Financing the Birth of Regressive Physics

PSI Blog 20200113 Financing the birth of regressive physics and cosmogony

Last week I hinted at the relationship between ideologies and economics. Like everyone else, regressive physicists and cosmogonists do not live on air. In the USA, money for science must go through Congress, the executive branch, or rich donors almost all of whom are extremely or at least moderately religious. The USA government is not going to finance the downfall of religion, which patriotically supports their military endeavors.

Here I once again present the interesting anecdote by John Chappell, who is widely regarded as the “founder of dissident physics in the USA”:

Here is part of #3 in the founding principles of the Natural Philosophy Alliance written by Dr. Chappell:

“DO NOT ASSUME THAT IF SPECIAL RELATIVITY WERE INVALID, THIS FACT WOULD LONG AGO HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED WITHIN ESTABLISHMENT PHYSICS.”
Dr. John Chappell

The reason it has not been is that almost everyone with a sufficiently bold and critical view of the subject to develop sound arguments against SR has not been allowed to flourish within the establishment. Great numbers of reliable accounts of such intolerance have been told.

One of the most recent comes from a new NPA member who, when doing graduate work in physics around 1960, heard the following story from his adviser: While working for his Ph.D. in physics at the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1920s, this advisor had learned that all physics departments in the U.C. system were being purged of all critics of Einsteinian relativity. Those who refused to change their minds were ordered to resign, and those who would not were fired, on slanderous charges of anti-Semitism. The main cited motivation for this unspeakably unethical procedure was to present a united front before grant-giving agencies, the better to obtain maximal funds. This story does not surprise me. There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics of Einsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in 1985, when I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that year’s International Congress on the History of Science.

After I finished, the Danish chairman made some courteous remarks about dissidents he had learned about in Scandinavia, and then turned to the audience for questions. The first speaker was one of a group of about 4 young physics students in the back. He launched immediately into a horrible tirade of verbal abuse, accusing me of being entirely wrong in my analysis, a simplification of the Melbourne Evans analysis–” Evans is wrong; you are wrong,” he shouted. He accused me of being way out of line to present my “faulty” arguments on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him “Then how would you explain…”, he loudly interrupted me with “I don’t have to explain anything.” The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by all this, that the question session was essentially destroyed.”

Financially, this has worked out extremely well for U.C. Berkeley, which is arguably “the best public university in the USA” where the Physics Department is famous for developing nuclear weapons and filling out the periodic table with the heavier elements (e.g., californium). It has been in the forefront of propagandizing the Big Bang Theory. This from the former chair of the Astronomy Department:

Silk, Joseph, 1973, Cosmological theory: Science, v. 181, p. 1038-1039.

Silk, Joseph, 1980, The big bang: The creation and evolution of the universe: San Francisco, Freeman, 394 p.

Silk, Joseph, 1988, The Big Bang (2nd edition): New York, Freeman, 485 p.

Silk, Joseph, 2002, The big bang (3rd ed.): New York, W.H. Freeman, 480 p.

Those financial constraints still hold. I doubt U.C. Berkeley will drop its support of creationism any time soon: