I am both the warner and the only reporter — a strange situation to be in. My scientific results prove that the currently running LHC experiment is going to shrink the earth to 2 cm in perhaps 5 years’ time with a probability of 8 percent if continued. They stay un-disproved for 3 years but no one takes notice. What is the explanation?
If my results were nonsense, some scientist would have taken the trouble to dismantle them publicly under her or his own name so I could respond and an open consensus – if need be that to disagree — could form as befits both science and the dignity of the public.
The fact that CERN currently continues in defiance of a Cologne court’s request to first admit a scientific safety conference is equally baffling, since again the public appears to have the right to know.
While CERN keeps a low profile, a well-equipped blog owned by a member of CERN’s sister institution, DESY, substitutes refutation by ad-hominem assaults to influence the media. Although experienced hatred is better than no response at all, this response throws a scant light on CERN’s science.
Why not demonstrate to the world why the gothic-R theorem and the Telemach theorem and the miniquasar theorem and the immunity of neutron stars theorem are false? A single one out of them, if disproved, will instantaneously transform me into CERN’s best ally as CERN well knows. Never was there a more manifest fear of the truth, it appears.
My last hope are the current victims of the technological hubris of another nuclear machine. They alone have nothing to lose by speaking the truth. Maybe one of them feels that a small amount of their remaining lifetime is worth investing to safeguard the lives of those dearest to them? For it is only contrition before heaven that can save us all,
Prof. Otto E. Rossler, chaos researcher, University of Tubingen, Germany (For J.O.R., April 13, 2011)
Your scientific results don’t prove anything. In science, only experiments can prove a theory. So you want to prevent experiments that may show your theory is correct ?!!? Quite a unique situation in scientific history…
It’s not the job of scientists in CERN or anywhere to contradict your theory. Their job is to verify their own theory. Your job is to bring an experimental evidence of yours. If it’s positive and non destructive, then you will become the Saviour of the World, the Eternal Hero and the first Physics + Peace Nobel Prize ever.
Otherwise, if the LHC shows that you are wrong, you’ll shut up forever ok ? I promise I will shut up forever if you are right :-)
Sweet positivism in the middle of the night — but thank you cordially for it.
Professor, you have my utmost respect and the respect of all socially responsible people for your request to CERN to pull themselves together and stop this unending advance into the unknown results of ever increasing beam energies, regardless of their understandable fears that the whole enterprise might be put on hold, or even canceled like the rather larger US one.
The plain fact is that you and others — eg Plaga — have raised legitimate concerns given the fact that no one at CERN or anywhere else really has any certain idea what this adventure will yield. Moreover, every single safety argument they have advanced in the past has eventually been retired as inadequate or in error, either disproved or open to serious challenge. Physicists have no right to fob off concerned members of the public with their specious argument that the aeons of cosmic ray impact upon the Earth prove the LHC — where the conditions are different, and momentum may be conserved by the production of slow moving mBlackHoles and other debris after collision.
To peddle this obsolete argument brazenly (as several have done to me when challenged in public discussion here in New York City) is sheer hypocrisy and demeaning to the physics community as a whole. The retreat to neutron stars and white dwarf stars already looks open to enough objectuions that it probably won’t stand for long either, so the truth is no one has any good reasoning to show that the risk is non existent.
We simply dont know what the products will be as everyone cheerfully admits from Brian Greene to Brian Cox to CERN itself. Therefore it is impossible to estimate the chances of any one danger, and impossible to say it is small.
Even if the whole affair merely demonstrates that physics theory is not yet good enough on other side, either to justify safety or to justify expecting catastrophe, we still need to properly assess the possibilities in a public review by responsible parties who are not committed to the project in terms of their career or their other interests. At the very least, some safety provisions might be implemented, other than the current slow ratcheting up.
CERN are completely irresponsible toward the public to evade this simple proposition, and they are quite wrong to ignore your protests. The situation is being analyzed at length on http://www.scienceguardian. com and I hope you will agree with what we write there and correct any errors of fact.
Erratum: The above should read “prove that the LHC is safe”, of course.
http://www.newaidsreview.org/
Thank you for this most interesting responsible response.
Thank you, Dr Rossler, also, let’s hope you receive a responsible response from CERN itself very soon, as this absurdity has gone on long enough, especially as we now have the additional conjecture that the Higgs is none other than the inflaton. But cynics will fear that the juggernaut locomotion of a 3000 physicist strong system with a committee for a head and career interest for fuel is impossible to pause.
(The url is properly http://www.scienceguardian.com, please note).
Dear Anthony: Your giving me hope to “receive a sensible response from CERN itself very soon” is a bright light on the horizon perhaps not just for me. Take care, Otto
Meaning no disrespect — this does sound like a load of old bollocks. The general idea that the LHC is going to destroy the Earth was given the scrutiny it deserved and found completely implausible. Cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere have orders of magnitude more energy and do not cause planet-swallowing black holes when they collide with it.
Dear Mr. Nerlich:
Thank you for reminding the world that CERN claims cosmic rays likewise generate mini-blck holes — even more massive ones — which would pass right through the earth if uncharged. Accordiung to CERN, the maximally dense neutron stars would be liable to being eaten inside out — but they still exist. This argument is correct except for the “minor” omission that neutron stars are immune to being eaten inside out owing to ther frictionless superfluid cores. Inside the latter black holes cannot grow. This quantum result, known to CERN in time, was suppressed in their safety report. It would be nice to learn how come. Thank you for your helpful letter.
Professor,
If mini-black holes are produced by cosmic ray collisions, and do not evaporate, there should ba a background of fast moving black holes in the universe, as cosmic rays hit stars over the years…what effects would they have?
Professor, you have our sympathy for the discouraging reception you receive on Web threads such as this one, when people who are under researched on the topic write facile rejections of your important public global alert as if you were unfamiliar with an obsolete safety argument, which is the only one they have heard of. They claim “no disrespect”, but what respect is there when they contradict someone with more expertise on the basis of what the safety alert “sounds like” to them?
