Like fish in water, humans have no idea what constitutes their universe.

The human brain — just 3 lbs of meat with a limited shelf life — is incapable of understanding the world, the universe and everything. Forty-two is probably the best answer we will ever come up with.

So, very roughly, opines that master of cosmology and philosophical scientism, Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society.

It is said that knowing your limitations is the first step to finding the truth, so we shouldn’t mock such an eminent figure admitting the total shambles that Big Science has become in the post-Einsteinian age.

As someone who has suggested that genuine mystics are the next step in human evolution — and is writing a book on the subject — I could easily retort, “So what? Some of us have been saying that for years, if not centuries.”

At this point in his disquisition, we would expect this formidable intellect to make the Eurekan leap in understanding that the brain is just a sideshow in human affairs. Instead, he pursues the materialist cause beyond the atom to smaller and smaller particles which must eventually constitute our state of being.

He even falls back on a Hollywood movie: The Matrix, with a suggestion that life is a giant computer simulation. Who, then, devised the simulation, and are they simulated too?

Somewhere the buck has to stop. Reality has to break into this vast chain of science fiction at some point along the line.

Rees, like most scientists, is afraid of confronting the G word full on, so jinks and sidesteps around the issue like an Irish fly half.

It may be, of course, that just as C.G. Jung avoided the overt use of mysticism to stay onside with his scientific peers who could be withering in their scorn, so Lord Rees is doing the same. One hopes so for his sanity’s sake.

Having come this far, Lord Rees stands on the edge of a familiar abyss, and a giant leap into the dark. His colleague Stephen Hawking had the same existential moment when he reportedly said: “I know how the universe exists [a big claim, but let that pass], but I don’t know why it exists.”

And that truly is the end of the road for science. The rest is mystery.

However, the “why?” suggests purpose, some “thing” willing it to exist, and here we are again. Big G looms into view, and science turns back to the apparent safety of physical existence and mindless mechanical processes like Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

It never seems to occur to many of them that what they are examining in so much detail is “form”, not matter. Form is the shape that mind takes in this case and that. Consciousness is all there is. All else arises from it, including the erroneous hypotheses of science.

The fact that we get it wrong, however, indicates the freedom we have to mess up our little corner of the place and miss the whole point of the universe. The answer to the vast conundrum lies in that portion of liberty we are granted in our existence.

Our purpose would seem to be nothing less than to look back on the universal consciousness in recognition and in wonder, while “it” drops down into life itself through our individual portion of consciousness. Think of the Jesus story and universalize it.

If that sounds complicated, it depends from which step on the ladder of understanding you are viewing it. The mystic has a high vantage point.

Science, and ordinary humanity, have indeed reached their limits. Now it’s time for the next step in evolution to become apparent.

I suspect that at some point in the 21st century, science and mysticism will merge and our materialist worldview will alter radically. Science will continue for some time to make a fool of itself by overstepping its natural field of practical technology and carrying its obsessive materialism into the realm of the Universal Consciousness.

Remember Icarus.

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?

Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: The Grain of Things
Saturday Ramble: Big Bangs are not what they used to be
Saturday Ramble: The Church and a State of Grace
Saturday Ramble: The Conservatism is just below the surface
Saturday Ramble: Dick Clameron takes office

There was a time when I believed that the great and the good — top politicians, scientists, writers, etcetera — were better and cleverer than I am. That might still hold true, but I no longer believe it. Piece by piece the edifice of admiration has crumbled until only the memory of it remains.

Almost every profession and calling has lost its air of invincibility in the past two decades. Growing up is a factor, of course, but attacks on elites by the media are a force to be reckoned with, plus the almost inconceivable incompetence of the Labour government, whose equality programme reduces everything admirable to dust on a quasi-religious whim.

The City of London’s financial Big Bang of the 1980s is looking distinctly droopy now, with understandable calls for a new British Glass-Steagall Act to separate High Street deposits from casino-style investment banking, and the apparent demise of widespread securitization.

The BBC’s often limp science strand Horizon contributed to the prevailing fin de siecle mood on Tuesday with a clumsy deconstruction of the beloved Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe. If you have an eye for these things, it’s almost as funny as an episode of Monty Python. The programme is now on iPlayer under “factual” — a joke in itself.

