People have been doing this all throughout the course of the Big Bang’s history. There is no shortage at all of critiques – many of them published within peer-reviewed journals.
There is, however, a real shortage of people reading these critiques and anomalous observations – in part because there is no sense of order today in the arguments against established theory. As is, it can take years to get to the bottom of a single controversy. I chuckle when people think they’ve understood the Electric Universe by simply passing a Tom Bridgman link titled “Creationism in Astronomy”. The people passing this around have clearly not even considered that the EU is a steady-state theory. There is no creation event; Bridgman simply claims that the EU is analogous in certain aspects – except its adherence to an actual creation event – to creationism. People buy this stuff because Bridgman works with NASA. It’s the narrative of his credentials. It’s really that easy to disengage the rational mind.
The Natural Philosophy Alliance has tried to bring some order to the fringes which surround established theory, and I have great respect for Greg Volk’s perseverance. Unfortunately, I would argue that they have so far failed to pull it off. This is not just a problem of creating a platform where against-the-mainstream thinkers can publish and review one another. That is just one single aspect of what is needed. The real problem is that when we are looking at arguments against conventional theory, there is always a problem with engaging the rational mind. When we are looking at a new idea, our System 1 (see prior post) is popping all sorts of questions and pre-formed narratives into our heads. We need a system for cataloging ideas which identifies these inner voices, and responds to them sort of similar to the way that consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers – like Unilever, Clorox and Proctor & Gamble – create product packaging. These two very different subjects are – oddly enough – linked, in that marketing is designed to elicit the irrational. What I suggest needs to be done is to take that body of research, and use it as a starting point for figuring out how to elicit the opposite – rational thought.
I have a good feel for what needs to be created. I could even create a pretty detailed design brief if I found people who were willing to work on this. But it’s taken me 8 years to get to this point. Now what? Nobody seems to care. There are no programmers who want to work on this. It’s quite tricky to come up with a business model which deals with this. And everybody is trying to build sexting apps. There is no awareness that there is any problem. The narratives dominate our realities.
On this specific point, I’d like to suggest that we all should care about having accurate beliefs about the universe. They act as the foundation for our views about our own lives. And even though we may lack the time to dig into every argument, we all have an interest in seeing the best ideas win out. So, this idea that particular individuals should be fully responsible for new ideas in science is perhaps the way things are today – but maybe something which we might culturally question.
Forgetting for a moment about the content of the theory, what is it about having one dominant idea in cosmology which appeals to people? When a person is told one option for belief, all the listener can do is either remember or forget it. When there are two or more options for belief, then the mind goes to work trying to figure out which is better supported by each new observation. The fact that most people today are not going out of their way to expose themselves to competing, divergent theories is really problematic, because one of the first things that happens when you start that important process is that you will observe how easy it is for either paradigm to explain the same observation. Most people do not expect this, and it causes them to take many things for granted in science – like assuming the narrative that when the truth comes, it will be easy to spot. That’s absolutely untrue. The are many truths out there today which are actively being argued against right now by the “experts”. So, the public basically has to make a decision: Do we simply passively absorb whatever it is that the experts tell us? Or, are we active participants in our own beliefs in science?
Now, when it comes to the universe, probably many people will imagine that they don’t actually care. It’s too remote, and irrelevant to our lives. But, if I told you that our beliefs about how the universe works have an indirect influence upon the types of questions people ask in biology and medicine, then probably more ears perk up. Or, if I told you that researchers recently dated the recent Mt St Helens lava flows to millions of years old, then all sorts of questions start popping into peoples’ heads. Or, if I showed you evidence that global catastrophe is a recurring phenomenon here on Earth, then we are getting closer to issues which concern people.
There is a resistance against working on these big problems which seem to us unrelated to our everyday lives. And this is largely why the astrophysicists and cosmologists are basically free to say whatever it is they wish: Because our inner narrative is that, whatever they have to say, we are not in any immediate danger. And that will basically seem to be true probably up until the moment that it isn’t.
