Rescuing Physics With Philosophy

(Author’s note: this post is meant to serve as an introduction and preface for future posts discussing specifics of physics and related concepts in more detail.)

Reality Check: The Standard Model of Physics is Wrong

Beware of false knowledge, it’s more dangerous than ignorance.

George Bernard Shaw

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

Buckminster Fuller

The standard model of physics is wrong about the nature of light, matter, gravity, electricity, magnetism, space, and time. The general theory of relativity is hopelessly and fundamentally flawed. Quantum mechanics is a mystical cult. Photon particles and electron particles do not exist and have never been the input or output of any experiment (let alone the “virtual photons” conjured to explain magnetism). Most field theories are dead on arrival because they can’t define a field without resorting to circular abstract concept reifications. Fairy tales about “wave particle dualities” that float in an empty nothingness called “spacetime” that has no attributes but can somehow also be bent are outright indeterministic obscurantism.

Mystical Quantum Confusion – How Did We Get Here?

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman

The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that.

Richard Feynman

Nobody understands quantum mechanics because it is a series of incoherent fairytales and abstract concept reifications. When their models did not match up with observable reality, physicists 100 years ago decided that instead of rejecting their flawed models, they would create an imaginary world where their models could be true. Not content to simply deny the existence of a medium in which waves propagate and swap out frequencies and boundary conditions for massless particles (quanta), they went on to create all sorts of magical quarky virtual particles to explain away the nonsense and “spooky” actions of their dogmatic fantasies. The mind virus of charge-carrying particles has gripped physics ever since.

A virtual photon is an abstraction which facilitates calculations and understanding. The term is very vague and loosely defined. They never appear as the inputs or outputs of experiments. Their existence is questionable at best. However, they are very useful concepts for making equations balance out.

Richard Feynman

Losing Physics In Math

They substitute words for reality, and then talk about the words.

Edwin Armstrong

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Nikola Tesla

Then physics got completely lost in math. Rather than counting on things that are real, physicists dreamed up things they could count. Then they got stuck in the delusionary trap of believing that descriptions are more real than what they are meant to describe. Descriptions became definitions. Waveforms weren’t simply ways of describing pressure patterns, they were treated as the phenomena themselves. The map they drew was now considered more real than the territory.

Clear Thinking Beats Deep Thinking

Scientists today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Nikola Tesla

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

W.C. Fields

When theoretical physics abandoned Occam’s Razor and the world of “what must be” (what the ancient Greeks called Ananke) for the make-believe and unfalsifiable world of “what if”, it had to replace rejected realities with deeper and deeper fantasies.

Once you start reifying conceptual abstractions, it’s hard to stop. If a something can float in a nothing, why can’t a nothing be bent? Why can’t there be little pieces of nothing that simultaneously exist and do not exist if you were to look for them across various imaginary timelines? Why can’t time itself be composed of little pieces that can be stretched and squeezed and bumped against each other?

To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing.

Nikola Tesla

The greatest minds in the history of natural philosophy understood that there is no such thing as nothing. They understood that wave is what something does, not what something is. They knew the vacuum could not be empty. They knew the difference between location and substance. They knew that thinking clearly about the fundamentals of reality was a pre-requisite for understanding its complexity.

Religious Scientism’s Cult of Experts

If your assumptions are based on fallacies and your explanations require reconciliation of circular reasoning with unnecessarily complex fantasy, you are not involved in the search for truth. You are defending a religious tradition.

[The theory of relativity] is a mass of errors and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.

NIkola Tesla

Calling such religious beliefs “science” is just a way to lend credibility to bad ideas. An authentically scientific process is on a quest for objective knowledge through reason and experimentation. Sadly, most of today’s physicists are on a quest to promote their careers and secure research funding by flattering a dogmatic cult of experts.

Logic to the Rescue

People don’t like it when you poke them in their axioms, so to speak.

Jordan Peterson

Here they come now. But what about [insert famous official-sounding refutation here]? What about the Michelson-Morley experiment? What about the double-slit experiment? What about the photoelectric effect?

I will have more to say about the specifics of questions like these in future posts. For now, suffice it to say that reason and logic correct and overrule experience and observation, not vice-versa.

Saying the sun rises in the east and sets in the west is one thing. Saying a team of unicorns (or virtual particles) is the underlying cause is quite another. People throughout history have been a part of this experiment every day, and yet look at how much time was spent trying to figure out how the sun was lifted and carried across the sky and what it might be doing in the underworld during the night. Assumptions about the earth being stationary prevented people from even asking the right questions.

If you’re not careful as you observe and learn, you won’t stop to question assumptions. You’ll focus on the obvious aspects of an observation in a limited context. You won’t consider the perception and measurement limitations of observers, techniques, and tools. You will be diverted by connotative descriptions and linguistic sleight of hand. You will be tempted to accept neologistic descriptions in place of causative explanations.

Even if your observations are valid and repeatable, your measurements are reliable, and your descriptions are consistent, your assumptions can still be completely false and your explanations could be wildly untrue or you could fail to provide them at all.

For example, describing how something moves does not explain what something is. If a man is described as a thing that walks, what is he when he is not walking? Is he invisible or does he pop in and out of reality? Maybe the footprints in the snow are from an invisible man with no “rest mass” who emits “walking particles” as he moves! He doesn’t seem to make any noise, but maybe that’s just because the sounds he makes are muffled by “silence particles” that could only be detected if you’re weren’t listening!

Theory of Everything

Those involved in the quest for a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of “force unification” to resolve the contradictions and fill the gaps in the current standard model must recognize that nature doesn’t have an identity crisis and doesn’t obey any “laws” men come up with. Nature is both more simple and elegant than modern physicists have come to believe, and we’ll have to go backward to go forward.