Just to correct the record, Steve, the familiar safety argument that cosmic rays have been hitting the earth for eons and caused no problem was contradicted by collider defenders themselves in 1999, and featured in Marton Rees’s book published in the US as Our Final Hour in 2003 by Basic (Perseus). If you like, you can read the details at ScienceGuardian.com where we are running over this discussion for those who would like to catch up with what is really being said and written, and not merely media reports. The idea you produce as showing Rossler’s doubts are “bollocks” is known as Cosmic Ray 1, and any informed physicist of any stature will confirm, if you ask him or her personally, as we have done several times in public, that it is this Cosmic Ray 1 rationale which is bollocks. not Rossler’s objections.
The basic principle is that of conservation of momentum. If the cosmic rays that strike the planet have produced mBHs or any other dangerous debris, those particles have flown off into space at colossal speed and therefore have done none of the damage they could have done if they had lingered here.
On the other hand, ‘photons at other particles collided at the LHCat ever increasing energies are expected to produce mBHs and possibly even strangelets and on the same principle that two trains colliding head on will yield debris which will not be traveling as fast as the trains were, the LHC collisions will also produce debris which will stay on or in the Earth, because it will be traveling at less than escape velocity, with some possibly even stationery.
If you read the CERN safety reports of 2008 carefully, you will see very quiet admissions of this kind too, at least in the public version. It is important to read exactly what CERN has been saying, since admissions of this kind are kept quiet and may even be omitted from its reports (this one was from the guides issued for the benefit of scientists), for the simple reason that physicists are very wary of having a spanner poked into their gigantic microscope, having lost the battle for the even bigger collider in the US in the 90s.
And given the level of public ignorance on the topic, who can blame them. But there is still no excuse for misleading the public by peddling this sop to public concern which has been obsolete for over 12 years. Professional scientists should at least tell the truth in public.
Apologies for the typos. It is Martin Rees, and it should be “photons AND other particles”. There is no means of editing posts on this page, unfortunately.
Thank you, dear Mr. AnthonyL. I appreciate this encouragement. At the same time I should add that all I am asking for is to be relieved of my hopefully false results. To give an example: my second major result is the “unchargedness” (universal lack of charge) of black holes. The profession so far believes that this cannot be owing to the venerable Gauss-Stokes theorem of the 19th century. For if because of the latter a fraction of the ultrafast natural cousins of the hoped-for artificial black holes from CERN is charged (so the third “hair” on the “pate” of a black hole in the terminology of name-giver John Wheeler is not cut off), the fact of earth still existing proves that CERN is innocuous. I will then retract my warnings. Unfortunately, my Telemach theorem cuts-off the 3rd hair (so that only the first and the second, mass and angular momentum) remain. Telemach stays unchallenged to the best of my knowledge.
My colleague, Hermann Nicolai, made it clear to me in March 2009 that this is the essential point in his opinion, which is well taken. I have asked him ever since to come up with a counter-proof to my lack-of-charge result in defense of Gauss-Stokes. He refuses to reply. I hope he will forgive me my mentioning his name in public. My excuse for doing so is that if he is right, he no doubt will appreciate the opportunity to demonstrate to the world the weakness of my position as a warner and simultaneously rehabilitate CERN. Conversely, if no answer comes from his part, the public will realize that the question is indeed maximally interesting scientifically — and perhaps not just scientifically. This interest of the planet justifies my going public, I hope: Dear Mr. Nicolai, please forgive me!
Professor, it seems to any reasonable person that if scientists theorize as to the safety of the collider experiments, as they escalate to ever more excruciating levels, and these theoretical analyses are taken seriously, then unrefuted theory which gives pause to charging ahead without review and careful consideration of the possibilities should be taken equally seriously.
One should also mention that group think has always proved to be a bad basis for scientific conclusions, as the typical Nobel prize often reminds us. All major scientific breakthroughs and progress replace the previous accepted paradigm, which is always the basis for group think, and which therefore indicates that group think is unreliable (unless it represents a general summing up of determinedly individual thinking, which is rarely the case).
Dire catastrophe typically seems extremely unlikely to to those aboard the Titanic, or as a fire starts threatening a crowded disco, and lives are often lost to this psychology, as people tend to feel safe in a crowd, and only the individuals really respond quickly.
It is rather disappointing to see that large crowds of physicist are no better than other groups of humans, as in this case, especially when they have formed an institution, as in this case, and are subject to the same myopic complacency. They fancy themselves more intelligent than the average member of the public, and they are in a narrow sense. But they seem to be subject to the same sheepish psychological paralysis of their normally acute perceptions as any other large group of humans.
Anyone such as yourself challenging the orthodoxy of what amounts to the high Church of physics must be prepared to nail their paper to the church door, and possibly be burned at the stake for it. At the very least you should be spared the reflex smugness of those who reply to your concerns on Web threads with their triumphant quotation of out of date replies to your concerns. That is not too much to ask.
We are merely asking for respect for your ideas and your courage in making them public, and we also ask for similar respect from your colleagues.
(Correction: in the previous comment photons should read protons, of course).
Dear AnthonyL:
Thank you for your refreshingly sad remarks.
I would add that the lay public and the media ought to be able to see the fact that no one in the physics establishment comes forward with her or his counter-proof, so that people could see where the scientific dis-sensus lies. For strangely, there really is no dissensus, only allegations of dissensus that are never substantiated and have no name or quotation behind them.
I today learned the technical term “Self-protection Argument” from Rudolf Uebbing, which refers to the fact that all CERN physicists claim they would not agree to the experiment themselves if they were not sure that their own families are not put in danger thereby.
