Professor Julius Sumner Miller is no longer with us, he passed away back in 1987, you have probably never heard of him but he was a man of physics.
The good professor was a very dynamic individual, he possessed a very good sense of humour, I find that most of the really good people in life are those who can discern irony, and the absurdities of human society, don’t you think?
Einstein was a big hero to Julius, and I think he actually modelled his own personality somewhat on that famous also man of physics, you could do worse!
One of the big topics Julius addressed was that of the state of modern education: ‘We need more rigor!’ Was his constant refrain, and I agree with him, today children and young adults are being short changed by public education.
If you were a watcher of television in the 1970’s and 1980’s you would have come across professor Julius Sumner Miller presenting his educational program: Why Is It So? Here is an episode for you to discern the qualities and format of his show:
So, why am I presenting this relic from the past, what is it about professor Julius Sumner Miller that has value for us in this bonkers year of 2020?
Science, this is being used today to justify many things, we do not have to travel far online, in blogs and YouTube videos, on Twitter and other places before we are told ‘Science says…’ and then we are given statistical charts, and someone expands on a narrative which is apparently ‘peer reviewed’ and the ‘consensus view’ on something; is this science, or something more akin to politics?
The science I was educated with, and read about spoke of testing hypothesis, reviewing established ways of thinking, it asked questions more than it provided absolute proclamations.
Dogma refers to lists of rules, prescriptive codes of thought; now science does speak about ‘natural laws’, Thermodynamics, Newton’s laws of motion, chemical tables of the periodic elements, and so forth, and all of the ‘natural laws’ are seen to be solid and unchanging – Enter…Quantum Mechanics!
The emergence of the ‘Quantum world’ was what pundits of philosophy label: A Paradigm shift. Many people speak about ‘paradigms’ and cocktail parties abound with clever types airing their esoteric insights from rogue physicists and their various obscure theories.
But the quantum thing is a game changer, no mistake; this has changed how we look at the natural world, the universe completely, the mechanistic models we derived from Newton, and his venerable contributions to our view of the universe had to give way to a much less certain, mysterious insight; the very solid machine-like qualities of nature which seem to conform with these laws without variation is only a facet of the whole picture.
We know we can still depend on Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian mechanics, we can plot our graph for 3 dimensional space (always being aware of the 4th dimension: Time), and make calculations which truly represent genuine outcomes, it all ‘works’ very well so what is the problem here?
It comes down to how matter and energy work together at the ‘sub-atomic’ level, the precision and certainty of the ‘macro’ expressions of matter/energy/time/space is not certain and precise the closer we look.
I am of course presenting a summary, a general view of these matters, because to delve into the granular precise level would involve needing to use very different language, mathematics and symbolic representations, which few of us are adept with, I am attempting to clarify in everyday speech what science means to us, and how it affects our lives; how developments in science feed into our social world and actually manifest.
As people of this world we are ultimately at the mercy of very powerful, fully resourced groups who have at their disposal a considerable ‘head start’ on most of us, to put it bluntly; the arrival of the WWW has helped to correct the imbalance of power, enabled a more ‘egalitarian’ distribution of information, it has also created a new arena of confrontation and struggle, the so-called ‘Information War’.
Reconciling the disparities between the quantum and Newtonian/Einsteinian view of the universe is a tricky matter, one of the most brilliant men to have lived in the 20th Century who actually succeeded in accomplishing this was Arthur M Young.
This Wikipedia entry for Arthur Young is by no means comprehensive, it does not provide the immense depth and richness of his work but it at least is there, I suggest looking further afield if you become interested. There are some videos on YouTube which offer a surprising range of Arthur Young’s ideas and biography.
You won’t find any references to Arthur Young in high school, or university textbooks, the establishment of science has worked very hard to conceal and bury much of his work, despite the very large contribution Arthur Young provided in successfully developing a commercially successful, and flyable Helicopter.
The Helicopter was not invented by Arthur Young, of course, but nobody had been able to come up with a viable craft which could be navigated and flown consistently with purpose; Arthur Young took the primary concept of a rotor powered aircraft and refined this into a fully realized, practical form, this became the BELL 47 which was released for sale in December of 1945.
The engineering, and design issues with the Helicopter were unique to this aircraft, Arthur Young was able to solve them all through the incremental development of models, learning from failures and persisting.
One would think that the triumph of the Helicopter would assure a place in history, and the respect and admiration of technical people everywhere, this has not been the case with Arthur Young because the true life’s work of this man was not about Helicopters but the very nature of our universe, the purpose of humanity and the ‘ubiquity of light’.
Arthur Young was one of the first academics to approach Einstein’s theory of Relativity; Princeton university had to custom design a course just for Arthur Young in 1925, because the standard mathematics/science courses had very little to offer this prodigiously gifted individual.
Relativity for Arthur Young was a good beginning, but he was to see it as being inadequate; revising both the theory of Relativity, and the theory of Evolution to arrive at his own ‘Theory of Process’ was a bridge too far for the scientific establishment, who painted Arthur Young as being a ‘New Age’ philosophy advocate and dismissed much of his later work.
We will discover, to our cost that this dismissal of Young’s incredible ideas was a grave error. I would just like to be one of the people who say this, because in decades to come Arthur Young will be revealed as one of the most brilliant people to have ever lived.
What is it about Arthur Young’s theory of Process, and his other work that brings me to proclaim this?
