Wonders in the Sky (and nonsense in the book)

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

Professor Hufford is erudite and insightful.

Here are some examples from his Foreward:

I [Hufford] was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations…

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

Vallee’s and Aubeck’s hubris astounds.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.

Vallee’s view is egocentric, megalomanic almost.

His view typifies that of those, generally, who are absorbed by the pheonomenon.

Irritated by Stephen Hawking’s postion vis a vis UFOs – “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” – Vallee and Aubeck don’t get it:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos – Vallee and Aubeck among them.

RR

The Goldbach Conjecture and literal UFO reports

Witness testimony, whether about UFO sightings, crimes, accidents, et cetera, is an iffy thing. And witness testimony after a period of time has passed even more so.

But that aside, I take accounts of events -- historical, mythological, reportorial, Biblical – as a “true” rendering of what witnesses saw or experienced, expressed with caveats about “inflation,” misinterpretation, subjective extrapolation, and mental bias.

Thus, the Biblical account of Ezekiel, for instance, is not a fanciful metaphor to make moral a moral point not is it a confluence of fictional elements imagined for whatever reason by the Biblical writer whose rubric is Ezekiel. It is a representational rendering of what the witness experienced and set down, as best as he could, considering the limited parameters of existence at the time.



Roswell’s wirnesses, at the time of the alleged incident – 1947 -- can be accounted as veracious. (Witnesses, providing testimony, many years later, suffer the vicissitudes on metal acuity that afflicts people as they age and as time passes, so their accounts can be ignored -- should be ignored.)

But to get at the heart of the UFO enigma, UFO researchers may take a serious perusal of witness accounts and testimony, past and present, providing exquisite details and data that has, so far, been sublimated, replaced by the more sensational aspects of what witnesses experienced.

Every UFO report, including those of “hoaxers” such as Adamski or Fry, should be evaluated, vetted, for elements that abut other testimonies, from reliable, credible sources.



The UFO-like reports, from religious and mythical writings – the Bible, the Hindu texts, the Greek myths, the Norse sagas, and all the rest – should be immersed in scrutiny and examined systematically rather than literarily.

And the Goldbach Conjecture?

Goldbach's Conjecture is that any even number may be expressed as the sum of two primes. If this conjecture is false, then there must be at least one even number that cannot be expressed as two primes.

Just as Goldbach’s theorems and musings about integers remains unresolved, the pursuit of verification provides a methodology for study of UFOs, past, present, and future – if UFO mavens are serious about explaining the UFO phenomenon.

The Ongoing Fusion of Eastern Mysticism and [Quantum] Physics

For those who think that there is a "connection" between Quantum (or even General) Physics and Eastern Philosophical Thought, we suggest a paper for your edification:

Parallels and Paradoxes in Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism: A Critical Reconnaissance by Sal P. Restivo (Social Studies of Science 1978)

Click here for the PDF

N.B. We feel that much in this paper impacts the UFO phenomenon -- a little or a lot.

Are we a simulation?

In John D. Barrows book “One Hundred Essential Things you Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains the World” [W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., N.Y. 2008], Barrow presents a chapter [19] Living in a Simulation, from which I’ve culled these passages:

“Once you take seriously the suggestion that all possible universes cab (and do) exist then you have to deal with another strange consequence. In this infinite array of universes there will exist civilizations far more advanced that ourselves, that have the capability to simulate universes…the would be able to watch the evolution of life and consciousness within their computer simulations.” [Page52/53]

“With in these universes, self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another.” [Page 53]

The physicist Paul Davies suggests that there is a high probability that we are living in a simulated reality, and is there a way to find out the truth? [Page 53]

“Even if the simulators were scrupulous about simulating the laws of Nature [in their created world or universe], there would be limits to what they could do.” [Page 54]

“They may know a lot about the physics and programming need to simulate a universe, but there will be gaps or, worse still, errors.”[Page 54]

“…gradually…little flaws will begin to build up.” [Page 54]

“…logical contradictions will inevitably arise and the laws in the simulations will appear to break down…The inhabitants of the simulation…will occasionally be puzzled by the observations they make.” [Page 54, italics mine]

“Mysterious changes would occur that would appear to contravene the very laws of Nature…” [Page 55]

“…if we live in a simulated reality, we should expect to come across occasional ‘glitches’ or experimental results that we can’t repeat or even very slow drifts in the supposed constants and laws of Nature that we can’t explain.” [Page 55]

Don’t these observations by Dr. Barrow resonate – when it comes to quantum theory and the UFO mystery (or even paranormal events themselves)?

Dr. Barrow’s musings were the province of Mac Tonnies blog and interest, and are the pressure points for persons who visit here, such as Bruce Duensing.

That we may be a simulation doesn’t grab this writer but it's an imaginative hypothesis that can’t be dismissed out-of-hand.

Plato, Descartes (somewhat) thought, and many current physicists accept the possibility, that we do live as a simulation.

The UFO phenomenon seems to provide a substantiation for Dr. Barrow’s method(s) to discern if we live as a simulation or not.

The possibility intrigues, but that is all it does….(for me).

RR

Confining our blogs...

