What’s the best definition of a scientist? Someone who joins up two dots on a graph and, if they point up, shouts “fire”, if they go down, shrieks, “ice-age”.

It seems we are now on the cusp of a rapid about-face from the former to the latter.

According to an article in the respected, learned journal Nature, global warming is off the agenda, at least for a few hundred-thousand years. The real menace is a vicious ice-age that will cover the eastern side of the British Isles with 6000ft of ice and snow. Even those of us in the warmer west can expect 3000ft of the white stuff.

If you’ve already thrown out your thermal underwear in anticipation of Mediterranean temperatures all year round, well … you should read Syntagma more often. We have been ridiculing the man-made global warmers for a couple of years at least.

Mind you, I doubt the global freeze-up picture too. Mankind has recently demonstrated a very destructive tendency to imagine that if something happens twice in a row it will go on forever, despite a million years’ experience to the contrary.

It comes from an over-reliance on a narrow concept of the intellect. Paranoia is a disease of rationality extended beyond its natural reach. Many people who should know better convince themselves that bad events must be set to continue and, naturally, get much worse. They react by building massive defences and shelters against “the coming storm”.

In reality, things usually switch over to the opposite well before crisis conditions set in — see my piece, Up-To-A-Pointism.

That is, unless a large enough group convince themselves of the worst and, by their actions, prevent the normal turnaround setting in. Almost all economic crises are made worse by economists and politicians. Now, it seems, actions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere against supposed global warming could precipitate a sudden global cooling of unstoppable proportions.

When eventually the worst doesn’t happen, the “activists” will just find something else to scare the pants off themselves and the rest of us. It’s their nature. Fear is also a bankable commodity these days, especially for the bright sparks seeking government research grants.

Western administrations in the U.S., Europe and Britain, have been frantically creating siege conditions against jihadist terrorism since 9/11, even kicking away the basic freedoms that distinguish our societies from the supposed insurgents’ dismal autocracies. They lose the “war” before firing a shot.

In the UK, politicians mimicking beached sardines, are plotting a kind of Stasi-state right out of Eric Honecker’s East Germany. Individuals you wouldn’t normally trust with assembling a flat-pack whelk stall are building vast databases of the personal data of every individual in the country, backed up by draconian laws. And this is being done “for our own protection”.

Did anyone give them permission to do this? Alas, if it’s not global warming or an ice age coming to get us, it’s a new form of “white slavery”. And the slave masters are materializing from our own political class.

So here’s a word to the scientists. Stop building flummeries in the air from tiny samples of data. Desist from imagining that the 3lb lump of fat and gristle in your skulls knows all there is about everything.

In the meantime we could always redefine mental illness:

Thy name is SCIENCE.

John Evans

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The dark matter of Dark Matter

It probably hasn’t escaped many people’s attention that on Wednesday an important event is taking place in the rarified world of Big Science.

At Geneva, CERN is to fire up its new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle accelerator which is the child of the aborted American version in Texas.

This multi-billion dollar project may give an assorted band of scientists insight into what happened one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, or so they claim.

That, of course, begs a number of questions. Was there a Big Bang at all, or do we have a Steady State universe, as the British astronomer Fred Hoyle asserted, in which matter is continually created?

Again, if space and time are illusions of the mind, as many scientists and philosophers believe, isn’t it likely that matter also is a figment of the mind’s buoyant imagination?

Strange that quantum physicists have no idea what gives matter mass. To fill the void in their knowledge they have plucked a new particle from thin air, so to speak. It’s called the Higgs Boson after its proposer, Peter Higgs.

Some commentators have jumped on this exquisite piece of fiction and named the new arrival, the God Particle. The Collider’s main mission is to discover traces of this elusive little bit of stuff.

And that’s where we’re at. Billions of European taxpayers’ money has been spent on trying to find Winnie the Pooh.

Naturally, they will come up with something. But will it be yet another fiction, arising from yet another mathematical model, and simply explaining the inexplicable by filling in the gaps with a bit of cartoon wizardry? We just don’t know, but can guess with a fair degree of confidence in the outcome. However, CGI is no substitute for the truth.

The end of the world is nigh
Most of the press and other media are concentrating on a more exciting aspect of this story.

That the forces unleashed inside the great particle accelerator will create a small Black Hole which will suck the Earth into it, and progressively, the rest of the universe bit by bit. As disaster scenarios go that must take the gold medal by a mile.

Others believe there’s a chance the reaction could change the fabric of space and time itself. It could speed it up, slow it down or even cause it to stand still. Result? We could all start saying or doing the same thing, over and over. Groundhog Day on acid.

