Blowback on Science and UFOs

The February 6^th, 2014 London Review of Books has a review by David Kaiser of physicist Lee Smolin’s new book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe [Allen Lane, 319 pp.]

Reviewer Kaiser opens with a look at Ernst Mach (after whom the Mach speed numbers are named).

Mach, who lived in the last years of the 19^th Century is noted for many things but especially his attacks on Newtonian physics and Newton’s laws.

Kaiser writes [on Page 27]:

“[Mach] chides Newton for losing his way, ‘cowering under the influence of medieval philosophy’, growing ‘unfaithful to his resolve to investigate only actual facts’.

What troubles him [Mach] was the array of assumptions that undergirded [Newton’s laws]. ‘The present volume is not a treatise on the application of the principles of mechanics,’ he wrote in the opening pages of The Science of Mechanics [1883]. ‘Its aim is to clear up ideas, expose the real significance of the matter, and get rid of metaphysical obscurities.’

Mach was offended principally by Newton’s notions of absolute space and time.

Mach [believed] that a proper science must be built on objects of ‘positive experience’: those which, at least in principle, could make some impact on an investigator’s senses.”

Current physicist Lee Smolin has taken a like stance when it comes to Einstein’s theory of space-time, the thrust of his new book.

Smolin believes that Time and space need to be separated – space is a thing we can move around in, backward, forward, sideways, et cetera, whereas time has a one-way flow.

Physicists, Smolin feels, could tackle the Universe more sensibly if the space-time factor is limited to space, only.

This would curtail all the nonsense of string theory or the musings of multiverses, which have befuddled physics since the Greeks and now have become so irrational that physics may be likened to conversations heard in an insane asylum.

Why do I bring this up here?

The review, along with Mach’s and Smolin’s stances about science, smacks of the position that Gaines M Crook took in the late 1990s and early years of the 2000 decade about UFOs and its practitioners.

That’s why we are presenting as much of Mr. Crook’s writings as we have access to.

His views would have had a cleansing effect on ufology had his writings not been suppressed or ignored by those in the UFO community who stifled (and still stifle) heterodox views about UFOs.

RR