Abuses of Science
Abuses of Science
(A dispassionate review)
Abuse includes excessive use. It happens when a concept, even if true and great, is used too often or unnecessarily. For example, we Hindu seniors start talking about our culture and philosophy within a few minutes of meeting each other even for the first time.[1]
Science fans too are not immune from such behaviors. Some students of evolution use it to analyze mother's love. Some others quote mathematical analysis, supposed to have been conducted by some great scientists, as a proof that God does not exist and all universe came from the Big Bang. They do not realize that science can only provide information but not wisdom.
The other posts on this web site are critical of our religious leaders and practices. It does not mean that all is well with the scientists. Not all spiritual practices are bogus; not all scientific concepts useful. Not all branches of science are beneficial to mankind. We need to approach spirituality as well as science dispassionately. Extremism needs to be avoided in all matters whether spiritual or scientific.
The spiritualists ponder about immaterial topics such as where do our souls come from, where do they go after our deaths etc. They come up with imaginary answers. On the other hand most of the scientists investigate real life situations. However, the astrophysicists and theoretical physicists do delve into topics not useful to the mankind. The answers they come up with may be real and correct but nevertheless not applicable to life on this earth.
Some lovers of spirituality treat dissenters as being dumb and ignorant. Some others who love science exhibit much the same profound unquestioning reverence for the sleep deprived star-gazers, be they called sages or astrophysicists, who keep pondering about celestial matters while ignoring the earthly needs. One need not get over-awed by anybody, be it Ram, Krishna, Buddha, Gandhiji, or any scientist like Einstein howsoever intelligent and renowned.
Most scientists, like those in medical research, work on topics beneficial to the mankind. Hats off to them. However, a few hundred, at the most a few thousands, overly curious ones keep pondering about immaterial, insignificant and irrelevant issues such as the space-time relationship, bending of light rays near massive objects, Big Bang, Mercury's tardiness[2] etc.
The relativity theory raises some pertinent questions. How would mankind be affected if it is proven right or wrong? Is it really necessary to spend humongous amounts of public funds to verify its predictions? Do the benefits of such verification attempts exceed their costs?
All proofs of the relativity theory pertain to matters so trivial that they do not affect mankind one way or the other. Only useful case is that of Global Positioning System (GPS), whose orbiting satellites have to be adjusted thirty-eight-millionths of a second every day (an error of one second in more than 72 years) to stay in sync with Earth's surface. This, the operators would have done by trial and error without the help of the relativity theory.
This would not be so objectionable if those guys did not spend billions of dollars of public funds to verify their ideas. They make governments build projects like Gravity-scope, Large Hadron Collider, Hubble Telescope etc. gobbling up funds that could better be used for productive purposes such as cancer research. The more money they spend, the more questions arise requiring further more expensive explorations such as studying a pulsar 56,000 light years away. This is a bottomless quagmire.
Judging by their outcomes, mankind has not benefited from the relativity theories, particularly the mass-energy conversion equation E = mc2. Based on it, Einstein, otherwise a kind and pacifist person, signed the letter that Szilard dictated in German and Wigner wrote down, imploring US president F. D. Roosevelt to have US scientists make an atom bomb before the Germans. ( http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml) The Germans were defeated by conventional weapons, not the nuclear bomb. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. About three months later, Little Boy atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The 'great' scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman could have stopped their research for developing a bomb 'before' the Germans if at all they had even an iota of wisdom. They didn't.
Einstein did cause irreparable harm to mankind, although inadvertently, because those letters sparked the nuclear arms race, which keeps causing serious problems even now. The Britishers, on the other hand, acted wisely. They prevented the Germans from making the atom bomb by destroying by sabotage, on two separate occasions, the Germans' supplies of heavy water, which is essential for making the bomb.
Peaceful use of nuclear energy too was not considered for several decades after the publication of that famous equation E = mc2 in 1905.[3] Even that utilization is not free from disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. The disposal of nuclear waste is not resolved satisfactorily yet.