Naturally, the Prophesies of Nostradamus are never far away from some people’s thoughts, especially the one that mentions Geneva.

So what is the most likely result when the big beast is finally switched on early Wednesday morning GMT?

Zilch.

How do I know that? Well, consider: the Earth is one vast particle accelerator, dwarfing even the great chunk of engineering buried beneath the French landscape. Countless cosmic rays are hitting the planet’s atmosphere every moment, colliding with all kinds of matter. So far, no Black Holes have been spotted lurking in the Van Allen Belt.

Indeed, the more honest of the scientists involved gave the game away when he admitted that the H.G.Wellsian machine may be much too small. “We may have to go back and ask for more money to build a bigger one,” he let slip. One wonders how safe his pension is.

The problem with all this peering into the soup of life is that it’s alive, just like us. The great Albert Einstein asserted that human observers affect the processes we observe. In other words we are co-creators of the universe. What we expect to see, we often get. The boffins want a Higgs particle that gives mass to matter. They will surely conjure up something like it.

But what, I’m inclined to ask, gives the property of mass-accumulation to the Higgs confection? Yet another particle? Where does it end?

The argument goes on and on, an infinite regression in human minds that can’t see the simple truth: that the universe is made of infinitely-adaptable mind-stuff, not hard lumps of rock floating about in a void with consciousness as “a disease of matter”.

One good thing may come out of this — with any luck. The new religion of Scientism may go into retreat when the last vestiges of the seven veils it holds up to the world are finally divested from the naked body of the universe and we find a mind looking back at us.

But I doubt the LHC is big enough even to make a start on that.

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Is there a secret history of the world?

If you are anything like me, you will occasionally — as if by serendipity — come across a book you intended to write yourself.

The book I chanced upon is The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, a nom de plume of Mark Booth, Chief Executive of Century publishers, a British imprint of Random House. The author has used his many connections within publishing to amass an impressive array of data on his topic.

The simplest way to explain his subject is to state that science has become a militant materialist philosophy that believes matter precedes mind. Some scientists have even called consciousness “a disease of matter,” as if it were an interloper in a senseless universe.

This view is the complete opposite of what a majority of the greatest minds throughout history have believed — or better, known.

The perennial philosophy, as it has been called — that mind gives rise to matter — is still believed by the larger part of the human race. The last Pope, John Paul II, was taught in his youth by a Rosicrucian master. Following a car accident which nearly killed him, he had a spiritual experience which mirrored exactly what the teacher had taught him. Such was its overwhelming power, the young mystical Pole signed up for a seminary that led all the way to his becoming Pope in Rome.

The Rosicrucians (followers of the Rosy Cross) teach the age-old knowledge of idealism — that all is mind — in a Christian context. It is said that there are 20 miles of books in the Vatican library dedicated to this and similar points of view.

Quantum mechanics comes very close to idealism without quite letting go of the materialist base of science. There is no doubt that Einstein was a thorough-going adherent too. Everything he wrote screams “perennial philosophy”.

The problem is, the early Church came down very hard on anyone who challenged its materialist worldview, and, as Jonathan Black writes, today’s scientism demonizes anyone who as much as suggests an alternative to rocky lumps floating about in a void. Richard Dawkins is a prime example of the modern scientific inquisition. On the face of it, an alliance between early Catholicism and modern science is bizarre, but it’s a fact.

Most early believers in the supremacy of mind formed secret societies based on the Mystery Schools of antiquity, where spilling the beans meant death. According to Black, many of these societies still exist, though often branded with the tag “occult”, a word that simply means “hidden”, as in occluded.

Despite the iron fist in an iron glove approach of the present-day intellectual establishment, the vision of man’s ancient understanding of the universe lives on and thrives. As well as Einstein, the British astronomer James Jeans stated that, “the universe is nothing but a gigantic thought”. Isaac Newton spent most of his life studying aspects of it, so did C. G. Jung, the great Swiss joint-founder of psychology as we know it.

Buddhism and Hinduism are based on it, as are most religions, even Christianity, whose earliest exponents were Gnostics, a term meaning “knowers”, as opposed to believers. They sought, and many found, direct experience of the secret knowledge that mind creates matter, and not the other way round.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a contemporary biologist, has conducted many scientific experiments showing the influence of mind over matter, or “extended mind” as he calls it. His recent The Sense Of Being Stared At is a treasure chest of empirical idealism. His other work on the psychic abilities of animals is ground-breaking science at its unprejudiced best.

Black’s book is eye-wateringly comprehensive across the field, but concentrates on the ancient timeline and secret society aspects of the topic.

Anyone who has ever doubted the primacy of matter over mind, should read it with an open mind. It is a richly rewarding classic of its kind.