A series of nerdy talking heads expostulate crazy ideas in between endless shots of a big red balloon inflating and deflating, and a variety of explosions in what looks like a deserted warehouse. There’s a jolly woman from Sussex University who sees the funny side of it. Dr Kathy Romer, a cosmology lecturer, has all the best lines and is delightfully frank and refreshing. When asked what “Dark Energy” is, she replies with a grin, “I know what it is, but I’m not going to tell you”. (Pause). “Actually I don’t know, but I don’t like it and I wish it would go away.” Now we know.

A couple of the other cosmologists say things like, “Nobody asked for this, and nobody wants it”, referring to Dark Energy. As if they get to choose.

The BBC’s subtitle for the programme is, “All that we think we know about the universe may be wrong”. So much for Big Science.

The story so far: the Standard Model of the creation of the universe, i.e. the Big Bang, whereby a vast explosion billions of years ago created the cosmos out of nothing, was seen to have many flaws. Notably that explosions produce lumpy and messy results with high and low temperatures existing side by side. The universe is not like that; its temperature is constant whichever way you look. The theory of “Inflation” was flung up to bypass this problem. Yes, the entire cosmos has inflation too.

One expert says, “The trouble is, the universe is not made of the same stuff as we are. That’s very puzzling.” Another says, “Every element in my body was made in a star. I am in the universe, and the universe is in me.” Even more puzzling.

The whole of cosmology is built around mathematical equations that can be manipulated to discover “what happened in the past, and what will happen in the future”. If that sounds shaky, wait till you hear the rest of it.

Because the universe behaves as if it weighs more than it does — how do they know the weight of the universe? — they have had to invent something to make up the difference: Dark Matter. They believe they know that 24 particles exist in matter and have postulated another 24 (Super-Symmetry) with different directions of spin. That allows one of them, Dark Matter, to pass through the Earth, and us, without leaving a trace. It must be there because the mathematical model says it is. Where have we heard that before?

On top of all this, the space between galaxies, which should contain absolutely nothing, doesn’t behave like that at all. It acts as if there were no such thing as “nothing”. Unsurprisingly, the boffins have now invented undetectable Dark Energy to fill the gaps. The film depicts it as a black sludge, like tar, flooding into every space in the cosmos. No wonder Kathy Romer says she doesn’t like it and wishes it would go away.

Dark Energy makes up 75 percent of the known universe, it’s averred. Call me obtuse, but if a theory is 75 percent unprovable, shouldn’t it be ditched?

Particle physicists admit they don’t know what gives mass to matter. True to form, they have invented a particle, Higgs Boson, to add the missing mass. Let’s call this, mind games. And they’ve built the £6 billion, and rising, Large Hadron Collider with our money to find the little dot.

Around 2,500 years ago, the Buddha said that only one-quarter of the universe is visible, the rest is a kind of spirit world invisible to us. How accurate does that seem now? And what if the whole of the universe were a vast field of consciousness? Actually, it would explain all the anomalies that Big Science wrestles with.

For example, what is nothing? Why does it act like something? The field of mysticism handles these questions much better than science with its lop-sided insistence on materialism.

The Zen master Huang Po recognized the difficulty: “Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of the [universal consciousness].”

The English author Paul Brunton expressed this paradox, or reverse perspective thus, “What the unenlightened regard as substance, that is, the form of things, is really its negation, whereas true substance, that is the essence out of which those forms emerge, is disregarded by them as non-existent. The hardest barricade for our Western understanding to break through is this simple acceptance of the Unmanifest as ultimate reality.”

Oh, and part of the cosmos is flowing very fast in an outward direction and in a straight line. This shouldn’t be happening, say the cosmoes, and can only mean one thing: there’s another universe out there sucking chunks out of ours. If you’re still with me, you’ll know what they call this phenomenon: Dark Flow, naturally.

All we need now is a Dark Lord to preside over it all and we have a Hollywood movie — or a religion.

Mandy, report for duty immediately. This Dark Sludge is right up your street.

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: What if Labour were to win?
Saturday Ramble: Is David Cameron making the most of his abilities?
Saturday Ramble: Politics and the land of Cockaigne
Saturday Ramble: Bubbles — how they destroy us and how we can fight back
Saturday Ramble: Gordon Brown’s Invictus rictus

There’s a wonderfully dorkish bit in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol when a scientist attempts to prove the existence of the human soul by weighing a man’s body moments before and after his death. The difference must be the weight of the departing soul.

