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Like most everyone else in these FDR forums, I'm wholly sick and tired of the Left with their hypocrisies and stupidities and their impact on Stupid Culture. But I'm also sick and tired of what passes for science these days, with the unsubstantiated conjecture that is allowed to enter into scientific discourse. I therefore arrive at my position and the purpose of this post... Stupid Culture can only ever create Stupid Science. Let us take a closer look... based on an an excerpt from a book that I am working on. Concerns about the peer-review process are not new. The crux of these concerns are addressed by the likes of Binswanger (2013) and Horton (2015) (references below). But as we now observe what seems to be the unravelling of the west as we know it, perhaps we should be taking these concerns to a new level. The culture of liberalism, feminism, SJWs, Antifa and the like, with their increasing hostility to freedom of speech, democratic principles and basic commonsense, seems to be pointing to a breakdown that I now fear to be more extensive than previously supposed. Could it be that our culture of Fake News is not confined to media and politics, but is actually an expression of a far wider problem... a mestatized cancer that has affected the whole culture? The symptoms are there, and a flailing peer-review in Academia is one of them. This is a rabbit hole that we need to go down, because science is itself a product of culture. Even the most objective of the sciences relies on cultural narratives to be understood. And if culture is broken, then we have to ask... is science also broken? Now as someone whose university education is solidly grounded in engineering and business, I have no problem with the most mathematical and Newtonian of the STEM disciplines. There is nothing here to intimidate anyone with a solid grounding in the hard sciences or math. TEM (technology, engineering and math) is on rock-solid ground for the most part, and Newton is perhaps the epitomy of good, rigorous science. But the S (science) of STEM is showing some signs of disintegration. There are some branches of S that are just not scienfific at all. Let us take a closer look. BIOLOGY Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection is respectable enough, but it is not the whole picture. Darwin himself accounted for the production of variety by way of Lamarckism, not genes. Things take a turn to La-La land in NEO-Darwinism, and the implementation of the infotech narrative in a genocentric paradigm. This infotech-based narrative thrives, despite the following inconsistencies: Absence of a computer technology to process the data. Where is the computer? If someone wants to inculcate others to the notion of genes/DNA as data, then the onus is on them to locate and specify the technology that processes said data. And thus far, no indications of any such technology in biological systems is forthcoming; DNA does not behave in any manner that is consistent with the infotech narrative, and the evidence has started to come in. Notice in the following link (Crew, 2017), the absence of anything resembling a computer or infotech... DNA replication appears to be taking place in a manner never before anticipated: http://www.sciencealert.com/dna-replication-has-been-filmed-for-the-first-time-and-it-s-stranger-than-we-thought Consider that the Human Genome Project has estimated that there are 20,000 to 25,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. For comparison, the number of genes in some less "complex" organisms play out as follows (Kimball, 2016): Naegleria gruberi (unicellular amoeba) - 15,727; Fruit fly - 17,000; Humans - 21,000; Caenorhabditis elegans (nematode roundworm) - 21,733; Mouse - 23,000; Pufferfish - 27,918; Picea abies (Norway spruce conifer) - 28,354. Is it conceivable that we humans have been bested by worms, mice, pufferfish and conifers? If we base our reasoning on genetic complexity, then this clearly is not the case; Consider how much information a DNA molecule can contain. The haploid human genome is estimated to be of the order of 3.2 billion bases long. For comparison, the now unremarkable Western Digital external hard drive sitting on my desk comprises 2 terrabytes, or 2,000 billion bytes. And if we interpret our 3.2 billion bases in the context of bytes, then the justification to interpret DNA in the context of the infotech narrative becomes even more preposterous. The four nucleobases that comprise the base-pair building blocks of the DNA molecule are cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine (DNA), abbreviated as C, G, A and T, respectively. There are four base-pair combinations that manifest as the rungs along the length of the DNA spiral, namely, C-G, G-C, A-T, T-A. If we interpret the four base-pairs that are possible as comprising one "byte" of data, then 3.2 billion bases would translate to a measley 800 Mb of data. Will the 800 Mb of data that a DNA molecule might contain, at maximum, be enough to specify a human? Really? A human with cells and neurons and eyes and bones and teeth and skin? Our scientists need to think this through. They need to think more like engineers, and not SJWs being supported by government grants; Genes and DNA are of course, very important... but not in the way that mainstream academia thinks. More importantly, there is no one-to-one correlation of genes with "intelligence." How can there be? If there were, we'd have to wonder what puffer fish or Norway spruce conifers were up to with their superior genetic configurations. What nefarious plans might a genetically well-endowed but inedible puffer fish be up to when we remove it from our hook to toss it back into the ocean? It would seem that, contrary to the Establishment's infotech narrative, the inferred relationship between genes and "intelligence" is non-existent. SPECIAL AND GENERAL RELATIVITY THEORY (SGR) The stupid is not confined to Neo-Darwinian biology. The same kind of wishful thinking extends into other wings of Establishment Academia that have interests and careers to preserve... such as relativity physics. Most of us, at one time or another, have probably come across some reference to the inconsistencies between relativity theory (SGR) and quantum mechanics (QM). The second of SGR's two postulates is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light (c). But this conflicts with QM, where information has been experimentally shown to be, for all practical intents and purposes, instantaneous. If we weren't educated in either of these fields, we might be inclined to defer judgement to the experts. It is now time to confront them on these inconsistencies. Either QM or SGR or both are wrong. Only one of them, at most, can be right. I am putting my money on QM, and I do so for the following reasons: Experimental evidence consistent with QM is compelling and repeatable (some silly or annoying interpretations of said results notwithstanding). Bell's inequality and entanglement have been proven experimentally time and time again, with good, smoking-gun evidence that is difficult to refute; SGR has no smoking-gun evidence... the evidence that they produce is open to concerns about confirmation bias, and brings us back to Binswanger and Horton, and the question of peer-review footsies, and interpretations by "experts" with an agenda. Most importantly, there is no GPS smoking-gun evidence, GPS technology does NOT factor in relativity corrections, but relies on basic feedback control algorithms and Laplace transforms - Barry Springer (2013). This GPS urban legend is trotted out at every opportunity like a prize bull at the Spring Fair, but it is complete nonsense, debunked as comprehensively as the wage-gap myth has been. But it's the only "smoking gun" evidence that they ever had... and it had me until I started digging around; So we've dispensed with the GPS smoking gun. What other evidence do they cite? Galactic red-shift as evidence for the Big Bang? The tired-light hypothesis provides an alternative explanation. And the more they say things, like, "but every scientist knows that tired light is nonsense and not taken seriously any more", the more I am reminded of Fake News Media and the Left. Nope, the tired light hypothesis is as real as red sunsets (photons losing energy tend to the red, in accordance with E=hf. And light scattering by the particles or molecules of interstellar space can also contribute to redshift, as what happens at sunset, when photons have more atmosphere to transit). And no, the Tolman brightness test and other tests are not inconsistent with tired light, no matter how often our lab-technicians masquerading as scientists stamp their feet. We need to ask what part Fake Science might be playing in confabulating a miasma of Big Bang Baloney; Mercury's perihelion shift. Again, no smoking-gun evidence here. Experimental evidence is not conclusive, because said relativity correction contributes of the order, only, of about 7.5% of the total. Given our concerns about Fake News Culture and the peer-review process, we need to be concerned whether this small fraction was arrived at impartially, or in the spirit of confirmation bias. Did they factor everything else in? What about the asteroid belt? Or Dark Matter for that matter? SGR is based on an assumption about the speed of light, and that's all it is... an assumption. They've constructed self-consistent mathematical proofs around that assumption in order to arrive at what I personally conclude is a major category error... the conflation of time as a dimension of space-time; Several sources are available online that debunk relativity theory. It is pointless enumerating them here, as the arguments are detailed and complex, and take us beyond topic. But for those who are interested, googling [relativity theory debunked] provides a good starting point; And finally, an important question that does not seem to entered into mainstream physics discourse. Is it possible that SGR's second postulate, the constancy of c, actually relates to a quantum-mechanical phenomenon rather than a relativistic one? If so, then the central axiom of special relativity, with its relevance to general relativity, no longer holds. This is a question that I am researching at the moment, and it relates to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the notion of "quantum tunnelling"... that a particle's motion through space is not the simple, linear vector as commonly understood in Newtonian physics. SGR's inconsistencies with QM are non-trivial. That nonlocal effects are instantaneous regardless of distance is a huge problem for SGR. That in itself might be enough to kill this SGR monstrosity once and for all, yet the SGR dogma continues to thrive. Like whack-a-mole, it repeatedly keeps wedging its weakly supported assertions into physics discourse, as if "nothing, not even information, can go faster than light" were an established axiom. No sooner do quantum physicists come up with an intriguing conjecture that deserves to be explored, than up it pops again... the constancy of c postulate, as if SGR were an established scientific fact. This weakly supported conjecture is a ball-and-chain that needs to be settled once and for all. THE BIG PICTURE After reading thus far, it still might not be clear to some readers what the core of my objection is. Does my objection relate to Darwinism? Relativity theory? Science? The scientific method? It relates to none of these. The core of my objection relates to culture, and the bad science that must necessarily accompany broken culture. We should judge a culture in the same way we judge people... by its fruits and by the company