I found this ingenious. The fact had been encountered by me before but I had overlooked its deep significance. Such loyalty, if it cannot be accompanied by factual evidence that the individual can and does reproduce on the spot, is a very strange phenomenon indeed. Do you have an explanation? It looks like collective madness to me, but I am of course partisan here and most likely subject to the very same blindness with the opposite sign.
But any third person could make sure that the truth is put on the table, could she not?
Professor, you (and your friend) have put your finger on the basic problem driving the defensive politics of large systems of human cooperation with a shared goal, whether BP, Philip Morris, government departments, CERN, or scientific fields based on a false paradigm, such as HIV/AIDS, and cancer. This is the problem that we have been dealing with at scienceguardian.com for seven years in many areas.
The cognitive dissonance introduced by the conflict between group goals (maintaining a system’s efficiency, forward momentum, profits etc) and individual goals (preserving the health of self and family, if not society at large) is removed in the individual by removing the conflicting logic and facts from consciousness, ie there is simply a brain phenomenon where denial prfecludes problem material from view.
The good physicists and others at CERN are personally unaware of the existence or validity of safety doubts, since their minds do not contemplate such material consciously, let alone openmindedly, but shelve it out of sight of their own reasoning as cognitive dissonance requires.
The brain itself tends to interpret incoming data before its reaches consciousness, research has found, and sufficiently threatening heresy is decoded as invalid before it even reaches consciousness.
Clearly your friend’s point is a good one, and logically valid. Ceteris paribus, intelligent physicists would not risk sacrificing the lives of their wives and children on the altar of finding the Higgs boson, if they allowed themselves to become aware that there is any such risk. But they don’t. They are not fully conscious of their own denial.
That’s the way the human mind works, it seems. All ideas are colored by emotion because the brain is continually informed by the body, research has now shown, so there is really no brain-emotion barrier, as there is a blood-brain barrier, and the entire nervous system is involved in formulating ideas. So even the best physicists in the world are not emotionally equipped to be disinterested in viewing the theory you present to them. Only another individual outside the system who does not automatically share its goals and the need to deny problems will be able to read your paper with balanced attention. That is the explanation of your experience of a strange absence of response from your expert colleagues, let alone CERN.
You should not be surprised to find that even the best minds will start saying remarkably foolish things when you confront them with the possibility of putting a spanner in the works of the LHC. They are only operating with half their marbles in play!
The phenomenon is seen in all fields. Ask any Nobel winner, and he or she will complain bitterly of the inattention and stupid rejections that dogged their early efforts.
That is why humans involved in major risk activities amid conflicting interests must always be monitored by independent reviewers who do not share the group goals. That is why your call for review is not being answered, even by your friendly colleagues, and certainly not by anybody at CERN.
Forgive this long explanation but I am writing for the benefot of any readers of this thread who are unaware of this phenomenon which I am sure as a lively and polymath thinker for your entire career you must have recognized yourself as soon as I mentioned it, but for the fact you are unwilling to accept that your smart and honest peers are subject to it!
Errata — Sorry about the typos — should be “precludes problem material” para 1 and last para “benefit of any readers”.
Dear Anthony:
Very interesting.
Let me add that I am not unwilling to accept that my colleagues do not respond at all. With the help of your words, I can say that I understand and accept this as something innocent and unavoidable, but not as something that the world needs to be living with as long as it still goes on.
You have shown the world that an outside inspector is always needed. You are one of these outside inspectors. Can you not muster others? Any journalist ought to be in the same position. It would be stupid if we lost our all-encompassing planet, including its past and the bible, for inadvertent lack of awareness of what is going on. Only because no outside supervisor is on duty.
You are my first independent reviewer. And not just mine.
Professor, you are, as I surmised, very aware of the essential problem, and only too right in calling for independent review, even from journalists (which we are trying to provide at eg the latest post at scienceguardian.com — CERN’s LHC: Black Holes Welcome, Regardless, at http://www.scienceguardian.com/blog/cern-ii-2011.htm), but alas, journalists are subject to much the same exclusion strategy as independent minded scientists, sorry to say.
For example, reading your papers we understand (correct us if we are wrong) that you demonstrated in your first paper in 2008 that it would take an infinite time for anything eg a positive charge to travel from the core of a black hole to its horizon of gravitational influence, and therefore the idea of a positively charged black hole safely dissipating via Hawking radiation was a non starter. Hermann Nicolai, charged by CERN with responding to this theoretical depth charge exploded under the good ship Safety Arguments of CERN Regarding the LHC (please excuse the lurid metaphor), seemed to acknowledge that your logic was quite acceptable, but maintained that your paper’s numbers were not consistent with cosmological data. In 2009 you published a revised paper in which the necessary adjustments had been made, whereupon you were met and have since been met with a significant silence, suggesting to interested observers that there is so far no good reply to your analysis, and that motivation to acknowledge this is lacking. We rule out the possibility that you are so far off base that the paper is unworthy of reply, because your esteemed colleague Nicolai’s initial reaction showed he thought it was respectable, at least in his expert view, even though CERN might wish otherwise.
So why the silence? Apparently it is standard in scientific disputes between the establishment in a field and a respectable dissenter to deal with the unanswerable by ignoring it, soon followed by ostracism of the dissenter. We have in your case, a paper, acknowledged to be worthy with a reply, but that reply actually was mistaken in referring to a 1915 paper by Max Abraham, when in fact you had in mind his 1912 paper. The objections Nicolai made in regard to data fit, you took into account. Now the strategy has changed to what we used to refer to in our schooldays as “being sent to Coventry” ie no one will talk to you.
This seems to parallel rather closely what has happened to Rainer Plaga, whose paper was first criticized by Giddings and Mangano in a way which involved them objecting to the wrong equation, and after this debacle, no further defense of CERN safety argument in the face of Plaga’s objections was attempted. Instead, he went from being Nature’s correspondent on an expert topic to someone who no longer is accepted for publication anywhere, as far as one can discern. Certainly we cannot find any recent paper by Plaga.
