"God Complex" Gene Splicers Say, "Full Speed Ahead!" (Like the Titanic Captain)

The Wiktionary defines a "God complex" as "an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility." It seems that virologists favoring "gain-of-function" pathogen research may suffer from such a "God complex" (like some other types of biologists).  

An article in USA Today is entitled "As COVID turns 3, experts worry where the next pandemic will come from – and if we'll be ready." We read some very scary stuff:

"Now, in addition to worrying about a virus that might jump from animals to humans, experts are concerned about research accidents and – what should be unthinkable – the possibility of someone intentionally unleashing a highly contagious and lethal pathogen. 

A pandemic has long been known to be far riskier for global security than conventional, nuclear or chemical warfare, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University and a leading expert in global health."

What? The risk of a man-made pandemic is "far riskier" than the risk of nuclear warfare?  How could so terrifying a thing be "long known" without such a risk being known to the average man?

Next in the USA Today article we read these very troubling claims:

"The idea of engineering a deadly pathogen that sickens the world sounds like the stuff of science fiction or superhero movies. But it's no longer a fantasy.

Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist, said people in his own lab could theoretically assemble a dangerous virus from DNA ordered on the internet for under $1,000.

Once pandemic-capable viruses are identified, thousands of people worldwide have the scientific training to make them from mail-ordered synthetic DNA.

'Imagine a world where you can order weapons-grade plutonium in the mail,' he said, 'and there are thousands of engineers who have the skills to put together something that might be a bomb.' "

Then we read about virologists defending reckless "gain of function" research in which gene-splicing is done so that pathogens become more deadly:

"In 2012, the scientific community and others debated research in the U.S. and the Netherlands that explored five mutations making avian influenza more contagious to humans. Some in the virology community defended that research as essential for understanding naturally emerging risks. Yassif and others worry it made creating a global hazard one step easier."

Seeming to have quite a "God complex," many virologists are turning a blind eye to such risks. Two virologists have authored a "let's keep going full blast" editorial in which they claim,  "Science is society’s best defense against the existential threats we face."  No, the actual truth is that science gave us the hydrogen bomb, which has presented the most existential threat humans have ever faced. 

The editorial refers us to a paper in which 100+ virologists recklessly argue for a "full speed ahead" approach in regard gain-of-function research. We might call it a "full Frankenstein" approach, referencing the fictional scientist Frankenstein who tried "gain of function" research by electrifying a body built from a patchwork of corpses.  The virologists are urging us not to worry about all the Pandora's boxes they are opening. 

Concerning the origin of COVID-19, the virologist authors tell us that there are "two major camps arguing that the virus either originated from animal-to-human transmission (zoonosis) or by a laboratory leak "  The virologists say, "each of these possibilities is plausible." That doesn't make any sense, since "plausible" is a word meaning "likely."  You can't have two mutually exclusive explanations both be "plausible." The authors totally fail to see the implications of it being "plausible" that a global pandemic was caused by blundering gene-splicing scientists. The implications are that gene-splicing should be much more carefully regulated, and that laboratory safeguards should be greatly increased. Very lamely, the authors resort to a "we already have some regulations and safeguards" reasoning. 

The author's "full speed ahead" reasoning reminds you of the "full speed ahead" policy of the captain of the Titanic. But it's even worse. In the days before the Titanic sunk, there was no recent reason for suspecting that very many people had died because ocean liner captains were traveling too fast. 

A three-part series at TheIntercept.com highlights the grave risks of pathogen tinkering. In Part 3, we read about scientists seeming to sweep under the rug accounts of lab accidents, as efficiently as scientists sweep under the rug evidence for the paranormal that scientists should be diligently studying.  The links to the series have these headlines:

• Student Infected With Debilitating Virus in Undisclosed Biolab Accident

• Accident With 1918 Pandemic Virus Raises Questions About Pathogen Research

• Lab That Created Risky Avian Flu Had “Unacceptable” Biosafety Protocols

Some government board recently released a report entitled "PROPOSED BIOSECURITY OVERSIGHT FRAMEWORK FOR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE." It's pretty much a joke. We have some "weak tea" recommendations that fail to include the type of physical safeguards needed to make a major improvement in security.  There's lots of bureaucratic shuffling and semantic fiddling that doesn't add up to  recommendations for major biosafety improvements. There's no mention of quarantines of researchers who fiddled with deadly pathogens, one of the needed improvements in biosafety. 

