dear think tanks : I will DENY Higgs Particle for cash - no marked bills please ....

Political science BAs are like old school nuclear physicists , we think we can talk about everything like an expert

Why not ?

If Marc Morano is qualified to be an expert on climate change, than so am I on the Higgs particle.

Like Marc, I have a BA in political science, hold strong opinions and am at times very partisan.

On the other side, it too is a similar story : teams made up of thousands of scientists at universities and institutions all over the world have laboured for decades before coming up with a a cautious scientific consensus.

(A) Humans are causing the atmosphere to heat up  (B) we have located evidence that the predicted Higgs particle exists, to Sigma 5 level of probability.

So on one side, high level tenure & repeated high level peer-review has qualified about one earthling in a million to truly be regarded as experts on a technical scientific matter.

These 7,000 experts have divided themselves into two big world-wide groups to look for the Higgs by two totally different methods and each big group has now separately decided, by general consensus, that the Higgs does exist.

One the other side, amateurs in the academic world's second oldest profession : not pros but game - on the game in fact.

Now all we need is a pimp and a john.

Strident advocacy think tanks die without constant infusions of hot cash --- they'll know who has some readies available.

Maybe Big Asbestos - they under the gun lately - seems at least 100,000 people die annually thanks to this killer mineral.

But how would proof of the existence of the Higgs particle damage the libertarian-capitalist world view enough to waste money refuting it ?

SOLID science is threatened, like never before, by Higgs

Well, I guess I would begin - strictly as a Devil's Advocate - to argue that what all of the various denier efforts have really been fighting is the notion that erroneous common sense (solid) science has been losing a century long battle with nonsensical but accurate quantum science.

The Higgs particle is the missing keystone to the Standard Model of how ultimate fundamental reality actually works.

How it works is in a manner totally in conflict with the 19th century commonsense positivist science that all deniers and corporate CEOs expouse.

Basically what we take to be a solid reality, based on a solid science, turns out to be neither.

Solidity is a vivid illusion - but illusion nevertheless.

But who can blame the deniers & CEOs - it is what they were taught and what 21st high school teachers still teach kids, (in part, because it is easy to teach and easy to write exams for) .

Solid - Newtonian - science is a BLACK BOX - it gets more less accurate results at a certain limited but common scale of events, but it is not a true explanation of the world.

But it is this old fashioned newtonian and daltonian and darwinian science that we spoon-fed high school and yes university kids with.

Rather than teach their trusting charges science that is difficult and unsettling but also happens to be true : quantum physics, quantum chemistry and yes, quantum biology.

By no coincidence, High School teachers teach this crap because because politicians in school boards and departments of education force them to.

Politicians and their corporate handlers sense that if quantum science was taught to all of the population, in a lay manner, it would unsettle the current human belief that we are the only smart and rational beings in a stupid but stable and simple world.

This belief is what lies behind libertarian skygod-ism and the denial of human climate pollution.

Attack Higgs, you attack the quantum theory and thus you attack the quantum (earthling) way of looking at the world.

So gentlemen, when do I get my money ......

MODERNITY FALLS 1945

   There is no consensus on the name for the Era we are presently living - the era after the Era of Modernity. But all agree that it began in 1945.

   That means that every single one of us has has spent the majority of our lives living in this "Era-Without-A-Name".

  Rather embarrassing that : perhaps it will be left to our ancestors to name this era retrospectively.

   Then billions will perhaps know us as Commensalities, when we never heard the word while alive, let alone ever thought of ourselves that way.

   A child whose birthday everyone knows , but who no one is willing to christen, is an unusual child indeed.

  Why then the nigh-universal consensus that this post modernity era we are living in all began in 1945?

   It was not as if nothing else happened in 1945, so it had some plenty of time on its hands to dream up post-modernity.

  1945 was the year the world finally ending its worst conflict : WWII.

   With the occupation of enemy lands long hidden from the world, reports of horrible things were finally confirmed by the Allied armies : the concentration camps and death camps.

  Soon the upcoming Nuremberg Trials would reveal that death camps like Auschwitz also held plenty of evidence of unbelievably cruel medical experiments on innocent human children.

  Gas Chambers or Doctor Mengele, all worked together to advance the ultimate intentions of Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   All worked to create the perfect Master Race, even if that meant that those judged non-master races had to pay the ultimate penalty to make it all happen. 

  Meanwhile in August 1945, the Americans dropped single bombs, from single planes,  yet big enough to wiped out big cities - cities like Hiroshima.
   Hitherto, thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of bombs ( and a perfect storm of weather) had been needed to wipe out a city.

  Since the Americans alone had thousands of these big planes ,B-29s, (planes able as well to fly half way around the world) that meant we suddenly faced a world where the next big war might mean all cities everywhere facing annihilation.

   Meanwhile the ineffectiveness of any defense against the German V-2 rockets reminded us that while we might be able to shoot down the B-29s before they reached our cities, soon even that option would be closed off.