We specialize at Science Guardian in how science is distorted by those at the top of a field clinging to outmoded and disproved ideas on which their high position is based. The phenomenon of silence followed by ostracism as a standard treatment of dissenters in the establishment has been seen in other areas, eg HIV/AIDS and cancer. Although this has always been the way in all academic fields, including science, we believe it has become much worse in the last fifty or sixty years because the funding for much of science has become serious politics. The gigantic sum of some $9 billion required by the LHC with its 10,000 or more scientists involved, whose careers hang on its continued operation and perhaps its results, simply makes it an extreme case.
You ask journalists to help. But it seems that journalists have become entrapped in economic trends as restrictively as scientists. Publishers don’t finance investigative pieces in print as willingly as they did in previous eras, and in science in particular there are very few science critics among science journalists, who are simply not given the resources to do investigative work, even if they are qualified to do it.
Any journalists who do attempt it are usually defeated by the response of the top scientists in the field, who simply tell their editors that they are wrong, and the editors know no better than to accept their authority, not having time to investigate who is correct in areas where the expertise is supposedly beyond the lay reader.
It is therefore very difficult for journalists to come to the rescue of good scientists who are mistreated in this way. The predicament of Peter Duesberg who pointed out at early as 1987 in the most respectable journals in the field that HIV could not be the cause of “HIV/AIDS”, which merely consists of misinterpreting and mislabeling other medical problems from a variety of causes, is typical. Hundreds of articles in major newspapers and magazines and more than thirty books could not prevent the politics from defeating him both in science and in the media. Most scientists and lay people now assume he must have been wrong.
In that case only a few hundred thousand lives were at stake. Now we have a situation where the entire planet is the gamble, and no review looks likely. All we can do is hope that in this cosmological game of Russian Roulette, the chamber which is at one end of the barrel pointed at the head of the human race does not contain the bullet.
In other words, the safety argument of CERN essentially amounts to, Keep your fingers crossed!
Only a proper respect for yourself, Professor, and for Plaga and other creditable commentators, can save us from this absurdity.
Dear AnthonyL:
Only one factual improvement: ‘the time to leave the horizon to the outside world is infinite for any particle’ is what I would stress in accord with any good textbook (like Frolov and Novikov, Black Hole Physics 1998).
Everything you say I understand and accept as well-researched and convincing. But journalists have one additional weapon: They can ask, “Which scientist on the planet is bold enough to tell under their own name that she or he disagrees with the potentially life-saving new result, and why so?”
If then not a single scientist is found to defend the establishment under his or her own name, the public (and the publisher) learns a precious news which cannot possibly hurt the magazine’s status, or can it?
For the public has a right to be informed about interesting and life-saving news, a layperson would think.
Forgive me that I feel mightily stimulated by your kind open-laying report which ought to be distributed widely among the well-meaning. To which to my knowledge no other profession deserves better to be reckoned than the one you presented so convincingly.
By the way: Did you watch the movie “And the Band Played on” with Matthew Modine?
In deep respect, Otto E. Rossler
Thank you for the correction, Professor Rossler.
Not completely sure what you mean in your comment above but you seem to be saying that if a reputable scientist disagrees with the rest of his establishment colleagues about the risks involved in a collider such as the LHC, or the global assumption (so far unproven in the literature) that HIV causes AIDS symptoms, then if no one reputable can be found to defend the established view under his or her name, the public will see the situation and come to the obvious conclusion ie that the established view is indefensible, except with politics. Is that right?
Unfortunately, the way it usually plays out seems to be somewhat less satisfactory. What usually happens is that the reputation of the critic is undermined, and this is done by ignoring him, not allowing him to publish in journals, not supporting his funding, not inviting him to conferences, etc and by letting the fellow traveling know-nothings who get some kind of psychological release by supporting the establishment in matters they do not actually understand, to write scornful and derogatory entries on various Web threads and blogs.
Thus everyone who matters decides that they no longer need to take the reviewer seriously, especially as more and more time passes and he receives no public support from colleagues. Any journalists who try and cover the matter impartially soon find editors will abandon the topic for more acceptable news. There is virtually no investigative journalism in the realm of scientific debate, which is treated by the public and the media as a game of numbers where the “consensus” is right (until overturned by a Nobel).
Only if major new evidence appears which supports him can the dissenting reviewer reverse this process, and only if it is sufficiently publicized, but it is generally difficult for contrary evidence to appear and be publicized when the entire field is based on the conventional wisdom, because so-called “confirmation bias” tends to result in most people rejecting new evidence which runs counter to their fundamental beliefs, so they don’t even consider it. For example the idea that bacteria caused ulcers won the Nobel in the 90s only after a great struggle earlier to win any kind of publication at all. Ask any Nobel prizewinner and he or she will typically tell the same story.
Of course, the end of the world as it is swallowed into a black hole or down a wormhole into another universe would certainly change a lot of minds, but unfortunately they would not be around to say they are sorry and apologize to those such as yourself who were proved rather dramatically right.
It is confirmation bias which is your enemy, Professor, except among those few who are original thinkers such as yourself, and know that science proceeds towards enlightenment only be replacing the previous paradigm with something better.
That is one reason we respect you and demand respect for your ideas. It is evidence of a distinguished mind that a thinker does not rest on his laurels and automatically support the status quo, but is able to view it critically, even later on in a career.
Yes, we saw the film And the Band Played On. The author Randy Shilts Alas died of the very misapprehension on which the book is founded, the idea that HIV is the transmissible culprit for AIDS, despite many warnings from those in the know. Perhaps because his book depended on that very assumption he found it difficult to challenge it, or perhaps like most people he found it difficult to challenge the medical profession who were treating him. So he like so many died from the drugs that were his treatment.
