Conversation with a Physicist

I had an extended conversation from late 1995 into 1996 with a physicist that was very similar to my conversations with many other physicists. I do not mean to pick on this particular physicist, whom I have had long discussions with on many liberty-related topics in a cordial and productive manner, so I will not use his name. This conversation was an archetype, though, and as such, is worth setting down. Some physicists have been milder and tolerant, some have been downright bloodthirsty and intolerant, but this is a good representation of the general tone of them.


Physicist: “I can see that you are troubled by this absence of purpose. Would that I had a simple and convincing answer to give to you for your consideration. I think that the universe is a rather large, frightening, cold and dark place of great mystery and with no shortage of exciting things. Other than that I find no purpose to it.”

I am not troubled by a theoretical absence of purpose, since it is an obvious error. I am troubled by the roving gangs of thugs in my city who have absorbed this purposeless scientific worldview and now see no moral difference between preservation of order and destruction for its own sake. Since it is far easier to destroy than to preserve, this is the behavior they default to.

Why would a universe with no purpose, that is, no importance, no value, no worth, have anything in it that could possibly be termed exciting or mysterious? Those are terms imbued with value. Where does the value come from if the universe has no value in it? Are you an absurdist, content to drift along meaninglessly with the other aimlessly hurrying atoms?

With no purpose in the universe, no meaning, how can liberty have any value whatsoever? What are you fighting for and why? Why is liberty more valuable than slavery if nothing in the universe matters in the slightest? Why is life more valuable than death if there is no purpose? In all seriousness, why don’t you throw yourself in front of a speeding bus? What difference would it make to anything, nothing is important anyway?

I always ask the thorough nihilists the bus question and I have never gotten an answer that didn’t eventually point to the existence of purpose, of good. Perhaps you’ll be the first and surprise me with a rational explanation of why you don’t do this. Oops, I shouldn’t have said “explanation” since you can’t explain anything absent purpose. But it doesn’t sound quite right to say “surprise me with a rational description of why you don’t do this.”

Come to think of it, is it a rational statement to say that the universe has no purpose? On what basis do we judge something to be rational without resorting to utility, that is, to value and purpose? Or do you think that a universe devoid of purpose must also be devoid of reason since there would be no way to judge an event or an object rational? And if no reason is present in the universe, then where would there be any room for truth? This sounds more and more like relativism, socialism’s most potent tool. With no purpose, no meaning and no truth, where does existence fit in? Does the current nihilistic scientific worldview posit that we exist or not? Or does it care to posit such a trivial hypothesis since nothing matters anyway?

Physicist: “I happily admit that I would prefer to live within a society based on some religious precepts.”

Would just any old precepts do, or do you have a favored set, and if so, what possible basis for favoring one set over another would you have if there is no purpose to anything, no importance whatsoever? Wouldn’t all religions, all cultures, all be equal; that is, equally unimportant? Isn’t scientific nihilism the underlying foundation for the utterly destructive multiculturalism infecting academia?

Physicist: “I also think you may be correct in supposing that a civilization requires some basic faith in order to evolve.”

Actually, I was quite specific as to what I said was required, and I didn’t say it was religious or scientific or philosophical or aesthetic. I said that a cosmological presupposition of eternity was a fundamental requirement for an ascending civilization. Our civilization is not ascending, it is descending.

Physicist: “I, of course, don’t blame physicists, I blame socialism.”

As José Ortega y Gasset pointed out so brilliantly in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) the scientists (which still includes most physicists), the “barbarians of specialization,” are the midwives to socialistic cultural forces.

Physicist: “I’m also uncomfortable with the implied proposal that such concepts as the Big Bang be suppressed.”

Suppression of theory? No, just work a bit harder to get the ontology straight prior to telling the world at large that the only rational worldview that anyone could possibly adopt is the scientific worldview that there is no purpose or meaning in the universe. This is the message that has been going out to the world for some years now, it is raw power politics fostered by an élite cadre of incomprehensible adepts from unassailable ivory towers of mystic gnosticism. Such a view is a guarantor of a descent to barbarism or a fellaheen mentality. Where will the next crop of physicists come from 4 or 5 generations from now? Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t matter, nothing matters. Why should we care about anything?

Physicist: “I think that the universe is a rather large, frightening, cold and dark place of great mystery and with no shortage of exciting things. Other than that I find no purpose to it.”

