End of Science

[Jones Beene]

.... or end of respectability for "Scientific American"?   Recently some genius commented that at his death Bethe had almost witnessed the "end of science"... John Horgan couldn't agree more. Horgan is a senior writer for the stogy, intransigent and way-past-its-prime magazine, "Scientific American" and occasionally presents himself to be one of the most foolish educated-men on the planet. Not just for his essay "The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age." but for repeatedly compounding his earlier errors with irresponsible backup statements. It is almost as if the senior staff at S-A has pledged allegiance to this "end-of-science" credo as their mantra; and are prepared to go down with the ship, once they are proven wrong.   Horgan ends his silly essay with "Modern science, as far as it has come, has left many deep questions unanswered. But the questions tend to be ones that will probably never be definitively answered, given the limits of human science." Yet as he speaks, these very questions are being answered in bits and pieces, and we actually seem to fast approaching a "tipping point" of sorts - one that will turn mainstream cosmology on its head and will indeed answer everything definitively.   The truth of the matter is, we are just on the dawn of a gigantic rebirth of science, especially physics and cosmology, as many old and incorrect and notions and "Laws" are being swept away to be replaced by a new physics for the new millennium. ZPE and LENR, dark matter and dark energy, are just the tips of the iceberg. To wit:   *Negative refraction* is brand new (age ~4) to physics and astronomy, but has been causing a stir in fields of applied-materials science. When light crosses a boundary, it is bent in a characteristic way. Keepers of the faith, like Horgan, would love to see it stay that way, so that they can have the smug satisfaction of saying "told ya so". But in 2001, researchers showed that certain artificial materials bend light in the opposite direction. Over a year later S-A, having tried to ignore this exciting R&D for as long as it could, finally did a modest and slightly negative assessment - hoping, one supposes, that this nonsense would just go away, since it doesn't fit into their end-of-science mega-theme. It hasn't gone away.   The initial revelation prompted a flurry of confirmation research, most of which has focused on understanding and developing earth-bound negative refracting materials. But then, the obvious and larger repercussions of negative refraction have emerged, some of them hinted at on vortex. "Black holes bend light the 'wrong' way" is a new story by Jim Giles along these lines. "Refraction effect may be distorting astronomers' results. The galaxy Centaurus A has a supermassive black hole at its heart − but could its gravity be fooling astronomers?"   Duh... where have you been, Jim...."Starlight may be bent in odd directions when it passes close to a rotating black hole, the researchers now say, unexpectedly shifting its source's apparent position in the sky. The cause is a recently discovered phenomenon called negative refraction, which physicists are still struggling to understand." ... well, Jim, not that recently, but hey, better late than never...   The foot-dragging here is understandable, when the mainstream press chooses to ignore the initial accounts (and it may take S-A a few decades to catch-on to the full extent of this), that is, if the publisher does not hurry-up and fire the entire senior staff, beginning with Horgan... Some critics of the magazine might even suggest a national "drop-your-subscription" campaign or boycott and this step should not be ruled out, as this is still an influential journal, presently being hijacked by Luddites.   How long will it take them to realize that Halton Arp gave the partial answer to this and much more, many years ago. They poo-pooed him then, but will they apologize when they are forced to "eat crow"?... I doubt it. Gravitational red-shift is a "sizeable part" of the correct answer, but one cannot eliminate distance, so it is not all the answer - and Arp himself was a bit over-reaching. But redshift itself is the higher order phenomenon that demonstrates that when over half of the universe is "dark matter" then the gravitation from this type of matter is going to bend light or retard/advance light-waves differently than is the standard assumption of the way light is affected by regular matter.   Oh well, we can sit back and wait to see how long it will take them to realize this little gem. Gravitational red-shift has been and still is significantly under-appreciated in both observational analysis and in mathematical calculations of the age, mass and rate of expansion of the universe, which is a steady-state universe in regular pulsation. There never was a "single" big bang, plain and simple, but there was indeed a "little bang" for our super-cluster, and this has thrown short-sighted observers into a tizzy of misunderstanding about the roles of "dimensionality" and "time," and the "mirror effect" of these.   Light leaving a region where the "normal" gravitational force is large will be shifted towards the red naturally, that is - its wavelength increases; or similarly, when falling into a region where the "normal" gravitational pull is large, will be shifted towards the blue. BUT in half of more of the cases where dark matter (or anti-matter) is present, these predictions might vary significantly from the norm, and might even be REVERSED. Some red-shifted light might well be indicative of close-by dark matter (dark now, but not when the light was emitted). There are so many permutations - of having three or four mass variables (light, dark, anti-, and normal) not to mention Dirac's sea, which is the basis for all of them, that no one can be sure, exactly. However, the truth is starting to emerge coherently and we are now fast approaching the new "Beginning of Science".   Remember, dear vortex reader, confused as we all may be by this fast approaching paradigm shift, you heard it here first, off the record, on the QT, and very Hush-Hush....   signed,   Harry Tuttle         - ductwork engineer and cosmo-arcanologist extraordinaire