The Pseudoscience of Scientific Skepticism

The Similarity Between What Science Believes and What it Rejects

In science, we have come to believe that faith only refers to a scientist's personal conviction that an experiment will yield the desired results. Aside from this attitude, or hope, faith has no other scientific bearing on the final product, nor is it allowed to be an active factor in the experimental outcome. This leads many to believe that what constitutes science is entirely factual, and never emotional.

However, the existence of science in the first place is a confirmation of a kind of belief in something that modernity takes for granted: that the physical world and all of its phenomena are entirely separate from the world of emotion, of belief, or of an individual perspective. Science guarantees that a result achieved can be reproduced regardless of the particular mood of the scientists, the given day of the week, the current alignment of the stars, or any other factor not physically connected to the elements at work in an equation or experiment. 

But again, let us be very clear here: scientific work is a system based more on what is believed than what is observed. For example, we cannot ever be sure that the physical world is not being affected by something non-physical; all we can do is measure what we can see. If there are forces outside our view of the physical world we can manage to measure, science remains continually blind and ignorant to them, and therefore cannot ever see what influence they may have on physical acts. There may, for example, be forces from order dimensions we can't perceive, and these forces are affecting something in our current world, such as our ideas about time, space, or gravity. 

Since the 18th century, science has been increasingly trusted as the golden standard for measurement, and for an understanding of our world. In the 17th century, it replaced the role of knowledge-production that was being served by philosophy, which in turn replaced the authority of religion in the centuries before that. It seems that all previous ways of making knowledge will eventually be replaced by scientific methods. But again - we must be sure that what we are experiencing is purely scientific, purely physical, and not philosophical or religious in nature. We are physically drawn to the center of the earth by gravity, which is not a philosophy or religion, it is a physical fact. We seem confident, too, that we can pray long and hard for the power to fly, but will never be able to float in midair. 

While we are on the topic of flying, let us imagine that there are two ways to levitate. One way is through metaphysical kinetic magic or capabilities, and the other is through a scientific understanding of how natural laws work in the observable world. For the scientific approach, we have learned that to defy gravity requires the physical laws of flight to be manipulated in such a way as to allow us to produce lift from a wing body that, as it moves through the air, has less pressure above it than below. This difference in pressure below and above a wing surface causes a very small vacuum, and the filling of the vacuum is possible by nature by moving an object below the vacuum toward the vacuum, which in this case, is above the wing surface, such that the winged body will fly. The physics of reduced pressure is essentially a vacuum above the flying object, whether it is the wing of a bird, or that of a plane:

(Source: https://steemit.com/aviation/@technerd/the-physics-of-aircraft-design-and-flight)

What we are speaking about is not flight but rather what one believes about how the world works. The aim of science is to create a belief-independent way of thinking, so that the physical world can be understood without resorting to emotion or other aspects not directly related to the material world. And scientists are very proud of the fact that the scientific method, which includes means for setting up experiments that generate consistent results, is “closed off” from anything other than physical forces. Science looks at the world, but is closed off from anything that cannot be measured – this is the philosophy of every scientist.

One can see or measure any phenomenon, but what really impresses scientists is the ability to understand (and reproduce) what caused it in the first place. Such is the fascination with material causes that scientists have been keen to point out how other fields of study with different ways of thinking are erroneous with regard to an understanding of causes. 

For instance, almost 50 years ago, the late theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, perhaps the most famous proponent of science above all other forms of thought, gave a speech (one of many) on science’s rational superiority over other modes of thinking. The speech in question happened to be the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, which published his remarks in the June, 1974 issue of its Engineering and Science journal.

Titled Cargo Cult Science, the subtitle of Feynman’s talk had the characteristic confidence of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist – someone who appeared to know truth from fiction – “Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself.” The implication there is that unless one is “scientific,” one is more likely to fool oneself. 

As he did in many similar talks, Feynman proved, in a quick succession of observations about (the non-scientific) world of “New Age” thinking in 1974, that he was rather more susceptible to superficial thinking than he gave himself credit for. Unaware of the naive traps into which science falls, he spoke mockingly of reflexology, ESP, UFOs, witch doctors, and psychotherapy, admonishing his audience that “we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.”

Yet, as for theories that don’t work, perhaps no field is more prolific at producing them than science itself, which has allowed the domain of the completely unprovable to become as valid a form of knowledge as what can be reproduced consistently under laboratory conditions. The list of science's unprovable fancies is long, and longer still is the length of time for which scientists have harbored those theories that are nevertheless supposedly scientific. Without doubt, the two primary fancies in the name of physics are what is called string theory in theoretical physics and the many-worlds theory in quantum mechanics. Do not let the word "theory" lead you astray, these are systems based on the most stubborn kind of belief: faith itself.  Let us devote a thought to each of these superstitions.

