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PERSONAL MEMORANDUM
TO: EIR Editorial/Home Page
FROM: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
RE: Understanding Non-Linearity
September 15, 1997 Popular Misconceptions About Science
SCIENCE IS NOT "STATISTICS"
There is an already significant, and rapidly growing amount of communication directed,
partly, toward me, and, more often, as idle gossip about me, in that electronic purgatory
which, I am told, is populated by (shades of H.G. Wells' "Dr. Moreau"!) strange,
tormented, polymorphic entities: web-footed, half-man, half-mouse. A significant ration of
this electronic chaff and chatter reflects the widely circulated opinion, that I am
responsible for more or less successfully discrediting two popular, pseudo-scientific
hoaxes: F. Sherwood Roland's "Ozone Hole" hoax, and the kindred fraud,
"Global Warming."
Like squeals from flies in extremis, as fancy might hear the wriggling creatures
trapped in another kind of web, there is a number of U.S. co-thinkers of Britain's current
Labour Party Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who are frustrated, and enraged against what they
consider President Clinton's stubborn refusal to impose those demands for collapsing the
U.S. economy, demands which are pushed by the "Global Warming" fanatics.
Prominent amid this Blairing protest, is the complaint, that persons associated with me
were active in exposing the two referenced hoaxes. Since my name is more or less a
household word in this and many other countries around the world, the enraged ones find it
emotionally self-gratifying to develop a "conspiracy theory," identifying me as
the evil genius causing their own, Maurice Strong's, and Tony Blair's frustration in these
matters.
Apart from such cranks, there is a significant number of individuals of manifest good
will, who are willing to submit their adopted opinions to the tests of my own and other
criticism. I excerpt a passage typical of one such recent communication:
"Can you tell me information about your science. Because there are a lot of good
scientists out there, like you, dealing with information. If the top ones out there say
there might be an Ozone problem, and some of these men and women are not being bought by
the Powerful, then, why discredit them? Please answer that."
The author of that statement is factually mistaken, but the question is nonetheless
fair by the standards appropriate for the "Generation X" presence within
university classrooms and related settings. The received questions, pertaining to
"environmental issues" of this type, pose three interrelated questions. 1.) Why
do I reject those new views on the "environment," the which have become
popularized during the recent thirty-odd years? 2.) What is the basis for my scientific
method? 3.) What authority lies within that, my scientific method, that of economic
science, which qualifies me to pass authoritative judgment on the competence of a
top-ranking hoaxster such as F. Sherwood Rowland?
Based on those considerations, rather than responding, repetitively, to each of these
inquiries individually, it were suitable than I publish a single, common reply to all
those received, and other messages which pose the same general line of questioning.
Naturally, this present response will also be posted on the relevant EIR site.
On the subject of the "Ozone Hole" hoax, evidence continues to support the
case set forth by co-authors Ralf Schauerhammer and Rogelio Maduro, in their
internationally celebrated {The Holes in the Ozone Scare}.(1)
In the case of the "Global Warming" scare, the unscientific method is modelled
on the fraudulent tactic used by Rowland, and others, to concoct the "Ozone
Hole" hoax. Thus, in broad terms, the Schauerhammer-Maduro book demonstrates the case
to be made against both of these hoaxes. In answer to part of the misinformed doubt that
environmental scientists had been "bought," wrongly asserted by the reader: It
is notable that Rowland became a "top scientist," including his appointment to
lead the American clone (AAAS) of the British Association for Advancement of Science
(BAAS), as one instance of the celebrity he attained in recognition of his concoction of
the "Ozone Hole" scam.