One day most of us may end up dead because our "God complex" gene splicers want to keep up their perilous fiddling without being inconvenienced by burdensome safety protocols. In a similar vein of "going full Frankenstein," a recent Daily Mail article is entitled, "Human CLONES purposely grown to give people 'spare parts' like hearts, lungs and livers could be the key to living forever, expert claims." We read of a nutty scheme proposing that people arrange for the appearance of full-grown but unconscious clones of themselves, to be used only for organ transplanting. Under this evil scheme, a "clone parent" person might keep down in his basement (or in some "warehouse of the damned") an unconscious clone of himself, fed through tubes for maybe 30 years, until one of the organs of the "clone parent" failed, at which point the clone would be robbed of an organ so that the "clone parent" could have his old failing organ replaced.  And when this cloned  human being was robbed of its brain early in its life, and later robbed of an organ without permission of the donor, would that be legally classified as murder? I guess those running this sinister scheme would have to arrange for the murder laws to be rewritten to tidy up this little difficulty. 

The Telepathy Results Were Stunning, But the Warmup Was Clumsy

In the major journal American Psychologist there was published in 2018 a paper  entitled "The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review." The author is psychologist Etzel Cardena, whose main work seems to be in regular psychology, although he did co-edit a handbook of parapsychology. The paper (which has been cited 192 times) discusses some powerful evidence for things such as ESP (extrasensory perception or telepathy). Before Cardena presents such evidence, he tries to kind of "pave the way" for his evidence presentation, to "soften the beaches" by "warming up" his audience. He must have been aware that very many or most of the people reading his paper may have been materialists who claim that telepathy is impossible. So we can see why Cardena would have taken an approach of trying to explain why telepathy is not impossible, and then present the evidence for telepathy. 

Why do materialists claim that things such as telepathy are impossible? The reason is mainly that their belief about the brain and the mind leads them to thinking that telepathy cannot occur. A materialist thinks that your mind is purely the product of your brain (or perhaps that the mind is merely something the same as your current set of brain states).  Now consider two people in different houses who are communicating telepathically. According to the belief that your mind is merely a product of your brain (or the same as your brain states), such a thing should be impossible. Under such an idea, the only way that telepathy could occur is by signal transmission from one brain to another. But a human doesn't have any kind of antenna that would allow him to transmit signals from his brain to another brain. And a human doesn't have any dish-like receiver that would allow him to receive signals transmitted by another human. 

Such at least was the argument that materialists would give against telepathy prior to the development of modern computer technology, back in the days before there were so many tiny devices that were communicating electronically without any visible receiver dishes or antenna. Now that we use so many tiny devices that communicate wirelessly without any visible antennae or receiver dishes, such as smartphones that use wi-fi, such an argument may seem less compelling even to the person who believes that the mind is merely the product of the brain. 

In his paper Cardena attempts to dispose of any such a priori rationale for refusing to even look at evidence for ESP and similar phenomena (broadly referred to as psi). There is a very good way of doing such a thing, but Cardena fails to use such a way.  He gives us instead a  clumsy attempt to warmup his audience for his presentation of ESP evidence.

Cardena starts out in a fumbling way by disparaging the term ESP, saying "ESP is a misleading term because it suggests perception as the mediating mechanism, although few if any psi researchers nowadays assume this to be the case." This claim makes no sense. The Cambridge English Dictionary gives us two definitions of perception:

1. "the quality of being aware of things through the physical senses, especially sight"
2. "someone's ability to notice and understand things that are not obvious to other people"

The term "extrasensory perception" is a perfectly good and honest term to be using, and the "extrasensory" part makes clear that the second definition of perception is being used.  It makes no sense to complain that the term ESP suggests sensory perception, because the "E" in that "ESP" clearly indicates that extrasensory perception (not involving the senses) is being referred to. 

