This is all well and good, but what does any of it have to do with 'science' as it's practised today? Today, ignorance is widespread and even scientists appear to show little interest in the truth, instead coveting fame and riches over principled dedication to solving the mysteries of reality.
What happened to the Enlightenment's promise to reform society through reason? In spite of the proliferation of science through education and media, scientists today are blinded because they are led by the blind in a system that vectors the fruits of scientific inquiry towards destructive ends.
What about those scientists who see this and attempt to break the mould? Mavericks are no longer burned at the stake for daring to challenge the status quo. Nevertheless, scientists today whose work challenges comfortable (and false) assumptions are defamed, ridiculed and marginalised.
In this week's show, we discussed with theoretical mathematical-physicist Arkadiusz Jadczyk how the 'hard sciences' are controlled through selective funding, a 'peer review process' that is anything but objective, and the devastating consequences - for society and planet - of science in the hands of a Scientific Establishment whose narrow-minded brand of scientific materialism has hardened into religious orthodoxy.
Running Time: 02:08:00
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Here's the transcript:
Niall: Hello and welcome to all our listeners. Your hosts are myself, Niall Bradley, my co-host Joe Quinn and Jason Martin's here with us. Welcome guys.
Joe: Hi.
Niall: We are very lucky to be joined tonight by Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Hello.
Niall: Arkadiuz Jadczyk.
Ark: Arkadiuz Jadczyk
Niall: Did I pronounce that right?
Ark: Ark.
Joe: No, but anyway.
Niall: Who we know as Ark. So the topic of tonight's show, well we're back onto science again. And this time we're going to be looking at the hard sciences in general and we think that having Pierre and Ark here, they'll have stories to tell us of their experiences in scientific and technological fields. Laura of course has written about the problem of corruption in science, about it being a fundamental problem. In fact I think she's written that it is possibly the root problem of all humanity's problems at this point in history. And one of the things that she said is that scientists today appear to show little interest in truth. The truth should be fundamental to science. Now this isn't just a moral position to take because the truth matters. It matters when problems that are dealt with, are dealt with incorrectly and that leads to more problems and more problems, one on top of the other. And eventually that would possibly lead to some kind of evolutionary cul-de-sac. Humanity can only take on so many mistakes before it's game over. So science is important.
Joe: Just by way of an introduction for Ark, just so our listeners know, Ark is a theoretical physicist of many years. He has over 90 papers published in top scientific journals. And Pierre has quite a few years, I'm not sure exactly how many...
Pierre: Eleven.
Joe: Okay, 11. There you go. Eleven years working in a top scientific research institute in France. So is that okay, Pierre as a description of your background?
Pierre: Well I'm not a scientist.
Joe: You're not a scientist.
Pierre: I don't have a Ph.D. I have two masters, a masters of engineering and an MBA masters of administration and I worked and managed an organisation on a good research campus in France.
Joe: Anyway, welcome Ark.
Ark: Welcome, but if we talk about truth, I must correct what you said.
Joe: What Niall said?
Ark: No, what you said because you said that I have these papers in top scientific journals. Some of them are in top, but some are in very obscure.
Joe: Well we'll be talking about the definition of "top scientific journals" and why some scientific journals are top and why some aren't and what it means to be top. But if any of our listeners have any questions for Ark or Pierre, or anybody, Jason's here as well of course, so he can be asked questions. He likes questions. If anybody has any questions for Ark or Pierre, feel free. Try and keep them on-topic ideally, but if you have to stray off-topic then that's okay as well. (Jason whispering "silence")
That's me waiting for Niall to continue from where I interrupted him.
Niall: Well, by way of introduction, what we've seen in past shows is that the fruits of science, the research, the hard work, the results of the research invariably end up serving destructive ends. It's really tragic because science does have potential to do so much good for people, for the planet.
Jason: In all fairness, I think science is very much an ideological system, in my opinion. I don't know what Ark thinks about that. Maybe he has some input, but most ideological systems can be good and they can help you to find truth and they can be used to sort of suppress it. And it has a lot to do with the people involved and what kinds of people are involved and how little objective information there seems to be out there about the types of people that are moving around in the administrative sectors and the upper echelons of various different ideological institutions, science and academia being one of course.
Joe: Yeah absolutely. We've talked about that in past shows, where we usually get onto psychopaths and the psychopathic mindset. But obviously we're talking about greed and the human condition.
Jason: I think people underestimate how many Judas Escariots there are out there, people who will, for 30 pieces of silver, just sell just about anyone down the river, even some little kid with leukemia. Are those people psychopaths? I don't know. Maybe. But I think a lot of it is just this unenlightened self-interest of people today.
Joe: Absolutely. Any area of human endeavour can be corrupted, not just science, and has been corrupted by people. That forms part of the topic of our show tonight but the hard sciences can be, and have been equally corrupted as we've talked about in previous shows, as medicine and psychiatry. It's all science-based. Research science is basically research into the all and everything of life and what the world around us is about and trying to understand it for the benefit of humanity. And that's where it becomes corrupted because there's people in positions of power who are not really interested in benefiting humanity, but they're rather interested in benefiting themselves.
Pierre: And maybe here we reach one of the most fundamental paradoxes of modern science. On one side the objective of science would be to discover and share truth, but on the other side it is controlled by elites that don't want the truth to be discovered and to be shared because the foundation of their power is based on lies. One example is the man-made global warming and we'll probably address that more extensively later. But this myth of man-made global warming versus the reality which is a cosmically induced global cooling. Man-made global warming maintains the illusion that the powers that be have control and are able to protect the population against potential threats because the sole source of legitimacy of the elites is this belief held by the population that the elites are able to protect them.
Jason: Even more than that, blaming it on man-made global warming, man-made climate change, there's this whole idea of the failure to admit that anything outside of the planet Earth could be causing it, type of thing. It edits the situation to make it seem like man is a big enough concern for the universe that we're going to destroy the planet instead of the planet's going to destroy us at some point. It's more hubris in a certain sense.
Joe: One of the main aspects and main ways today in which scientific research reaches the population, reaches the people, the scientific findings, the studies or research of scientists is through scientific journals. As Ark mentioned, he's published in 90, some of them top, some of them maybe not so top. And that definition of top journal obviously has a lot to do with influence and money, political influence as well. There was an article I was reading just today, from February 2010 and it was published on BBC News website and it was about the corruption of science.
There's a quote here from Peter Lawrence, who's an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge who talks about scientific journals and journal research. He commented on the fact that funding bodies now award grants almost exclusively to research who have published in a handful of top scientific journals. According to this emeritus professor at Cambridge, it's this new accounting mentality that's corrupting the scientific process. He says that awarding grants was never a very accurate process in the past but it was done by people reading the research papers and determining whether it contained sparks of originality and quality, rigour and argument. He says now in the modern day, in the last 10 years "Now that aim has been more or less abandoned. What counts now is not the quality or rigour of the research or the argument, or the originality of the research that could benefit people and move scientific understanding forward, what counts now is how often the research is cited or mentioned by other researchers in their publications. This is supposed to be a reflection of how influential a piece of research has been but many outside the grant awarding system regard it as a crude measure."
So Ark, that's my first question for you. The comments by this...
Ark: Oh, I completely agree.
Joe: Have you any personal experience of this?
Ark: Well not necessarily. I think I took preventive steps if I had a paper that was original. No, I had some experiences. I tried to publish some original papers in top journals. Where I have argued with the referees, the papers have been rejected. Then after some time of course, I published them somewhere else and then they were quoted and of course the referees of the top journals were completely wrong. They didn't understand completely. But I didn't want to fight because it's a waste of time.
Joe: Because you won't win.
Ark: Yeah, I could, but it would take too much energy. I prefer to spend my energy on something else. I publish my paper somewhere else and I know that after 10 years or 15, someone will discover them and probably someone will copy and publish his own paper. That's normally what happens.
Joe: I've read a little bit, I've listened to you talk about the whole process and it seems almost very childish to me, the way that they act. People regard scientists as being the height of maturity.
Niall: Yeah. Upstanding.
Joe: Upstanding members of the community.
Ark: If you are a monkey then you should behave like a child, right? And then have a good time.
Joe: A good time, but to the detriment of good research and the publication of research.
Ark: But you see the main problem is that young scientists study and they hope that looking for truth is what science is doing. But after they graduate, after they start working on their Ph.D.s then they find out that this is not what they will be paid for. They will not be paid for finding truth, but they will be paid for the number of papers published in some journals and then they fight for grants. And of course they will get grants because grants are important because once you get grants you can get equipment, you can go to conferences, you can get books.
Niall: You can work.
Ark: But the main this is that you can travel because grants are mostly spent on traveling and on hiring students to do the technical jobs for you. If you have a grant, you pay Ph.D.s and Ph.D.s will work for you, right? So you need this grant. But to get this grant, you are not supposed to look for the truth, but you are supposed to look for what problems are now popular so that if I work in this, I will get a grant. It doesn't matter how stupid the problem is. After 10 years, it can be completely abandoned, right? But nowadays this is the fashion. And if you use the right words in your application, you'll get a grant.
