‘Scientists’ hopes that last summer’s triumphant trapping of the particle that shaped the post-Big Bang universe would quickly open the way into exotic new realms of physics like string theory and new dimensions have faded this past week. Five days of presentations on the particle, the Higgs boson, at a scientific conference high in the Italian Alps, point to it being the last missing piece in a 30-year-old cosmic blueprint and nothing more, physicists following the event say. “The chances are getting slimmer and slimmer that we are going to see something else exciting anytime soon,” said physicist Pauline Gagnon from CERN near Geneva in whose Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the long-sought particle was found.’
‘The last missing piece in a 30-year-old cosmic blueprint and nothing more’. For heaven’s sake, what does it take to get people excited these days? I mean, what sort of more were they expecting – a rolled up parchment that would say “Ye Treasure Mappe, X marketh the spot”? A message from some deranged feminist Goddess ordaining that Germaine Greer’s gardening columns contained a code by which all life DNA could be understood?
It is one of the ironies of the Universe that the small detail of it is endlessly fascinating, but the scientists tell us that the Big Stuff is predictable. For nigh on fifty years now I have been following space exploration, and what I have found almost without exception is that everything planetary geeks expected to find from Mercury to Pluto has been blown away the second a satellite camera starts clicking, or those landing pads settle on an alien surface. You thought Venus was a life-supporting haven beneath thick protective clouds? Wrong! It’s largely gaseous, and the temperature would vapourise you within seconds. Mars is the Red Planet? Wrong! It looks just like the Moon, only bigger. You thought Saturn was the only planet with rings? Wrong! Neptune has them too. You thought Uranus was pronounced Your Anus? Wrong! It’s actually called Oo-rar-nus.
There’s an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this: scientists are almost always wrong about almost everything. This is an insight so absolutely central to any understanding of the Universe, it should guide every analysis of every occasion when scientists declare that they have discovered something. Even more, it should act as a major-league doubt whenever they say they have established something. Scientists do in fact often discover, but their ability to establish is minimal. This is why the Establishment is so called: it is the intention of all those within it to suggest they know WTF they’re at, when of course in reality they don’t.
Google the phrase ‘Facts about the Universe’, and 58.8 million site references will come up. But the truth is that almost no facts about the Universe can be guaranteed beyond (probably) E=Mc2. That’s the formula devised by Einstein – and still being confirmed sixty years after his death – which basically states that physical escape from this Universe of ours is impossible. But Google the question ‘Is our Universe the only one?’ and 98 million sites are listed. This proves that, if a man spent his entire life looking up Google references to multiple Universes, he would die long before he got anywhere near the answer. Ergo sum, what scientists can establish is minimal. At present day prices, it may even equal nothing.
Twenty years ago, a prostate infection that had been driving me mad for eighteen months disappeared after I took a three month course of the homoaeopathic medication medirhynum. I was told by medics afterwards that the dose I took was so minute, there is no possibility it could’ve made any difference. Now we think we know that in the sub-atomic zone, dilution of dose equals concentration of effect. Also we think we know that placebo syndrome is a very real brain effect based on suggestion. Clearly, even what we think we might know is a billion times or more than we’ve yet discovered. The establishment of anything in that context is so tiny as to be, by definition, homoaeopathic.
None of this is my usual grist at The Slog, although I have to be honest and say I find it absolutely gripping….and always have. But it does inform my take on contemporary econo-fiscal theory. I was, for example, ploughing through a pretty turgid set of technical charts this afternoon about how the history of investment shows that interest rates, returns, market highs, gold values, currencies and Treasury debt behave in a scientific manner. This too was interesting, but it couldn’t explain what lies ahead, because what lies ahead has never been encountered before.
Einstein’s final thoughts about Time suggested (and this makes eminent sense to me) that one could travel forward in Time, but not back. Not only could one not change history by altering what had already occurred, equally one couldn’t go forward, see what had happened, and then come back again to try and change it. The Law of Causality applies: it might be random, but once it’s happened, that’s it. Jim O’Neill will not come back from 2023 and tell us all what to do, because that just can’t be done. And there is a lesson in there for all of us.
It is this: don’t rely on any concept of scientific certainty, and twits desperate to tell you that the Higgs bosun particle is a bit of a let-down. That’s the thinking of those who would have us believe the Universe is predictable – and thus somehow boring: ‘The chances are getting slimmer and slimmer that we are going to see something else exciting anytime soon‘. Remember that these are the same eggheads telling us that the Universe is a random accident without order or design…ie, totally unpredictable. My response is a straightforward one: if ‘random’ rules in the Universe, how can the result be boring, unexciting, and totally explanatory?
Earlier at The Slog: Why we should lift the Ashcroft hunting ban
The Slog 