it keeps. Any culture that can entertain nonsense as toxic and absurd as feminism, with the accompanying victim narratives of post-2016 liberalism, with all its violence, delusion and hypocrisy, will yield mostly rotten fruit. Thus our problem is not that of a few bad apples, but rather, a systemic problem best understood in the context of a broken culture yielding broken science. The core of my objection is that contemporary, mainstream science has ceased to be scientific, and has ceased to conform to the rigorous principles of the scientific method. CONCLUSION I rest my case at this point, and conclude that Fake Science Academia is a logical extension of Fake News Politics and Fake Victim Culture. This is not a problem of Left versus Right but a cultural and epistemological problem that has serious implications for how our world will look in 50 years time. Science has become Scientism, a Church where lab-technicians masquerading as scientists become the caretakers of sacred dogma handed down from on high, and to whom we are all required to genuflect. The time to call them out on their scam is now long overdue. Fake Science Academia is inextricably an expression of Fake News Culture. It's the same kind of groupthink. It's the same kind of bullshit, with the same kind of smug, self-indulgent, intellectual weaklings controlling the discourse. BIBLIOGRAPHY Binswanger, M. (2013, December 17). Excellence by nonsense: The competition for publications in modern science. Springer Link: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/ Crew, B. (2017, June 19). DNA Replication Has Been Filmed For The First Time, And It's Not What We Expected. Science Alert. Retrieved June 17, 2017 from http://www.sciencealert.com/dna-replication-has-been-filmed-for-the-first-time-and-it-s-stranger-than-we-thought Horton, R. (2015, April 11). Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma? The Lancet, 385 (9976), 1380: http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf Kimball, J. W. (2016, April 3). Genome Sizes. Kimball's Biology Pages: http://www.biology-pages.info/G/GenomeSizes.html Springer, Barry (2013). Does GPS Navitation Rely Upon Einstein's Relativity? Proceedings of the NPA: http://worldnpa.org/does-the-gps-system-rely-upon-einsteins-relativity/

My assertion is that comedy and quantum mechanics have a common basis. I was listening to Stefan's thoughts on comedy or humour (the Canadian spelling), as well as those on sophistry and first principles (great descriptions). There is always a hidden element to our actions and feelings, and Stefan works to discover it - always relying on first principles. My question to anyone who might be even slightly interested is whether or not my assertion at the top works through first principles, and is not just sophistry? My steps in this argument are: 1. I need to show that there is a definable relationship between mathematical symbols and those of language. My answer is that the relationship is the difference between what is "fungible" and "non-fungible". Example: money is fungible since it is used for anything. Equally, numbers and mathematical symbols, in general, are "fungible" or "universal" for what they refer to. On the contrary, linguistic symbols are "not fungible". For example the noun "dog" refers only to dog, and is not a universal symbol for anything else (other animals, etc). Thus, mathematical "strings of information" are based on a system of fungible symbols and linguistic "strings" are based on non-fungible symbols. This is why we can tell stories with linguistic symbols but not so with mathematical symbols. 2. Quantum structure can be extremely complex depending on the number of elements in the given structure. However, the simplest form of such structure is one in which there are only two elements. Example, each photon (of light) has two forms - "particle" and "wave", and they are paradoxical in their forms. No one has ever been able to define the relationship between them, even though they refer to the same phenomenon. This is the issue of wave/particle duality. We should be able to say that we are looking at the same thing but from a different angle or perspective when one changes to the other. However, no physicist has every been able to do this. There is no way to define the smooth mathematical transformation between these two perspectives. The best even Einstein could do was use the phrase "spooky action at a distance" - not exactly a mathematical description. 3. Humour (comedy), also has as its basis two parts that are paradoxically composed but refer to the same thing. For example - Question: what did the Zen Master say to the hot dog vendor? Answer: "make me one with everything". There are two meanings that have no relationship to each other yet refer to the same thing - the single request by the Zen Master. We laugh as a pleasant (but nervous) form of response to the relationship we cannot interpret rationally. Both of the above examples (one of quantum structure and the other of humour) have two parts that are incongruous or paradoxical (the juxtaposition of the incongruous). The quantum structure is based on a system of fungible symbols and the humour is based on a system that is not fungible. My conclusion is that these two examples share a common basis of internal structure, and the difference between them, in their common structure, is the flipping of relationship for the property of "fungiblity" (from fungible to non-fungible). Looking at this in a very large philosophical perspective (it might be sophistry, but I think not), this small example hints that our entire universe, physical and in experience is one entity which we view from individual paradoxical perspectives. This is what creates the great diversity of life, but it is all linked as one, no matter how unrelated the parts appear on the surface to our observation.