Pierre: This article from the BBC shows how insane the system is and how it works in a closed full circle. Actually what really matters for the notoriety of a scientist is not how close he comes to the truth, it's how many papers he publishes in top journals and how many times he's quoted. So we're not talking about being true here. We're talking about being influential as was mentioned in the article if I correctly remember. Once you've had your paper in Nature, in Science, and you're quoted a hundred times for example about global warming, because a lot of people are getting funding about global warming and they need data to support their own theories supporting the dominant paradigm. So once you reach this status, big papers in big journals with a lot of quotes, then you're going to have access to grants. Then you're going to get more resources, Ph.D. students, equipment, trips, whatever, that will give you the means to publish much more papers in this direction. And then you're going to be published even more. And you see how it goes full circle starting from actually a political orientation because at the very top the amounts of money available for this topic or that topic are decided by a ministry of research that depends on the Prime Minister. It's political.
Jason: It's a lot like Google in a way, that they rank pages by who's referencing it. It's a popularity contest. That's the kind of system that benefits the psychopath the most because of their glibness and shallowness and chattiness they go from place to place and talk people up and they get very popular. So the popularity system with the halo effect and all this stuff, that works for them. It doesn't work for hardcore scientists because they're too busy doing work to be social.
Ark: I would add a little bit as an insider to what you said Pierre. The story, as far as I see it, is the following: once you have a grant, you go to conferences. You meet people. Then you talk to the people. "Oh, you see I have this paper. I will quote you and in the meantime, will you quote me?" And so on. And then the more you meet people in the conferences, the more you are being quoted, you see, and they are quoted and so you quote those whom you know and they quote you.
Pierre: And that works if you're close enough to the main paradigm. But this system is particularly detrimental in science because science is based on innovation, a change of paradigm. And if the notoriety of scientists is based on how often they're quoted, it means that the outsiders, the ones who might have new ideas, will not be quoted because their ideas are so different and so threatening to the mainstream scientists, that defend the mainstream paradigm.
Ark: No, no, no, but this is not a problem if the outsider really cares for truth, then even if he will not be quoted, his paper and his idea will be stolen and the truth will be known. (laughter)
Pierre: Well, if the ideas are not threatening to the powers that be.
Joe: To the established order.
Ark: That's rare.
Joe: That rare?
Ark: Yeah.
Pierre: Well I have an example. And maybe we can talk and you can say what you think about it. So it happened in southern France about 10 years ago. I was managing this technology transfer organisation. So basically we were helping scientists with good ideas and less good ideas, to transfer these ideas in R&D and finally innovation, products, business. So there was this brilliant biologist who had an idea. He had discovered a molecule that seemed to work against AIDS, HIV. There's a lot of controversy about HIV and AIDS and the proof that this virus triggers the deaths that are attributed to HIV is controversial. We could make a whole show about it, but let's go straight to the story.
So this guy had a very good idea. And a word scale test of the best therapeutic molecules against HIV got tested. The revac trials. The 10 best international research teams in the world were selected and had to give their molecule and they were going to be tested on groups of monkeys, six monkeys each, because monkeys develop an HIV virus that is very similar to the one in humans. Okay, so out of the 10 teams all the monkeys died within two weeks after the injection of the so-called therapeutic molecule except for one team, the team of this French scientist. All the monkeys, despite the inoculation of the Simian HIV virus, survived. He obviously had a very promising molecule.
So following those results the NRSA, the equivalent of the NIH in France, ordered to kill and burn all the monkeys because there had been a flaw, allegedly, in the scientific process. So there was no proof of the effectiveness of the molecule. Then GlaxoSmithKline gave the world award to this French scientist. The world award up to this point, only American scientists got the award so it was a big award, a lot of money. And at the same time they proposed a deal. "Okay, we give you this amount of money and we're going to develop your molecule, go for the clinical trials. So that's $500 million put on the table. We get the R&D agreement and we develop the vaccine. It was a preventive and curative vaccine.
And then the scientist was really happy. He had an award. He got money and he just had to wait. And he waited and he waited. He waited years and years until he finally realised he had been screwed and GlaxoSmithKline had bought his molecule to bury it because it was not profitable. It was a small peptide, 100 pairs of protein, 100 pairs, easy to manufacture. You administer it once and you prevent AIDS and you cure AIDS. Meanwhile GlaxoSmithKline and others are making billions with different therapies where basically AIDS patients swallow something like 30 pills a day. So they are literally cash cows. It was not profitable. And that's why I was saying sometimes if the scientist goes too close to an uncomfortable truth, his truth won't be shared.
Ark: I agree but I will repeat. This is rare.
Joe: Well, there are, can I call them maverick scientists, who have complained about modern science and the process to getting research published and the peer review process and everything and one of them, J. Marvin Herndon, who we have published on SOTT.net, is talking about the national science foundation that's in the U.S. He says that the consequence of this new modern peer review process being that generally speaking trivial projects are proposed, often with non-scientific end results such as the widespread practice of making models based on assumptions instead of making discoveries. He says further "The proposal evaluation is often a guise to engage in exclusionary and ethically questionable anti-competitive practices. Moreover bureaucrat program managers decide which projects are suitable for programs that they design. There is no incentive to make important discoveries or to challenge existing ideas. Quite the contrary." Ark, do you think that's an accurate statement? That there is no incentive to make important discoveries or challenge existing ideas?
Ark: Yeah. There is no incentive but on the other hand, to make a career in science is not so difficult because it's easy to decode how you have to write your papers in order that they will be published in top journals and if your goal is to make a career and probably it is your goal because you have to feed your family, after all, right? So if you are not publishing a lot, it means you don't know how to decode the system. So you're not such a good scientist.
Joe: So you're saying it's actually possible to get ground-breaking or new research that goes against the system.
Ark: No, if you want to make a career, you never go against the system.
Joe: But what about truth? Where does truth fall?
Ark: Well, that was long ago. A hundred years ago, scientists cared about truth. But even then, if someone was finding the truth that was unpopular, there are many examples, scientists that were hiding their reserves in the drawers of their desks because they thought the world is not yet ready for this discovery.
Pierre: There was a major change around the second world war. Before the second world war you had space for independent researchers that could get their work public, that could share their ideas and that could conduct their research. And then research started to become institutionalised with political control of the funding, political control of the work position, political control of the publication. And science, and scientists indirectly, became the tools to further some political ideologies.
Joe: Well of course and the political ideology has, for quite a long time, been control of the population and science is certainly one area, possibly the only area where people can be provided with understanding and information about the world around them that may in some way make them less controllable, more free perhaps and obviously therefore, people in positions of political power who want to make sure that people remain controlled, have decided that they need to keep a tight control over scientific discoveries and what gets released by incentive research.
Jason: Well I don't think that they do it to give the impression that there is this vast amount of groundbreaking scientific discoveries that would completely change your life, like immortality and insinuating like the cure to disease, cure to cancer, cure to AIDS and stuff, that these things are being suppressed. That's not necessarily the case. Like Ark was saying, it's actually rare when there seems to be a real concerted effort to suppress some new discovery. It just makes some guy who's a big hoodoo look a bit like a ponce because he forgot to carry a couple of...
Ark: No, but you see, these real cases if they would not be suppressed, they would be enough to make big technological and scientific jumps. And that's one of the reasons why during the say 100 years, we do not have a real breakthrough in physics, you see, it is that whatever can be of real value is taken over by military and by whoever, by the industry and it's being suppressed, right? So the normal science that just goes step by step,usually in the wrong direction, it works well. But I would add something to what you said Joe, that before the second world war it was a little bit better. It's not exactly that. Even after the second world war there was much more freedom in science but then what was really bad came from the U.S. and this is the centralisation. During my scientific career, at the very beginning when there was no system of grants, the money was distributed locally. The university was getting whatever funds and then within the university, when people who know each other, it was decided "Oh, this guy is promising. We give him the grant. Let him have a seminar. We listen to him. Oh yeah. We decide." Okay? So his professor or the department decided "You get the grant" and so on. But after that came this centralisation of grants where there is a body somewhere in the capital of your country or even...
Niall: It's high up and far away. Not local.
Ark: Yeah, European society or whatever, or work institutions. They don't know you and they don't have time to learn about you. So what they do, they look "Okay, this number of papers. This number of quotations. This number of indexes. Okay, yeah, that's fine." And moreover, if he's supported by so-and-so who has a position there and who is a member of our - okay? So certainly he gets a grant, right? And that's it. It doesn't matter how bright or how promising you are.
Joe: Do you think that was done deliberately in terms of trying to control the allocation of grants so that there could be a control on the type of research done?
Ark: No, I don't think it was deliberate. Certainly because United States was a very rich country, for whatever reason.
Joe: Whatever reason.
Ark: For whatever reason. And after the second world war, they were able to take all the best scientists from all over the world.
Joe: Germany.
Ark: Germany, okay, whatever. So their science was making big steps still after the second world war and they didn't suffer because of the war so much as the rest of the world. So they were making big steps. So other countries were looking "Oh, we want not to be worse. What is the challenge. We should take their system."