The argument to be made against both of these, and related pseudo-scientific
"ecologisms," is to be presented on two levels. The first level is typified by
Dr. Dixy Lee Ray's endorsement of the Schauerhammer-Maduro text:
"... Everyone interested in the so-called global environmental issues should read
this powerful book, and then consider whether press releases and computer simulations that
are unaccompanied by solid scientific evidence should drive our nation's science
policy."(2)
Dr. Ray spoke as a representative of those standards of scientific competence which
were generally accepted by the scientists from the generations which lived, as adults,
through either or both of the two World Wars of this century. Rowland typifies the
post-modernist collapse in intellectual and moral standards of scientific practice, the
which has taken over leading positions in shaping "politically-correct science
opinion" during the past twenty-five years.(3)
The clinical fact, that an incompetent, Rowland, has achieved as much celebrity as he
has, guides us toward a second, deeper issue. The post-modernist quackademics of Rowland's
following, received their university education under the direction of scientists from my
own generation. This poses the question: "What misled relevant faculty members, from
the World Wars I and II generations, into awarding today's new generation of leading,
'politically correct' science-quacks their university degrees?" What is the relevant
virus of error infecting the classroom and related practice of earlier generations of
actual scientists, the virus which is expressed by their "Baby Boomer" and
"Generation X" students, as the "Ozone Hole" and "Global
Warming" hoaxes?
In my conclusion, I shall identify summarily the anti-science, political motives
responsible for these activities of Rowland et al. That, I think, should wait until after
I have situated the problem within the bounds of the science profession as such. I begin
with a crucial example of the relevant problem, as encountered within my own specialty,
economics.
--Why Karl Marx and Adam Smith Were Incompetent--
Adam Smith and his follower Karl Marx committed the same fundamental blunder, in their
respective misdefinitions of the axiomatic principles of political-economy. The difference
between these two, is that Marx, unlike the modern Manicheans, such as Michael Novak and
those of the Mont Pelerin Society, admitted the existence of that specific fallacy of
composition in his construction.(4) There is nothing in the
design of the economics doctrines of virtually any variety of economics doctrine taught in
any university today, which makes any functional distinction between the presumption that
the economy is run by apes, or by human beings. Specifically, all of this assortment
excluded consideration of those developable cognitive functions of the individual human
mind, within which discoveries of physical principle are generated. These are same
principles assimilated for economic practice, and also assimilated as increases in the
per-capita, physical, productive powers of labor.
The omission is monstrously large, a monstrous and pervasive incompetence inhering in
virtually all "mainstream" varieties of textbooks and university classroom
instruction today. This reveals the same, defective state of mind, in the field of
economics, exhibited by such former proteges of Bertrand Russell as the "inventor of
information theory," Norbert Wiener, and the inventor of "systems
analysis," Russellite acolyte John von Neumann.
The core of the relevant argument to be made, involves the empirical evidence which
demonstrates, conclusively, that the human individual differs fundamentally from that
class of higher apes with which some zoologists have often, mistakenly, identified the
human species. Essentially, under the conditions which have existed on this planet during
approximately two millions years to date, the ecological population-potential of all
species of higher apes, combined, has never exceeded several millions living individuals.
Whereas, man, who appears, superficially, to have the ecological attributes of a higher
ape, had reached planetary population-levels in the hundreds of millions during European
civilization's Hellenistic period, and is measured in billions today.(5)
The combined archeological and historical evidence compels us to recognize that this
qualitative distinction, which places mankind outside ecology, outside the domain of lower
forms of life, is that mental faculty, relatively unique to mankind, whose fruits are
typified by the increase of the human species' potential relative population-density,
through the benefits of scientific and technological progress. For example, a
throwing-spear, recently excavated from a stratum 600,000 years deep within Germany's
Hartz Mountains region, can be attributed to nothing other than a mind identical with the
modern human genotype's.(6)
This subject, the relationship between those distinctive, cognitive powers of
the human individual's mind, and the increase of the potential relative population-density
of the human species, is the foundation of all of my professional accomplishments over
more than four decades to the present date. It is from the standpoint of my original and
related discoveries in this area of investigation, that I have adopted and advanced that
science of physical economy first established, under that name, by the principal mentor of
my adolescent intellectual life, Gottfried Leibniz, during his related work of the
1671-1716 interval. Since late 1952, my work has been indebted to Bernhard Riemann's 1854
revolution in physical geometry for the representation of the implicitly measurable
relationship between validated discoveries of physical principle, by individual minds, and
the increase of the productive powers of labor (i.e., increase of potential relative
population-density) by societies which commit themselves to scientific and technological
progress.