The following is an excerpt from an article titled “Tomorrow Never Was” about Einstein’s theory of relativity (Discover magazine, June 2015, p.41).
“The future, though it remains unknown to you, seems to be written already. Einstein himself described it thus: 'People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.'” If so, the words 'before', 'now', and 'after' mean the same, don't they?
This statement raises many questions. Would not it render the laws of cause-effect meaningless because both would occur simultaneously? If there is no distinction among the three time stages, there can be no 'before' or 'after'. Did he not make these adverbs redundant? Why then did he sign that letter to US president and followed up with three more letters, urging him that USA develop an atomic bomb before the Germans could. Did not those letters go against his own "knowledge"? When did he make that statement? Was it before he wrote his first letter dated August 2, 1939 to the US president F D Roosevelt, after his fourth letter or after he expressed his regret for writing them? Even the way he repented it was half hearted.
Einstein is known and respected for his "thought experiments" leading him to his theories. Let us run some of our own thought experiments. Suppose that he had written those letters to President Roosevelt earlier or USA had worked faster and that the two bombs called little boy and fat boy were ready before the Germans accepted defeat. What would Einstein have recommended Roosevelt to do, drop them on Berlin and Bonn? What if the Germans still kept fighting even after devastation of its two cities? What if the two nations had developed their own bombs at about the same time? Would USA have used it first? Einstein does not seem to have considered all such possibilities. All said and done, his insistence on USA to make the bomb was not a wise one.
Einstein's energy-mass conversion equation is real, not an illusion. It does produce enormous amounts of energy. Speed of light, c is an important factor of that equation. Time interval is one of the two parameters of speed. Therefore, time cannot be an illusion as stated by Einstein. How do the scientists resolve this paradox? The relativity theory is based on a postulate that speed of light is constant.[4] Is that a correct one? If it is correct, why is there the variable c in the formula? Should it not be replaced with the constant numerical value of c2? The term 'c2' is needed only to balance the equation dimensionally.
The scientists should deal with what does happen, or is likely to happen in the near future, say about a few thousand years, on our earth unlike the 'fundamental research' being conducted by some scientists about happenings, outside our solar system and too far in the past or future, that neither help nor hurt the mankind.
The question I am raising is not whether the theories have been proven or not. They are proven. So what? How does all that knowledge gained and proven at enormous costs benefit the mankind? $750 million were spent after 'Gravity Scope' just to verify Einstein's relativity theory as if non-verification of that theory would have been catastrophic. This and the other exorbitant costs of similar projects divert the public funds from more beneficial legitimate scientific research like cure for cancer, which can save many lives.
Arthur Eddington used photographic evidence of images of stars behind the sun during a solar eclipse to prove Einstein's prediction that light does get deflected when passing next to a massive object like sun. What useful purpose is served by knowing that? It does not affect mankind in general. Why should anyone try to see the stars behind the Sun? It may be relevant for a few astrophysicists on earth watching a star, say Vega, while it is behind the sun. The effect of such bending of its light in the vicinity of the sun would last for a few minutes, or few hours at the most, only as long as the earth is collinear with Vega and sun. As soon as the earth moves away from that line, the bending effect will cease. Why should anyone give so much importance to such a transient phenomenon? Similar questions can be asked about the perihelion precession of Mercury, relativistic delay of light, equivalence principle, geodetic and frame-dragging effects quoted as proof of the validity of relativity theories. Has there been any realistic use of any of them?
Scientists spent more than five billion dollars to build the Large Hadron Collider to generate Higgs-Boson particle. How long did that particle last? What was it used for? Elsewhere, they have created elements heavier than the heaviest naturally occurring elements. They too do not last long enough to be used. Why make them at all?
Now some scientists are proposing that the universe is just a hologram. (Is the universe 3-D? Or just a hologram? See the link:http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015/04/27/Is-the-universe-3-D-Or-just-a-hologram/3901430155121/) They are also talking about 'teleportation' of human body. Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHPVgAMxeuI. Do not these sound like fairy tales?