Joe: And of course after the second world war you had the cold war.
Ark: Right.
Joe: So it was essentially the U.S. with all of its money to allocate toward scientific research and to scientists, they were on a war footing. They were in wartime.
Ark: Yeah, and also the Soviet Union at the time...
Joe: The same.
Ark: ...was also the cold war. But there was big scientific progress in Soviet Union as well. They have fantastic scientists but it all stopped of course, after everything was privatised. And so today Russian science is a disaster.
Pierre: One can wonder you know, after the second world war, Operation Paper Clip brought to the U.S. 1,500 top German scientists. And until the second world war, during the 19th century, the beginning of 20th century, you have a series of major breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs. And all of a sudden it started to go down. And meanwhile you had this infusion of 1,500 German scientists and this emergence of the military industrial complex and development of secrecy. So you wonder to what extent two-speeds of research appeared, public research is open, which doesn't seem to evolve very fast and a secret research that achieves results. These results are not available for the benefit of the population.
Joe: And just on the point you made Jason a little while ago about, as Ark had said, it's very rare that there's some kind of a major discovery that's suppressed, I would tend to think that the reason that discoveries are rare is because of the control system. Do you know what I mean? Or at the very least if there is a system that tries to make sure that certain research goes in certain directions and if that was more open, there may be little discoveries that would have knock-on effects. It would spread. If it was an open system, you may eventually have a knock-on effect where one little discovery would lead to another, lead to another. So it's not just that one person has to come up with the answer to all and everything, but that if all scientists were free to follow the research that they wanted to and if they were benevolently inclined in terms of trying to find answers to social problems or human problems, that big discoveries could eventually come out of that. But that doesn't happen.
Jason: I think that's a naïve perspective to have on the situation. It still goes into the idea that if science were allowed to, it could do no wrong, or if science were allowed to, it could solve all these things. It could discover anything in the universe. And I don't necessarily have that much faith in science to think that there's going to be an endless number of discoveries if the scientific method would just be allowed to do what it has intended to do. I think that that's a lot of faith to have in it which I don't have. Of course Ark may disagree with me. He and I sometimes do have disagreements on the ideological aspects of science and I'm kind of a little bit anti-science most of the time. But what I was trying to get at was not so much that there couldn't be lots of breakthroughs. Obviously yeah there could. There could be new quantum theory or new theory of relativity that isn't retarded type of thing. That's fine. Yeah, that could happen. I don't know. But the point I was trying to make was that a lot of what's wrong with science has absolutely nothing to do with the suppression of paradigm shifting discoveries and has everything to do with the guy who builds a better microchip to navigate the bombs. And he doesn't have any obstructions in his way. Or the guy who comes up with a new chemical weapon for the military. Those types of people, those scientific discoveries which obviously don't meet with any opposition but are actually really quite bad. The guy who's designing horrible chemical weapons and the guy who's designing new, more efficient armour-piercing rounds. That kind of stuff, that science, the guys who design that kind of stuff are really in a certain sense being a little bit irresponsible, I think. That's my opinion.
Joe: So basically what you're saying is that it's controlled in a certain direction. It's pushed towards the development of weapons of war. That's where all the scientific research funding goes from the government.
Jason: The corruption of science is not so much that they suppress invention, it's that they immorally and unethically push forward certain types of inventions.
Joe: Yeah, that's basically what we're saying. Like I said, so if it was free and open for scientists to follow, if they had some benevolent intentions, that certain discoveries could be made that would be very beneficial and could be groundbreaking. So I don't think it's naïve to think that. I think what you just said bears out the point that I made, that actually if it was free and open...
Pierre: It's not mutually exclusive. I think the leaders, the powers that be, they push in a certain direction, destructive at worst, at best useless. And also they prevent the real slips that occur. There are not so many slips because the system has such an insidious imperative, that most scientists self-censor themselves. They know the game. They know you cannot go beyond this line. They know 'here you get the funding'. 'Here you get the carrot, here you get the stick' so they follow where the carrot is. But sometimes there are slips concerning some breakthroughs.
Jacques Benveniste is an interesting example. Jacques Benveniste knew the rules, he knew the game. He was one of the top immunologists of his generation. He's the one who discovered the platelet activating factor. Brilliant guy working for INSERM (French Institute of Health and Medical Research) in France. And along with his studies, very classical studies, mainstream research, everything was alright, big funding. Along with his research he started to test the impact of bee venom on degranulation of blood. That's one of the consequences of the contact of bee venom, is this degranulation thing. And he noticed that when he put less and less venom in the blood, the less and less degranulation which is logical.
But then he reached concentration where statistically there's no more venom in the solution. And although there's no more venom, the degranulation reaction still occurs at the level higher than zero. So he just published that. And he was published in Nature. Big paper, highest impact factor. But a few days after this publication, peer reviewers had nothing to criticise. All the scientific protocols had been applied and the resources were interesting, it was very consistent.
And then the director of Nature reacted a few days later and said "No, there's been a mistake. It's a fraud. The data has been cooked." So they asked Benveniste to remove his article, to present his apologies and Benveniste didn't do so. And he replicated the experiment and he replayed the experiment to other cases where there's no more concentration of any factor and still the effect occurred. And that's why people called it later the proof of the memory of water. That's a very interesting concept. But anyway, long story short, Jacques Benveniste got no more grants, no more funding from INSERM, he got expelled from his lab and he settled some temporary boxes in the garden in front of his ex-research institute. He got bashed in the scientific and mainstream medias. He was called a liar. He was called a fraud. He has been accused of cooking the data and they harassed him so much that they didn't kill him directly. But after 10 years of harassment, he died.
Jason: I'm not trying to say that it doesn't happen at all. I'm not going against that. I'm just speaking from my understanding that the way that I felt that things were being presented, which is why I said it, is basically that there's all of these fantastic discoveries that are being suppressed and that that's what's wrong with the system. And I was just saying "That's a small part of the problem". Obviously there's these mean bastards who do that kind of thing which happens in all other fields as well. But science kind of has somewhat more of a moral responsibility. It's like with great power comes great responsibility. And in the sense of science, you have a lot of power and you have a lot of people who don't have a responsibility. That's the corruption of science.
Joe: Yeah, the idea is that because science is so controlled, as we've been talking about, the potential for any great discoveries to happen is basically nil. So as you're saying, it's not that there are people all over the world with cures for cancer and how to time travel, etc., but if those things were ever possible, we're never going to find out with the state of the system as it is today. Ark, I have a question for you from a listener.
Ark: Yes.
Joe: It's from Genevieve. She says "Would Ark be willing to discuss how the scientist actually seeking truth gets attacked, ridiculed or worse?" Do you have any stories or experience of a scientist who was actually involved in some kind of research that was following the path of truth, without any considerations for his career, but maybe didn't understand the system and how he or she got attacked or ridiculed or suppressed?
Ark: Nothing like that comes to my mind right now. I think that what happens more often, that if you find something important and you find some truth, that it's not along the mainstream interests, then you are simply being ignored. This is usual. It's not so often that you are getting ridiculed and if you are being ridiculed, then you know you can fight. But if you are just being ignored, it's worse than being ridiculed, you see?
Joe: Yeah.
Ark: Okay, nobody will quote you. You have someone who will steal your idea, rephrase it, publish it as his own under different names, changing everything here and there, but you will be ignored.
Joe: Yeah. Another question from listener called Pashalis to Ark. What part does plasma cosmology play in quantum physics nowadays?
Ark: Oh, this I don't know.
Joe: No?
Ark: No. I know that it's probably something very important and probably some day in the future I will get interested of course. I was looking here and there. I collected a lot of papers to be read afterwards when I am not so busy with what I am doing now. But by the way, just as a side remark, to the problem of responsibility of scientists. I decided that whatever I do, it's going to be completely useless from the practical point of view because if I do something that is useful, it can be used for the purpose that I don't want it to be used for. So what was my choice? My choice is to do things that will probably be appreciated so far in the future that today they are completely useless.
Joe: They are completely useless or they would be subverted? Do you mean they're practically useless or...
Ark: Yeah. They have no practical application. But you know for instance, I am working on this quantum fractals because there will be no application. But not long ago I discovered that "Well, I can invent some application. Oh my god, what should I do? Should I stop?" (laughing)
Joe: And did you?
Ark: No, I am still kind of in suspension.
Joe: Yeah, you're still thinking about it.
Ark: Yeah, I don't know what to do.
Niall: In a suspended state.
Ark: Probably I will have to phrase what I know in such a way that any possible application will be so hidden and so impossible to find it.
Joe: But that's what I mean. That's terrible.
Jason: It's a shame.
Joe: It's not just a shame. It's a travesty that someone like yourself can spend so much time with so much talent to investigate something and come up with ideas and theories about something that could have a practical application...
Niall: For good.
Joe: ...for the benefit potentially of people or of life on the planet, whatever, and you feel like you just have to shut up.
Ark: But you know, there are different kinds of benefits. To one kind of benefit is practical benefit and another is esthetical benefit. I prefer to work for...
Joe: Esthetical?
Ark: Esthetical, you're right. To produce something that is beautiful you know, and give esthetical pleasure.