Unfortunately HIV/AIDS is a supreme example of an incorrect paradigm which has triumphed globally to the extent that every book on the topic, every conference, every textbook, every magazine piece, every movie, with very rare and rather admirable exceptions, work with all the medical and scientific journals and institutions to create one gigantic confirmation bias in the minds of experts and laymen alike that will probably endure forever, because all evidence however contrary is now reinterpreted in terms of the reigning notion.
Similarly the bias against concern over colliders will probably defeat any critic such as yourself until something very unexpected and alarming is produced. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be what you fear.
Sorry, that should read “by replacing the previous paradigm”.
Dear AnthonL:
I never got a more sympathetic and deep — and hope-deflating — support.
There are two points of disagreement, the first important, the second a side issue (but so only in comparison).
First: You assume on the basis of much professional experience that no influential philosopher or layman seeing what you described would wake up planet-wide. I have many young and not so young supporters who show me that the quasi-equilibrium is about to flip over. Only the time window may not suffice…
The second point is, of course, my medical upbringing and the “one disease, one pathogen” rule. I must admit I do not know anything bout the alternative theory which you researched regarding the AIDS epidemic. I only know that non-believers in the virus have wrecked much damage — if it is true that whole countries lost a generation while others who followed the traditional medical rules did not (as I cannot judge). So you see how “ordinary” my thinking here is. And hence how hopeless my own cause must be in comparison.
The high level of discussion that you have brought to the issue is, however, bound to have a good effect on the planet. Thank you for having forced this course.
Otto
It is good news that young supporters have come to your side, Professor, and one certainly hopes that this pool of respect will widen sufficiently to induce greater respect and a more respectful reply than the leaders of the field have so far given you, even from the beginning, when they made casually derogatory statements eg they would not expect your paper to gain publication in a respected journal on its merit.
We would have credited that insulting judgment more easily if it had been accompanied by a thorough and respectful line of theoretical reasoning which took issue with your assumptions and your logic on a reasoned basis which extended to reading and replying to any adjustments you made, as you have now done.
As it is we see mostly psychology at work, the exceedingly unprofessional lack of objectivity which derives from enormous confirmation bias, and the group politics and self interest which feeds it, conscious or not.
Since we have known many of the most distinguished and original scientists in the world in the course of our work we recognize behavior that is not practiced by the best minds.
The true elite know that the essence of good science is to know that one may be mistaken, and one’s perceptions however clever may be skewed, and that one should always check one’s assumptions and one’s conclusions, however valid they may seem to one — especially when the public is at risk, not to mention the entire planet.
In other words, one must always respect a critic of standing who suggests that one’s position may be flawed. That open mind is the characteristic we look for in scientists, and if it is not there, we know that they are not the very best, and therefore the public should demand they answer critics, rather than allow them to dismiss reviewers with political posturing and social sanctions as they always do if they can.
In this case the stakes are high enough that the public has a right to demand a proper scientific debate which involves respect on both sides.
The issue of HIV and AIDS is one where the truth is buried beneath an avalanche of disrespect and reflex dismissal of any critique of the prima facie absurd claim that HIV is the cause, as anyone can see for them selves if they trouble to read the original papers in the original journals, which few scientists do, either within or without HIV/AIDS, let alone any journalists or other members of the lay public.
This is true despite the many ways in which the claim is prima facie absurd, and even more absurd when investigated thoroughly. Examples may be seen in today’s Science section of the New York Times, where Lawrence Altman reviews the history of the epidemic and his understanding of it. (It can be found at 30 Years In, We Are Still Learning From AIDS)
The obvious inconsistencies and fallacies Altman maintains uncritically in the course of his account and the misfit between the facts of the epidemic as recorded in the literature and the claims of the paradigm leaders he treats as gospel will tell any alert reader all they need to know about the mismatch between paradigm and good science in this area — where deaths still run at 17,000 or more in the US despite the supposed benefits of drugs that allow you to “live with AIDS”, while the number of people who are “HIV positive” has remained more or less 1 million over the last two decades in what is supposed a “heterosexually transmissible” disease, which has never created any heterosexual epidemic here despite African and Asian experience of supposed rampant HIV/AIDS where it is entirely balanced between the sexes. (We will write up the details at http://www.scienceguardian.com shortly)
These obvious problems are invisible to Altman however beneath the monster confirmation bias that has taken over his brain as well as countless otherwise able minds.
In fact, it is better not to mention the HIV/AIDS theoretical problem in discussing your ostracism by your colleagues, Professor, since though it is a symptom of exactly the same psychology it is by association going to validate your treatment in the eyes of those who are subject to confirmation bias in your own area, ie almost all of your colleagues and their supporters in blogs etc. It will double the confirmation bias with which you have to contend.
But one should point out that the Harvard researchers who condemned critical reviewers of their fond paradigm (HIV=AIDS) as having caused x number of deaths by delaying the delivery of AIDS drugs to patients in South Africa are working on the assumption that their still unproven theory is correct. Their critics would reply that on the contrary they saved x number of lives by delaying the drugs that are the actual cause of AIDS deaths, as is shown by the fact that half the people who die of “AIDS” in the US (as I say, 17,000 or more annually, according to the CDC, more according to WHO) die of drug symptoms (liver damage, etc) which are not on the list of HIV/AIDS symptoms.
A letter to the Times making these points would have zero chance of being published, of course, unless it was from Luc Montagnier, say, who finally won the Nobel two years ago for finding HIV first in AIDS patients, though like Robert Gallo of NIH, finding it in too few instances (a third) to be the cause of their ailments. Interestingly, Montagnier has publicly acknowledged HIV may not be sufficient to cause AIDS, and that it should be easily shrugged off by any healthy person. I believe he is a fundamentally decent man and good scientist who is aware of the paradigm problem in AIDS and always trying to quietly move beyond it.
But Professor Rossler, you may need a Nobel before you can get anyone to respond to you who is part of the media-science-medical system. I would be proud of having forced a different course, if that was so, but I am afraid that my two cents is worth nothing to your cause of gaining a respectful response to your concerns, and may even be a detriment.