Cardena then attempts to warmup his audience for a presentation of evidence for psychical abilities such as ESP by referring to physics. He states this:

"Quantum mechanics (QM) and Einstein’s theory of relativity have depicted a reality that differs substantially from commonsensical assumptions. Nobel laureate and pioneer of molecular biology Max Delbrück (1986) expressed it so: 'Modern science . . . has forced us to abandon absolute space and time, determinism, and the absolute object.' "

This is a poor strategy of attempting to warmup his audience for a presentation of evidence for psychical abilities such as ESP.  The nature of time and space is a question that is not closely related to the possibility of abilities such as ESP and clairvoyance. There is no need at all for people to change their beliefs about time and space in order to accept evidence of paranormal human abilities.  If makes no sense to ask  someone to "abandon absolute space and time" as a prerequisite to accepting ESP evidence. No such abandonment is required. 

Cardena then dives into a murky discussion of quantum mechanics, telling us this:

"In his interpretation of QM (and experts differ on how to interpret it, e.g., Schlosshauer, Kofler, & Zeilinger, 2013), the eminent physicist Bernard d=Espagnat (1979, 2006) discussed the implications of experiments showing that measuring/observing the property of a particle, such as its spin, instantaneously determines that of another particle entangled with it, no matter how distant. Entanglement means that the quantum states of such particles are not independent but part of a system, which can be produced in different ways. D’Espagnat concluded that such experiments falsify the local realist theory that effects cannot propagate faster than light and that objects far apart in space are relatively independent. For him, the world is not made of separate 'material' objects embedded in space-time, but of a nonseparable, indivisible field, a 'veiled reality,' with which consciousness interacts. He concluded that the implications of QM and 'transcendentalism-inclined thinkers'  (d’Espagnat, 2006, p. 429) have points in common, as did renowned physicist David Bohm (1986) in his theory of the implicate order or guiding field, which he applied to psi phenomena."

Cardena is here again following a fumbling approach at attempting to  warmup his audience for a presentation of evidence for psychical abilities such as ESP.  He has mentioned the very murky topic of quantum mechanics, and a particularly puzzling feature of quantum mechanics, a very baffling physical phenomenon called quantum entanglement. Neither quantum mechanics nor quantum entanglement has any clear and obvious relevance to the possibility of paranormal human abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance. It is not at all necessary for you to have any particular interpretation or idea of quantum mechanics before having a credible belief in telepathy, and it is not necessary for you to believe that anything can travel faster than the speed of light. 

Cardena then gives us several more paragraphs discussing controversial interpretations of physics, including retrocausality, the idea that future events may affect past events.  The possibility of retrocausality may have some relevance to whether it is possible to have an anomalous knowledge of future events, called precognition. But no controversial interpretation of physics (such as a belief in retrocausality) is needed for anyone to believe in telepathy or clairvoyance. Whether retrocausality ever occurs is irrelevant to whether telepathy is possible. Cardena mentions a physicist who has postulated "additional dimensions beyond the temporal and three-spatial ones." The possibility of additional dimensions has some relevance to consideration of evidence for near-death experiences and life after death. But the possibility of additional dimensions has no direct relevance to whether telepathy or clairvoyance is possible. You do not need to believe in extra dimensions to accept evidence for telepathy and clairvoyance. 

After so clumsy an attempt to foster receptivity to evidence for paranormal psi abilities, Cardena does a fairly good job at presenting such evidence. But he fails to present the evidence in a way that will cause the layman reader to realize how strong the evidence is. We have in Table 1 an indication that there is evidence for "ganzfeld" which has a "P" of "< 10^-16."  What does that mean? Someone who has long-studied such topics will know that the word "ganzfeld" refers to a type of ESP or telepathy test, that the letter "P" refers to a p-value that can very roughly be considered the probability of getting a result through chance, and that < 10^-16  refers to "less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000." But the average layman will not know all of these things, and may glance at Table 1 without having any understanding that very strong evidence has been presented for paranomal human abilities. 

Similarly, we have in Table 1 an indication that with something called "forced choice" there have been results of "P" of "< 6.3 X 10^-25."  But what does that mean? Neither the average layman nor a typical psychologist will know upon coming to Table 1, because Cardena hasn't yet explained the term. A few pages later he gets around to explaining the term (without explaining it very well):

"In forced-choice studies, the guessing possibilities are finite and the possibilities are known by the person, for instance cards in a randomized deck. The protocol measures whether the participant can guess correctly more often than would be expected by chance. This was a common design in the middle of the 20th century." 

What he's talking about by "forced choice studies" are things such as (1) telepathy tests in which one person tries to guess a randomly selected card that some unseen person has selected and observed; (2) clairvoyance tests such as card tests in which a random card is dealt face down, and someone has to guess what the card is, before anyone has seen it.  An average person making a causal reading of Table 1 will have no idea of what is meant by "forced choice," so Cardena has not very effectively presented the compelling evidence for ESP in a way that will cause most readers to understand how compelling it is.  So it goes again and again with parapsychologists. They have all kinds of incredibly compelling evidence they can present, but they are often very clumsy about presenting such evidence in ways that the average reader can easily understand.  Roughly speaking, the "forced choice" evidence listed in Cardena's Table 1 is evidence that in certain types of telepathy or clairvoyance tests, there have been results with a chance likelihood of less than about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is roughly the same as p of "< 6.3 X 10^-25."

What would be an effective way of fostering receptivity for evidence for paranormal human abilities? It would be a strategy completely different from the approach Cardena took. An effective way of warming up an audience for a presentation of evidence for paranormal human abilities is to start out by discussing at considerable length the evidence of brain physical shortfalls, and the very strong evidence that nothing in the brain is capable of explaining any of the main mental capabilities that humans have. If you take this way of "paving the way" for evidence for paranormal human abilities, you will discuss things such as this:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy often  produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities, as I discuss here. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.

2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.

3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it should be  impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.

4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.

5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.

6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.

7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a purely mental effect such as an abstract idea. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.

8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 

9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.

10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.

11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.

12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredibly fast calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.

13. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head.

14. Well-documented evidence for apparitions provides evidence that the human mind is not merely the result of brain activity. Such evidence includes (1) more than 100 cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, only to very soon learn that the corresponding person had died (as discussed here, here, here and here); (2) many additional cases of apparitions seen by multiple observers, contrary to the explanation of hallucination (discussed here and here); (3) many other cases of death-bed apparitions as discussed here and documented by researchers such as Haraldsson and Osis. 

15. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.

16.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

These things all indicate that our minds and memory must be the result of some spiritual or immaterial aspect of man or some soul aspect of man, in direct contradiction to the position of materialism that such a thing does not exist. Why do such things help "pave the way" for the evidence of paranormal human abilities? Such things help to establish the likelihood that the human mind is some mysterious reality that cannot be explained by any known physical causes. Once we have reached such a conclusion, all talk of an impossibility of telepathy or clairvoyance collapses like a house of cards blown apart by a shotgun.  All of the talk of an impossibility of telepathy or clairvoyance was based upon the dogma that the mind is merely the product of the brain or the same as the brain. Once such dogmas are exposed as tenets inconsistent with what we know about the brain and its many severe physical shortfalls, "it's a whole new ballgame" and "all bets are off," to use two American colloquial expressions. If we don't understand how we got our minds, and cannot credibly explain the main common phenomena of minds by referring to brains,  then we don't understand the limits of our minds, and have no business claiming that some mental phenomenon is impossible because it cannot be neurally explained.  When we properly realize that we do not understand how our minds arise, then we are in a "whole new world" in which things such as telepathy, clairvoyance and life after death are very "live" possibilities rather than impossibilities.

 

"We're Like Deer in the Headlights": Physicists Learn No Lessons From Their Failed Wild Goose Chases

A theory called supersymmetry theory arose as a speculative attempt to explain away (or kind of sweep under the rug) a case of cosmic fine-tuning that bothered scientists. The issue of the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass (the mass of the Higgs boson) was skillfully explained by physicist Ben Allanach in a previous article at the Aeon site: 

"Behind the question of mass, an even bigger and uglier problem was lurking in the background of the Standard Model: why is the Higgs boson so light? In experiments it weighed in at 125 times the mass of a proton. But calculations using the theory implied that it should be much bigger – roughly ten million billion times bigger, in fact....Quantum fluctuations of ultra-heavy particle pairs should have a profound effect on the Higgs boson, whose mass is very sensitive to them....One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned. Just as the movement of air or tiny vibrations should make the pencil fall over, the mass of the Higgs shouldn’t be so perfectly calibrated that it has the ability to cancel out quantum fluctuations. However, instead of an uncanny correspondence, maybe the naturalness problem with the Higgs boson could be explained away by a new, more foundational theory: supersymmetry."