Today, Wednesday, May 25th, 2011, comments to this blog were not automatically sent to us for moderation. I had to go into our e-mail service and retrieve them, which allowed me to scrutinize responses more judiciously than usual, and without them being sampled by other here.

I continue to be distressed by the slovenly thought-processes that are exampled by what purports to be critical thinking about our postings.

In dialogue with other bloggers and friends, I’ve decided that we shall confine comments here to those that reflect intellectual, open-minded rumination, and not knee-jerk response to things written by us and others, which torment an ingrained belief-system or narrow-minded, non-objective cogitation.

There are several (many, actually) commenters we look forward to hearing from but a few that irk us with their bigoted, snotty, unthinking commentary.

From this point on, more so than our usual fascistic deletion of comments that we don’t like, we’ll not be approving comments from some who visit here.

We have a respect for some of you -- your intellectual proclivities, your open-minded objectivity, even-handed skepticism, and your genteel approach to our oblique and beleaguered postings, some of which I agree are over the top.

Your comments will continue to be registered here.

But if you send us a comment that doesn’t appear, and it’s not the fault of our blogging service, you know where you stand with us.

So don’t go away angry…just go away…..



RR

Einstein proven right, again!

Click here for NPR story

Not the "God Particle" but maybe the Jesus Particle?

Fermilab finds intriguing "particle."

Quantum teleportation -- finally!

Click here for an item saying scientists have achieved quantum teleportation

Quantum and String Theories for Dummies?

Wiley Publishing Company has two books, in its Dummies series, about quantum mechanics and/or string theory:

Quantum Physics for Dummies by Steven Holzner [2009, 321 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones with Daniel Robbins [2010, 366 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



Holzner’s book is, as far as we can determine, geared to college students or advanced high schoolers who are adept at mathematics of an advanced kind (Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus particularly).

Jones and Robbins provide an overview of quantum physics and string theory without a total immersion (as Holzner insists) in mathematics.

If you’re looking for a cogent assessment of string theory, which is in a category rightfully called a quantum field theory, get the Jones/Robbins book.

If you are a math genius – and we accent “genius” – Holzner’s book will satisfy. It won’t enlighten you about quantum mechanics in a philosophical way but it can lead you through the abstruse mathematics of quantum theorizing.

Holzner’s book, in our estimation, is not a Dummies book, per se. It’s a tome on rarified mathematics, which science and physicists use to remain arcane and aloof.

Jones with Robbins, on the other hand, empathize with readers who want to know more about quantum and string theory and provide a door to understanding both.

We’ll be presenting material from the Jones book upcoming.

As for the Holzner book, we’ll leave that for those who think science is furthered by use of mathematics rather than clear statements of logic and hypothesizing, in plain English.

The Grand Designer is God! – says (inadvertently) Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

The 2010 Bantam Book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow purports to show that physical laws account for life and reality, without the intervention of a prime mover, God.



But after one reads the book, with all the complex interlocking laws of quantum physics and the hypotheses of the so-called M-theory as presented by Mlodinow (mostly), one has to conclude that, indeed, a supreme mind, a thing we can call God, did indeed create the universe and life as we know it.

Physicists try to promote their god – mathematics – with abstruse theories and convoluted mathematical gyrations, but after all is said and written, the conclusion that only make rational sense is that reality is, indeed, a concoction of a sensate entity, no matter how that entity is defined.

Our belief, however, is that God existed – we think He/It died or has gone hidden, as expounded by such writers as Richard Elliott Friedman in The Hidden Face of God [Harper, 1995].



No amount of mathematical machination by physicists destroy the early thinking of philosophers such as Aristotle, or the great theologian Thomas Aquinas – that God is (or was) the designer of the Universe and life itself.

Chapter 7, The Apparent Miracle (Page 165 particularly), provides the unconscious belief in God by Mlodinow (and Hawking also?) exampled by the thoughts of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, who themselves believed a mind (God) created the laws that govern the Universe and life.



The book can be skimmed in parts, as much of it presents the gyrations of physicists who are as flummoxed by existence as laymen are, but who pretend, like the alchemist of old, to have access to the secrets of life, presented by them as mathematical theories, obfuscated so as to feign hidden knowledge.

M-theory is a reworking of the philosophies of the early Greeks and the scientific investigations of such luminaries as Galileo, Maxwell, Newton (of course), and others. The Grand Design tries to make a case for M-theory, calling it “the unified theory that Einstein was hoping to find” (Page 181) and is, in fact, The Grand Design.

That’s an egregious stretch.

M-theory and string theories are all extrapolations of earlier thinking by Biblical writers and the Greek, Islamic, and Scholastic thinkers of the past.

The inherent quandary (about reality) of physicists is not masked by their obeisance to mathematics, which didn’t really arrive in science until Newton, and have been ballyhooed by physicists and science ever since, but not making any sense, as scientific use of math (or arithmetic) of any kind is merely an elitist ploy to make laypeople believe that science has an inside track to the truth of existence.

But as Richard Bucke shows in his masterwork, Cosmic Consciousness, reality is something so transcendental that human minds can only occasionally observe it but never truly understand it.



For Hawking and Mlodinow (and others, such as Dawkins, Smolin, et al.) to write that that they are near to resolving The Grand Design is beyond preposterous; it’s hubris of a massive kind.