String theory, a branch of theoretical physics, holds that reality is made up of infinitesimally sized vibrating strings, much smaller than atoms, electrons, or even subatomic particles like quarks. This field of study is 60 years old (although its roots are 100 years old, with Gunnar Nordström proposing the dream of a 5th dimension as a way to explain how gravity and electromagnetism can be correlated), yet no experiment has ever been done – or can ever be done – to observe or validate whether string theory is really true. It simply cannot be observed or measured, cannot even be falsified. Yet, despite the impossibility of observing string theory in action, it has persisted as real science, even though scientists like Feynman have selectively dismissed other equally unobservable, unprovable non-science based systems. 

Sometimes, for science to fool itself, it only needs a mathematical framework large enough to hold everything together. In that style, string theory “works” because it constructs a space of sufficient size and dimension that anything can be related to anything else within it, sort of like an invisible mathematical universe that cannot be seen or entered. Not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid; one prominent physicist, Lee Smolin, has acknowledged that string theory (or rather, an infinity of string theories) exists because there is continued belief in it among physicists, something that should be seen as problematic, particularly when there are so many other competing theories:

Given the infinite number of string theories, most with a large number of free parameters, it is not surprising that some can  be found that predict phenomena that, with appropriate adjustments of free parameters, put some effects just at the threshold of observability.  This is just a consequence of the lack of falsifiability of the theory.   Of course, if some new phenomena were discovered experimentally that could only be explained on the assumption that string theory is the fundamental theory of nature, that would be all the proof that is needed.  But in most of these cases, such as cosmic strings, there are already on the table alternative explanations for such effects which do not involve fundamental string theory.

In that spirit, one of the pioneers of string theory, Leonard Susskind, has recently attributed the theory’s problems to the fact that, as observers, scientists are inside the experiment they are studying:

The usual methodology of physics, in particular quantum mechanics, is to imagine systems that are outside the systems we are studying. We call these systems observers, apparatuses or measuring devices, and we sort of divide the world into those measuring devices and the things we’re interested in. But it’s quite clear that in the world of cosmology/de Sitter space/eternal inflation, that we’re all part of the same thing. And I think that’s partly why we are having trouble understanding the quantum mechanics of these things.

Bearing this in mind, let us momentarily return to Feynman’s talk, in which he mentioned the case of the Cargo Cult people in the Pacific island of Vanuatu:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

As we mentioned earlier, the intention of the statement is clear: observing a phenomenon that you want to repeat is useless if you can’t understand its cause. The scientist's job is to find the cause, which will not reveal itself easily: the airplane is, like the bird, merely a physical instance of the aerodynamic lift principle. The plane can fly here, or there, as can any bird, but where is the principle itself located? It has neither location nor temporal placement, it is simply part of nature's totality of laws; it is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

The folks in Vanuatu (who we may doubt were doing more than performing a staged simulation for Western visitors) saw the flying ships but didn't understand the mysterious principles of lift that we discussed earlier. Perhaps, by focusing only on what they could see, they were too far from the cause. On the other hand, the string theorists, as Susskind stated, are apparently too close to what's happening at the sub-subatomic level that pervades everything to be able to measure it. Perhaps this is the more elegant distinction that Feynman should have made, although it would have required a scientist to accept his own limitations of thought.

Given his naïveté in matters outside of science, we know that not all scientists are as playful (yet patronizing) as Feynman. Still, there is a moral lesson here, and it applies equally to all: knowledge sidesteps vanity. Facts are useful, but to truly know is not a merely intellectual pursuit; the heart, too, must be open to all visitors – thoughts that are logical, contradictory, counterintuitive, and unlikely must all be made to feel equally welcome in the mind in order for nature to reveal its abstractions because every probability brings a hidden gift. That is the difference between having knowledge and having intuition – knowledge defines what can be retrieved, while intuition defines what can come next.

And so now, we shall consider whether the next example is based on knowledge or intuition. The field of study in question is known as many worlds interpretation - let us call it MWI for short - and it is a leading contender for the best explanation of what is happening in quantum mechanics, which is “the study of physics of the very small” at the atomic and subatomic level. 

Quantum mechanics (QM) has several problems or challenges, known to every physicist. The first of these is that the study of elementary particles cannot be done with certainty. All of the instruments that we may use, devise, or imagine for exploration at such small levels are themselves made of atomic particles. There is no higher level looking at a lower level: everything in QM is atomic. In biology, an electron microscope may look at a virus, but the virus, no matter how minuscule, is nevertheless composed of many atoms. A flake of snow may appear very different from how we see it, but it is still a very large number of particles:

(Fresh snow from Dec. 12, 2008. Hanover, NH. Columnar grain with end caps. Detail showing sublimation of flake. Source: Electron Microscope Images)

Unfortunately, there is no electron microscope for electrons, protons, or any other elementary particles – for comparison, a proton is 0.000000000000039370078740158 inches wide. The tip of a needle is 0.0011811023622047 inches, as shown below:

In 1600x magnification, the tip appears like this:

There are over 11 billion protons at the tip of the needle. For an example in space, below is a photo showing our planet (the circled dot), as seen from Voyager 1, which is currently 11 billion miles from earth:

Thus, if we can imagine a particle spaced every mile between the satellite taking the photo and the dot, that is how many protons are at the tip of a needle. 

