X-Message-Number: 11134 Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 20:31:29 -0800 From: Olaf Henny <> Subject: Scientific Establishment Often a Barrier to Cognition Below is the copy of an article in the Vancouver Courier, which deals with the attitudes of establishment scientists toward some of the research results, which do not fit into the pattern of generally accepted theories and toward the scientists involved. It may help to remind us, that it is not cryonicists alone, who encounter establishment backlash. It is also good to know, that the general press is catching on to the prejudice toward the nonconforming: /---------------/ "The recent Courier cover story on the SFU-based Beyersteins resulted in a fair bit of debate on these pages. Personally, I'm skeptical about much of what passes for skepticism these days, and the reluctance of many so-called experts to say three little words: cogito ergo stumped. Not that I'm a not a skeptic myself. Heck, I even have doubts about my writing table. The nature of my writing table seems straightforward enough. It has extension, mass, and is resolutely real. Tables are tricky things, however. Back in 1928 the British physicist Arthur Eddington wrote a famous parable about two tables -- one of the commonsense variety, the other of the scientific imagination. The first needs no further explanation, but the second is "a more recent acquaintance", and Eddington did "not feel so familiar with it." "My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself." The scientific table defaults to the normal one, in a practical sense: "It supports my writing paper as satisfactorily as table No. 1; for when I lay the paper on it the little electric particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at nearly steady level." Eddington's schizoid work-station is an example of how radically new something can appear from a different angle. In our time of shifting, dizzying perspectives, it should come as no surprise that whole areas of study now appear as paradoxical as Eddington's table, and worthy of newborn skepticism. Consider what happened a few years ago in the field of Egyptology, when antiquarian John Anthony West enlisted the aid of a non-Egyptologists to help investigate the age of the Sphinx. After studying the pattern of wear on the monument, University of Boston geologist Robert Schoch pronounced it due to erosion from water rather than wind. This put the age of the Sphinx thousands of years before the accepted birth of civilization, back to a time when precipitation was heavy in the Nile delta. From the standpoint of Schoch's geology, the Sphinx could be no more recent than about 5000 BC, and possibly as old as 10000 BC. Schoch and West presented their findings at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, and made headlines around the world. Egyptologists, not surprisingly, presented a united front. The dates were impossible, they sniffed; there was no known civilization in 5000 B.C. Voltaire called history "a trick the living play on the dead", and he might have said the same of prehistory. Across the globe, artifacts and oddments languish in the back rooms of museums -- things that don't fit into any known chronology and are conveniently ignored. An example of one such find dates from the late sixties, when a team of archaeologists studied artifacts unearthed 75 Mlles southeast of Mexico City. Using uranium series dating, fission track dating, and other methods, they came up with an age of about 250,000 years. It was bad enough for the archaeologists concerned that this was far earlier than the accepted date for migration across the Bering Strait. Worse still, human beings capable of making the sophisticated tools found at Hueyatlaco were not thought to have come into existence until about 100,000 years ago in Africa. An article on the finds met with successive rejections until 1981, when if finally appeared in Quaternary Research. This small victory had lethal consequences. "My academic career was destroyed," said Virginia Steen-McIntyre, principal archaeologist at the site and author of the article. Steen's experience is not an unfamiliar one to academics and scientists who start looking at things in new ways. The claims made for ESP, cold fusion, and other 'things that go bump in the lab' are from scientists working under the establishment radar. Until the senior guardians of consensus reality decree otherwise, the claims made by a minority of their colleagues remain heresies. Scientific progress largely remains a matter of generational conflict. Max Plank, the founder of quantum theory, said that "science progresses funeral by funeral." If tables can evaporate into a dance of electrons, they can also be turned. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11134