Prof.
B. M. Hegde,
“The central problem of
our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.”
Bertrand Russell.
Science
and scientific temper simply mean curiosity. They are efforts to get to know
the secrets of Nature. Many a time Nature refuses to fully divulge her secrets
when one goes very close. Children, before they start schooling, are curious
but, when they come out they become, by and large, just repetitive robots
because of their brainwashing in schools about the accepted norms in science.
Occasionally, there are exceptions, but their numbers are very small. To swim
against the current is not easy, either. Research depends on grant money; most
grants come either from the government or industry. Both masters would like
their interests guarded. Refutative research, which tries to demolish the scientific
myths, is not funded and so is nipped in the bud. Publishing the data from
those studies is almost impossible in the present atmosphere. Even one’s
position in a University might be threatened!
Scientism,
on the contrary, is like a powerful religion that tries to influence people’s
understanding of this Universe in the accepted norms. Any attempt to show
evidence to the contrary is being hushed up with all the might at their
command. Scientism was helped by the early successes of technology based on the
present scientific paradigm. Society venerates science for the simple reason
that we have the telephone, electricity, easy transportation, satellites, space
ships, nuclear war heads and the computers et cetera, thanks to the
conventional scientific paradigm. In addition, there is this big money business
in scientific technology. Powerful countries are sold to scientism because they
have been able to build destructive weapons, thanks to scientism. These weapons
give the countries enormous powers to dominate the world. The lure of medals
and prizes and the large amount of money involved in some of the prizes like
the Nobel have even made people fake research findings or plagiarize them from
others without acknowledging the original source.
That
is how science got a clean chit from society. Let us examine the present strong
pillars of science to see how strong and solid they are. The Big Bang, origin
and evolution of the human species, the relativity theory and, quantum
mechanics are those four pillars. Reductionism and statistics are the pillars
of medical science and biology. Darwin’s theory of evolution is found wanting
in many areas. Evolution inside a species
is different from evolution of a new species; a bird from a fish, for example.
The latter needs thousands of biochemical reactions that individually will have
no survival advantage when the
ultimate new species arrives by accident. The efforts by Richard Dawkins to
sell Darwinism to the public are not very scientific either. One example of the
very complicated eye developing from a small depression in the earlier species
looks rather too simplistic.
The relativity theory, first developed by a German physicist,
Lorenz along with the French mathematician, Poincare, had a significant
contribution also from the famous Irish mathematician, Fitzgerald.7
Albert Einstein, the deified guru of
physics, had very little to do with it. Einstein, however, had contributed
immensely to Brownian movement, photoelectric effect and movement of ions in
solutions. Einstein giving away his Nobel Prize money to his first wife, whom
he had divorced by then, gives credence to the view, held by some close
confidents, that the original Nobel paper of Einstein did have his wife’s name
as the first author, which must have disappeared later. Many have doubted if he
had plagiarized her work!
Be that as it may, the question raised by Prof. Dingle of the London
University about the theory remains unanswered so far. The assumption in the
theory that there is same velocity of light independent of the direction of
measurement with respect to the motion of the earth has recently been found to
be inconsistent. The jewel in the crown of physics, the quantum theory, does
not seem to have much connection to reality. We still do not have answers to
questions like a) what is a wave function? b) In the Schrödinger’s equation
what are the waves “of” and what are the waves “in”? and third c) what is an electron?
The basic problem in the theory of evolution would be, if we accept that
there is no design and there is no teleology as sold by the scientific establishment, to explain
the prior existence of the DNA! The accepted laws of chemistry need chance
collisions between simpler constituents.13 Darwin’s book Descent of Man makes it mandatory for us
to discount any design. Dawkin’s book
The Blind Watchmaker makes an effort
to whitewash these questions! Lamarck must have had his last laugh in his grave
when he came to know that rats developed diabetes following destruction of
their pancreas by drugs: they then passed the disease on to their
offsprings-evolution through inheritance of acquired
characteristics-Lamarckism. One would benefit a lot by understanding the word Entelechy-spontaneous development of
order, as opposed to entropy-disorder, first coined by the
German biologist, Driesch (1867-1941).
NASA claims that there is no life anywhere outside the Earth, but they
could not discount bacterial life deep down the surface of Mars. There are some
indicators to that possibility in the recent works. Mathematics, the foundation
of all sciences, including the King of sciences, physics, can not explain many
of our experiences in life. Let me quote Albert Einstein himself here: “Insofar as the propositions of mathematics
give an account of reality, they are not certain; and insofar as they are
certain, they do not describe reality.” If there is no design how could a high school student, Ramanujam, write down large
number of new and original theorems, some of which he could prove but, some
others he simply stated as true, and
were later proved by other mathematicians at
the Cambridge University?
The remarkable picture of that gigantic explosion, the Big Bang that
began the Universe: the latter expanding ever since, is understood even by a
school boy/girl. What happened before the Big Bang? Maddox, the then editor of Nature, in 1989 did write that Big Bang
theory would be forgotten by 2000 AD. Edwin Hubble did put forward arguments
against the theory but the big one bangs on! The Tired Light hypothesis shows that the Universe is not expanding.