One can understand the true picture and the psychology of denial involved in resisting truth, without having any influence on the outcome. All one can offer is to write up whatever success you do have, which may be magnified by gaining media coverage.
Let’s hope that this problem of science being distorted by power is better understood in the future and therefore counteracted in the new generation of young scientists that you have attracted. Perhaps the Internet will help in that cause.
It is good news that young supporters have come to your side, Professor, and one certainly hopes that this pool of respect will widen sufficiently to induce greater respect and a more respectful reply than the leaders of the field have so far given you, even from the beginning, when they made casually derogatory statements eg they would not expect your paper to gain publication in a respected journal on its merit.
We would have credited that insulting judgment more easily if it had been accompanied by a thorough and respectful line of theoretical reasoning which took issue with your assumptions and your logic on a reasoned basis which extended to reading and replying to any adjustments you made, as you have now done.
As it is we see mostly psychology at work, the exceedingly unprofessional lack of objectivity which derives from enormous confirmation bias, and the group politics and self interest which feeds it, conscious or not.
Since we have known many of the most distinguished and original scientists in the world in the course of our work we recognize behavior that is not practiced by the best minds.
The true elite know that the essence of good science is to know that one may be mistaken, and one’s perceptions however clever may be skewed, and that one should always check one’s assumptions and one’s conclusions, however valid they may seem to one — especially when the public is at risk, not to mention the entire planet.
In other words, one must always respect a critic of standing who suggests that one’s position may be flawed. That open mind is the characteristic we look for in scientists, and if it is not there, we know that they are not the very best, and therefore the public should demand they answer critics, rather than allow them to dismiss reviewers with political posturing and social sanctions as they always do if they can.
In this case the stakes are high enough that the public has a right to demand a proper scientific debate which involves respect on both sides.
The issue of HIV and AIDS is one where the truth is buried beneath an avalanche of disrespect and reflex dismissal of any critique of the prima facie absurd claim that HIV is the cause, as anyone can see for them selves if they trouble to read the original papers in the original journals, which few scientists do, either within or without HIV/AIDS, let alone any journalists or other members of the lay public.
This is true despite the many ways in which the claim is prima facie absurd, and even more absurd when investigated thoroughly. Examples may be seen in today’s Science section of the New York Times, where Lawrence Altman reviews the history of the epidemic and his understanding of it. (It can be found at 30 Years In, We Are Still Learning From AIDS)
The obvious inconsistencies and fallacies Altman maintains uncritically in the course of his account and the misfit between the facts of the epidemic as recorded in the literature and the claims of the paradigm leaders he treats as gospel will tell any alert reader all they need to know about the mismatch between paradigm and good science in this area — where deaths still run at 17,000 or more in the US despite the supposed benefits of drugs that allow you to “live with AIDS”, while the number of people who are “HIV positive” has remained more or less 1 million over the last two decades in what is supposed a “heterosexually transmissible” disease, which has never created any heterosexual epidemic here despite African and Asian experience of supposed rampant HIV/AIDS where it is entirely balanced between the sexes. (We will write up the details at http://www.scienceguardian.com shortly)
These obvious problems are invisible to Altman however beneath the monster confirmation bias that has taken over his brain as well as countless otherwise able minds.
In fact, it is better not to mention the HIV/AIDS theoretical problem in discussing your ostracism by your colleagues, Professor, since though it is a symptom of exactly the same psychology it is by association going to validate your treatment in the eyes of those who are subject to confirmation bias in your own area, ie almost all of your colleagues and their supporters in blogs etc. It will double the confirmation bias with which you have to contend.
But one should point out that the Harvard researchers who condemned critical reviewers of their fond paradigm (HIV=AIDS) as having caused x number of deaths by delaying the delivery of AIDS drugs to patients in South Africa are working on the assumption that their still unproven theory is correct. Their critics would reply that on the contrary they saved x number of lives by delaying the drugs that are the actual cause of AIDS deaths, as is shown by the fact that half the people who die of “AIDS” in the US (as I say, 17,000 or more annually, according to the CDC, more according to WHO) die of drug symptoms (liver damage, etc) which are not on the list of HIV/AIDS symptoms.
A letter to the Times making these points would have zero chance of being published, of course, unless it was from Luc Montagnier, say, who finally won the Nobel two years ago for finding HIV first in AIDS patients, though like Robert Gallo of NIH, finding it in too few instances (a third) to be the cause of their ailments. Interestingly, Montagnier has publicly acknowledged HIV may not be sufficient to cause AIDS, and that it should be easily shrugged off by any healthy person. I believe he is a fundamentally decent man and good scientist who is aware of the paradigm problem in AIDS and always trying to quietly move beyond it.
But Professor Rossler, you may need a Nobel before you can get anyone to respond to you who is part of the media-science-medical system. I would be proud of having forced a different course, if that was so, but I am afraid that my two cents is worth nothing to your cause of gaining a respectful response to your concerns, and may even be a detriment.
One can understand the true picture and the psychology of denial involved in resisting truth, without having any influence on the outcome. All one can offer is to write up whatever success you do have, which may be magnified by gaining media coverage.
Let’s hope that this problem of science being distorted by power is better understood in the future and therefore counteracted in the new generation of young scientists that you have attracted. Perhaps the Internet will help in that cause.
The potential danger of black holes at the LHC is the important issue to which Prof. Rossler has alerted the world. It is totally unrelated to the merits or failings of an alternative view of AIDS. There have been many dissident views in science and medicine — some right and many wrong. To tarbrush the case against the LHC by confounding it with unpopular dissenting views of HIV/AIDS seems inappropriate and illogical.
The title of Dr. Rossler’s article suggests that “No single scientist openly contradicts my results.” In it he writes, “If my results were nonsense, some scientist would have taken the trouble to dismantle them publicly under her or his own name so I could respond…” The article also suggests that CERN has made “no response” to his papers..