In an article in Symmetry magazine, we have a similar explanation:

"To understand what’s fishy about the observable Higgs mass being so low, first you must know that it is actually the sum of two inputs: the bare Higgs mass (which we don’t know) plus contributions from all the other Standard Model particles, contributions collectively known as 'quantum corrections.' The second number in the equation is an enormous negative, coming in around minus 10¹⁸ GeV. Compared to that, the result of the equation, 125 GeV, is extremely small, close to zero. That means the first number, the bare Higgs mass, must be almost the opposite, to so nearly cancel it out. To some physicists, this is an unacceptably strange coincidence."

How big a coincidence? The Symmetry article later quotes physicist Lawrence Lee Jr. as saying “the conundrum with the Higgs mass, which would require fine-tuning on the order of 1-in-10³⁴,” which is a coincidence like the coincidence of you correctly guessing the full phone numbers of three consecutive strangers. 

Scientists should have just accepted this case of very precise fine-tuning in nature.  But instead, many of them made a long, quixotic, futile attempt to overthrow it (like someone trying to overthrow the observation that the sun is hot, with some elaborate theory trying to explain how the sun isn't really hot).  Why did they do that? Because they had a motivation, an ideological motivation rather than the motivation of simply discovering truth. Their ideological motivation was related to a belief that the universe should not be anything that looked like a product of design. This ideological motivation is clearly stated in the Symmetry article by physicist Lee, who states it as follows: “In general, what we want from our theories—and in some way, our universe—is that nothing seems too contrived.” If you want for the universe to not "seem too contrived," then you may twist yourself into knots trying to explain away cases of apparent fine-tuning in the universe. 

An article makes it rather clear that the supersymmetry theory was mainly motivated by a desire to get rid of a case of fine-tuning, and make the universe look like it was a little less lucky, a little less  providentially blessed. We read this:

"For example, the small mass of the Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to explain—its calculation requires subtracting two very large numbers that just happen to be slightly different from each other. 'But if you add supersymmetry, this takes care of all these cancellations such that you can get a light Higgs mass without needing to have such luck,' says Elodie Resseguie, a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

All attempts to verify the theory of supersymmetry have failed.  The Large Hadron Collider failed to find any of the "superpartner" particles predicted by supersymmetry theory.  In a recent article in the New York Times, physicist Maria Spiropulu comments on the dismal failure of supersymmetry theory.  Referring to the "supersymmetrical particles" predicted by supersymmetry theory, which physicists wasted endless hours speculating about, without ever discovering, she says this:

"That has been a little bit crushing; for 20 years I’ve been chasing the supersymmetrical particles. So we’re like deer in the headlights: we didn’t find supersymmetry, we didn’t find dark matter as a particle."  

There was a very important lesson to be learned from all the vast amount of time physicists wasted on supersymmetry theory. The lesson is that when nature presents us with a case of very precise fine-tuning (such as we have in the Higgs Boson/Higgs Mass), then we should just accept that purposeful-seeming fine tuning in nature and maybe ponder the philosophical implications of such fine tuning, rather than wasting endless hours twisting ourselves into knots trying to explain away the fine tuning, and sweep it under the rug. There is no sign that our physicists have learned this important lesson.  

In the same article, we hear from emeritus professor of physics Michael Turner.  Turner shows zero signs of having learned any lessons from the gigantic failure of supersymmetry theory and string theory (which is based on supersymmetry theory, but has many more speculations). Between 1980 and 2020 physicists wrote many thousands of papers on supersymmetry theory and string theory. All evidence thus far suggests such efforts were a waste of time, and no evidence exists for such theories.  But when asked about string theory, Turner simply says this: "We will have to wait and see what comes from string theory, but I think it will be big."  No lesson has been learned here.  It's like an old person who wasted half of his life searching for the Abominable Snowman saying, "But one day we'll get some evidence for it!"

A recent article at the Ars Technica site gives us the real scoop on string theory. The article is entitled "Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything." We read this:

"Despite decades of work, it [string theory] has failed to deliver on its promise. What went wrong, and where do we go from here?...The whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like 'Beyond Supersymmetry' and 'Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.'  Where does that leave string theory? ....Without supersymmetry, string theory isn’t gone, but it’s certainly on life support."