The point is that all particle physics can only be approximated by machines that smash atoms and by complex mathematical equations. No one has ever seen what an elementary particle looks like, or even what exactly it does. 

In a few moments, this is what QM is telling us about how particles really work. But first, this model, which we all learned in school, about how particles apparently “look” is completely wrong:

All that this simple model claims is that matter is made up of particles that are spinning around a nucleus. However, if particles were really doing this, they would be giving off light, soon exhausting their energy, and being sucked into the nucleus; an electron, for example, would disappear in 1/100 billionth of a second. Instead of a point particle, therefore, an electron must instead be “spread around” the nucleus, so that it can avoid losing its orbit (again, no cameras can capture this, so science must speculate). This spreading of the electron means that it is acting as a wave, and so, scientists calculate the positions of an electron by means of an equation called the wave function, which produces the probability that a particle is at any given position at any given moment, as it moves around the nucleus. Thus, instead of the single objects in orbits above, the movement of particles is believed to be more like this description of waves – the higher the waves, the greater the chance that a particle will be at that location; the lower the waves, the lower the chance the particle will be at that position:

There is a reason why I have repeatedly emphasized the idea that we cannot observe particles, because every instrument that can observe a particle is itself made up of particles, so there is no “outside” observation possible in quantum physics measurement: each particle to be measured will be “hit” by any number of particles coming from the measuring experiment itself, and therefore, the observed particle will be disturbed by the measuring instrument itself. In a way, we can say that the particles and the experiment’s instruments are all entangled together at the same level. Here is all we need to remember: the particle can be anywhere, so we have a list of probabilities as to where it can be. This list appears as a wave on a graph, with the horizontal axis (x) representing the location of the particle, and the vertical axis (y) representing the probability that the particle will be at that x location. The graph below shows:

There is a wave of probabilities in that graph because we don’t know where the particle really is. However, once we determine the location of the particle for sure, all other probabilities for its location become zero (i.e., there is no chance that the particle is anywhere else). Notice how the wave function “collapses” as it narrows to a single point:

But now we turn to the many worlds interpretation (MWI) which holds that this entanglement also includes the observer as well, so that each time there is an apparent collapse of the function, as we just saw above, what is really happening isn’t that the particle has stopped being in all the other possible locations, but rather that the location we are seeing it at (location x2 above) is a location unique to this universe. The particle didn’t stop existing everywhere else: rather, it remains at a different location. We don’t see it any longer because there is a separate universe coming into existence in which the particle’s true (different) location remains. So, if we have a million possible locations for the particle, the function above doesn’t ever really collapse, but rather, a million new, different universes are born. 

I grant that you may have to read this last paragraph more than once. The other locations of the particle haven’t disappeared, they’re just in other universes - not ours.

What I’m saying is that once again, we are too close to this phenomenon to prove it, nor can we ever see another universe (none has ever been discovered - how can it?). In this apparent craziness, many theoretical physicists have staked their reputations. One of the more articulate proponents of this theory today is Sean Carroll, whose books and talks are extremely clear. Here he is explaining how Many Worlds is an alternative to the fact that standard interpretations of quantum mechanics are not complete.

This theory states that as we measure something, we are part of the measurement. In the case of electrons, the separate locations of the electrons are in fact separate universes, no longer aware of each other. 

Yes, it’s true. It seems we have come full circle – the scientist works by faith after all, for science has forced physics into places that resist explanation by mere measurement alone.

I now conclude by arriving at my primary point: skeptics who rely on science as a means to discount faith about UFOs, or anything else, are standing on the shakiest ground of all. In regard to UFOs, they seem happy to dismiss what witnesses are photographing and reporting simply because it all seems pseudo-scientific – and all the UFO theorists along with it – while believing much more untenable absurdities about many worlds and multiple dimensions (11, at last count, in string theory) coming into existence, simply because equations cannot explain reality in any better way.

Perhaps it’s time to give faith a try, outside of science, outside of the strange alleys where “reason” has been trying to corral us. Either that is true, or, like the many worlds interpretation argues, they, too, are entangled in the reality that they seek to describe, and are, to repeat Feynman's verdict, now aimed at these scientists: “they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential”. Perhaps it’s an understanding of how the physics version of the “Vanuatu plane” (string theory, many worlds, and other belief systems) actually flies. Symbolic belief is often more enriching than factual understanding.

Until next time, my friends. Let us remain humble about what we encounter.