Yet in the comments both he and AnthonyL refer to criticisms of his black hole papers by physicist Hermann Nicolai, director of the Albert Einstein Institute. Elsewhere, Dr. Rossler has indicated that Dr. Landua of CERN agreed to send his papers to several physicists for comment. Since late 2008, CERN’s public report “The Safety of the LHC” ended with two paragraphs about Dr. Rossler’s studies and gave links to three critiques by physicists Nicolai, Giulini, and Bruhn.
As Anthony pointed out, the first critique by Nicolai confused a 1915 proposal by Max Abraham with the 1912 proposal to which Rossler’s paper had referred. The 2nd critique, by Giulini and Nicolai, referred to discrepancies with cosmological data, but these disappeared when the Rossler’s theorems were further developed in 2008–2009. The Bruhn critique amounts to a confession that Bruhn didn’t understand Rossler’s paper. The three critiques are thus flawed and inadequate, and refer to the 2007 version of Rossler’s paper. Apparently there has been no reply to his 2009 revision, which merits serious attention and is available at LHCfacts.org.
@Robert Houston, if you reread the comments exchanged above, you will see that the topic was not the right or wrongness of Professor Rossler’s theoretical paper, but the evident fact that it is not being fully and properly addressed by CERN defenders. and the reasons for this.
As he states he is now suffering a lack of respectful response on a continuing basis, following his first accommodation of objections, some of which were quite off the mark. They are now ignoring him. So the present situation powerfully suggests that a review should be conducted by an independent expert panel to expose and weigh the claims of CERN that the LHC is safe to operate at escalating beam energies, bearing in mind the possibilities theorized not only by Rossler, but also by Rainer Plaga, and even by theorists on the staff of CERN.
The exchange above was specifically concerned with whether confirmation bias and other psychological factors fueled by group and private interests lie behind the silence that now greets Professor Rossler’s theoretical doubts, and those of others, The situation with regard to HIV and AIDS is very relevant. Similar serious doubts about the ruling wisdom in the field, concerns explained and justified in the literature, on whether the paradigm HIV=AIDS is valid at all, exist. Their reception has for a long time been one of silence and ad hominem disparagement.
The issue of why Rossler is now being greeted with silence, the topic of his article above, makes it very appropriate and logical to mention HIV/AIDS, therefore. The reason for mentioning it is not the merits and failings of the alternative view of AIDS, as such, but the similar enormous confirmation bias which obtains in both arenas, ruling out public debate in similar fashion. If you are unaware of this, please refer to earlier posts at Science Guardian.com which deal extensively with the problem.
Also, you imply that Professor Rossler is misleading us by stating that his paper has received no response. Perhaps you would care to point out where Professor Rossler states this. Possibly you were misled by his phrasing. What he said in the article above is that no one has disproved his paper, or disproved any of the four major parts of his thesis which together suggest dire possibilities if the LHC is allowed to escalate without pause for further safety review.
He then mentioned that a blog run by a member of DESY had resorted to ad hominem assaults, in place of scientific refutation, and joked that possibly this “hatred” was “better than no response at all” . But it ws clear that he meant response by the blog, not by CERN theorists.
To suggest otherwise is to accuse the unfortunate professor of wanting to mislead us, which would be disrespectful, which I am sure is the opposite of your attention. The whole point of this comment thread is that Professor Rossler deserves every respect as a qualified and responsible debater and theoretical doubter in this arena, and should not be ignored, attacked ad hominem, or any other diversionary tactic used.
Since you are clearly one of the very few outside observers who have respected Professor Rossler as a theorist sufficiently to read his papers with full attention, and you note that the responses so far are inadequate, your comments in support of him are a valuable addition to the cause of demanding serious attention and debate for his and other critics deep concerns with the inadequacy of CERN’s safety review.
As mentioned, there are numerous dissenting views in science and medicine. These may tend to be marginalized through similar predjudicial factors as have shut out critics of the LHC. But that does not justify in this context expounding at inordinate length (3 times longer than Dr. Rossler’s post) on the entirely different issue of HIV/AIDS dissent.
The prejudicial factors involved in the LHC controversy — of which confirmation bias is only one — were well analyzed by Prof. Eric Johnson in Part 7 of his monograph on “The Black Hole Case” at http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.5480 .
I never accused Prof. Rossler of “wanting to mislead us”, as Anthony put it. Apparently, the post left out some needed qualification, such as “since Jan. 2009.” As it stands, the claim that “no single scientist openly contradicts my results” is factually in error, in view of the open critiques of his results by Drs. Nicolai, Giulini, and Bruhn at CERN’s website.
Dear Mr. Houston: Thank you for correctly mentioning that my first version of my first paper got criticized scientifically on the Internet. I responded at the time, first on the Internet and then in my revised version (since one point of criticism had been correct while leaving the main result unchanged). As to Telemach, there are no criticisms in so far. Neither CERN director Heuer nor his many collaborators did so far respond to my pertinent request. Nor did the Albert Einstein Institute, to whose journal “Einstein-online” I had submitted the paper owing to its urgency. Maybe Professor Nicolai or Professor Huisken would be ready to tell you how far the reviewing process has progressed? I would appreciate it if you could kindly inform me.
If they tell me, I’ll be happy to let you know. But surely there are more favorable journals than that of the Institute directed by your major critic.
Two new journals refuse to reply. Name me one with more chances and I will try it out.
In contrast to “Einstein-online”, there would be better chances for publishing in journals that previously accepted your work, such as “Leibniz Online” — http://www.leibniz-sozietaet.de/journal/archive/08_10/roessler.pdf .
You are right. But we know that the idea of publishing has acquired a superstitious element to it. It is and always was the content that counts. The Internet is a genuine blessing given to humanity. Otherwise we could not jointly think about how to reach the young people. A single person who reads this may have the insight saving us all.