All that we can say about the universe today is that it is very, very old. The
million dollar question as to how the world began remains unanswered! Big bang
and the Black holes make good material for lay books that are sold like hot
cakes and make their authors very rich, but most of that stuff is still in the
realm of science fiction!
Science deals with our five senses only. What the senses can not measure
and observe does not make science in the present paradigm. However, the
observers’ consciousness impinges on the findings. An electron is what it is
depending on who looks at it! When no one is looking at the electron, no one
knows what the electron does!24, 25 There are a lot of things in
this universe that our five senses can not realize and they exist all the same.
Science does accept that what is known today could be proven wrong or replaced
by a new theory tomorrow, but to say that what we don’t know today (or what
does not fit into the present paradigm) is unscientific is illogical. But that
is exactly what scientism is trying to do.
To give a few day-today examples: we are not able to measure our
thoughts, our emotions, and many of our actions based on those emotions and
thoughts. Do they, then, fall out side the realm of science? Do thoughts exist?
Do emotions have any role in human physiology?26 If the answer is
yes, then we need a change of paradigm in science, at least in medical science,
where the RCTs (randomized controlled studies) have been sold as the last word
in medical research. The truth is that there is everything wrong with this
approach. No two human beings could be compared based on a few of their
phenotypical features. The results are there for all to see. Most, if not all,
RCTs have given unreliable results in the long run. But look at the following
in the encyclopaedia of RCTs published by the establishment!
“A major difficulty in dealing with trial results
comes from commercial, political and/or academic pressure. Most trials are
expensive to run, and will be the result of significant previous research,
which is itself not cheap. There may be a political issue at stake (cf. MMR vaccine)
or vested interests (cf. homeopathy). In such cases there is great pressure to interpret
results in a way which suits the viewer, and great care must be taken by
researchers to maintain emphasis on clinical facts.
Most studies start with a 'null
hypothesis' which is being tested (usually along the lines of 'Our new
treatment x cures as many patients as existing treatment y') and
an alternative hypothesis ('x cures more
patients than y'). The analysis at the end will give a statistical
likelihood, based on the facts, of whether the null hypothesis can be safely
rejected (saying that the new treatment does, in fact, result in more cures). Nevertheless this is only a statistical likelihood, so false
negatives and false positives are possible. These are generally set an
acceptable level (e.g., 1% chance that it was a false result). However, this
risk is cumulative. There is a
tendency for these two to be seized on by those who need that proof for their
point of view.”27
Before we do more damage to mankind by blindly following the
reductionist paradigm, at least in medical sciences, let us think of a new
paradigm.
Let research be directed to find out the myths and dogmas in the present
paradigm to replace them with newer ideas and findings that might make life
easier for mankind. Of course, it might destroy our “rice bowl” for the moment,
but we might get a bigger bowl in future. Scientific temper should make us
identify the false dogmas and enable us to destroy them. Science is change and what does not change
is not science. Professor John O’M Bockris so beautifully describes the new
paradigm shift that is needed in science in his classic The New Paradigm.3 What does not change becomes
religion. That is why I sometimes feel that scientism is a kind of religion we
are made to follow blindly. Present
science is excited about nanobots but
does not bother about our giga problems like environmental pollution, abject
poverty of the majority, preventable illnesses which kill the poor and
unemployment of the majority!
It is preposterous that medical science does not worry about health
promotion, while it goes overboard about disease interventions, many of which
make the patient worse! Sir William Osler had warned us not to intervene when
the patient is doing well, but that
is exactly what we do today! Medicine does not believe in the wellness concept.
Everyone is ill unless proved otherwise is the present paradigm, thanks to the
total body scanners. Routine check up is the biggest medical industry, while we
know that predicting the future is impossible in a dynamic human system using a
few data of the initial state. Even changing those parameters might not hold
good as time evolves.28 Changing those parameters might even harm
patients in the long run, while it is mandatory to do so if the patient is
symptomatic and is suffering, because doctors are here to “cure rarely, comfort mostly but to console always.”
The effort here is not to belittle the great strides science has made in the last two centuries. The
stress here is to let the reader know that there is so much noise in this area that almost drowns
the signal! Unless we silence those noises and try to pick the signals science will not progress and
mankind will still be in the dark.29, 30 Even if one person is
stimulated to think on those lines, the purpose of writing this will have been
achieved, despite the fact that 99% of the readers would be angry or unhappy
about the contents. Conventional journals would hesitate to publish this piece
for obvious reasons-their peer reviewers will not permit it and the editors
dare not take the responsibility themselves!
“Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the
destiny of mankind.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
"A new scientific truth does
not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that
is familiar with it."
Max Planck
(I remain ever grateful to
Prof. John O’M Bockris, Distinguished Professor and Head of Chemistry at Texas
A&M University, for I have drawn very liberally from his classic The New Paradigm , published by A and M
Enterprises Publishers, College street, Texas in 2005, for this article.)
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