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Science is not yet in its infancy, nor even embryonic. It is still being conceived. It is still looking for the right genes, the right DNA, the right combination, the right wisdom...

And already it is a rather big “disturbed child”:

Many scientists are proud that almost all the advancement of science has occurred in the last few hundred years (since Newton), and almost all of that in the last century (since Einstein). But science, almost completely, holds the inconsistent views that it “has arrived”, that it is “the only game in town, the only real game”, that nothing is truly real, nothing truly exists, unless-until science has studied it to the extent that there is an accepted scientific theory that includes it. If some religionists hold that the world came into existence a mere 6000 years ago instead of the tens of billions associated with the Big Bang, what can we make of (ourselves as) scientists who effectively hold that the world came into existence a mere 100 years ago (50 if we go by modern Western medicine), and continues to do so only as scientists report new findings.

Science deifies, as it were, the “objectivity” that “science alone” embodies, objectivity that science is, if not the “one true God” of, at least the only possible one true high priest of. Science correspondingly demonizes “subjectivity”.

This can be considered somewhat strange if we simultaneously consider the Uncertainty Principle that has come to be raised to such an exalted status in Science. “Objectivity” implies a non-interaction with the observed, or at the very least a fixed and immutable such interaction, so that different “objective” “observers” don’t get different “observations”... “obviously”. The “ob-” implies a fundamental and totally “ab-sentee” landlord-like substance, one that science in its Uncertainty Principle has dismissed as impossible. Paradox can be found deeply embedded in with and in Science, too.

To our “modern” science, subjectivity, religion, magic, the “supernatural”, the “paranormal”, metaphysics, astrologyespufosetc, even life itself (since it is always breaking the laws of science), and often even philosophy and the social sciences, are taken as enemies. They are fathers to be killed to take their places and marry mothers, they are Abels to be Cained, they are rivals or critics to be beaten, dismissed out of hand, silenced forever. It is sometimes made explicit that (only) “Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth”.

It is truly a tragedy that science takes willful ignorance as an advisor, ally and even as a modus operandi rather than as an enemy. (“It is unscientific for anyone to even look through your telescope.”)

•  In the early 1900s, almost all scientists scathingly denounced as completely unscientific the many reports — and those making them, and any scientists who publicly gave credence to the possibility that the reports were true — of sightings in and around the Indian Ocean of a species of fish thought — by science — to have become extinct approximately 80 million years ago (or, at the very latest, by the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago), the coelacanth. Then, in 1938, one was caught off the coast of southern Africa. Now, only a few decades later, catching them alive has become a common place occurrence.

•  Modern Western allopathic medicine has started discovering the medical value of leaches (as seen in documentaries on The Learning Channel and Discovery Channel), when a few short years ago even a mere suggestion of their possible medical uses was also scathingly denounced as completely “unscientific” and called charlatanry, just as ancient “magic” (as opposed to stage magic) is still so called.

•  Acupuncture has been developing for roughly 50-100 times as long as “modern” Western allopathic medicine, but only in the last few decades of the 20th Century was Western science finally forced to admit that acupuncture is as scientifically valid as Western medicine — at least as valid, perhaps more.

•  Italian peasants have known about the relationship between mosquitoes and malaria for over 2000 years, but modern science didn’t make this discovery until the 1880s, in the person of a French physician, pathologist, and parasitologist named Alphonse Laveran (1845-1922), who was at that time a French army surgeon stationed in Algeria. (For this and later work on protozoal diseases he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1907. Too bad 2000 year old Italian peasants aren’t eligible for Nobel prizes.)

•  Philosophy has made it clear for thousands of years that it is in fact absolutely impossible to prove the non-existence or impossibility of anything in reality. Reality is too open ended to allow such restrictions on its domain. It is only possible to prove the non-existence or impossibility of certain mathematical entities within the context of certain mathematical theories. To “prove” such non-existence or impossibility in reality requires 2 things: 1) omniscience, and 2) infallibility, neither of which are easy to find, even among the wise.