Another unnecessary search the great scientists are keen on is a 'unified' theory of every thing. Variety is the essential feature of nature. Why then the different physical systems cannot have their own separate theories?
A track athlete was the fastest runner in his region. One night, a burglar broke into his house. The athlete woke up and challenged the thief who then started fleeing. The athlete chased him and passed him. When someone asked him why he was running at night, he replied, "that stupid burglar thought he could outrun me!". Our astrophysicists are like this runner, not knowing when to stop.
Mr. Raolji, who runs the blog ‘Kuruxetra’, has come up with a very good metaphor. While driving an automobile, one has to operate not only the accelerator but also the brake. The driver should have the skill and wisdom to press only one of them just enough as needed to travel safely. Similarly, while pursuing scientific knowledge, we should stop at our destination and not chase moving targets. Unending search for more knowledge is not prudent. We do need fundamental research such as molecular biology or stem cell therapies but not like the proposed one for studying the properties of a pulsar 56,000 light years away.
Archeology is another branch of science pursuing knowledge of limited use. There were dinosaurs. So what? Does it matter at all? The evolution of our human species is a proper topic of study. But why examine fossils of unrelated extinct species? But at least that information pertains to our dear earth, not some distant planet or star.
The following is a link for a video clip of a news item on NBC Nightly News on August 4, 2015 showing how a quick-thinking fast-acting police officer (constable) saved the life of a motorist. The car driver lost control and hit a post near a railway crossing. The car stopped with part of it on one of the rails of the track. A train was approaching very close. The policeman pulled out the man just before the train struck the car thereby saving his life.
This looks very much like a scene from a stunt movie where it would have been scripted, rehearsed, acted and edited before inclusion in the movie. All the steps of this incident happened according to the laws of science. Each of them had low probabilities of happening. The overall probability of their happening in the proper sequence, at the proper time and speed was minuscule. How did it happen naturally? Who was its writer, director and producer? We dim-witted people call it God; intelligent ones do not call it any thing. They are too busy looking at the cosmos because science cannot provide answers to such questions.
When a child, buried under the rubble of a building collapsed during an earthquake or another disaster, is found alive after several days, we find it proper to credit God for that miracle. The logic-lovers disregard such isolated happenings because they are not scientifically designed provable and repeatable experiments.
I am not against all science. I am only against diverting funds from productive research to those that are not. "Fundamental research" is not bad by itself. However, it is important to make certain that it does not become just a euphemism for idle curiosity. It would be so if it does not pertain to things and processes on earth or within our solar system.
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[1] Nowadays some Hindus try to justify our ancient beliefs, continuing till toady, on the basis of modern scientific findings. For example, when there was some news that NASA had noticed a serpentine shape in a galaxy (or nebula) some people concluded that our sages were right in saying that the earth rests on the head of a cobra called 'Shesh Naga'. Very soon some devotees will claim that the black or dark energy the scientists are talking about is the same as Maa Kali. Some others will claim that modern science confirms that the universe is just a 'maya' (an illusion) like the holograms the top scientists are mentioning while explaining space-time relationship.
[2] Mercury's tardiness is an example of how the top scientists make a big fuss about negligible discrepancies. Newton's laws of motion explain most natural phenomena to a reasonable degree of accuracy for all practical purposes. There are some minor questions which could not be answered on the basis of those laws. For example, Mercury takes a half second more to complete one revolution around the Sun in 88 earth days than that calculated using Newton's laws, an error of one in more than 15 million. Is this a big error? Not so for us but for those scientists it was. This was ultimately explained by the relativity theory (perihelion precession of Mercury ) which is taken as a proof of its validity.
[3] The first nuclear reactor to produce electricity (albeit a trivial amount) was the small Experimental Breeder reactor (EBR-1) designed and operated by Argonne National Laboratory and sited in Idaho, USA. The reactor started up in December 1951. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Outline-History-of-Nuclear-Energy/
[4] Second postulate (invariance of c) :- As measured in any inertial frame of reference, light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c that is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. OR: The speed of light in free space has the same value c in all inertial frames of reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postulates_of_special_relativity