For purposes of illustration, the application of Riemann's metrical principles to my
discoveries respecting the human mind, the so-called "LaRouche-Riemann Model,"(7) is typified by the work of such earlier followers of Leibniz as
Lazard Carnot and the circles of Carl Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, in developing the
principles used by President Abraham Lincoln's United States to launch that modern
machine-tool economy-driver model later copied by post-1876 Germany, and other nations.(8)
--Cognition:The Active Principle in Economy--
The key to the relative uniqueness of my own discoveries, is my shifting the
investigation of the way in which the individual human mind generates experimentally
validatable discoveries of physical principle: rejecting the parochial view of
"physical science," as customarily defined during the Twentieth Century, and,
employing for physical science, instead, the standpoint of the role of metaphor in
Classical art-forms of poetry, dramatic tragedy, musical polyphony, and plastic arts in
such traditions as those of ancient Scopas, Praxiteles, or modern followers of Leonardo da
Vinci such as Raphael Sanzio. To restate this point in a relevant way: the ontological
paradox which demands a resolving discovery of new physical principle, in the domain
of experimental physical science, is viewed by the cognitive processes of the developed
individual mind, as the same type of challenge represented by a true metaphor in the
domain of Classical forms of plastic and non-plastic art.
The issue which prompted me to effect these discoveries, was a 1948 confrontation with
Professor Norbert Wiener's "information theory" hoax. My response to Wiener's
provocation (and, also, the same hoax presented by John von Neumann under the rubric of
"systems analysis"), was premised upon my previously established, and deeply
embedded commitment to the methodological standpoint of Gottfried Leibniz, the commitment
which I had adopted during my mid-adolescence. Although I first adopted this method from
Leibniz, rather than the Plato from whom Leibniz had himself adopted it, my method, then
and now, is strictly Platonic. The term "Platonic" has the following, decisive
significance in addressing the issues posed by the currently popular ecological hoaxes
against science.
The central issue posed by the notion of "human knowledge," is the fact, that
all claims to such knowledge depend absolutely upon the contention that the laws of the
universe are not embedded within the domain of sense-perceptions as such, but, rather, lie
within man's ability to willfully change human behavior to such effect, that man's
per-capita power over the universe is willfully, manifestly increased. The forms of mental
activity, through which those willful increases in power over nature are achieved, are the
subject-matter of knowledge, as knowledge must not be confused with mere sense-perception,
or with mere "textbook learning."
This may be restated as follows. The foundation of both science, and Classical forms of
artistic composition, is the process by which individual human minds are capable of
generating those experimentally validatable discoveries of both physical and cognitive
principle, the which are generated as solutions to contradictions which can not be
resolved by deductive methods. The type of contradiction involved is typified by the
following general case.
Given, the circumstance, that undeniable evidence shows the occurrence of phenomena
whose existence is implicitly prohibited by presently established principles of scientific
knowledge. Since, the disturbing evidence, and the previously established scientific
knowledge, are both manifestations of the same faculty for determining empirical
actuality, the contradiction between the extant belief and such contradictory evidence is ontological
in implication. Hence, the contradiction is rightly described as an ontological
paradox.
The parallel case, in Classical forms of art, is typified by the issues of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, the famous Act III soliloquy most emphatically. Hamlet knows,
that clinging to his accustomed, swashbuckling code of conduct, dooms him, and also dooms
the kingdom of Denmark. The existence of a contradictory, alternate behavior, is apparent
to him. He would prefer, however, to cling to the inevitable doom of following his
habituated inclinations, rather than risk the uncertainties of a future "from whose
bourn no traveller has returned." So, he and Denmark are doomed; so, the final scene
of the play closes, over the warm corpse of Hamlet, with the character Horatio, speaking
from within the play, to us, the surviving witnesses, in the play's audience; that
Horatio, then, implores us, to relive that contradiction, that we, in the future, might
escape the self-doom which Hamlet imposed upon both his own nation, as upon himself. In
all Classical art-forms, the expression of such dualities of implication --ontological
paradoxes,-- is called "metaphor."(9)
The presently existing possibility of a mathematical representation of this process of
discovery of a validatable new physical principle, we owe to that family of discoveries by
Bernhard Riemann which is centered around his 1854 habilitation dissertation, "On The
Hypotheses Which Underlie Geometry,"(10) and to the
preceding work of Gottfried Leibniz,(11) J. F. Herbart,(12) and, immediately, the work of Carl Gauss on the development
of a general theory of curved surfaces, out of preceding and accompanying work on
biquadratic residues.(13)
A summary account of my own approach, which led into my rereading of Riemann's 1854
habilitation dissertation from this standpoint, will be helpful to the reader on several
counts, respecting the material covered in this general reply.