Pierre: What you say is pretty close to what Nicola Tesla was saying. He knew that his discoveries would be used for nefarious purposes and that's why apparently he knew how to make these particle beams, death rays, and never revealed all the secrets of this discovery because he knew it would be used for nefarious purposes.
Joe: Yeah, he had a very direct, personal experience of the nefarious agenda with..
Pierre: J.P. Morgan.
Joe: Yeah, and the development of AC and DC currents for the electricity wars.
Pierre: Yeah, J.P. Morgan buried his projects when he saw that he was not cashable. He could not make money with it.
Joe: And it's interesting that he died a pauper.
Jason: Which is unfortunate because he was actually responsible for quite a few interesting technologies that we have today, wouldn't have happened without him.
Pierre: Yeah. Wireless communication. AC current.
Jason: I was about to say something and I lost it.
Pierre: Just one point about plasma cosmology. I'm not an expert in the field, but from what I understand, it's an elephant in the lab, in the room, that is thoroughly ignored and systematically ignored. Plasma cosmology started with Becklund and Hannes Alfvén. Both got the Nobel Prize actually. And the state of matter plasma is 99 percent of the matter in the universe. Plasma, unlike the traditional cosmology is scalable so we can test it in labs, in experiments. And there are many, many results. And you barely hear about plasma cosmology and when you hear about it, usually it's ridiculed as fantasy thinking, as junk science. Although I'm not expert enough to say that it's true but it fits very well with a lot of observations that traditional cosmology cannot explain at all.
Ark: I said that I know nothing about plasma cosmology, right?
Pierre: Was it the truth?
Ark: But from what I know, I would not put it into the subject of the corruption of science. It is just the standard inertia of science because if you look at the last 10 years, plasma cosmology is making its way to the conferences, to the journals, to monographs. With each year there are more and more papers devoted to this. So it's just the inertia.
Niall: I want to go back to something that we were discussing before, the use of breaking technologies for weapons in particular. Obviously you end up with weapons and we can blame the system as a whole and that's true, I think it's true. But before that, the research that the eventual weapon is built on, that was never intended for ultimately being weaponised. So you've got people working in labs who do make breakthroughs, whether it's the use of physics for developing laser technology or even before that. They have no idea what the ultimate application will be. There are cases where things are suppressed, but as Ark said, that's rare. It's that the research, what happens to it next, it becomes vectored or...
Pierre: Yeah, exactly. I don't know in the U.S., but in France, there is a law that states that any discovery, for every patent, the military have a priority on the patent.
Ark: Well it's exactly the same in the U.S.
Pierre: Okay. And there is an example that illustrates what you were saying and shows that on every scientist's head there is this Damocles' sword hovering. There was this guy who invented fins for swimming with a kind of pivot at the level of the ankle and support at the level of the leg, it increased the effectiveness of fins in water by 50%, it was more effective mechanically speaking. And this guy was doing spear fishing in Marseilles and he wanted to develop that for spear fishermen and people who were swimming, just to be more effective, to go deeper and to have more fun. He was a nice, benevolent guy and he deposited the patent. And they immediately pre-empted it for military applications.
Joe: You mean the military grabbed it.
Pierre: Yeah. So a man who was well intentioned, who made an interesting discovery, who wanted to benefit humanity at a small level, a fin, ended up seeing his discovery, years of effort, used by navy Seals, for nefarious purposes.
Joe: And was that never released then to the public?
Pierre: No, no. If they grab the patent, the military sphere acquires exclusivity on the patent. So you as a civil industrialist, you cannot use the patent or you have to pay rights to the military, but usually the military doesn't want to share the technology so they don't even give rights for developing the technology. They are exclusive exploitation rights of the pre-emptive technology.
Ark: Yeah, but it's more technology, not science. I wanted to add something to what was said before. We were talking about weapons and usually when we talk about weapons we think about bombs or missiles, tasers, or whatever. But nowadays I think knowledge information is also a weapon. Secrecy is a weapon. The way they break secrecy is a weapon. The way to make things secret is a weapon. So it all extended from the pure material world to the world of general information. Information can be used, or disinformation is nowadays used as a weapon more efficiently than bombs.
Pierre: Yeah, and ironically it's the breach of the secrecy within the IPCC, the panel on climate change, when they got all those emails, they stole those emails that were confidential, that revealed how the manipulation occurred around this global warming scam.
Joe: Absolutely. That's a very good point Ark, that the real weapon in science these days is secrecy and keeping data secret, not necessarily even groundbreaking discoveries, but just keeping simple data secret, as Pierre just mentioned, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, about the whole global warming business because that involves a lot of scientists and corruption in science. We can only speculate because there's no smoking gun proof, to a large extent, on whether or not people were doing it consciously, although there is the reference to hiding the decline, hiding certain data that the planet was not warming, that it was in fact cooling. But in terms of how that whole mechanism worked behind the scenes, where people were being paid off, people were being blackmailed, that kind of thing. We don't know the specific reasons why but we do know that as a result of this exposure of this attempted secrecy that science says exactly the opposite of what the governments and the UN have been saying.
Jason: Well on that topic, I wanted to say something that does link to that. When you think about the technological problem, like the mining shaft gap from Dr. Strangelove, the military escalation of power. If we don't develop the weapon the other guy will. In all fields of science, it is kind of like that. 'If we don't develop and exploit this particular thing, or take control of this particular thing, some other country will', type of thing. And it's really actually an insoluble problem almost, when you think about it because it is kind of true. If the American government doesn't have it, it really will be some other government. That is a fair estimation of what will happen. And the truth of the matter is the only way to keep science clean and honest is for average people to be all up in their business constantly, all the time. That would be the only way for it to happen. Otherwise it has to work the way it is, which is basically it has to be suppressed and controlled.
And the problem is that the responsibility of the average citizen, people never take responsibility for their culture, their civilisation, their society. They don't do anything to keep it clean in a certain sense. They don't do any work for it. They want the centralised body to just make sure that it's not too bad. And so in certain sense, like what happened with the whole climategate thing, if people really took scientists to task in a very public way, throughout the entire society, then of course those types of things wouldn't be the way that it was done. And governments and scientific institutions wouldn't be able to get away with it. But because people are lazy and disinterested and self-interested and they're there playing their Angry Birds and Facebooking and Farmvilling all the time. There's a concerted effort, like we were talking about with the whole psychoanalysis thing the other day, to get people just chasing around...
Joe: Chasing their tails.
Jason: ...chasing their tails type of thing, to keep them from stopping for a minute and just smacking the scientist when he does something stupid.
Joe: Well the whole climate change thing or global warming, as it used to be called, I think pretty much most people have changed it to climate change these days, but still with an emphasis on human-based CO2. Even the people who are playing Angry Birds and dissociating and stuff, they're looking outside their window and wondering where is the global warming? Even the average person who, as you said, is disinterested completely towards the whole idea that global warming has fallen foul of Mother Nature, who has provided, especially for the northern hemisphere over the past four or five years, extremely cold weather and lots of snow. It's almost like I'd like to think that that was just a slap up the side of the head by Mother Nature, these liars and disinformation artists, because even the average person is going "Hang on a minute". Even just on a basic level they were saying "Global warming? Snow? How does that jive?"
Niall: Well what they did was they adapted and they said that man-made global warming could bring freezing weather. And they had explanations and data and models to show how this was also part of the same. I think it's like what Ark was saying about the inertia. The global warming is 30 years old now, this theory, if you want to call it that. And there's kind of an inertia behind it, that no matter how much evidence to the contrary emerges, there's so much money, it's like a snowball that's turned into a giant snow mountain and it's immovable.
Joe: But they have focused and still do focus on the idea of warming, because they talk about CO2 in the atmosphere causing a warming. It's a greenhouse gas. It causes warming of the planet. They still come back to that. Al Gore with his giant screen and his stepladder.
Jason: Manbearpig Gore.
Joe: Manbearpig Gore. He's up there showing how manmade CO2 causes warming. He's not talking about cooling, even though the Bilderbergs two years ago had global cooling on their agenda. But just for some data, it's totally ridiculous. This is really a ridiculous area where there's twisting of the information and the deliberate corruption of scientific research. You're not talking about just a tweak here or a tweak there. You're talking about deliberate ignoring of scientific data and turning it on its head for some ulterior motive. They talk about carbon dioxide as if it's going to be the death of us all if we don't do something about it. We all breathe out carbon dioxide. It's less than 0.04% of the earth's air, for a start, carbon dioxide. And human beings contribute 4% of that 0.04% in all of their fossil fuels, etc. You're talking about an infinitesimally small amount of actual gas here.
Jason: Just remember, you have to pay a tax for that percentage.
Joe: Well exactly. And it's not 0.044% tax either.
Pierre: It's a $2.7 billion market, the CO2 market. And interestingly, ironically, Al Gore has invested massively in two companies that are heavily involved in CO2 trade. The names of the companies are Silver Spring Networks and Generation Investment Management, UK-based companies.
Joe: Yeah, and so human beings create 4% - go ahead.
Jason: Cui bono?