This begs a truckload of questions, of course, not least that the soul may not be physical at all. However, the author’s “noetic” scientist reports an infinitesimally small difference so, Eureka!

All great fun. The trouble is, something similar is happening across most of the conventional sciences. The recent swine flu pandemic scare is a good example of vested interests skewing the truth and driving massive public expenditure for no other reason than greed. So is “catastrophic man-made global warming” with its vast new global infrastructure, all paid for by you and me in the middle of a long and crippling recession.

I was thinking of that passage in Dan Brown’s book last week while watching someone blowing bubbles from washing-up liquid. The bubbles seemed to be weightless, even though they are made up of physical substances. But then that’s the nature of bubbles, they appear to be miraculous at first … then they come down to earth or just burst in the air. One should never invest hard coin in bubbles.

Unhappily, lots of people do, and go on doing so even when countless bubbles have burst down the centuries.

Human bubbles are made up of ideas and mental states composed of wishes and deceptions. They form into powerful psychological contagions as they mature, and even take on an apparently material basis as they grow, often posing as something different.

The two current global bubbles are, 1) the myth of catastrophic man-made global heating, and 2) the notion that global decisions are self-evidently better than local ones. Both are underpinned and given force by one of the most lumberingly under-performing institutions in history: the United Nations.

In the economic realm, there are the surpluses of cash built up by exporting countries, China and Japan, matched by the gaping deficits of the US, the UK and many European nations.

Bubbles define our world. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Trillions of our electronic banknotes are now being thrown at the global boiling hypothesis by unrepentant politicians, some well meaning, others self-promoting. The problem is, that bubble has burst.

Global warming by man-produced carbon in the atmosphere has been found not to exist, at least on any timescale we can measure or plan for. The data has been shown to be wrong, or deliberately tampered with. The politicians and their less-than respectable allies — hordes of anti-capitalists and unwashed any-cause hysterics — have gone too far down this road to pull back now. Most will retire to rewrite their personal histories, leaving a new generation to clean up the mess at huge further costs to us.

Here’s a proposition. All new ideas involving the spending of public money should be examined painstakingly for speculative (imaginary) content:

1. What do we actually know, and what are we being advised to believe?
2. Is there a real problem that we can see before our eyes?
3. If it becomes necessary to spend public money to avert an apparent threat in the future, let’s spend it on things that will be useful even if that threat is found to be baseless.

A good example from the past is London fog. In Victorian times, right up until the early 1950s, London was often draped in a pall of yellow smog caused by the burning of cheap sulphurous coal. Millions of lives were lost early from respiratory diseases, heart problems, and simple misery. China and India are still burning this stuff.

The solution was the appliance of science at its best: practical technology. The National Coal Board, then a nationalized industry, brought in two eminent philosopher-scientists: Dr Jacob Bronowski, best remembered for his stagey, but brilliant, BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and E.F. Schumacher, author of the evergreen Small is Beautiful, which was based on Burmese Buddhism. Polymaths both.

They developed the first smokeless fuel. Politicians did their bit and passed laws making it an offence to burn anything else in the big cities, and hey presto, problem all but solved.

The trillions now committed to various schemes for carbon reduction, dreamt up by naive politicians, including the fraudulent brokerage schemes and the “new industries” devoted to pulling wool over our eyes, should be re-evaluated by incoming hard-eyed administrations looking for real value, not notional empires in the stratosphere.

Once again, reducing smokey particulates in the air is worth spending money on for solid health reasons. But the vast array of wind farms and new French nuclear reactors, should be replaced by cheaper, simpler, and more reliable, home-grown alternatives: for example, natural gas derived from Britain’s own methane beds and oil shale deposits. While the Americans and others are pioneering this new technology, Britain — led by the proboscis by bureaucrats in Brussels — is prevented from doing so by self-inflicted barriers reaching as far ahead as 2050. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

By what natural right do these people boss future generations around? The answer lies in the feeble compliance of our lacklustre politicians.

