Making Reality Fit the Scientific Model
by Asa Boxer
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The more one delves into the literature critical of the drift of science into dogmatism, the more one discovers that alarm bells have been ringing for many decades. In 1972 Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at London University, Herbert Dingle, wrote Science at the Crossroads to express his objections to special relativity. Having hit upon several fatal problems with the theory he had previously supported, he decided to go public, and lo and behold, he was met with the sort of abuse I examined in my series on new atheist fanatics. Dismayed that physicists of all people were behaving in such a manner, he addressed the problem in the preface to his book as follows:
the traditional proud claim of Science that it acknowledges the absolute authority of experience (i.e. observation and experiment) and reason over all theories, hypotheses, prejudices, expectations or probabilities, however apparently firmly established, can no longer be upheld. The devotion to truth at all costs has gradually given place — largely unconsciously, I believe, but still undeniably — to the blind pursuit of the superficially plausible; the direction towards the most seductive, in which advance has been easiest, has been taken without regard to preservation of contact with the base, which is the truth of experience and reason; the verdict of those authorities falls on deaf ears, that of the Vardons or Hagens of physics, to question which is automatically to place oneself in a class which Lyttleton's letter makes starkly clear, having now established itself as final [Lyttleton quoting eighteenth-century poet Goldsmith referred to Dingle’s captive listeners as “gazing rustics”]; mathematics has been transformed from the servant of experience into its master, and instead of enabling the full implications and potentialities of the facts of experience to be realised and amplified, it has been held necessarily to symbolise truths which are in fact) [sic] sheer impossibilities but are presented to the layman as discoveries) [sic] which, though they appear to him absurd, are nevertheless true because mathematical inventions, which he cannot understand require them. The situation is precisely equivalent to that in which the zoologist assured the astonished spectator of the giraffe that if he understood anatomy he would know that such a creature was impossible — except that, in physical science, the layman usually believes what he is told and, unless he is enlightened in time, will be the victim of the consequences. This phenomenon, most evident in relation to special relativity, is now common in physical science, especially in cosmology, but its culminating point lay, I think, in the acceptance of special relativity, and it is with that alone that the present discussion is concerned. It is ironical that, in the very field in which Science has claimed superiority to Theology, for example — in the abandoning of dogma and the granting of absolute freedom to criticism — the positions are now reversed. (4-5)
As we have seen, this problem has only grown worse. We are in the grips of scientific barbarism.
I have argued that the source of this barbarism has nothing to do with either science or religion, but instead with the will to incorporation, i.e. the will to lock-in gains and demand obeisance to administrative structures that perceive frameshifting creativity as a nuisance if not a threat. Despite my drawing aside the curtain on the ugliness of new atheist rhetoric along with my suggestion that adherents to the militant cult of new atheism not be trusted as ethical guides, I recognise how individual displays of disagreeable behaviour are not grounds for dismissal of their scientific activities, researches, and findings. My purpose in exposing their fallible humanity—and likely an acute neurosis arising from leftbrainitis—has been to indicate what happens when one neglects the inner dimension of one’s being. And my purpose in exposing the institutional rot has been to disabuse the public of their trust in the scientific method and in those instruments that purport to uphold the standards that underwrite our blind faith in TheScience™.
In short the public and the representatives it elects to protect its interests must make stricter demands of the institutions and the individuals operating within the various scientific edifices. Put simply: scientists must be held to account in the sense that they must be obligated to explain themselves to the public in a plain and sensible fashion. They should not be permitted to despise and denigrate the public they serve as “rustic gazers,” “deniers,” “denialists,” “deplorables,” “fringe” or whathaveyou. They cannot be allowed to get away with rhetorical stratagems, smear campaigns and censorship. And they most certainly mustn’t wield the political power to overturn our hard-won human rights and freedoms.
The notion that TheScience™ can be left to self-police has proven untenable and even lethal. The Bayh-Dole Act1 and its like must be scrapped for an entirely new approach. The manner by which science is funded and by which funding is renewed must find new strategies to eliminate book cooking and inflated claims. Perhaps rewards must be offered to those who acknowledge failure. Something must be done to allow for graceful exits from money-gobbling projects like Cern when those projects prove unproductive. Science Awards must be reconsidered, and more generally, the disproportionate esteem (and funding) allotted to this group of professionals must be distributed more wisely to include their critics and the creative, potentially frameshifting thinkers.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
It may be worth writing a bit on the Bayh-Dole Act. Briefly, I’ll quote from an article at science.org that can’t bring itself to acknowledge any real criticism of the act:
Bayh-Dole was a competitiveness and economic development initiative. It was intended to reconnect academic innovation to the mainstream economy after three disastrously controversial cases in the mid 1960s (involving Gatorade, 5-fluorouracil, and the phenylketonuria test), in which the government asserted ownership of patents because it had funded the underlying research. Because the government would only grant nonexclusive licenses to patents it owned, a wall was erected between academic and corporate research. Research was literally described in this period as being “contaminated” by federal funding because of the government’s licensing policies.
The Bayh-Dole Act was remarkably simple. It gave institutions the unambiguous right to claim title to inventions made with federal funding. The funding agency couldn’t deny a request for title unless it had made a “determination of exceptional circumstances” in advance. Disclosing the invention and claiming title had to be done within defined time limits. A single set of rules governed all funding agencies.
For now, suffice it to say that the Bayh-Dole Act was passed December 12, 1980 and the Anthony-Fauci-inspired fear mongering campaign regarding AIDS started in 1981. Let’s not forget the overt homophobia and segregation that came into play then: folks old enough to recall will remember being afraid of sitting next to a homo lest you got AIDS. It took about ten years of advocacy to get the message out that this was utter nonsense. Sound familiar? The same Fauci playbook was used with SARS—the common cold until the end of 2019—only this time, it was “the unvaccinated” who were demonised as disease spreaders. The main issue with the Bayh-Dole Act is that it allows for a revolving door between corporations and watch-dog agencies (FDA, CDC, NIAID, etc.) and thereby promotes conflicts of interest that undermine public health and safety. (See David Levenson’s homework at MIT for a short essay on the subject.)
This barely scratches the surface of the problem, but it's a good scratch nonetheless!