Joe: Yes! Human beings create 4% of the earth's carbon dioxide an
d the total amount is, as you said 0.04%, so nature, or the planet itself, produces the other 95% of that 0.04%. So calling it pollution obviously is nonsense. But people have it in their minds after, as Niall mentioned, 30 years of propaganda and disinformation. People have it in their mind that carbon dioxide is a pollution. But it's a trace gas.
Jason: "It's going to kill us all" (whispering).
Pierre: There's another factor. Among the greenhouse inducing gases, CO2 contributes to between 1 and 3%. Water vapour, for example, is a far more major greenhouse contributor. So we're talking about 3% manmade CO2 or 1-3%. So it's about 0.01% of the increase calories.
Joe: Well it's really ironic in a way because when people talk about taxes in general, a long time ago probably, someone came up with the first idea of when complaining about taxes that what's next, they're going to tax the air we breathe? And to a certain extent...
Jason: They do, actually.
Joe: To a certain extent, that's what the whole CO2 management is about because we breathe out CO2 and CO2 is evil and has to be taxed. So indirectly, you are actually being taxed for the air you breathe.
Jason: Well think about the smoking thing. It's the same thing. It's about the money. And it's not about the money of corporations, it's about the money the government makes off of taxing cigarettes.
Pierre: I think money was one of the objectives of this scam. There was also maintaining the illusion that the elites can protect us and if the cooling is cosmically induced, they can absolutely do nothing. And their legitimacy disappears and then we know what happens when the elites don't seem legitimate anymore in the eyes of the population. The population revolts. And there is a third factor that's the guilt trip in the Christian Catholic fashion, each human being, you, me, gets the finger pointed at him and saying "Yeah, you're the one who's responsible for the poor polar bear dying on these melting pieces of ice".
Ark: I would like to make a comment, just to keep close to the truth. Because when we are speaking about these pollutions, you see, I think that part of this direction is good because it's good to have cleaner cars. I remember how cars were polluting some 20 years ago, and how it is now. Nowadays walking through London, it would kill you if the car would be the same kind, okay? And then we have this coal business. When I was living in the area where you couldn't see the clean sky because all this smoke from burning coal. I'm not sure if nuclear energy is better, that is another problem, but there are other solutions. And it's good that people are getting aware about polluting.
Pierre: I totally agree. And you see how this manmade CO2 led the good intentions of human beings to protect the planet on wrong tracks. Today if you buy a car, you're going to pay a tax or get a bonus, you get money from the government if you buy a car that generates a low level of CO2. But CO2 emission is not the problem. It's not what is polluting. And the result of this taxation based on CO2 emissions is that diesel cars, which have a higher efficiency rate, combustion rate, release less CO2, so you get money, you don't pay taxes on CO2 but at the same time diesel cars, diesel engines are the ones that produce the more toxic particles.
Joe: Not CO2.
Pierre: And not CO2. So in the end, cars that get promoted are the ones that are the most polluting.
Joe: Yeah. It's completely turned on its head. At the same time as they're complaining about pollution from CO2, they're deforesting large parts of the planet and in fact it's trees that are huge scrubbers of pollution and of CO2 as well from the atmosphere. So all of it is totally disingenuous and largely based on lies. And the science behind it, as we've said has been totally corrupted because we know about climategate in the UK a couple of years ago and just on CO2 the UN deliberately omitted 90,000 reliable measurements of CO2 levels over the past 180 years. And these reliable measurements of CO2 levels over the past 180 years reveal the natural fluctuation that was up to 40% above current levels. The whole idea that there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere right now has been shown to be completely bogus and the heating of the planet is driven by other factors, not by humans, not by their burning of fossil fuels, not by cows passing wind.
Pierre: And the same cooking of data, which applies to CO2, as you mentioned, applies to temperature directly. Seventy-five percent of the temperature of the weather stations that were used for data, statistics, have been removed and the 75% of stations were located either in rural areas or in mountain ranges. Result, they kept 25% of the stations that are located in coastal areas and all urban areas and we know that coastal areas and urban areas are warmer. So that's the way to make reality fit a model. And by the way, the model that was proposed by the IPCC, you know this hockey stick model that was predicting a strong increase in temperature was released during the first IPCC meeting in 1995 and 2000 and it was a prediction of the 2000-2015 period. So now we have observations. We have real, actual data and the actual data does not fit into the tunnel, the predictive tunnel, which is a compilation of different models. Actually it's totally out of it and while the tunnel is on the increase, showing an increase in temperature, the actual data observations show a decline in temperature. So there might have been a global warming prior to 2000 but all the indicators show that after 2000 temperatures have been globally dropping over the planet.
Jason: Well I was going to say something as a comment, not necessarily directly on that about the authorities, the powers that be and their constant need to indoctrinate people into the belief that they are potent in our reality, that they have some way of controlling things, that they can fix things, that they can protect you. But if you stop for a minute, step back and think about the signs that are all around you, why do they need armed policemen on every corner? Why are all the train stations and airports - they give you this excuse that it's to protect you from terrorists. But if a terrorist goes in there with a bomb, what is this guy with an M16 going to do against him exactly? He's going to shoot and the bomb's going to blow up and it's still going to kill people. Supposedly the suicide bomber that they've created is there to die. So a guy shooting him is not really a problem as long as the bomb goes off for him. That's not going to solve anything. They've got all these police agencies, all these armed people in the street for the express purpose that they realise that their authority is undermined already. The authority of the powers that be has already been undermined. And people realise, like Joe was saying, when they look out their window they say "Hey wait a minute. This is not matching up". And they see that the powers that be cannot protect you from what's going on in the world and that's why you see all of this proliferation of military technology and drones and this, that and the other thing.
Joe: Because they realise...
Jason: They realise that...
Joe: The game's up.
Jason: ...they can't control it. The game's almost up.
Joe: Almost up.
Jason: Obvious there's going to be some killing and there's going to be some suppression and some attempts at totalitarian government, but eventually if the global cooling situation comes on and there's an ice age, there's going to be a bunch of frozen guys standing on corners with M16s that are going to be pretty useless, type of thing.
Joe: Yeah. Right now we're going to go to a commercial break and we'll be back after these words.
[Comets and the Horns of Moses promotion]
Joe: The clock is running down on our civilisation. I think for the past few weeks we've adequately demonstrated that there's something to that idea. But I have a question here from a listener for Ark. And the question is why do you think the promising experiments with phenomena that are called paranormal were so harshly suppressed? For example William Crookes and Daniel Dunglas Home?
Ark: Well probably because of the conservatives. Science is conservative so it was always the case and I don't think nowadays it's much different than it was. Of course also nowadays we have this military applications which were absent during say, 100 years ago. So this adds to the conservatives of science. You don't have to look - at the normal university, you should not suspect that there is some military or whatever involved, but if you are too original, you will be not liked. You have to find a different place. So it's a question of originality, you know.
Joe: What do you mean "you will not be liked"?
Ark: Well they will say "You are strange, you do not belong to us, you are not like us, so just find another place. We are serious scientists and we do what other scientists do. Don't try to be too original."
Joe: So who decides what scientists do though? Scientists themselves? Back then, 120 years ago, 130 years ago or around that time, even then, like you said, you didn't have, necessarily, such a vested interest in terms of military and everything, but even then people who investigated into the paranormal were harshly suppressed.
Ark: But this normal if you have a flock and one bird is different from the other birds. The other birds will pick.
Jason: Well on that topic, I can understand the conservative science in that respect because there was a lot of chicanery going on at that time. The couple of people who may have had something actually true going on, it was really hard for anyone to actually research that because there was just so much chicanery going on. There were so many people who were scamming that it was really easy for a scientist to say "It's all a scam. It's all a fraud". Houdini went around sort of debunking a lot of people. He was an original kind of amazing randy-type character and just proving that they were frauds or at least that their effects could be gotten via fraudulent means, which kind of made it really hard for scientists to look at it. And those who did, yeah, they got suppressed and all, but you can almost understand it from a certain perspective because even when you look at the evidence, it's never really super-conclusive. Somebody tipping a table, it really is problematic. Like Edgar Cayce said "A dead Presbyterian is a dead Presbyterian." Yeah maybe these people are channelling dead people, maybe they're not. Maybe it's their subconscious. Who knows? But it was difficult to find somebody who had a connection to any kind of real source of information even among the people who were not being basically scammers. So it was very difficult to reproduce experimentally.
Pierre: I think there are maybe two other reasons that explain the attitude of mainstream science towards the paranormal. The first one is the ideology and modern science seems to be fundamentally based on the materialistic, mechanistic, causalistic, deterministic paradigm. And the paranormal addresses concepts like conscience which is almost the antithesis of the atomistic vision of the universe held by most mainstream scientists. And the other problem is the repeatability. Science is based on the fact that if it is true when you apply it to experiments, you can replicate the results of the experiment and protocol. The problem is, and maybe Ark can explain it better than me, that quantum mechanics shows that there may be interaction between the observer and the observed phenomenon. And maybe in paranormal activity those correlations between the observer and the observed phenomenon are more tangible or more perceivable than in other phenomena, experiments.