This is the nihilistic worldview of the exalted, the anointed physicists. A universe of mystery and excitement but no purpose, is the intellectual playground of the neo-gnostic adept, the cognitive élite perched above the benighted teeming masses of sheep. What about the worldview of the sheep? Well, you went on to say:

Physicist: “I happily admit that I would prefer to live within a society based on some religious precepts. I don’t believe them, but society is broad shouldered enough to allow me my beliefs and I thank it for that.”

What this sounds like to me, is that you and your fellow physicists want to live an illumined life while the masses can live in the dark, incapacitated in a religious haze. Essentially, you want the masses in church so they won’t be robbing your house and raping your daughters. I fail to see how this view is any different than Karl Marx’s view of religion as the opiate of the masses. Your solution for the masses appears throughout history: panem et circus in service to the Roman aristocrat; opium dens to the Chinese mandarin; gin mills to the English industrialist; vodka to the Russian communist nomenklatura; firewater to the American white settler. Today’s version is prozac and social workers for the stressed-out urban rootless, will-less masses of America in service to international bankers and information-age corporate overlords.

This business of “broad shouldered” society, where do broad shoulders come from? Religion? Fear? A stupor? Your whole dichotomy of worldviews here strikes me as reminiscent of the old high school ‘in’ crowd: “We’re popular, we’re cool, we’re smart, we run everything, so get out of our way and shut up and leave us alone to rule, and, by the way, like it.”

This dichotomy, this way of thinking is what Thomas Sowell wrote about recently in his book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995). He outlines the anointed (the smart, tough physicists) and the benighted (the masses feeding on puerile religious precepts to keep them in line) point of view. Tough physicists indeed, I detect this self-congratulation, this pride in your ability to live in the nihilistic abyss of the dogmatic scientific worldview, when you say: “It bothers me not one whit that my existence will be forgotten... The universe will last a very long time, by its end we should already have exterminated ourselves...” This is what I call entropic death-worship, what the Pope calls ‘the culture of death.’

When it comes to the nihilistic free-fall into barbarism we are experiencing, you say, “I, of course, don’t blame physicists, I blame socialism.” I say, nihilism is the disease of the left, and scientific nihilism is a pillar of support of socialism. Science has drifted left for many years now, since the dogma of the Big Bang and the purposeless universe ossified in the last thirty years. I can’t read the leftist Scientific American without getting an ulcer, and I can barely stomach Science magazine only by blanking out all the pleading for big government funding, whacko environmentalism, AIDS propaganda, diversity worship and multicultural urgings in it. Leftist feminism does not make for good peer review of scientific findings and moral relativists do not make for good reviewers of scientific books.

Western science has just about exhausted itself, the nihilistic dogma is the sign of this. It may trudge on for years yet on borrowed moral capital from the pre-Big Bang glory days, but this will not last too long without an infusion of new moral capital along the way. Nihilistic physics and socialism go hand in glove, the affinity Bohr had for Stalin and Heisenberg had for Hitler was not an aberration, it was a homecoming. Nothing matters.

The dichotomy of vision, nihilism for the anointed on the one hand, and religion for the benighted on the other hand, is really no more than a competition among religions. The nihilistic scientific worldview has absolutized random activity as its deepest metaphysical presupposition, it has committed civilizational hara-kiri by deifying chance. Science has conquered over superstition by co-opting it. The banality of this historical repetitive pattern is really too much, will we ever learn from history, or are we doomed to scientific ignorance placed on the altar for our worship?

Liberals invariably undermine their own utopic ideals by disconnecting from objective reality. Scientists who adhere to the professionally de rigeur nihilistic view of the universe are liberals at heart in large part due to this disconnect mechanism. They rationally chop up and discard any trace of morality they may discover, then they blame someone else for the destructive consequences of an immoral society that cannot refute the scientific worldview because science doesn’t recognize the authority of any other methodology but its own (aka might makes right). Ortega y Gasset was absolutely right about the petulant ‘learned ignoramuses’ (scientists and technicians) demanding satisfaction of their whims from whoever can satisfy them. Inevitably, the whims can only be satisfied by big government, and voila! the welfare state is upon us without their ever seeing their own hand in bringing it about. Speaking of Mr. Einstein, modern nihilistic physicists have come around to agreeing with him that “God does not play dice with the universe.” However, they have proposed an alternative to this that I don’t think he would’ve been too enamored of. They have granted that God doesn’t play dice, they have discovered that God is the dice. And they love gambling, their muse is no longer Truth, but Las Vegas. They define Entropy as the House.

