong, All the Planets, including the Earth, must be orbiting the Sun.

But what happened? Galileo was eventually seized by the Inquisition, forced to retract, and then imprisoned for life.

We don’t have an Inquisition any more but we do have Priests of a different kind: experts whose livelihoods, reputations and ambitions enforce adherence to a certain dogma. It’s not easy when you are an elderly, respected professor of Cosmology, with several books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers behind you, to admit that you have been wasting yours, and everybody else’s time. And if the old won’t recant, why should the young, who still have their reputations and their livings to make? There is no Inquisition it is true but there are, in a highly competitive profession, appointment and tenure committees to please, journal-referees to propitiate. Brave myths to the contrary, academic success is based above all on allegiance to the Common Book of Prayer.

I know it will be hard for outsiders to believe in such conformity, I certainly wouldn’t have believed in it myself if I hadn’t experienced it at first hand, and to some extent colluded rather shamefully in it myself. Yes I went to conferences and politely pointed out the anomalies facing us in the sky. I even published papers in elite journals like ‘Nature’ demonstrating that real galaxies couldn’t possibly have formed in the CDM manner proclaimed by cosmological theorists. But when nobody responded, shouldn’t I have bellowed and trumpeted my doubts?

Honestly I should. But two things held me back; lack of self -confidence for one. Cosmology is a huge and complex subject mired in the hardest Mathematics and Physics – and perhaps I’d missed something – which the experts had not? Then again it wasn’t my real love. If I acquired a reputation as a madman I wouldn’t get the observing time on top telescopes I absolutely needed to do my Galaxy research. Many of us subscribe to popular myths, knowing them to be untrue. One well-known colleague told me that when he is applying for observing time he always alludes to CDM, which he knows to be diseased, because he’s found that if does not, he won’t get the time. And so CDM, a central dogma of BBC, continues alive, when it is so obviously wrong.

But enough of personal anguish and Sociology. How could the uncommitted thinker look dispassionately at the arguments for and against BBC and come to a balanced opinion?

There is a way – using Common Sense – if you know how it works – which most scientists, let alone other scholars, do not. All it will deliver is a provisional conclusion, with some kind of Odds on it attached. What I will do next is to exhibit two different attempts of mine to have a go at the BBC problem, so that readers can appreciate some of the philosophical subtleties involved.

The first, entitled “Doubts about Big Bang Cosmology” was published back in 2011, where my Odds against it being broadly right were only 4 to 1, disappointing, but hardly decisive. It is reasonably short yet contains the main arguments in a not too technical fashion I hope, so readers may care to see how those Odds were reached. You can find it at

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Doubtsbigbang-copy.pdf

In cosmology itself nothing much changed dramatically over the next 4 years. But my understanding of Common Sense did when, in 2015, I stumbled upon the vitally important PAW or ‘Principal of Animal Wisdom’, indispensable to all thinkers who might otherwise be blown wildly off course by Systematic Errors. Now my Odds against BBC shot up dramatically to 128 to 1 against it being broadly right. Not only are they far more conclusive but they are , in my opinion , far more robust too because they rely on a whole network of interlocking and broadly concordant evidence. Without any need to repeat the cosmological arguments the new Inference Table, with its condemning Odds O(H|E) {i.e Odds on the Hypothesis H given all the evidence E} is briefly exhibited at

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SCAMBBCTable-copy.docx

The conclusion I would draw from all this is that the Universe is trying to tell us something profound and interesting about itself, but we professionals, soaked in our preconceptions, and deafened by our Church choir, are unprepared to listen. After Galileo’s experience we should have anticipated, and some of us on board the Hubble did. But ….

Our susceptibility to misconceptions lies in our weak grasp of Common Sense today, and in particular our total ignorance of PAW, or The Principle of Animal Wisdom. Animals whose very survival depends on sound judgements, cannot afford to be taken in by misleading clues. So how do they discount them? That was the question I asked myself back in 2015. The answer is they cannot allow any single clue a predominating Weight – because that clue might be false, and fatal. They must rely on a network of weaker clues which reinforce one another. That is what I call PAW. And when I apply it to BBC the Odds against it shoot dramatically up. BBC can’t be right, it can’t. Something at least about it is deeply wrong, never mind the technical details. [To see more on the PAW go to Post ‘ANIMAL WISDOM & US’ in ‘Thinking’ Category].

If the PAW is so damned vital for animals then how did we ever lose sight of it? Because Priests preach Certainties – their influence, their power and their livelihoods all depend on proclaiming Certainties, whilst the PAW stands out firmly against them. And, to be fair, many of us prefer Certainties to uncomfortable uncertainty – which is all the natural world has to offer. So over the last few thousand years the PAW, which is grown-up, has become submerged by a childish and misbegotten craving for Certainty, which only priests, but not men of Common Sense, can deliver. As Voltaire put it: “Uncertainty is uncomfortable; Certainty is absurd.” See a talk on Youtube by me on this topic at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KskJrJmfr34

What IS the universe trying to tell us ? It could be exciting.

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