Joe: What do you think Arky?
Ark: What you said about this lack of repeatability is very important because to make real progress with understanding the paranormal, you would have to change completely the paradigm of science and you mentioned quantum theory. I think we have to go beyond quantum theory. Quantum theory is not enough. Quantum theory is also based on algorithms and you can repeat quantum experiments. Of course you can not predict single events but it depends, I postulate now. So okay, you cannot repeat single events but you can make serious experiments and take averages and so on. With the paranormal it is so that this is not working. If you take averages, the phenomenon disappears, you see. So you have to find new ways of researching these kinds of phenomena and there is not yet a method of doing this. Of course, if more scientists would be working on it, this method would have been found already. But because there are so few and they are conservative, and there is this inertia, we will probably have to wait another 100 or 500 years before it happens, unless there are some breakthroughs. You know. Who knows? There are bright scientists.
Pierre: And positivism as well. Our whole way of thinking is based on the fact that if something is proven to be true, it's true, but if there's no proof it exists, it doesn't exist.
Ark: Oh, stop it about this postivities. So many scientists are religious.
Pierre: Of course! Of course.
Ark: And you are speaking about positivities.
Pierre: But that's what they claim. And they use it to discard paranormal events. Absence of proof is a proof of the absence.
Jason: Ernest Gellner kind of came out and said "Okay, here's the problem with the paranormal and science in that science at its core philosophy, there's no such thing as aquirory knowledge. You can't have god as a source of knowledge, and science built its whole base when it took on the Catholic church with that whole Darwinism stuff, ousting the religions so that they could ascend to dominance was all about "No, god cannot come in and inspire you. There cannot be any a priori source." And they kind of painted themselves into a corner a bit from that philosophically and ideologically. And I don't think that science couldn't study paranormal, but the way it is right now, with the ideology that it has, I don't think that it really can. You can't really remain in science and then start talking about whether or not god can really talk to people, or spirits, or whatever, or a cosmic mind or something like that. Science can't go there because it spent so much time bashing the hell out of the people who were representing that particular ideology, now they feel like "Whoa, we can't turn around and do what they did!" So they kind of have this emotional investment in this whole fixed repeatability. Even the lowest scientist has to be able to go into a lab, push the same number of buttons and get the exact same effect. If I can't reproduce the experiment, then we have to discredit it. And there is a certain logic, it's kind of the scientific method. There's a logic to the way that they do things and it works for a lot of stuff.
Ark: But i think still there is some hope because I know there are some very bright scientists with very good original ideas going in this direction. The problem is that they are separated one from each other. And so there is no real group and there is no funding. They do it as their hobby mainly because they have to feed their families and so on. But there are good ideas going in the right direction. So because once in a while things happen randomly and we have this butterfly effect, I do not exclude that in the near future a breakthrough in this direction can be made.
Joe: Just a note to our listeners, if anybody has any questions you can also call in with any questions for Ark or Pierre or Jason or Niall or me or anybody.
Jason: You should definitely call in. We'd love you to call in.
Joe: You should call in and we'll answer your questions. So Ark, on the religions/science thing, does that mean that a scientist who is religious shouldn't he or she have some kind of a problem?
Ark: I think scientists, they really separate these two things. They go to the church and pray, and on the other hand, they go to their labs and they forget about everything else and they do what they do.
Joe: So it seems to me that there's some kind of a schism in their mind, a split in terms of surely if you're a real scientist, you couldn't be happy with believing in god as a...
Ark: I don't think that believing itself is something bad because I repeat it again and again: it doesn't matter where you are getting your inspiration from. You can get it from the bible or from torah or from kabbalah or I don't know, from whatever, right? What counts are the results. And what quite often happens, for instance, Newton was producing great things but he was interested mainly in alchemy and the great things in science came - science was a hobby for him and alchemy was a full-time job, and counting how big Jerusalem would have to be to be able to take all the souls in the last judgment day.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: There's one area of science that we probably cannot wait 100 or 500 years for a breakthrough, and that's surely a good working knowledge of the space sciences. We're still with the paradigm of comets being dirty snowballs. We've got large bodies actually impacting the planet quite regularly now. One notorious one in February that blew up over Russia. And what I've been noticing is a flood of...
Joe: Did you say meteorite over Russia? That's the magic word. (plays sound of Chelyabinsk meteor explosion) I'll not labour that one. We've played it enough times.
Niall: Well what seems to have happened, as soon as a bunch of researchers, scientists, whoever, heard that noise, they wrote up some applications for grants and there were some wild ideas going on out there about landing on asteroids, about how we could deflect asteroids by if we see if far enough in advance, we can tug it gravitationally. In fact if there's one that's a serious threat, that's going to be very close, what we can do is we can tug it into an orbit around the moon. People coming up with these ideas, have they no understanding of what they're dealing with here? They're supposed to be the people who know.
Jason: Those papers were right out of movies. That was the entire plot of Armageddon.
Joe: That was their research material.
Pierre: James McCanney describes how he thinks NASA works with three concentric circles. And the insiders, the very top, they have access to data and they know partly the truth. And they think they filter out to the average scientist in NASA what they are allowed to know. And those scientists, bottom NASA scientists are the second ring. And the third ring are the scientists that work in medias and that feed the population with what the population is supposed to know and to ignore. This being said, this dusty snowball model has been so defended by NASA and all the mainstream scientists because I think the asteroid threat is a sore spot for the elites because it's a real threat. There's been five documented major extinction cycles in the history of the planet. There's been many more minor ones. All the current signs point towards an increase in asteroid activity. And all the actual data, observational and empiric, show that those bodies are not dusty snowballs. Okay, just two examples. First example Comet Lovejoy was observed reaching the sun going through the sun's atmosphere, corona, six million degrees Kelvin. And one hour later it went out of the sun's atmosphere. It was still there. How does it leave if it's a ball of snow?
Joe: There's a snowball's chance in hell and it did pretty well, huh?
Pierre: And the second example, Tempel they sent a space probe to take pictures, very close pictures, and Tempel had no ice. No snow. Tempel was a dark piece of rock.
Niall: It looks like an asteroid.
Pierre: So these are asteroids. All those bodies are asteroids and when they light up because of plasma discharges, i.e., electric model of the universe, they get bright and we call them comets. But all of these bodies are threats because it's not a snowball. When they enter the earth's atmosphere they would not melt and we'll have what happened at Tunguska in Russia or worse. They might directly impact the surface of the planet.
Joe: Yeah, it's really terrible because science today has run up against a roadblock, all of the scientists that could researching this particular idea of cyclical cosmic catastrophe via space rocks are not allowed, as Pierre just mentioned, to go there and to explain and to try and understand the reality of the threat because essentially NASA, in this case, puts up a wall and maintains the paradigm and no one is allowed to refuse it or to question it. And people who do are attacked and ridiculed. And this isn't just some nice discovery that might help humanity. We're talking about something here that is a dire threat to the entire population and all life on the planet. And still they're doing the same stonewalling of the people who want to push through and come up with new paradigms. And it's not even a new paradigm for godssakes. It's just the idea that there are rocks. It's in all the history books. Read Comets and the Horns of Moses that you just heard an advertisement for.
Pierre: It's co-related with global cooling. Maybe on another show we can develop how higher cometary activity and global cooling are correlated. But these two factors are hidden by mainstream science and the mainstream media. Instead they talk about man-made global warming and they do not acknowledge the increase in asteroid activity; and they support the dirty snowball model. They hide the fact that humanity is on the verge of a very major threat. And by not using their power for the people, for the reasons we mentioned before, and at the same time to keep their power, they spread those lies and they expose the whole world population to this major threat. Because there might be a solution, but to find a solution, first you have to allege a program and the program is systematically hidden.
Jason: Well I mean think about it. In a certain sense it's the "If I can't have it no one can" mentality of the psychopath in this case because the truth of cyclic cosmic catastrophe means that it doesn't matter if you're a king. It doesn't matter who you are. At any point in history, your whole civilisation can go right down the tubes and there's not much you can do about it. Earthquakes, some sort of temporary ice age, whatever. All these different things can happen and there's no way you can do anything. What that would instruct societies all over the world and humanity as a whole is basically that you have to lift up every single part of society. You have to put them on equal footing and give them each an equal chance because if something like this happens, you have to make sure of the continuation of the species and the continuation of the spirit of humanity, right?
But if you want to control everything, it's kind of like "Well, if the comets come and destroy everybody, I'm going to make sure that we all go because if I can't rule, then no one can" instead of lifting everybody up and saying "Everybody has access to all of the knowledge of humanity. There are no secrets. There's no need for it.". Because at any point in history half the entire race could just die and it has to go on and we have to not be put back into a stone age type of situation where we have a whole bunch of people who don't have access to everything that's come before them. That would create that kind of situation. Eventually humanity would be like "Hold on, holy shit! What do you mean? Like 90% of us could die at any point?" And then they're going to say "Well then screw this. There's no reason to have all of this poverty, all of these systems, all of these hierarchies because there's no point because the hierarchy gets toppled and then where are we?" We're put right back to what happened at the fall of the Roman empire which is basically that they lost the ability to even make basic pottery for hundreds of years. They lost all their writing and it wasn't there for 300 years or something like that.