   So Newtonian Physics was also in its final phase : no longer content on measuring the transit of planets, it had moved up to destroying planets instead.

   Hiroshima, Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw - city after city shattered  with depressing ease.

   Equal depressing was the thought that Auschwitz was merely the culmination of six years of killing in the name of Genetics.

  But also in 1945, World War II was credited (wrongly) for bringing at least a bit of good news.
   In a race against time, tiny simple stupid Microbes had beaten the best of the world's chemists (The1940s Masters of the Universe) to produce natural penicillin when Mankind failed to make synthetic penicillin.
    What today is an enormous industry, bio or micro technology, never looked back.

 By contrast, Daltonian Chemistry, hitherto the Queen of Science particularly in Industry, started a long slow slide into invisibility.  

   The jewels of  the Era of Modernity were these three: Newtonian Physics, Daltonian Chemistry and Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   With all three in ruins by the end of 1945, Modernity 's Fall was all but available....

WWII caused by Bad Faith Scientists preferring "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" to "TRUTH,TRUTH,TRUTH"

   After 1895, as it gradually became apparent across the entire width of the science and mathematics that Newtonian mechanics was   perhaps not the metaphor for the way that Reality worked, individually and collectively scientists faced their biggest ever dilemma.

   Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
   (Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
    It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
   There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
   Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
   It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
   They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well  respected for doing so.
   Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
  They were thus dependent highly on public good will.
  
 
  
  
  

My job isn't "inside the BELTWAY" ...

Michael Marshall

My job, as I see it , isn't "inside the BELTWAY" of peer-reviewed science.

Whenever I do peer inside that Beltway (ie when reading the articles in our leading science journals) I see little to complain about.

And I am a great one for complaining.

Instead I see provisional results, I see uncertainty, doubts, probabilities, possibilities, unknowns.

I see, in other words, scientists admitting that there are limits and restraints on what we can know and what we can do vis a vis the physical world.

(I am not naive and I know that these admissions are themselves frequently only provisional, necessitated by the need to be accepted into peer-reviewed journals.)

No, my concern is the science of our day-to-day world (POPULAR rather than PUBLIC science in my definition of those terms) and here I see big, literally "Life-Threatening", problems.

Most of us pick up what little notions of science's potential and methods we retain, from textbook teaching in high school or from a few undergraduate intro courses.

We supplement this with the occasional news item  and magazine article, perhaps even with that best-seller book from that famous scientist we've seen on the telly.

Out here in the real world, the science we get is still mostly Whiggish Science, Newtonian Science , a science that sunnily dismisses any possibility of limits to Man's knowledge of reality (given enough time and money thrown at the scientists' labs).

(Let me give you a mild example, from an article I recently read with admiration, until this short passage jarred me into alarm ; it's
from STEVEN WEINBERG, Nobel prize winner and a key architect of The Standard Model of physics:

"...I think that we'll get to the point where there are no puzzles of this sort. And that will be quite a remarkable turning point in the intellectual history of the human race."

To his credit, Dr Weinberg didn't quite say the physicists' equivalent of the medical doctors' "we can close the book on infectious disease", but in his quiet, cautious way, he came damn close.)

Most other examples are far more blatant.

And I see all this hot air hubris as what is driving our world to meet its Climate-Changed-Doom.

Not so oddly enough (given my previously stated lack of naivety) most of this Blue Sky Science wind is generated by the same chappies as what wrote those carefully constipated peer-reviewed articles: Drs Hyde & Jeckel, PhD,FRS .

My job then is to expose split-personality scientists and ask the real one to stand up: either stand up and admit they really see no limits to what Man can do or stand up and reaffirm that Reality will always be a bit of a mirage forever slightly beyond our grasp.

That is, I only want our scientists to be consistent: to say outside the Beltway of peer-reviewed journals what they say inside it.

Is that too much to ask ?

And once our Stevensonian pair have made their admissions , we will then be better forearmed as how to trust their handling of the Climate Change brief....

PROVIDENTIAL science versus PROVISIONAL science

Michael Marshall

Traditionally the popular face of science has always been badly out of sync with the public face of science.

Surprisingly, popular science (science talk for non-scientists or  junior-level scientists) does not primarily come from quickie 800 word news columns from the conventional media's science popularizers.

Instead that science talk originates from the big fat hardcover books ,written by many of science's most respected practitioners.

Unfortunately, in the past, the accurate science in these books -- usually written by major prize-winners well into their dotage --- always tends to be mixed with a great deal of overly-optimistic blue sky imaginings.

Most of the book could never get accepted as articles by any peer-reviewed journal --- but other scientists have generally been reluctant to say as much --- because these are the past or current heroes of their own profession.

Most of these other scientists realize these books are simply crass tools to 'sell science' to a skeptical taxpayer and to tired businessman.