Human society has always been conflicted, we have this duality, the differences between the insights of spirit and the very clear intellectual wisdom of technical and physical science; we have always known that our nature is conflicted, our religions and spiritual philosophies have continually clashed with the technologists, and pure sciences, between the pragmatic absolutism of the rationalists and the moral/ethical problems we uncover through our social life, the conditions of existence itself.
Arthur Young experienced what he describes as his ‘Gee Whiz’ period, the time which followed after he had delivered the Bell 47 into production, which found him exploring Zen, Buddhism, Extra Sensory Perception, Astrology, along with Quantum Physics and the more ‘esoteric’ quarters: this was not a superficial whirlwind survey but a profound discovery of those aspects of human life which mainstream science cannot comfortably account for.
It was here that Arthur Young refined his model of the universe as being ‘Toroidal’, and he proposed the ‘Arc’ of process to account for the stages of development beginning with particles, atoms, molecules e.t.c finally arriving at humanity, which represents maximum freedom.
We are not introduced to Arthur M Young at any stage in public education, even his incredible work with the Helicopter is grudgingly recorded in obscure sections of the WWW and the dusty sections of university libraries. The inquiring person is forced to conclude that there is something threatening about his work to mainstream science; why else would this be the case?
The complexity of our society is quite obvious, this complexity results from our specific development, our need and compulsion to communicate. Human beings are defined, and enabled through this one characteristic: we are the noisy animal, the chattering cultured ‘apes’ who came down from the trees in order to light a fire and hold a talk fest.
At least this is what we are most often led to believe, I am not certain of this, but I am certain of the ‘talk fest’ bit.
All of our social world is the result of our highly developed communication; everything that we have done, and can do is founded on this one trait of ours.
From our development of writing, recording critical pieces of information, tallies of items, lists and simple directions, to our first major break through: the printing press.
We know that it is the printing press that gave us the means to amplify our intellectual, and creative life; this enabled us to teach one another, to enlarge our view, to imagine and then create entirely new ways of existing.
Our modern world was made possible by the printing press, if we can trace the beginnings of modernity and step back to view the path we have traveled, we can also imagine the road ahead with the enormous amplification of the printing press, which is what the World Wide Web truly is.
Journalising, this convention of recording thought and of describing events, of analysing and accounting for what takes place in our social world, providing information and insights into different areas of our communities has also undergone some significant changes; to account for the whole of journalism would be much too daunting a task for a mere article, suffice it to say I am looking at the profound shifts in journalism and ‘mass media’ which have taken place in three short decades since broadcast journalism was removed from its very splendid throne.
When I say this, I know that you will understand immediately what I am saying: we collectively understand that journalism today has very different quality to that of our previous generations; the newspapers and television bulletins which informed the populations of post WWII western countries have given way to YouTube, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and a plethora of independent and ‘alternative media’ publications.
This is all part of the ‘complexity’ I began with, the sheer volume of content, options and players in the media world has generated a bewildering scenario; the average punter is today confronted by a collage of information which they have to try and make sense from, those groups who previously held the reigns and were able to siphon their narratives directly into your consciousness thanks to the one-way dynamic of broadcast media are now confronted with the reality of competition: enter ‘Fake News’ into the arena!
The coining of the term ‘Fake News’ is a pretty obvious matter, we have been aware of ‘Propaganda’ for a long time, and we know already that analysis, and placement of stories, videos, graphics and ‘memes’ can influence people; Fake News is something different.
The collective hatred for Trump on the part of legacy media is in part driven by Trump’s very plain words when he describes long established media organisations such as: ‘The Failing New York Times’, and ‘CNN is fake news’, Trump does not conceal or obfuscate his views!
The rest of the hatred is bound up with more complex reasons, primarily ideological and profound differences of world view between powerful, rich groups in this world, (Bilderberg, World Economic Forum members are among these) and the people who stand with Trump throughout our western world.
Today we are presented with ‘Fact Checkers’, this is a distinctly modern development, the implication being that the Web is so uncertain and flexible a medium that professional bodies are required to filter misleading, or obviously false information and claims; that the population is so incompetent and naive it requires hand holding, and verification authorities to ensure you are given the ‘right kind’ of information.
Very dangerous, deeply concerning, because who will be checking the checkers? Who are these people, and how can we be certain they are non-partisan, objective, unbiased in their work?
The involvement of the intelligence community in mass-media has a long, and checkered history
THE GREAT RESET
Friends, people of good will all over the world, I draw your attention to this matter.
Forget about “Conspiracy Theories”, has not the social reality you have each experienced during this year not proven that your political agencies, your local and state leaders are complicit in seeking to repress your lives, in dismantling your previous way of living?
Have you not complied with their directions in good faith, cooperated in restricting your activities, sought to protect others, observed all manner of ‘curfew’ and closure?
Have you not strived to obey your police forces, and respected their words and directions?
Do you observe multitudes falling to the ground, stricken by illness?
Are the graveyards, morgues overflowing, is the sound of lamenting and despair emanating from each household?
Why did they shut down the businesses, prohibit the meetings, censure the voices of dissent?
The Global Economic Forum is underway, have you heard about this, have you seen any mention of this on your television news?
No you have not, I am willing to bet only a small fraction of those reading this modest publication will have even heard of it.
And yet, this is something of profound significance.