•  There are people who are ostensibly “scientists” — and others, such as famous stage magicians — who attempt to “scientifically disprove” the existence of the “supernatural” or “paranormal” by offering examples of how “supernatural” or “paranormal” events can be mimicked, with the implication of fraudulently.  They, and unfortunately many other scientists and the lay public, seem totally oblivious to the complete speciousness — in its turn fraudulently so, or at least incompetently so — of this “scientific methodology” that is logically equivalent to “scientifically proving” that there is no such thing as real money or real gold by demonstrating the existence of counterfeit money or “fools gold”. This is science failing scientifically, as well as epistemologically, and morally.

•  Any scientific theory, as opposed to phenomenology, has a metaphysics that is foundationally essential, yet science ignores its own metaphysics and demonizes the metaphysics of others. Philosophy...

•  Science — for many reasons — has become burdened with a truly counter-productive complexity and conformity; complexities and conformities is more accurate. “Publish-or-perish” and “conform or you’ll never see tenure, funding, or even recognition” have afflicted science, mathematics, even philosophy and academia in general for millennia, and counter-productive complexity tends to thrive in that environment. Complexity and conformity — especially counter-productive complexity and conformity — help maintain various synergistic potential energy barriers that protect what becomes a priesthood against critics, rivals, and other heresies. Any who question or criticize too closely are obviously not of the inner circle, and they can be dismissed both within the community and publicly without much ado. Unfortunately, science has come to culture — i.e. perpetrate, propagate and adhere to — counter-productive complexities and conformities for just these types of reasons.

•  And many other such.

All without science getting a bad name, even among... scientists.

Luckily the well-known and well-loved Arthur C. Clarke once said (here paraphrasing heavily and essentially):

•  “any sufficiently advanced science-like-substance is indistinguishable from magic.”

We have yet to reach that state of advancement in science. And it is still completely overlooked that:

•  any sufficiently understood magic-like-substance is indistinguishable from what science may eventually evolve into... if it becomes wise.

And it is still correspondingly completely overlooked that:

•  any sufficiently advanced “objectivity” becomes indistinguishable from “subjectivity”.

I.e., imagine someone who optimizes with respect to more than ten-thousand-trillion variables. This person will to most of us seem “subjective” when compared to an “objective” person who optimizes with respect to only a single variable — “objectively chosen”, to be sure. (There are infinities of “objective” criteria, often incompatible, and choosing among them is always a “subjective” process.) No fetus could become a viable infant, and no infant could ever develop into an intelligent child, if either had to do any critical part of its developmental learning or evolution using the/an “objective scientific method”.

And as long as we're at it:

•  the supernatural is the natural, one story up (just a short, Jacob’s escalator ride away), the paranormal, the normal, one block over.

Evolution, for example, will never be understood until science recognizes the supernatural as natural, i.e. the existence of intelligent spirits, imperfect to be sure, but guiding the various evolutions nonetheless. Science is currently studying merely various levels of the bodies — material, energy, gross material, etc. — which the soul and the spirit — none of these well understood by anyone, even religionists and spiritualists — use as vehicles. These bodies-vehicles have a lot of architecture and engineering that has been worked out over vast periods of various “spacetimes”, all of which have also had a lot of  architecture and engineering designed and built into them.

The primitive roots of our word “magic” meant one variant or another of “wise”. It is not wise to deny or negate the existence of whatever we are ignorant of, of whatever is not “dreamt of in our philosophies”. Would magic be “real magic” if its secret doors, secret compartments, secret passageways, mirrors, smoke, all existed in or operated from other dimensions than those we currently credit?! Would it be “real magic” if there were people in those other dimensions who manipulated our locally perceived matter-energy-spacetime-evolution?! Or would these merely be more “science”, waiting — like true wisdom — to be discovered?!

Only an infinitesimal portion of what we experience as life has even the remotest possibility of ever being measured scientifically (at least by today’s scientific standards), which measurement might give it at least a chance to get that rarely given out green card of scientific acceptance (“It’s Now Science”).

Mythology, astrology, sacred scripture, others: are these bogus? or are they the closest thing 21st Century man has to Isaac Asimov’s mathematics-science of “psychohistory”?!

The Greek word from which we get “apocalypse” literally meant “(take the) lid off”, “dis-cover”.