Physicist: “ think that the universe is a rather large, frightening, cold and dark place of great mystery and with no shortage of exciting things. Other than that I find no purpose to it. I happily admit that I would prefer to live within a society based on some religious precepts. I don’t believe them, but society is broad shouldered enough to allow me my beliefs and I thank it for that.”

Look carefully at the dichotomy of vision you have expressed here, nihilism for you, the scientific worldview, the only rational point of view possible and irrefutable from outside of its hermetically sealed cloister (send my theory to Physics Review or Nature, indeed, humor noted, like telling Galileo to explain to the Pope that Scripture is a load of hooey). And religion for the masses outside the cloister so they will behave and leave you alone.

I will repeat myself, looking at your own words quoted above, do you really want everyone in the world to think like you (adopt your physics nihilism), that nothing matters, that to the universe there is no difference between feeding your cat and murdering your father? Or do you really prefer that the rest of the world avoids your brand of nihilism so that mayhem won’t break out? This is a serious question deserving serious thought, not some flippant evasion. I get no answer from you.

Physicist: “You keep insisting that physicists change their observations and theoretical constructs because you don’t like them.”

Any physicist worth a salt lick doesn’t like the metaphysics underlying them, and they never have. Absolutized random activity is no foundation for anything, it boils down to “nothing’s there.” Yet here we are, so something’s wrong with it. Self-satisfaction in physicists is a sham front they show to the world in order to maintain their political power of claiming exclusive rights to dictate a rational worldview to everyone.

In truth, any thinking physicist should feel deep shame over having no explanatory power to their equations, no metaphysical foundation that could be termed rational by any stretch of the imagination, no confidence over extending their equations forward into more complex areas because they don’t even know why they work in the few areas that they do work. Shame is in order.

The great physicists felt this shame acutely, they all knew deep down that there can be no ‘infamous boundary’ between the quantum realm and the classical realm, they knew that the contradictions between quantum mechanics and general relativity mean something very bad about their ontological assumptions. J.S. Bell, at least, rightly considered the quantum theory scandalous for a serious physical theory, the equations are known but the fundamental principles are not; he wrote “Is it not good to know what follows from what, even if it is not really necessary FAPP [for all practical purposes]?” To posit that zero points have physical existence is unbelievably shabby thinking. Likewise, to posit that probability statements applied to the future have physical existence is a fraud. We lack the metaphysical foundation for doing so, because probability, when not objective (a physical count from past actual occurrences) is nothing more than a declaration of our ignorance of causal factors.

Physicist: “The fact that you or anyone else does not like them is immaterial.”

What arrogance! This is, in fact, the high school ‘in’ crowd syndrome, exactly. “We’re right, and we have the power to impose our nihilism on everyone if they want to be labeled ‘rational’, so nyah, nyah, nyah.” Juvenile delinquents have occupied the citadel of learning, the ivory tower is a really a day-care center. You, yourself, couldn’t stand living in a world where everyone adopted the physics nihilism; it would be as my friend said, “a world where every streetcorner ‘Übermensch’ wills his own Warlorddom.” This is the inescapable consequence of nihilism, you might call it a law of nature right up there with E=mc^2.

I am confused. First you say science only describes (the how), and doesn’t explain (the why). For example: I said “I see nothing wrong in demanding explanation from physicists...” and you responded “Demand all you like there is no explanation of why to be found as yet only how,” then you follow this up with “From a previous message of yours I know that I must anger you by saying that I first must determine ‘what’ and only then move on to ‘why,’ regretting to note that science does not answer ‘why.’”

Then you say, in fact, that it does explain. For example: you say “The snag is that [certain obscure geometries] cannot be disregarded, they explain too much” and “I understand that many folks don’t like the explanations of an expanding universe which is unbounded, I don’t understand why it upsets them so much” and “Wow, that even explains the spectral shape and cause of refractive index...” Note the use of “explain,” “explanations,” and “explains.”

Which is it? I am generally confused when presented with contradictory statements from the same individual, I don’t know what their actual belief really is. I’m very old-fashioned, I know it’s not a law of physics or anything so hi-falutin’ as that, but I happen to think that this contradiction violates a common-sense axiom. Again, I get no answer from you.

