With Numerous Links to the Forbidden Subjects of Ufology, Parapsychology and Many Others of a Similar Nature as well as Some Numinous Links.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Some of the links below may seem irrelevant, misleading or simply pointless. This is entirely intentional: The links are intended to mirror life -- and physics. As in the history of science, there are false starts, dead ends, spurious connections and -- perhaps -- even frauds and hoaxes. Walk carefully, with a sceptical but open mind. (It might be best to skip the links on first reading, so as not to interrupt the smooth flow of the narrative.) It is up to YOU to assemble all the bits and pieces into a coherent "Weltanschauung" -- to weave(?!) your own reality tunnel ("An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism."). And remember: You can always try the search engines to find the true truth -- nicht wahr?

As the nineteenth century drew to an end, the theories of physics were almost perfected. Man had fathomed the farthest reaches of both the macrocosm and the microcosm. The stars, the planets and the other heavenly bodies ran their deterministic courses in perfect accordance with Newton's laws of motion. Given the state of the universe at one point in time, its state could be exactly computed at any other time, past or future. Nature's smallest building blocks -- the atoms -- were equally well behaved. Immutable, unchanging, as indicated by their name, they constituted the eternal physical basis of the universe.

Things had not always been this way. In ancient times, lead and iron had fallen more rapidly than wood and wool, arrows had been unable to move through the air and tortoises had easily outrun hares. In those days, Nature had obeyed the will and thinking of Aristotle.

Much later, in the thirteenth century, new ideas had emerged. Scottish philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham) invented the very useful razor which bears his name. (A modest proposal: search the Web for Occam's razor -- you'll be surprised!) Roger Bacon, an English Grey Friar and scientist (and, possibly, necromancer), held that

mathematics should be the foundation of all higher education, since mathematics alone has the ability to purify the intellect and make the student susceptible to other kinds of knowledge,

and that

true scientific knowledge can only be obtained through experiments.

(Besides this, Bacon invented things like cars, steamers, aircraft and gunpowder. He also questioned the "naturalness" of circular motion and claimed that Ptolemy's system of epicycles was unscientific and probably in error. Small wonder that Bacon had to spend more than a third of his life in prison, condemned for heresy.)

Bacon's ideas about the proper method for investigating Nature caught on, and science as we know it was born during the 15^th and 16^th centuries by men such as Lionardo da Vinci, Mikola Koppernigk (why don't you visit this site, too?), Giordano Bruno (tortured, tried and fried by the Holy Inquisition -- see this site for much more information), Tyko Brahe, Johannes Kepler (here is a German biography) and Galileo Galilei. The latter was threatened with imprisonment or death at the stake for claiming that the sun was at perfect rest at the center of the universe and that the Earth moves around the Sun. Clearly, this could not be so. Already in the 2^nd century A.D., Alexandrian astronomer and geographer Ptolemy had informed the world of the true nature of things:

"It is once for all clear....that the earth is in the middle of the world and all weights move towards it."

Today, one can only marvel at the argument put forth by Scipio Chiaramonti, Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the university of Pisa (1633):

"Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs and muscles, hence it does not move."

Another of Galileos adversaries was Francisco Sizzi, Professor of astronomy, who had this to say about Galileo's discovery of the Jovian satellites:

"Jupiter's moons are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist."

The church obviously had very convincing arguments:

"I, Galileo," he told the Inquisitors in the year of Our Lord 1634, "being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth."

Things got better, though. During the 17^th century academies were founded -- e.g. The Invisible College in England, Académie des Sciences in France, Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Germany and Accademia dei Lincei in Italy. Newton (search the Web for more!) invented the calculus, studied the properties of light, found the laws of motion and published his ars magna: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. (In his later years, Newton also made substantial contributions to alchemy.) His views on gravity seem to have been somewhat schizophrenic:

"That one body may act on another through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to be so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

The universe grew; improved telescopes made it possible to map the stars and discover new planets -- Uranus (pictures here!) and Neptune. (Here is general information about the solar system.) Sometimes, unconventional ideas were put forth:

"We need not hesitate to admit that the Sun is richly stored with inhabitants." [Sir William Herschel (Court Astronomer of England and discoverer of Uranus), 1781.]

At length, even meteorites -- for a long time forbidden and denied by the French Academy -- were allowed to exist.

The structure of matter and the nature of energy were investigated, and by the end of the 19^th century it was well known that matter and energy were indestructible. In the words of John Dalton, British chemist and physicist and the father of modern atomic theory (1803):

"Thou knowest no man can split the atom."

Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz (more Hertz here) and James Clerk Maxwell (here is the other side of Maxwell) gave birth to the theory of electromagnetism. It was common knowledge that the electromagnetic waves were carried by the invisible but all-pervading ether.