Pierre: It might even be worse because I think those elite people think they have it. They know what is going to happen and they're getting ready. They've dug this so-called seed bank in Svalbard and other facilities and they think they will survive it. But they might not have the whole banana. And cometary impact is one factor. Global cooling is another factor. But you have to factor in also the massive weather disruptions, the increased earthquake activity, volcanic activity. So it's all global, systemic change that we're facing. And factoring on the one factor won't help you to go through it.
Joe: Yeah, and I think that another factor in terms of real science or real discoveries or real knowledge not getting out to the population - informing the people about what's really going on in any area , but specifically in the area of cosmic catastrophes - is that a lot of scientists, theorising, I would say that a lot of them are only too willing and at least marginally happy or content to believe the establishment idea that human beings are not about to be destroyed, that life on the planet is not cyclically destroyed because that, from a personal perspective for any individual, that's not a very nice idea to entertain. And if you put up a lot of grant money for any scientist to go and start researching for the truth about the fact that that is what happens, that the planet does go through cyclical catastrophes, you might not find an awful lot of them interested, because of their own personal investment. "You're asking them to investigate the data that I'm going to be destroyed at any moment? Me and the rest of the planet?" It's not a very nice area to research.
And I think it ties into also the mention of paranormal research. There's a lot of subjectivity obviously, just by humans in scientific research just because of the particular scientists doing it. For example the paranormal activity, scientists would be only too eager or happy to dismiss the idea of paranormal activity because they themselves, first of all, do not experience it. And the other idea of it not being repeatable, it can be repeatable for one person perhaps. One person can produce some kind of paranormal ability but if you can't replicate it across the large number of the population, well then that's just an anomaly so it's not really worthy of research.
Pierre: Or it's repeatable if you manage to control all the factors involved in the experiment. And there are probably many hidden variables. In some cases, in classical mechanics it doesn't have an influence. The engine works always the same, but for some other phenomenon, those hidden variables may play a major role. We tend to idealise the scientists you know. The scientist has only one thing in mind and it's this quest for truth. The scientists, objectively are human beings, like all of us, with their prejudices, with their educational background, with their family troubles, with their traumas, with their memories, with their beliefs, with their hopes. And like all of us, they're facing this choice between uncomfortable truth and some comforting lies or beliefs. Sometimes they choose truth and sometimes they choose comfort, grants, statues, publications, papers and bright futures or the illusion of a bright future.
Joe: Yeah. So I suppose what we're talking about here is that not only are scientific breakthroughs and discoveries rare, but the calibre or the quality of any particular scientist is a factor as well in terms of that person's own inner nature and ability to imagine and to think outside the box, the desire to think outside the box and to pursue that. Surely a lot of scientific research Arky, comes ultimately from an idea of a particular person. Do you know what I mean? It's not something that would be self-evident or that any scientist on the planet could share. One particular scientist may be required, because of who he or she is, to come up with an idea that they follow. Do you agree with that?
Ark: Well from my experience, looking at all my colleagues, truth is never the goal. The goal is to produce papers. Forget about truth. Are you learning about searching for truth during your university studies? Do you have any education? Yes, you have some little bit of philosophy, but what about scientific ethics? Is it being taught at the university?
Joe: No.
Ark: I don't think so. For instance if you want to be a doctor, you have to go through the course of ethics. It doesn't matter what happens after that, to what you learn. You learn this and that and that. But afterwards you forget about it. "Oh, it's not going to work", right? For instance if you are a priest, you are supposed to keep your confessions, right? But for scientists, are you supposed to really look for truth? No. The main thing you have to learn is technique. Then you have to learn how to produce papers. And then you have practice. And then you have to learn how to produce them quick!
Jason: A lot of that ties into that comparison that I always make with the Catholic church and science which is that obviously filtered down from scientists who write papers and scientific writers who write books for the layman, to the media and how science has allowed and encouraged itself to be portrayed as a bunch of very noble men searching for truth, which is part of their propaganda campaign, that ultimately it's not what it's about. That what we think as lay people they're about. That's what they've been telling us. But in the end, they're doing it for the same reason that the CEO runs a corporation and the same reason that people all do these things. It's a job. And the people who want to get at the top of the food chain in academia, they climb the so-called academic corporate ladder the same way that a CEO does and stuff like that. And obviously they want to present themselves as kind of like pathfinders and explorers, but for the most part they're not.
Joe: They're serving a master who has a goal and an agenda, essentially. A job.
Jason: Yeah. And for the most part the master is money. They serve no master but their ambition, type of thing. That's what you see in every area of life in society.
Pierre: There's another belief with all conservative scientists that spend their time maybe not looking for truth, but at least they spend their time making experiments and writing papers. They spend time with the microscope and with these tubes and equations. And actually at least most of the time spent by scientists is writing proposals for grants, grant applications, intermediate reports, final reports. All the papers relating to compliance with internal policies of the lab, all the bureaucratic, administrative paperwork and actual time spent by scientists doing real science is less and less and less.
Ark: There is another small factor which adds to that, namely when you apply for a grant, you have to write what you will do during the next two years. Then suppose after one week you find that what you were looking for is stupid and you have to change it, right? But you cannot say it because you already have the grant. So you have to continue doing something that you already know is useless. It goes in the wrong direction. That's how it works.
Pierre: And a lot of discoveries, maybe most major discoveries, were made in a non-deterministic way. The discoverer didn't know what he was going to discover. Sometimes it was due to an accident or random chance, like penicillin or other major discoveries.
Joe: Yeah. A listener who is engaged in scientific research has just commented that she remembers how "Not long ago the head of the research of a fellow student told me in an excited way that we could get two or more papers out of this research". And when she answered her that it's not important, the person just looked at her as though she was insane. But on the topic of truth, you're suggesting Ark, that truth should be a foundational part of scientific research when people are in school and they should be taught that truth is the goal?
Ark: Well it should be, but I don't think it's going to be.
Jason: Truth is a philosophical complexity, as a scientist once said.
Joe: It absolutely is.
Niall: It's also something that becomes self-evident after a while. We've been discussing climate science and then astronomy. There are things that for us are self-evident because there are scientists who really did pursue research that is apparently more objective, more accurate, i.e., they were looking for the truth of either comet behaviour or the factors of climate change. So there is science there for people to discover that is correct, that is true.
Pierre: Yeah, there is. I see what you mean and it's difficult for the layman because when you start researching about a topic, you find a lot of papers. And usually you would have 90-95% of the papers that support the mainstream ideas, the dominating paradigm. But you have a small percentage of scientists that will produce papers, sometimes if they're lucky enough they will get published, or they will write their own book. And in this small number of papers you can find nuggets of truth. There are scientists, thank god there are a few. I don't know, that's maybe not appropriate for this discussion about science, but fortunately, there are a few, a minority of scientists, who made this brave choice of stating what they observe, by defending the truth and maybe sometimes they were aware of it, sometimes not, but by doing that, they sacrificed their careers. And it's a noble act.
Niall: Even when they knew it was not what their peers or colleagues or their funders wanted to hear. It's rare, but it happens.
Pierre: Yeah.
Ark: No, it's not so that they sacrifice their careers. They publish things and they are being ignored. So that's usually what happens, you see?
Jason: If they're smart, they don't try to get published in a big thing like Science or Nature. That's the problem with this Benveniste guy. He should have realised what he had found and he should have published it in the most obscure journal possible because once it had gotten out into Nature, they had to destroy him or else...
Ark: No, but this is a well-known truth, that if you have something original you should not try to publish in one of the major journals you see, because first what will happen most probably, your paper will be rejected and your idea will be stolen.
Pierre: Yeah, and Benveniste's case is interesting because it's a glitch in the system. Benveniste's paper should have never been published in Nature. The peer reviewers didn't find any flaws but the peer reviewers were not part of this insider ring described by James McCanney. They just evaluated objectively the science in the paper. It was good so it was published. And then a few days later the real top boss of Nature started to intervene and put pressure on Benveniste because it should never have been published according to the hidden policies of those journals.
Jason: And that is why he got crushed in a certain sense. And that's why a lot of these scientists do get crushed because they're a little too ambitious. They don't know that what they're saying is dangerous and it sucks, but that's what happens. And it's understandable from a certain perspective. But what I wanted to say on this whole other topic, because I always come back to this whole 'science is a religion, man'. When people see scandals in the Catholic church or any sort of religions, they see sex scandals and money scandals and they say "What's wrong with these people? Aren't you supposed to be serving god?" And then you see the same kind of stuff in science and they say "What's wrong with you people? Aren't you supposed to be looking for truth?" And the answer is no.
Pierre: I think one of the "mistakes" of Benveniste is that he didn't measure, he didn't perceive all the consequences of his discovery because he only published the results of this correlation between the quantity of bee venom and blood. He didn't realise that actually he found empirical proof of some kind of water memory or important and hidden phenomenon that science hadn't grasped yet. He's not the one who coined the term "memory of water". It's later on that the media started to spin and twist and extrapolate from his finding that was purely scientific.