Virtually all publishers/editors/journals are group thinking centers, where anyone who makes a bolt for freedom will lose all status and participation. A recent example is Medical Hypotheses, a journal that dared to try and publish high level analysis of HIV/AIDS epidemiology that was critical of current wisdom, where the long time editor was fired and the peer review system was revamped (from merely editorial vetting) to review by conventional thinkers. And this was a medicine dedicated to new and challenging ideas which might prove difficult to get into other journals.
Group think emotional attachment to ruling ideas guarantees that any different view gets short shrift even if there is new evidence, and even though eventually that evidence and its researcher may win the Nobel for it. People enlightened enough to be aware of this distortion of free speech and free thought in science are typically frustrated by the politics and hope that the Internet will save them, which it does to an extent, since as you say, it allows publication. But this doesn’t ensure respect from conventional peers, even if they read it, who are prejudiced against the material. Nor does the recruitment of young people, who are viewed as naive and gullible and undiscriminating in their enthusiasm for Oedipal iconoclasm.
What is always needed is the support of someone of great influence and high position, a leader, either in the field or in the media, or possibly even a book author. Even then, it may be impossible to get the support of such a person when the material is hidden in abstruse mathematics and physics.
If not that, the only hope is a moral appeal to the miscreants themselves, in this case the professionally thoughtless superannuated wiz kids who run the LHC project. Unless one of their wives starts in on them and tells them to shape up and be responsible for their actions, and the fate of the world, it is hard to see anyone getting through to them.
It is rather like asking someone in bed with a very nubile young woman to stop and consider how it appears on the moral plane. Only a threat such as news of the imminent entry of their wife can interfere with the dictates of Mother Nature.
In the case of the LHC, Mother Nature that means the ecstatic excitement with which these fellows/females view the prospect of revving up the LHC to record heights and seeing what subnuclear oddities tumble out. That the end of the world just might be involved is never going to be a ruling consideration.
Sorry that should read “journal dedicated” not “medicine dedicated”.
I agree with you that the peer-review system guarantees dogmatic science –the absence of scientific revolutions. This is why it was deliberately introduced by Leo Szilard, by the way.
I also completely agree that one of the CERN wives is the hope of the world. If they only were allowed to learn about this lifeboat.
Well; Dr Rossler, at the risk of sounding facetious, we have our heroic figure already in the form of your distinguished and thoughtful self, but unless you are already influential with a wife in key position, or preferably, more than one wife, or are prepared to try and place yourself in such a position, the outlook is not bright, and we can fully understand that you may be morally prevented from any such course of advance. On the other hand, the law celebrated by the play Six Degrees of Separation is that we are all separated from any other person on the planet by only six steps of friendship or connection, so maybe the process can be effected through more than one link.
We are merely trying to be positive, and give you some humorous relief, but we can see, Alas, that we are probably coming off too facetious for a very serious issue, one that has arisen precisely because the grown kids at CERN laugh it off.
Still, we do believe that wives and daughters may be the route to salvation, since women tend to have considerable skepticism about their husbands anyway, unless they share the same career. And possibly even then.
All that may be needed is that Carla Bruni or the equivalent at CERN be apprised of Lifeboat and there may be a breakthrough.
Yes.
Unfortunately, no man is a hero to his valet (or wife). Therefore no man at CERN or outside it at a high level is going to take his wife’s concern seriously unless a Lysistrata strategy is implemented. Even then doubts that a chorus of Old Women would be enough to take over the Akropolis in this case, however, and there are plenty of females on the CERN staff anyway. So on the whole it appears that only President Obama remains a worthwhile target, ie of sufficient stature and capable of listening and acting on the gravity of the theoretical dangers. Access through Michelle would appear hopeless unless she is given a tour of inspection of the gigantic halls of the LHC, which should give any sensible mortal pause. The first step, therefore, is to sell CERN on the idea of giving Michelle and her husband a tour of the facilities, provided of course that they are in good order at the time, and not under helium. Perhaps this should be emphasized as an addition means of pointing out the dangers, by highlighting the inept engineering capacities of LHC staff having already led to it twice falling apart like a Christmas toy for physicists where some of the bolts got lost in the unwrapping and assembly.
In the other currently very active blog here on Lifeboat, we have just arrived at a point where the strange fact that the whole discipline of physicists adheres to a false picture of gravity: To an erroneous physical interpretation of the correct Einstein principles and equations.
In short: The community of specialists believes that although even light takes an infinite amount of time to reach the horizon from the outside, or to emerge from the horizon, as the accepted equations imply, some other objects (material bodies like astronauts or electrons or virtual particles) could reach the horizon or come out from it in finite outer time.
This false belief is decades old and thus time-honored. Every citizen knows about Hawking radiation which is based on this very assumption. So it would be high time some physicist of standing in the public eye would start to explain the situation to the world public.
Am I right when saying that this is the biggest gaffe in science for many decades, and that on the basis of this oversight all the media of the world have cooperated with CERN exposing the public to dangers obviously potentially implicit in the bigest blunder of history?
This fact — in case people like Leonard Susskind (from whose work I learned much 13 years ago) and Gerard ‘t Hooft do not object — not to speak of Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein and my friend David Finkelstein — suffices to prove to the world public and the media that the very physicists they trust blindly enough to suppress all warnings are not trustworthy. Unfortunately.
Is this not a ray of hope at the horizon?
Dr. Rossler,
If you are still active, I would be grateful for any reviews and feedback you could provide on the paper linked from the above forum.
Dear Messenger:
Please, allow me to ask what paper you have in mind.
It was received with a lot of scietpcism from the science world but, as of yet, no one has spotted an obvious flaw, leaving everyone on edge as scientists attempt to replicate the finding. This will be huge news in 2012 if it’s found to be accurate and you can read more about it in my old blog.
Forgive me — can you, please, repeat the reference?