In short, everything seemed to be under control. The scientists of the late nineteenth century lamented the fate of their successors for whom only small mop-up operations remained. Said Albert A. Michelson, of Michelson-Morley fame, in a speech at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, U. of Chicago, 1894:

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

In 1899, Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of U.S. Office of Patents even urged President McKinley to abolish his office:

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

(It is only fair to mention that there were those who remained unimpressed.. One incisive critic of science was Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, who in 1861 demanded that the funding of the Smithsonian Institution be cut off:

"I am tired of all this thing called science.... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.")

There is, however, no Eden without a Serpent. Every structure carries within it the seed of its own eventual destruction. Or, as Swedish eighteenth century poet Carl Michael Bellman puts it in his epistle number 43 (Till Ulla Winblad, skriven vid ett ömt tillfälle):

"....Tusen dödar kring dig stimma; ända i din kärlekstimma måste du en död förnimma; masken, dold i blomman, bådar blommans död"

In the case of late nineteenth century physics, the serpent took the form of some anomalies:

• Black body radiation stubbornly refused to behave the way it was supposed to
  
• Electrons (by the way: Did you know that the electron celebrates its one hundredth birthday this year? Here you can read about the first electrons and about Thomson's "plum-pudding" atom with electrons stuck in it like raisins in a cake. Expand your mind!) continued to orbit their nuclei, instead of spiralling inwards, losing energy, until they were finally absorbed
  
• After Michelson-Morley's experiment, the ether was in deep trouble
  
• The brief lifespan of a sun obtaining its energy from conventional burning or from contraction was incompatible with the geological records (here is a biography of Charles Lyell.)

All the same, hopes were high among the physicists of the day. The general feeling was that these glitches could be fixed rather easily.

Then, all Hell (did Jesus go to Hell? This site will perhaps answer your question. Would you like some cookies from hell? Be my guest! Like another entrance to Hell? Please feel welcome.) broke loose. Becquerel found the strange footprints of a piece of uranium (here is the home of the Uranium Institute -- the international association for nuclear energy) on a photographic film. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered the rays which bear his name (i.e., the X-rays), and was -- not unexpectedly -- accused of fraud:

"X-rays are a hoax." [Lord Kelvin (British physicist and former President of the British Royal Society), ca. 1900]

Actually, Kelvin's suspicions were not unfounded: In 1903, distinguished French physicist René Blondlot announced the discovery of N-rays (named after the University of Nancy, where he worked). N-rays became the rage of the day, and a lot of research projects were initiated, resulting in some 300 papers by 100 scientists between 1903 and 1906. Blondlot himself was awarded the prestigious Leconte Prize in 1904. Unfortunately, N-rays simply don't exist.

Einstein (expand your wiews here, too... or maybe here...) explained Brownian motion (why don't you visit this site for an entirely different approach to Brownian motion) and the photoelectric effect and proceeded to erect the grand theories of relativity (I suggest you look this one up yourself. There are at least 20.000 references on the web...). His accomplishments were not appreciated in all circles, as the following quotations show:

"I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas." [Ernst Mach, Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna, and a man of Principles, 1913]

"The so-called theories of Einstein are merely the ravings of a mind polluted with liberal, democratic nonsense which is utterly unacceptable to German men of science." [Dr. Walter Gross, Third Reich's official exponent of 'Nordic Science', March 1940]

"The theory of a relativistic universe is the hostile work of the agents of fascism. It is the revolting propaganda of a moribund, counter-revolutionary ideology." [Astronomical Journal of the Soviet Union, March 1940]

Ernest Rutherford split the atom. Bohr, Heisenberg , Planck, Schrödinger and deBroglie founded quantum mechanics. The electron was subtly but miraculously transsubstantiated from its previous somewhat soft and doughy "plum-in-the-pudding"-appearance into a hard ball, madly whirling around the nucleus. It did retain its name in the process, though, and it was still charged with the task of being the negative guy. A few years later, a top hat trick changed this ball into a standing wave. Then a final(?) transmogrification took place, this time turning the electron into a hazy probability cloud. Quite a life for a centenarian! Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Enrico Fermi harnessed fission, disregarding the prophecy of Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics:

"There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom ... Nature has introduced a few foolproof devices into the great majority of elements that constitute the bulk of the world, and they have no energy to give up in the process of disintegration." [Millikan, 1923]

John Archibald Wheeler, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller introduced a novel application of nuclear physics: Mankind suddenly faced the prospect of complete and instantaneous extermination in a thermonuclear holocaust. Today, the art of making atomic bombs is common knowledge. Later in the century the weak and electromagnetic forces were joined in harmony. Quarks, elusive, invisible, appeared on the stage. There was talk about GUT:s -- Grand Unified Theories (try this one yourself: There are over 550.000 references on the web!! Quite a popular subject!). Improved telescopes like Arecibo (three links will suffice: 1, 2, and 3) and the Hubble Space Telescope allowed Man to look back in time almost to the Big Bang -- the Moment of Creation. (Well, there is a lot to be said about this, so let's have one more link.)

