Well, to be honest, the way in which we educate astronomers and astrophysicists today basically deprives them of the opportunity to make a decision about their own personal beliefs on this issue. When a student is basically told to learn this very lengthy series of compounding speculations – or, hey, you can alternatively just drop out of the program, with devastating consequences – at what point have they willingly bought into the ideas? I think – given the extraordinary evidence which is constantly accumulating on this important issue from such an incredible diversity of sources – that the public has every right to question the very meaning of the various consensuses that we observe within these disciplines.
At some point, learning to “think like a scientist” in the physics PhD program came to also involve adopting a very specific worldview about how the universe works in order to fit into the culture of astronomers and astrophysicists whose ideas – conveniently enough – already dominated that culture. This is really not that complicated to understand, and the fact is that I’m not at all the first person to say it.
Check out the YouTube interview of Peter Woit titled “Piling Conjecture Upon Conjecture”. At 12:27, the transcript reads …
“Our fundamental problem with unification is that a certain number of
ideas have been tried out which all have well-known problems – and
string theory is now one of them. But there’s a lot of things that
haven’t been tried … If you start to get to know the subject, you
realize the number of people working on the subject … It’s a fairly
limited community. It’s a few thousand people … And … most of them
are kind of following the lead of a fairly small number of people.
The number of actual different ideas that people are trying out is
actually quite small … There’s a much larger array of ideas out there
which nobody has taken the time to look into because the way the field
works … These things are very difficult. You would have to go spend
several years of your life doing this, and if no one else is
interested in what you’re doing (and most likely, whenever you’re
trying out new ideas, it’s not going to work anyways). The way the
field is structured, it’s kind of very very hard to do that kind of
work, because it’s likely to damage your career. If you’re trying to
do it when you’re young, you’re gonna very well end up not having a
job.”
Jeff Schmidt’s book, Disciplined Minds, makes a very similar claim. Neither of these guys have anything to do with the Electric Universe, nor with each other, btw. From http://www.julesnyquist.com/articles/article/1430100/16489.htm …
MR: When you first thought of writing this book, you were in graduate
school, right?JS: Yes, that’s right. I got interested int he topic when I was going
to professional training myself, getting a PhD in physics at the
University of California, Irvine. It seemed like the best of my fellow
graduate students were either dropping out or being kicked out. And by
‘best,’ those were the most concerned about other people and seemed
less self-centered, less narrowly-focused, most friendly people…they
seemed to be handicapped in the competition. They seemed to be at a
disadvantage not only because their attention was divided, but because
their concerns about big picture issues like justice and the social
role of the profession and so on, caused them to stop and think and
question, whereas their unquestioning gung-ho classmates just plowed
right through with nothing to hold them back. As I mentioned, there’s
about a 50% drop-out rate for students entering University programs in
all fields; and what I found was that this weeding out is not
politically neutral. To put it bluntly, the programs favor
ass-kissers.
Fred Hoyle from the Cosmology Quest video, who again – for those that don’t know – had no affiliation with the Electric Universe …
I’ve always said that the cause of the trouble is the American
graduate school … You see, when we had graduated first degree, we
were independent. We could thumb our noses at the professor. And in
fact the best way to get ahead was to do something that all the people
didn’t agree with … But, in the graduate school, you all have to
learn what the professors are teaching you. And then, those people go
out and get jobs and they go to their own graduate school … You get
a few places like CalTech or like Harvard, and they set the fashion
for [all the rest] …
You can continue to propagate the false image for people here that astronomers and astrophysicists actually choose their beliefs irregardless of the culture inherent to their discipline, or we can have the more productive conversation regarding how to fix this insane system which deprives our most talented physics specialists from the right to actually diverge from conventional wisdom.
The well-being of the discipline that we both love is on the line. Is this another problem that we’ll simply punt to the next generation?