To science, to scientists, the above will sound like (mere) philosophy (or worse), and that is what this section is titled, since the subject matter and its approach fall naturally into the realm of philosophy of science,  i.e. the love of the — perhaps only future, “for man ever will be, but never is blessed” — wisdom of science. Scientists tend to reject philosophy — even philosophy of science — when it seems to put science itself in a bad light.

For example, philosophy has pointed out for thousands of years that it is absolutely impossible to prove the non-existence or impossibility of anything — with the exception of certain mathematical entities within the context of a satisfactory mathematical theory. To “prove” non-existence or impossibility requires 2 things, neither of which are easy to find, even among the wise: 1) omniscience, and 2) infallibility.

For example, suppose you have an infinite number of boxes in each of an infinite set of universes, perhaps most of which are invisible or otherwise undetected. Perhaps each has its own physics, chemistry, etc. In order to prove that none of the boxes contains an “ESP” or a “UFO”, you must look in every box, in every universe — and very, very carefully, as well, with every possible means of perception, since the ESP or the UFO might be difficult to detect; and you must keep looking forever. No marks you make on a piece of paper can prove that all the boxes will always be empty, no matter how fancy the marks are, and no incomplete set of even the most careful observations can, either.

I.e. science can never prove the non-existence of such things as “ESP” and “UFOs”, and any attempts to do so are scientifically incompetent, as well as philosophically incompetent. But scientists, in their turn, reject and/or ignore this impossibility more-or-less absolutely, and go ahead and declare that such things as ESP and UFOs themselves are “unscientific”, that they do not exist, and can not even possibly exist.  In addition any crediting of even the possibility of their existence is also “unscientific”. (It is truly strange indeed that when engineers are so close to producing “flying saucer”-like substances that scientists still hold that all such are absolutely unscientific and cannot possibly exist.)

•  It is time for science to once and for all let go of
       proof by ignorance, and
       proof by lack of imagination.

•  It is time for scientists to admit at least the possible existence of the as yet scientifically unknown but nevertheless infinite ocean of “emergent” “complexity” of “chaotic” reality that does not yet have a corresponding empiricism sufficiently emerged  in scientific awareness to be begin to be dreamt of in their philosophies. (See the Santa Fe Institute web site for more on their studies of complexity, chaos and emergent behaviors of complex systems.)

But, we can note with optimism, science is at times able to overcome its fears and rejections, even of e.g. metaphysics. In the 1800s scientists such as Ernst Mach — as in Mach 1, Mach 2,... — and Wilhelm Ostwald adamantly opposed the developing atomic-molecular theory of matter (at the time considered a totally metaphysical approach), e.g. on the grounds that it would never be experimentally verifiable. Today we regularly photograph atoms and molecules. It can be hoped that in a similar way science and mathematics can come to terms with their pervasive foundational... oversights.

It is for the above reasons that the material presented in the PAIAS web site is so important. It goes beyond the “merely philosophical” (and “moral”, etc) and shows that science is failing scientifically, i.e. it is failing on its own terms, and failing egregiously. And it is not just science that is failing on its own terms, mathematics does so as well.

Mathematics, sometimes called the “queen of sciences”, and openly accepted as the ultimate foundation of science (along with abstract reasoning in general), itself has fatal flaws in set theory, itself the foundation of perhaps 2/3 of early 21st Century mathematics, including the applied mathematics of physics.

And worse, besides the inconsistency of set theory, it can be mathematically demonstrated that applied mathematics, applied logic and abstract reasoning in general — the worlds where science, mathematics and reasoning become all but indistinguishable — are of necessity formally invalid. In a simple proof that reminds one of Gödel’s results concerning the completeness and consistency of certain mathematical theories, it can be shown that there is a formal logical-mathematical counterpart to the well-known wisdom that “the map is not the territory”. At best one can only reason with formal validity about the map and the dynamics we give its elements (and perhaps not even that). Science, far from being all-but-omniscient and all-but-infallible, is formally invalid to the extent that it uses applied mathematics/logic, or at a minimum abstract reasoning, which last has heretofore ruled science (and religion, it should be pointed out), and — one way or another —  has ruled most of humanity by a minor variant of “divine right” for ages on end.

When people think to give control over everyone’s lives to science, it is only right that they should also be aware that science is neither all-but-omniscient nor all-but-infallible, but rather the opposite. We all too often need to ask:

•  “You mean science can’t even get that right?!”