The New York Times writer asks Turner about grand unification theories, one of the biggest failed wild goose chases of physicists. Thousands of scientific papers have been written on this topic, and no successful grand unification theory has emerged. The New York Times writer asks, "Where are we on unification?" Turner gives us a circuitous answer that shows no signs he is even aware of the grand flop that grand unification theories were. No lesson seems to have been learned here.  The New York Times writer later suggests how big the failure was by later asking, "If unification is the wrong question, what is the right one?"

Ideas such as grand unification theories and supersymmetry theory and string theory are ideas that all gained popularity because of what has been called a snowball effect: a sociological effect by which ideas in academia gain more and more acceptance for a while, picking up followers, funding and attention like a rolling snowball picks up snow as it rolls down a snowy mountain. The diagram below illustrates the idea:

A theory can greatly benefit from such a snowball effect, but the end result is usually nasty, as illustrated by the visual below:

The charts below (made using the Google Books Ngram viewer) shows the failure of grand unification theories and supersymmetry theory. We see a great spike of interest around 1985, with a steady decline: just what we would expect from theories that did not succeed.

Asked about the multiverse (the groundless speculation that there are countless other universes), Turner says this:

"I think we have to deal with it, even though it sounds crazy. And the multiverse gives me a headache; not being testable, at least not yet, it isn’t science. But it may be the most important idea of our time. It’s one of the things on the table. Headache or not, we have to deal with it. It needs to go up or out; either it’s part of science or it isn’t part of science."

That sounds very "deer in the headlights." But perhaps we should use a stronger phrase of disparagement to describe what string theorists did regarding the multiverse. They calculated there were maybe 10 to the 500th power "solutions" to their string theory equations, and then they started suggesting that maybe all these hypothetical universes really exist. It's like some Aquaman novelist calculating there are a quintillion different possible versions of his Aquaman story, and then concluding that this means there are a quintillion universes, each with its own different version of Aquaman. Reasoning like that is the opposite of science. 

Next in the article Turner is asked this:

"Why is it considered a triumph that the standard model of cosmology doesn’t say what 95 percent of the universe is? Only 5 percent of it is atomic material like stars and people; 25 percent is some other 'dark matter,' and about 70 percent is something even weirder — Mike has named it 'dark energy' — that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate."

Completely failing to see the failure of a theoretical program in which it is claimed that 95% of the universe is mysterious never-observed substances (dark energy and dark matter), corresponding to no known particles, Turner merely says this: 

"That’s a big success, yeah. We’ve named all the major components."

The New York Times writer then replies: "But you don't know what most of them are."  We again seem to get a "deer in the headlights" impression.  The New York Times article rather gives us the impression that today's particle physicists may be lost in the woods.  But at least there is one hopeful sign: the New York Times reporter is asking some tough questions, rather than just throwing the usual softball questions.

A story a few days ago on the www.phys.org illustrates some of the lamentable tendencies of modern theoretical physics and cosmology. We have a headline which is another example in which the wildest and most implausible of speculations is passed off as a discovery, the headline being "The bubbling universe: A previously unknown phase transition in the early universe."  We read this:

" 'But if we trust the observations and calculations, we must accept that our current model of the universe cannot explain the data, and then we must improve the model. Not by discarding it and its success so far, but by elaborating on it and making it more detailed so that it can explain the new and better data,' said Martin S. Sloth, adding, 'It appears that a phase transition in the dark energy is the missing element in the current Standard Model to explain the differing measurements of the universe's expansion rate.' "

So now they're speculating not just about dark energy, but bubbling dark energy that underwent a phase transition like liquid water turning into steam? It's like saying, "My zombie theory doesn't work, but I can fix it by making it a theory of shape-shifting zombies." A good lesson to learn from the failure to detect dark matter and dark energy and "superpartner" particles: spend more time studying things that can actually be observed rather than spending so much time on hypotheticals that no one has observed. 

Postscript: A search on the Inspire database shows more than 68,000 papers written on the topic of supersymmetry:

That's many millions or billions of dollars of federal funding, down the drain.  On the same site we can get some evidence that physicists are paying attention to the evidence for cosmic fine-tuning. A search for "fine-tuning" shows 4000+ papers. 

A more specific search for "cosmic fine-tuning" shows 400+ papers:

The World Economic Forum's Mediocre Record at Predicting Global Risks

An organization called the World Economic Forum has long been issuing an annual report on global risks.  In a post on this blog way back in 2013, I reviewed the World Economic Forum's 2013 report on global risks.  Listing technological risks and economic risks over the next ten years, the Forum failed to foresee substantial risks from a pandemic. Its 2013 report listed "Vulnerability to Pandemics" as being of below-average likelihood in the next ten years. 