I agree that science cannot possibly explain anything whatsoever with absolutized random activity as it’s presupposed foundation, there’s nothing there to begin with. And if science can’t explain anything because it has nothing as a foundation, then I can understand how it can posit creation ex nihilo, but certainly there is not a shred of rationality in these positions.

I have never met a nihilist who didn’t turn out to indulge in authority-worship. Along with emotivism as an ethical system, nihilists have a penchant for evolutionary epistemologies, that is, unrelenting criticism of everything; but as a practical matter, only criticism coming from authorities who have been granted such authority by the nihilist seems to count. Criticism coming from sources that are not self-selected never seem to count, it’s a small, small world after all; smug nihilism.

You told me you will not accept the authority of my theories unless you see them published in Physics Review or Nature, this is strong-arm political tactics on your part, a self-selected small world of smug nihilism. This is not vitriol, it is describing the mechanism of what gets granted the label “rational” scientific cosmology in your world. Again, your unwarranted use of the word “hate” is coming from a self-contained world of emotivism, aka “projection” in psychobabblese. Your constant misattributing to me of dislike for you personally, of being hate-filled and all, is something I typically see coming from liberals.

One of the primary reasons that scientific nihilism is the government’s officially sponsored religion pushed on students in the public schools, is that emotivism is the only moral system that can be sensibly taught side-by-side with it. How does Johnny “feel,” never what does Johnny “think.” The élites interested in One World Government don’t care much about science at all, it is just useful to have scientists backing them up in the nihilistic stew force-fed students. The élites really care about the successful adaptation of emotivism as the world’s only ethical system, because people who can’t tell right from wrong unless they base it on their “feelings” are easily led by introducing to students how they should feel about things. Justice becomes avoidance of hurt feelings and nothing more, certainly never setting things right because there is no authoritative right. Public life is reduced to a bunch of intellectual adolescents emoting at each other while the élites reign above it all.

I suggest you examine your own basis of how you determine right from wrong in light of your own scientific nihilism. I hope that you will come to see that absent purpose, importance, or values, that you cannot make one single judgment about anything whatsoever. When you recognize that you do, in fact, make judgments all the time, perhaps you will begin to question whether purpose may be present after all.

Since you’ve read Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses you know that the masses he refers to as revolting are the scientists and the technicians. These rational élites ostensibly want to bring progress through knowledge and invention to humanity, to materially better the condition of all. In reality, they look out for their own morally uncultivated self-interest, with a petulantly adolescent expectation that society, in gratitude, ought to bend over backwards to cater to their whims.

Yet look what actually happens, their rationality produces what rationality can only produce; ideas that the universe popped up out of nothing at all, is going nowhere, and consists of a jumble of random activity in between two voids. The rational answer to the quest for truth is senseless, meaningless, and purposeless in its entirety. The technicist élite knows this to be the case, and they also know that scientific rationality is the only legitimate epistemology. Yet they want the public to fund them to play in their sandbox studying a random universe and show their gratitude still! Absolutely amazing at how stupid the technicists think the public is! What point could there possibly be in studying anything in a random universe coming from nowhere and going to nowhere? When the public starts to accept the rational facts of a random, purposeless, meaningless universe, and begins to behave like gangs of thugs grabbing what they can for enjoyment in the here-and-now while they wait to senselessly die, then the self-anointed technicists decide that maybe religion is good for the benighted public, to keep them in line. They never see how religions die when their inner spiritual truths are no longer believed by those in charge of passing the religion on to future generations. And why should those in charge want to be labeled irrational and disparaged by the anointed? The technicists turn out to be more imbecilic than the public they privately disparage while sucking at the teat of public grant money! They expect the individuals they revile, the irrational religious leaders, to help them keep the barbarians they themselves have produced, from raping their daughters and robbing their home! It’s all too human, where’s the rationality in any of it?

Think of the techno-cyber-élite that vote for Harry Browne in all the net polls. They’ll want him until he actually cuts off the flow of grant money to the sinecures of higher education’s research facilities, and to everyone for any scientific or technical work at all. He’s for limited government, right? They’ll squeal, just like the NEA and AFT are doing over threatened cuts to public education.

Reilly Jones

© 2001

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