The starting-point for my attack on Wiener's "information theory" hoax, was,
inevitably, the nature of the distinction between processes whose underlying ordering is
overall entropic, as distinct from, for example, the species of living processes,
which are anti-entropic in their typical, underlying distinctions in ordering,
differing so from what we consider particular cases of non-living processes, including
non-living organic processes. This was the same starting-point adopted for all issues of
physical principle, by such notable followers of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's founding
principles for modern experimental physics, as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and
Johannes Kepler.
To determine, from the standpoint of crucial-experimental tests, whether particular
types of human communication of ideas are entropic, or not, is a matter of showing
whether, or not, the result of that communication, is a potential increase, or decrease of
the entropy expressed in society's physical relationship to nature. This measurement must
be made from the standpoint of the relevant actor, mankind, receiving this communication.
Hence, we must measure the experimental result so: in terms of man's physical power over
nature, per capita, and in terms of improvements in the demographic characteristics of the
relevant class of households. Thus, for such measurements, we must exclude all
consideration of money-prices, or related fictitious valuations; we must limit our
attention to the physical interaction of mankind with nature: i.e., to Leibniz's and my
own relevant domain in science, that of the science of physical economy.
Respecting the increase or decrease of the entropy of social interaction with nature,
we start with the general fact, that the increase of the human species' potential relative
population-density, and correlated demographic considerations, depends upon discoveries of
principle which, introduced, have the mathematical-physical implication of axiomatic
changes in the notion of a geometry of man's functional interrelationship with the
universe.
The changes corresponding to successful axiomatic transformations of this type, are
expressed as activities each corresponding to those principles. Hence, in the successful
case, the gain in productive power of labor (of potential relative population-density)
occurs at the "price" of increase of per-capita value for "energy of the
system," when the latter is defined in respect to the process taken as a whole. Yet,
in the successful case, the ratio of the process's "free energy" to its required
"energy of the system," is either increased, or, at worst, not decreased. Thus,
physical economy adopts the following relative definition of anti-entropy: the
requirement, that the ratio of free energy to energy of the system not decrease,
despite a required increase in the per-capita relative value of "energy of the
system."
This notion of a contrast of entropy to anti-entropy, lies outside what the ordinary
university graduate considers mathematics. It lies within a higher,
"meta-mathematical domain," which Leibniz identified as the domain of Analysis
Situs, and which, in mathematics, is otherwise associated, in its more limited
aspects, with hypergeometric forms of modular functions.(14)
In other words, the generative (e.g., "causal") distinction between
entropy and anti-entropy, as distinct types of ordering, can be reflected in the results
of the relevant ordering, but can never be defined in terms of a statistical function, or
any other deductive mode of argument.(15)
This brings us to the indispensable role of a Classical Euclidean geometry in science.
No one could possibly achieve competence in scientific matters, without a grounding in a
strict geometry of this type, a grounding preferably by about the time of onset of
puberty, or slightly earlier. On this account, the introduction of the so-called "new
math," during the course of the 1950s, has crippled the cognitive functions of two
generations of relevant university graduates. We shall state the case at an appropriate
place, here below; but, at this instant, we proceed as if the reader had had the benefit
of a pre-1966 U.S. standard for a competent, pre-science secondary education.
To make this distinction in notions of ordering clearer to the reader, consider the
self-bounded characteristics of a deductive form of geometry, such as a classroom version
of Euclidean geometry. Such a geometry allows as theorems, only propositions which are not
inconsistent with any among a fixed set of combined definitions, axioms, and postulates.
In the method of Plato, such a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, is termed an hypothesis.