Why not cut free from the whole ridiculous rigmarole and go our own way for our national interests alone. Everyone else is secretly doing this to some degree. If we succeed, you can be sure others will follow. That’s real influence, not the shadowy, pretend kind put forward by Gordon Brown.

Summary: Always be aware of bubbles as they form, and only ever spend public money on what is immediately apparent. Speculation on thinly-based science is rarely profitable. Nature is cyclical and comes and goes, rises and falls in roughly predictable ways. Mankind’s lives are too short to grasp the full picture. Some kind of trust in the future is essential. Most of it is unknowable. If we accept our limitations, we will be happier here and now.

Solution: Replace the top tier of government scientists with practical philosophers who can think any situation through without spending money.

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: Gordon Brown’s Invictus rictus
Saturday Ramble: Pre-Budget frog spawn
Saturday Ramble: My word, you do look queer!
Saturday Ramble: Rotten information – Part 2

In last week’s Saturday Ramble I castigated the so-called scientific community for spewing out baseless information across the board, especially in the area of supposed man-made global warming.

Today, I draw your attention to a fascinating post in Telegraph blogs by James Delingpole. His suggestions of blatant fraud at the Met Office’s weather lab are naturally hedged about by disclaimers, but worth reading in detail. No doubt we’ll be hearing more about this as days pass.

To add to that, this is what I wrote here on November 1, 2005:

It’s November the 1st, All Saints Day.

As I look out of my window here in southern England I can see girls going to work and college in T-shirts. Nobody’s wearing winter or, for that matter, autumn clothing. The temperature here is an almost balmy 67F (19C). So Global Warming is upon us.

Hah! All is never what it seems in this life. Summer has been particularly warm, though never hot. And it’s certainly nipped a whole month off winter … so far.

But, the long-range weather forecast predicts the bitterest winter since 1962/63 when the UK froze under 20ft snow drifts for three months from Christmas Day till March.

The word “predict” is relevant here. How different is this forecast from the Star Sign predictions in the tabloid newspapers? Well, it’s based on readings from scores of special submarine buoys out in the north Atlantic. Computer models show that the peculiar nature of this year’s data is only matched by those of 1962.

Except, the forecasters didn’t have the remarkable submarine buoys back then. So do the figures match as well as the meteorologists suppose? And, what if there are other factors not being looked at, and missed 40 years ago?

Humans make huge judgements based on narrow data and scattergun information. The wonderful intrusion of paradox is never taken into account by our boffins. Bless their cotton socks, but Syntagma predicts a remarkably warm and balmy winter here in northern Europe, and especially in southern England, where the girls will continue for some time to go to work and college in T-shirts. And an early spring will take us all by surprise. You heard it here first.

Was I right? Here’s the verdict from netweather.tv:

“This winter was widely close to average snow-wise … Not much snow to speak of during January and February (the late February ’06 easterly was even less potent than the Feb ’05 one) … A northerly airstream during first week March brought snow showers for many …”

In other words, a fairly typical British winter, with snowfall lasting only a day or two and with a late flurry in March. My early spring, though, was out by a week or two, but then I’m not paid out of the public purse to forecast the weather.

How long can we go on listening to authorities who seem always to get it wrong?

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: Poor information is destroying the quality of our lives
Saturday Ramble: 1759 and all that + 250
Saturday Ramble: Established freedoms equate with good governance
Saturday Ramble: What if there had been referenda on the early EU treaties?

A new feature summarizing policy ideas suggested on this site.

From: DIARY: Education, March 1, 2009.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

From: Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley, February 27, 2009.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to adopt the can-do attitudes of West Coast Silicon Valley and Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train home-grown developers and software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East. More engineers in general are also urgently needed.

From: Why is Gordon Brown protecting the rest of the world?, January 31, 2009.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

The Conservative Shadow Education spokesman, Michael Gove, will have his work cut out to make instant improvements to a depressingly hopeless State education system. It will take three Parliaments to get the structure right, never mind the quality teachers it needs.

Opposition from the blockheaded educational establishment will be fierce. An alternative approach might be to set up a separate system alongside the State one, allowing parents to migrate across voluntarily. It would be difficult for teachers’ unions to strike against the freely made choices of parents and pupils.

Abolishing the politically contaminated teachers’ training colleges would also be a godsend to good heads and concerned parents.