Dogma in the Scientific World

The homie @themillionthings left a really thought provoking comment on the post I made the other day about my upcoming physics book. Attached was a youtube video to a Ted talk by a guy named Rupert Sheldrake, evidently a friend of Terrance McKenna's, and Sheldrake spoke of "universal constants" and the blind faith we have that these numbers and values are permanent, unchanging fixtures of our reality. Among the universal constants, of course, we have the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the planck units, and many others. In my book I devote considerable time to questioning the notion of a fixed, invariable speed of light, which leads to all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions. I realized after listening to Sheldrake's talk that there are many other constants in the modern physics paradigm which are similarly regarded as immutable. Not only that, but some of these constants are determined by the averages of many disparate values or they are erroneously produced by the results of "intellectual phase-locking," where researchers skew their data to reflect accepted measurements. Sheldrake's anecdote illustrates the problem better than I can myself:

I went to see the head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure constants. And I asked him about this, I said “What do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945?”

And he said “Oh dear, you’ve uncovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science.”

So I said “Well, could the speed of light have actually dropped? And that would have amazing implications if so.”

He said “No, no, of course it couldn’t have actually dropped. It’s a constant!”

“Oh, well then how do you explain the fact that everyone was finding it going much slower during that period? Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?”

“We don’t like to use the word ‘fudge’.”

I said “Well, so what do you prefer?”

He said “Well, we prefer to call it ‘intellectual phase-locking’.”

So I said “Well if it was going on then, how can you be so sure it’s not going on today? And the present values produced are by intellectual phase-locking?”

And he said “Oh we know that’s not the case.”

And I said “How do we know?”

He said “Well”, he said “we’ve solved the problem.”

And I said “Well how?”

And he said “Well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972.”

So I said “But it might still change.”

He said “Yes, but we’d never know it, because we’ve defined the meter in terms of the speed of light, so the units would change with it!”

So he looked very pleased about that, they’d fixed that problem.

But I said “Well, then what about big G?” The gravitational constant, known in the trade as “big G”, it was written with a capital G. Newton’s universal gravitational constant. “That’s varied by more than 1.3% in recent years. And it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time.”

And he said “Oh well, those are just errors. And unfortunately there are quite big errors with big G.”

So I said “Well, what if it’s really changing? I mean, perhaps it is really changing."

And then I looked at how they do it, what happens is they measure it in different labs, they get different values on different days, and then they average them. And then other labs around the world do the same, they come out usually with a rather different average. And then the international committee of metrology meets every ten years or so and average the ones from labs all around the world to come up with the value of big G. But what if G were actually fluctuating? What if it changed?
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I know that that was a long digression, but that's really amazing isn't it? Two consecutive decades of the whole scientific community coming up with similarly low values for the speed of light. Either it's a result of them all mimicking the values agreed upon by their peers, or it's a result of them all arriving at the same low value. Either way, it suggests that our modern day belief in a permanently fixed velocity for light may be a belief more dogmatic than rational. But, as Sheldrake tells us, the manner by which we could question this modern equivalent to scripture has been circumvented by the 1972 introduction of new length constants, which define the meter in terms of the speed of light. Imagine that: the speed of light in meters per second, while the meter is itself defined by the speed of light. This is a circular definition with nothing underpinning it, but it cannot be amended because an adjustment to the speed of light would adjust the length of the meter in equal proportion.

While I was thinking about all this, I stumbled upon another youtube video with a very different subject but a common theme:

The video talks about the famous "Monty Hall Problem," where a gameshow host tells us there are three doors, two of which have goats behind them, and one of which has a prize. The contestant picks a door, then immediately afterward a second door is opened by the host, revealing goats. The host then asks the contestant, "Do you want to stick with your original choice or change to the other door?" Common sense might tell you that each of the doors have a 1/3 chance of holding the prize and it doesn't make a statistical difference whether or not you change to the other doors. A literal genius by the name of Marilyn Mach vos Savant (what a name) was one of the first to declare this common sense dead wrong. Simple statistics demonstrate that you should always change doors. This might sound like old news, but it was heresy when Mach vos Savant first declared it. She received countless letters calling her a fool (and worse), and many of these letters came from professional mathematicians, statisticians, university professors, and other members of the academic world. 92% of 10,000 respondents all believed that the highest IQ person on Earth was wrong on this simple statistical problem. More concerning--- 65% of all responders from the world of academia (professors, mathematicians, statisticians) all believed that she was wrong.

Just try to wrap your head around this: in 1990 the world's smartest person states a simple statistical fact, and for months afterward the world consensus-- from academics to lay people-- is that she's wrong, that the sky is green, that up is down, that something objectively wrong is objectively right. This is a prime example of dogma and tradition trumping intellectual rigor, logic, and facts. If we cannot trust the academic world to make the proper conclusion on a problem that is now routinely resolved by elementary school math experiments, how can we trust them to come to the proper conclusions on the far deeper and far more complex questions pertaining to the fundamental nature of our universe. If dogma can govern a field as cut and dry as statistics, how can we be so naive as to think that dogma does not also govern the realm of physics? And if physics is led blindly by tradition and "intellectual phaselocking," what might it look like if we were to remove our blinders and rose-colored glasses? I certainly don't know, but I hope very much to find out.