The introduction of a newly discovered, and experimentally validated, physical principle,
or of a new principle of cognition as such, creates a new physical geometry, one which is
pervasively inconsistent with any acceptable theorem of a preexisting, deductive system of
argument: thus, requiring a new hypothesis.(16) Thus,
physical science is focussed upon the nature of the ordering of successively more powerful
hypotheses. (The ordering principle of such a succession is Plato's notion of Higher
Hypothesis.) These higher, meta-mathematical, forms of ordering, such as the
distinctions between efficiently entropic and anti-entropic orderings, are apparently
"meta-mathematical" precisely for the reason that they reflect the efficiency
of those axiomatic principles (i.e., of higher hypothesis) which do not exist within the
previously established systems of deductively ordered beliefs. These are the crucial
issues of Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, and also the underlying issues of the
notions of modular, hypergeometric functions in the work of Gauss and Riemann.
I have found it convenient, pedagogically, to illustrate this point by reference to the
estimate for the size of the Earth constructed by the famous Third Century B.C.
representative of Plato's Academy at Athens, Archimedes' contemporary and correspondent,
Eratosthenes. In summary, the illustration is as follows.
From no later than the time of Thales, Classical Greece's original development of the
currents leading directly into modern science, had used sound principles to estimate both
the distance of the Sun and Moon from the Earth's surface. For reasons of scale intrinsic
to the kinds of observation available, there was an inevitably large margin of error and
difference, in and among these various observations. However, despite those margins of
error, it was clearly shown to the Classical Greek mind, that the Sun was a very large
object, at a very great distance from the surface of the Earth.(17)
Eratosthenes, a representative of Plato's Athens Academy who rose to a topmost position in
Egypt, conducted such observations himself. On the basis of that knowledge respecting the
relationship of Sun to Earth, he devised a conceptually simple astrophysical approach to
measurements in the geodesy of the Earth's surface.
If one defines, astrophysically, the meridian line which connects Egypt's Aswan
(ancient Syene) to Alexandria, and if one places plumb-bob-oriented gnomons (pins) within
hemispherical sundials at measured distances along that line, the size of the Earth can be
estimated with decent approximation. (Eratosthenes' estimate came within approximately
fifty miles of the Earth's polar diameter.) The comparison of the angles of the shadow
cast by such a series of gnomons,(18) when the shadows are
each pointed, during the same day, in a north-south direction, implicitly defines the
curvature of the Earth's surface along that interval of the meridian-line.
Thus, for measuring all but very small areas of the Earth's surface, we must enter the
domain of astrophysics, the domain of geodesy. We must abandon the limits of a
two-dimensional survey, to include a third dimension, corresponding to the line of the
radius of curvature(19) at each point (very small, e.g.,
infinitesimal interval) of the Earth's surface. All valid discoveries of new physical
principles are analogous to this Eratosthenes experiment.(20)
The validated new principle, which corrects the error in our previous doctrines about the
physical universe, has the character of a new dimensionality in a physical space-time
geometry. The discovery of that "dimensionality," constitutes the solution for
the ontological paradox addressed. This new "dimensionality," appears to
deductive opinion as in the form of an added axiom of deductive mathematical
physics.
Thus, metaphor has the same form as those ontological paradoxes which require
validatable discoveries of new physical principle. The difference is, that ontological
paradox looks at one aspect of man's interaction with the physical phase-space of that
universe of which he is a part; metaphor looks, similarly, at the principles of individual
human cognition themselves. On this account, Shakespeare, as master tragedian, is
sometimes described as a "great psychologist." The problem to be solved, is the
fact that some stubborn mental blocks prevent ill-fated men, women, and even entire
societies, from either discovering, or accepting a feasible alternative to a self-imposed,
awful destruction. To avoid such doom, we must discover those principles of both the
individual mind, and of relations among individual minds, which will enable us to prevent
repetition of such errors.
It is metaphor which defines Classical art. It is the efficient interaction between
discoveries of physical principle, the domain of physical science, and the use of
Classical art-forms to uncover the moral principles of cognition, which defines a science
of human history, the science of physical economy, and the corresponding principles of
statecraft.