It is Whig Science - triumph piled on top of triumph, ever upward and onward- 'people, can't you just smell the sizzle from them there steaks??'

As all scientists benefit if the general public continues to regard science as well worth the money we spend on it, scientists generally bury their scruples and keep their doubts to themselves.

As a result , the con continues.

And very effectively too, because we readers are disabused from holding doubts about the optimistically windy parts, by the honored name on the cover ---- and by the silence from other scientists.

In turn, those books are read -- and absorbed into their efforts --  by science journalists and the editors of undergraduate textbooks, and by high school science teachers.

Thus it is the only science that most of us non-scientists ever learn.

As such, this science is resolutely old-school 19th century newtonian in tenor, and is portrayed as the one human activity we could rely upon to give reliable, exact answers.

Its Laws of Nature are conveyed as if  Providential and carved as a concise formula onto tablets of stone for all eternity, by whatever or whoever is the atheist equivalent of the Jehovah of Moses.

That was then, this is now.

Thankfully ,the popular face of the newer science is increasingly being cast in the style of the public face of both the old and the science.

 Science, in its public face, (scientists talking to other scientists on their same peer-level) has always been cautious and tentative.

Which is a 'Good-Thing', because that is the reality of reality and so should be the reality of science.

This cautious style can be seen in the style of any article found in science's peer-reviewed  journals.

Here the Laws of Nature are more properly represented as Provisional as yesterday's promises from a politician.

Newer science practitioners are much more willing to reveal the uncertain and tentative public face of science in the popular works they write for the general public and this can only be a good thing.

However there is hundreds of years of the old-school Blue Sky popular science still out there to fight against and this is what leading, more than anything else, to today's 'war between the sciences'.

Many of us can't get our heads around the blunt - but finally honest - messages we are getting from today's working scientist , because we have grown up with 70 or more years of windy optimism from POP Science.

That's where the DENIERS are coming from: they have been lied to for so many decades by science that they can't tell now when it is finally telling the truth.....

the optimistic DOOMERS and the pessimistic DENIERS ...

Michael Marshall

The DENIERS are ever optimistic about their ability to muck about with Man and Nature, wholesale, without ever making too much of a mess of it ---- but they are highly pessimistic about the ability of working class people to be able to string two sentences together about anything important.

DOOMERS are highly pessimistic that Newtonian Man can be trusted to do anything truly complicated without making a total cock up of it, but are very optimistic about the hidden cleverness of Nature's smallest, weakest members.

Optimism and pessimism are not in fact held consistently on all matters by anyone, not even by people we ALL agree seem born prenaturally optimistic or pessimistic.

We humans are in turn, pessimistic or optimistic, depending on the particulars of an issue.

DOOMER and DENIER are fun labels to smear upon others, but they are a dim reflection of the true complexity of  the cumulative
positions we hold over our lifetimes.

But where DENIERS and DOOMERS differ most, is over their  assessments of the ability of civilized humanity to be able to correctly predict the ultimate consequences of its activities upon our entire ecosystem.

In that narrow area alone, the labels DOOMER and DENIER, smear or not, are useful metaphors to describe both groups....

Global Referendum on CARBON TAX would give plurality to Deniers

Michael Marshall

I do not believe, in any way, that climate deniers (aka 'skeptics') are limited to a tiny minority of flat earth believers and cranks.

Whenever a seriously effective carbon tax is raised, at elections or in legislatures ,we see the wheels quickly come off the bus of the majority of us who do not deny that climate change will seriously damage society within our own lifetimes.

A plurality of us quickly forms up to oppose even weak carbon taxing and the idea of serious carbon taxing sufficient to halt and reverse global warming, finds no traction at all.

Since there still is a mania about the Titanic sinking in the air about my hometown of Halifax as I write this post, let me use a metaphor from past ocean liner disasters.

If we really truly believed that the lifebelt of a sharp tax on our extravagant lifestyle was the only hope for being alive 30 years from now, we would be rioting trying to get at the ship's stores of them.

But we are not - instead we are busy rioting in an attempt to avoid being made to put to them on.

Deep down ,most of us still believe Newtonian science's glossy promise that given enough time, money and mental effort, human science can solve any problem thrown at it.

None of us, not even WILD ROSE premier-elect Danielle Smith, denies that past human science has thrown up some serious environmental and social problems right now .

(I believe even Exxon executives would admit this ----- privately.)

What most of us deny is that it will take a global solidarity of will without precedent in history, to do something, in time, about our biggest current problem.

That is the fact that we are pumping way too much CO2 into the atmosphere.

We still believe that Newtonian science, two body science, linear, rational, mechanical science , can quickly and painlessly invent a technical solution.

It can't.

It won't.

Three body science, post modern science, commensalistic science, says only by accepting limits (in this case upon our burning of carbon-based fuels) can we pull out of this fatal Phaetonian dive.

The Deniers are not just MURDERERS AMONG US, they are a majority among us, a majority of us.....