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

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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

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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

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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.

This has been a year of portents. We’ve had so many “end of the world is nighs” that we’re probably into “the end of the end of the world is nigh” by now.

It clearly isn’t the end of the world though, just the end of our picture of it as a booming sybaritic paradise.

A new Great Depression was well trailed this year and last, despite scornful voices to the contrary. Those of us who knew it was coming are now fearful it may be even worse than we thought. Portents do sometimes come true.

The prophesies surrounding the Large Hadron Collider were probably the most entertaining, especially when it spluttered to a halt before it ever got going. It’s still in the repair shop, naturally, and the universe has not been sucked into a Black Hole caused by a few lengths of pipe and wiring in Switzerland. How arrogant to imagine it would.

However, a scientist now believes that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is revolving around a Black Hole 4000 times larger than the sun. He can’t prove it of course, it’s just a possibility thrown up by his mathematical modelling.

Frankly I’d rather believe an astrologer. At least the planets are visible to the naked eye and the results of the predictions are clear for all to see. So it interests me, as a student of the ancient and arcane, that today an almighty Grand Cross is forming in the sky around us.

Jonathan Cainer describes it thus on his astrological website:

“The rare ‘grand cross’ culminates today with the full Moon in Gemini. As you watch it rise in the sky, look towards the setting Sun. You’ll see Venus and Jupiter, beaming in the twilight. Also near the Sun is Mars — too low to view but in a position of great significance. Half way between the rising Moon and setting Sun is Uranus, invisible without a telescope. Opposite Uranus, halving the sector of sky beneath our feet, is the planet Saturn. You can’t see it but you can easily see the impact of this ‘grand cross’. Just look at how strangely people are behaving!”

I like that last bit. To my eye, people are always behaving strangely, especially politicians and scientists. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for bringing to our attention this majestic astral configuration.

It’s the grand culmination of … something. The apogee of … infinite possibility, perhaps. If you are about to rush to the supermarket to stock up with cases of baked beans and bottled water, stop! It’s way too late. The tentacles of strangeness are already encircling you. You never know, you may enjoy the experience.

So if my Saturday Ramble column on this site tomorrow appears a little…er…strange, how could you tell the difference?

John Evans

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