And at best, science (as is the case by definition for all abstract reasoning) is a “stick figure” approach to reality. Abstraction gives us infinitesimal stick figure shadows on the walls of our cave, and it is these we reason with, and from which we create our science.  Advances e.g. in medicine and genetics have changed our ideas fantastically in the last century. And will again in the next. But we are still at a stick figure stage in the evolution of science, indeed of all human knowledge. We are just beginning to be aware that, in all our endeavors, we as humans, like Isaac Newton, are still only finding a few shells prettier than most on the beach of an infinite ocean. And advances in our shell collection are only made by people who at least implicitly question accepted science.

But unfortunately, there is a strong tendency for today’s science to “filter out” those who question it “too closely” or “in the wrong way”, to filter out those who seem to think there is a need for science “to be put right”. And this tendency will be aggravated here since many of the failures and other errors that will be demonstrated are not of a subtle kind, the kind that ordinarily might leave a scientist (or mathematician, since they share in this) with some self-respect. They are blatant errors, blatant... oversights. But, these demonstrations are all necessary preliminaries to “when wrong, to be put right”.

Reality is effectively infinite, in infinite dimensions. It has an infinite dimensional spectrum, even if we only consider sight oriented access to it. And science has been gifted so far only with a rather narrow visible spectrum of limited dimensionality. Science is color blind in the extreme. But, “higher powers” seem to think it has future potential, and they have been nurturing it toward a proper conception. And it’s slowly getting there. We all need to help it along. “When right, to be kept right. When wrong to be put right.”

The wise of the ancient world long ago learned that humor was essential to the learning of wisdom. A sense of humor always goes hand in hand with having multiple (and “hyper-dimensional”, “hyper-topological”) views of things that are not so abstract as to blind one to the essence of reality, as to force the mistaking of one thing for another. We will try to make our serious message(s) entertaining to further this, as well as make our entertainment seriously relevant to “the real world of science”, which we hope will not always be the contradiction in terms that it so often is today.

So whenever you even begin to think that science might be more infallible than other means or systems of knowing, be sure to say to yourself:

•  “Remember the coelacanth!” “Remember the bumblebee!” “Remember the Laotian rock rat!”

(Remember that, even though it is humorous, the story that our best modern physics of aerodynamics still “proves” that bumble bees can’t fly is seriously true. And the “Laotian rock rat” has been discovered alive after ostensibly going extinct 11 million years ago.)

Science is very young, even though we can see that it has been evolving for thousands of years. As scientists, we are the new kids on the block. We have not yet come to terms with the fact that there are older kids, and that they were and still are more evolved than we are, except perhaps in those ways we try to establish ourselves as different from them. But we have not yet come near to perfecting the “scientific method”. We have just begun to conceive that such a thing is possible, but perfected it?! No. In fact science is literally riddled with... oversights, so many failures, so obvious in retrospect, and so fundamental that people will question whether science will ever attain true competence. But as the first steps in “when wrong, to be put right”, these failures must be examined, extensively and in detail.

Heinz used to tell his classes that there was a difference between the laws of man and the laws of science: a law of law of man is broken you put the law-breaker in jail, but when a law of science is broken you put the law-maker in jail. This turned out to be a... statistic. Jails are not overcrowded with scientists, not yet (“Remember the coelacanth!”), but that is because science makes sure that it, too, controls the courts and the coinage. In fact, science is being abused more and more often in court and coinage situations outside of laboratory settings.

These scientific failures, and the arrogance with which science dismisses questioning concerning just about any seriously possible and-or possibly serious failures, are essential factors in the mass migrations of people away from science that find expression in such statistics as “According to a study by the National Science Foundation, 70 percent of Americans do not understand science”, and let’s-hope-they-are-just-jokes like “Here’s the sad part: 30 percent don’t even know what 70 percent means.” (Both quotes from http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/06/15/not.rocket.scientists.ap/index.html, which unfortunately now no longer seems valid.)

Everything in this web site is intended to be relevant to gaining public recognition of these numerous and serious failures of science and mathematics on their own terms, achieving appreciation of what the consequences have been/are/will be, and providing inspiration about what might be done about it all.