A look at the World Economic Forum's 2019 report on global risks also shows a failure to alert us to the some of the biggest global economic hazards the world faced between 2020 and 2023. The 2019 report gave us the chart below. The only mention of a pandemic is a red diamond in the top left quadrant, one labeled "spread of infectious diseases." This was rated as having a "below average" probability. In the chart below we see no explicit mention of war as a global risk. There is a mention of "interstate conflict," but that is a vague term.  Inflation is listed as having a below-average risk (with its opposite, deflation, having the same risk). 

The 2019 report listed the following as the top 10 global risks in terms of likelihood:

Oops, there was no mention of a pandemic as one of the top 10 global risks in the next 10 years. There was also no mention of either war or inflation as one of the biggest global risks. The three biggest risks the global economy has faced in the past three years seem to have been the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the risk from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

The 2020 World Economic Forum report on global risks did not do any better. It gave us estimates of risk that were not very different from the estimates shown above. Below is what the 2020 report listed as the top 10 global risks in the next 10 years:

Again, there was no mention of a pandemic as one of the top 10 global risks in the next 10 years. There was also no mention of either war or inflation as one of the biggest global risks. The report had a chart looking very similar to the first chart shown in this post, and in that chart both "Unmanageable inflation" and "Deflation" were listed as risks of below-average likelihood, with deflation listed as the more likely of the two. 

In my 2013 post on the World Economic Forum's 2013 report on global risks, I chided the report for its overlooking the threat of nuclear war, stating this:

"My only objection to this summary graph is, again, that it inexplicably ignores the risk with greatest impact: the risk of nuclear war. A conservative estimate of the risk of a nuclear war is 1 percent per year. The United States has approximately 2150 active nuclear weapons (7700 in all), and Russia has 1800 (8500 in all). Every year those weapons continue to exist, there is a chance of nuclear war, through things such as a software error, a mechanical error (as in Fail Safe), a deliberate launch of weapons by a sub or missile base commander afflicted by insanity or rage (as in Dr. Strangelove),  or one side misidentifying something as a nuclear attack (such as happened in 1995, described here). Nuclear war should have been listed as the threat with greatest impact."  

The 2020 World Economic Forum report on global risks did risk "weapons of mass destruction" as number 2 on its list of risks with the greatest impact, thereby partially correcting the strange omission I had noted in my 2013 post.  But that 2020 report failed to mention conventional war as one of the 10 most likely risks. 

In the 2021 World Economic Forum report on global risks we see them starting to get things right. There is a chart with the same format as the first chart shown in this post.  Now suddenly we see a red diamond labeled "Infectious diseases" at the top right of the chart, indicating a risk of the highest likelihood. The diamond labeled "Deflation" has changed into a diamond labeled "Price instability," which covers both inflation and deflation. Now we see the 10 most likely global risks listed as below:

Finally, we see what could be a reference to international war (described as "interstate relations fracture") listed as one of the ten most likely results. But the improvement of the 2021 global risks report wasn't anything much to brag about. COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic by early 2020, and by the year 2021 Russia was loudly threatening to invade Ukraine, something it did in February 2022. 

The 2021 global risks report failed to alert us to the risk of inflation. The report only mentioned inflation twice, each time in a very vague way in which inflation is described as price instability that could be either inflation or its opposite (deflation). Inflation in the US rose to 4.7% in 2021, and 9.1% in 2022.  

The 2022 global risks report of the World Economic Forum has this figure:

None of the risks listed above include a mention of inflation, which was 9.1% in 2022 in the US. None of these "most severe risks on a global scale over the next 10 years" include an explicit mention of the risk of conventional war or nuclear war.  This makes no sense. The world still has thousands of nuclear weapons that are vastly greater risks in the next ten years than almost every item listed above. What kind of "nuclear weapons amnesia" is going on here? The war between Russia and Ukraine (which is receiving heavy military assistance from the US and Europe) makes the threat of nuclear warfare worse than it has been for quite a few years. 

All in all, it seems that the World Economic Forum's record of forecasting risks is not terribly impressive.