There was also one genuinely new development: historians of science began to construct theories about the evolution of physical theories. Theories of science were brought forth by men such as Karl Popper (why not try this one, too?) and Thomas Kuhn. The Platonic world of the ideal receded, and was replaced by the concept of (more or less successful) modelling. The evolution of science was no longer seen as a steady progression, albeit with small temporary setbacks, towards a final Revealed Truth. Instead, it came to look more like a Darwinian scenario, with different theories -- involving large vested interests -- competing for supremacy, and with quiet periods of "normal science" interrupted by revolutions -- a.k.a. "paradigm shifts". As the saying goes:

"Science advances funeral by funeral."

So, by and large, as the twentieth century draws to an end, the theories of physics are almost perfected. Man has, once again, fathomed the farthest reaches of both the macrocosm and the microcosm. The stars, the planets and the other heavenly bodies run their deterministic courses in perfect accordance with Einstein's laws of motion, even though space and time have had to be replaced by space-time:

"Von Stund an sollen Raum für sich und Zeit für sich völlig zu Schatten herabsinken und nur noch eine Art Union der beiden soll Selbständigkeit bewahren." [H. Minkowski, Raum und Zeit (in Physikalische Zeitschrift 10 (1909) 104)]

The wave function describing the behaviour of Nature's smallest building blocks -- the quarks, the atoms (no longer indivisible) and the molecules -- behaves in a perfectly deterministic fashion, at least until the moment of its collapse and subsequent resurrection.

History, however, has a tendency to repeat itself:

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on one's outlook), all this apparent harmony requires the suppression of what the late Charles Fort (three references should be enough: 1, 2 and 3. If you need more, you know where to find it...) used to call "damned facts", i.e., facts damned to oblivion by science; facts which do not conform with the ruling theories and which must therefore be suppressed or denied. A case in point is described by astronomer and computer specialist Jacques Vallée in an interwiev:

"I started out wanting to do astronomy and I ruined essentially a perfectly good career in science by becoming interested in computers. This was in France in the early days of computing and the earliest days of satellites and space exploration. So I took some of the earliest computer courses at French universities. My first job was at Paris observatory, tracking satellites. And we started tracking objects that were not satellites, were fairly elusive, and so we decided that we would pay attention to those objects even though they were not on the schedule of normal satellites. And one night we got eleven data points on one of these objects--it was very bright. It was also retrograde. This was at a time when there was no rocket powerful enough to launch a retrograde satellite, a satellite that goes around opposite to the rotation of the earth, where you obviously need to overcome the earth's gravity going the other direction. You have to reach escape velocity in the direction opposite the rotation of the earth, which takes a lot more energy than the direct direction. And the man in charge of the project confiscated the tape and erased it the next morning. " [My emphasis]

Another example is provided by the French Academy's treatment of the meteorite issue in the eighteenth century. Today, ufology and parapsychology (see links below) are under a ban. If anything can behave in the way UFO:s are reported to behave, then present day science has a long way to go. If the phenomena of parapsychology -- telepathy, clairvoyance, astral projection, psychokinesis, maybe even teleportation -- actually exist, then the theories of physics must probably be reformulated beyond recognition. Other, possibly even more far-out, condemned subjects such as healing, dowsing, crystal therapy, homeopathy and iridiology, also seem to blatantly contradict existing theories. And how should we treat near death experiences, visitations by angels and apparitions of the Holy Virgin?

By the way: what about cold fusion these days? And whatever happened to Nikola Tesla? Or John Keely?

It is not really necessary to take a stand. It is, however, necessary not to reject these things out of hand. Hundreds of thousands of observations may be inaccurate or misinterpreted or even faked, but they do exist. No authority -- be it one of the churches of mainstream run-of-the-mill religion or the Church of Fundamentalist Materialism -- can tell us what is false or true. Almost eight hundred years ago, Bacon and Occam laid the cornerstones of modern science:

True scientific knowledge can only be obtained through observation and experiment When choosing between two possible explanations, choose the simplest

These rules have served science faithfully during the centuries. May they continue to do so.

But remember this: An open mind and a readiness to investigate unconventional ideas is not equivalent to uncritical acceptance of nonsense and flim-flam. You are well advised to visit Alan Sokal's Home Page or this page for a demonstration of the dangers of gullibility.

Reactions to the views expressed above are most welcome.

With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort and worry; the first instinct is to abolish these painful sensations. First principle: any explanation is better than none ... The search for causes is thus conditioned by and excited by the feeling of fear. The question "Why?" is not pursued for its own sake but to find a certain kind of answer -- an answer that is pacifying, tranquilizing and soothing. F. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

Why not try some Fun Physics before you leave? Or, maybe, some Weird Research and Anomalous Physics? Perhaps a tour of The Institute for New Energy? How about Black Light Power?


You may now proceed to the Anomalies Link Page

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Last updated 2001-02-14 Claes Trygger: trygger@math.kth.se