Joe: Yeah, and obviously apart from, as we've mentioned, that the essential control that's exerted or exercised over scientific research through the peer review process, which is a bit of a joke these days in terms of really encouraging proper scientific research in diverse fields...
Ark: It's a joke.
Joe: It's a joke. A lot of scientists are encouraged and grants are given to scientists for not very useful experiments, let's say.
Jason: Studying the speed of the flow of ketchup.
Joe: Study the speed of the flow of ketchup and stuff.
Jason: For $50,000.
Joe: Yeah. That's actually one that was funded. It's a way to control that's either conscious or maybe it's not conscious. Maybe it's just a sign of the degradation of society in general, as we see all around us and it's spread, and that science isn't immune. But there are a large number of very crappy, useless experiments that are being funded, that seem to serve no real purpose whatsoever. And it serves very well to just suck up the funding money and to fill journals.
Niall: Was that a real study? No. The speed of ketchup?
Jason: Yeah, I saw it. It was years ago. Was it on 20/20? Some sort of news expose about science and the different experiments that got funded. And one of them was some guy had got something like $50,000 to study the speed of ketchup down an incline. It really was no joke. He was very serious about it. Fluid dynamics or some sort of thing that he claimed. But basically it was the speed of ketchup.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: But putting money into trivial areas of research, I think it has this effect. I remember the effect it had on me when it came time to deciding what subjects I would study later on in school. It was a shame because I did have a keen interest in the sciences early on. And then I think I lost it and looking back, there's an impression that comes through that more or less everything that is to be discovered has been discovered. The world is known. We more or less have everything down. And that's why now there's nothing left to do but put money into funding the speed of ketchup because the world is more or less known, and we just have to fine-tune a few little things here and there. But that's not an objective view of the world at all. There are so many, many things to discover. Would you agree Ark?
Ark: Well I don't know. Where did you learn that there wasn't - really somebody told it to you that everything has been discovered?
Niall: No, no one told me but this is I think the impression that I received. Maybe it's the way that science is taught to children.
Ark: Oh yeah.
Niall: There's no wonder in it. "This is what happens when you do this. It leads to this." You're left with the impression that it's all facts.
Ark: Oh yeah, there are many scientists who would say that if you teach children that they should be open to the new, you are spoiling them. You should teach them respect for science. And how can you teach them respect if you say that there are so many things that scientists have no answer for. So they would fight "Oh no, you should teach children science like religion. You believe this. This is how it works. Look how wonderful is science. We know everything. We can explain every phenomenon. Become a scientist."
Pierre: Yeah, and I agree with what Niall just said. When you start getting interested in the a scientific field, a topic like cosmology for example, you find all those papers and all those theories, and all those complicated words and all the theories explaining everything with these big bangs and antimatter and black matter and gravity and formation of stars and explosion of stars and supernovas and original comets. Everything is "perfectly" explained. It's only when you start digging that you see that a lot of pieces of the puzzles are missing, that most of the pieces of the puzzle that are presented do not fit together, that in the end there's a lot of inconsistencies. And in conclusion, there is a lot to be discovered and a lot of the current beliefs have to be thrown out.
Ark: I would like to add to this from my experience because there is also this phenomenon. You go through the regular studies and essentially you come out with the beliefs that everything is known, right? And there is still so much to learn in front of you. "Oh my god, I know only so little! How can I discover something when I have to read all these hundreds of papers and books and so on?" But then at some point, if you are lucky, you start going to conferences or you meet real scientists who come to your place and you start to talk to them privately. And then you see when you talk in private and you ask questions "But I don't understand this." "Well no one understands it."
Pierre: "Neither do I."
Ark: Right. And when you are able to talk to these top experts only then they will tell you privately what you will not find in their papers and what you will not find in their monographs.
Joe: That the truth isn't known completely. They'll say that privately but not publicly.
Ark: Well they are not hiding it. They are happy to share with you if you ask. So I will tell you "Oh, this is terra incognita completely. This is undiscovered. Here are the questions" okay? If you are lucky, you get one of these problems and you make your Ph.D. of this.
Jason: Well one thing that's important to understand is that there's such a huge gap between scientific papers and scientific textbooks that are in the college and scientific textbooks that are in a high school and scientific textbooks that are in elementary school. A lot of time those are actually written by people who are not really scientists in the true sense of the word. It's more like they got a Ph.D. in education or a Ph.D. in some sort of administration. They're not really scientists but because they are there and they're willing to do it, they get to write the textbook and they choose whatever it is that they believe or think. And Joss Whedon who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and all that stuff, he has a word called phlebotinum that he created or maybe he didn't' but I don't know. And he refers to it as the "magical mystical explanation for why things work in a television program" about mystical stuff like "oh, he cast the magic spell" type of thing "and that's why it worked".
And a lot of scientific textbooks are filled with scientific phlebotinum which are basically like they give you a technical explanation that doesn't actually really explain anything. I refuse to believe in evolution because I still don't see how it could have worked because they give you all these different things and it sounds so reasonable until you say "Yes, but how did that happen between two amino acids in a pool of sludge?" type of thing. And they say "Well it was some sort of random chance".
Joe: "It must have happened that way."
Jason: And I'm like in order for life to evolve, the life had to get there from somewhere. How did that happen? I don't imagine two rocks sort of banging together and suddenly becoming alive and then they can evolve. Sure. So, so much of science is phlebotinum. It's just a magical, mystical explanation.
Ark: Yeah, but then when you start reading original papers, you will find scientists who ask this question, who reserve this problem, but this is fringe.
Jason: Fringe.
Ark: They're still science but it is fringe science. It's not mainstream, right? And they produce papers, sometimes even in top journals, but they are being ignored.
Joe: So a lot of the unknown in science is fringe. Niall was saying the impression that is given, for whatever reason, the impression, particularly children come away with and one of our listeners just said that that was definitely also the feeling he got, that almost everything was discovered and there was not really any big mysteries anymore because human beings have discovered almost everything. Obviously that doesn't coincide or jive with idea of telling children who are budding scientists, it doesn't fit with telling them that they should be looking for the truth. Because if you tell someone that a major part of science is to discover the truth, if you know everything, there is no truth to discover.
Ark: When I was teaching students, I was teaching with the idea to show them all the open questions. And they were usually very bright and they found their jobs afterwards, they made Ph.D. However my lectures were so popular that I got three times in a row the students' award for the best teacher. After that students were forbidden to give awards by the department.
Joe: Because you were getting too many?
Ark: Right. Because I was getting too many and I was reminded that perhaps I should change my teaching so that it is more like ordinary teaching because otherwise I am attracting too many students and there were not much left for others. (laughter)
Jason: You're serious, right?
Joe: So the truth is still appealing then, to students, if they thought you were the most popular because you were essentially...
Ark: Oh they loved me.
Joe: ...telling them the unknowns that they have to discover.
Ark: Yeah.
Joe: They have something to discover.
Ark: They loved me and they made their careers later on. So okay, they made their Ph.D., they found their jobs, but then they went into the normal routine and they've forgotten everything about being open-minded.
Joe: So it wasn't continued on in further research.
Ark: No.
Joe: Well, that's pretty grim on the one hand. But it also suggests that people do still have an interest and love for the truth and it's just being suppressed in the world today.
Jason: I think people as a whole actually do. I think that the world does kind of illustrate that and like I said the other day, all of the efforts to suppress and distract people are simply for the fact that if they relented for one second, people would just basically go "Hey wait a minute. This is a great big ball of shit".
Joe: Yeah. They have to keep up the pressure.
Jason: They have to keep the pressure on.
Joe: Well maybe one day they'll over-stretch themselves and something will break out.
Jason: Eventually people will get tired of the way things are. They'll get sensory overload, like watching too much TV in a day. There's a point at which you really just want to clean the house or something because you're tired of it. And that's going to happen to people pretty soon I think.
Joe: Yeah. And maybe it'll be demonstrated to them by Mother Nature. Maybe that'll be the catalyst.
Niall: I think so. For all the terror that may or may not come with it, it could be the catalyst that literally unleashes a wave of curiosity that we have.
Joe: That's pent up inside us, that has been suppressed.
Niall: Yeah.
Pierre: Well there's a choice I suppose on the conscious or unconscious level. And with this, as you call it, sensory overload, either you wake up or you disintegrate.
Joe: Yeah. So there may be something coming down the pipeline. It seems like things are happening on the planet right now so maybe our purported or theorised break out moment in terms of the truth and people waking up a little bit are maybe not too far off in the future. We can only hope. It may not be pleasant but if it does happen, you can bet we'll be reporting it here on SOTT Talk Radio. I think we're going to leave it there for this week. Thanks for all of our listeners for listening and for your comments. Thank you to Arky for his valuable insights.
Ark: You're welcome.
Jason: Thank you Ark.
Joe: And to Pierre and of course to Jason.
Pierre: Thank you.
Joe: And to Niall.
Niall: Good night to everyone.
Joe: And we'll see you all...
Niall: Next week.
Joe: We'll imagine you all next week.
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