Thus, prior to my apprehending the relevance of Riemann's work for the foregoing line
of investigation, it was clear that the accumulation of new dimensionalities of validated
discovery of physical and Classical-artistic principle was, at once, the expression of an
increase of society's per-capita "energy of the system," and, at the same time,
the source of an increase of the ratio of total "energy output," per capita, to
"energy of the system," per capita. When Georg Cantor's development of the
concepts of transfinite ordering is properly situated, within the framework of Riemann's
1854 discoveries, the means for expressing my anti-Wiener notion of anti-entropy, as the
basis for a reform of economic science, is evident.
In the development of European culture, Plato traced science to Pythagoras and his
school, and the anti-scientific, or contemplative standpoint, to the succession of
Eleatics, materialists, and radical nominalists, and, of course, Plato's enemies, the
Aristoteleans. The first, the scientific standpoint, chooses as its primary
subject-matter, the interrelationship between the self-development of the individual
cognitive processes, and the human species' increasing power to exist, relative to the
whole universe with which the human cognitive processes are interacting efficiently. The
second, emphasizes the relatively nominalist standpoint of formal logic, placing mankind
as observer of the mere representation of the sense-perceptual actuality.
Thus, economic science requires, that the young members of society enjoy a quality of
education which emphasizes reenacting validated original discoveries of physical principle
and Classical art-forms, as opposed to merely learning approved representations and
procedures. Hence, the functional significance of the difference between knowledge and
mere learning. In economy, the essential requirement, is that the persons employed in the
economic process must be capable of revolutionizing that process. This latter efficiency
is fostered by that quality of education, in which the pupil reenacts validated original
discoveries of principle, instead of merely learning "the right answer," without
going through the experience of reenacting the discovery. The Classical humanist form of
education, as opposed to the mind-destructive modes which have become almost universal
within U.S. education today, addresses the most fundamental principle of a science of
physical-economy. Any brand of economic teaching which ignores this principle, such as
that of Adam Smith or Karl Marx, is intrinsically a hoax.
--The LaRouche-Riemann Principle--
Although my original intention in challenging Wiener's "information theory"
hoax,(21) was not aimed at so ambitious a result, by late
1951, it was clear to me that we must redefine the meaning of the term
"science," contrary to generally accepted, pro-Aristotelean, academic usages at
that time. This was not a redefinition in merely the dictionary sense of the term, but,
rather, a new functional sense of scientific practice in general. "Science"
could not be defined as the sum of mankind's experimental observations of nature. To
eliminate the source of most of the monstrous errors promulgated as generally accepted
classroom notions of "science," it was indispensable to discard entirely the
pro-Aristotelean delusion of "scientific objectivity." Science must be
understood, functionally, not merely in terms of validated physical principles, but,
rather, subjectively: in terms of the adducible characteristics of those individual
cognitive processes, within whose sovereign domain all validated discoveries of principle
were generated as otherwise impossible solutions to a devastating paradox in the existing
state of established scientific belief. We must understand, that what crucial
experimental methods do, is to validate those types of cognitive processes which generate
experimentally validatable discoveries of physical principle.
The key to this proposed, improved functional notion of "science," and of
scientific method, lies within the science of physical economy as Leibniz had defined it,
and as I had freshly defined it at that point in my work. When the economies of entire
nations, or, better, humanity generally, are considered as indivisible entireties, the
anti-entropic form of increase of the potential relative population-density of a society,
is a measure of mankind's increase of the our species' per-capita power over nature.(22)
This relationship, between the society and the universe at large, is rooted in the
referenced distinctions of the individual person's, developable, sovereign cognitive
processes, the unique role of those individual cognitive processes in generating (or,
replicating the generation of) discoveries of principle, such as validatable discoveries
of physical principle. This defines the individual's, and the relevant society's potential
relationship to nature, a potential reflected as increase of potential relative
population-density. However, the actual relationship of society to nature, is located
within the structured social relations which shape the effective relations, respecting
ideas for practice, among the sovereign cognitive processes of the individual members of
society as a whole.
If we consider the individual cognitive processes and these structured social relations
as the subjective side of man's relations to nature at large, we can match this subjective
side with the adequacy of the array of physical principles, and the rate of change of that
latter array. Thus, the functional relations between man and nature must be
conceptualized. That is the required basis for a functional notion of the term
"science."
This combination of interacting subjective and physical development, defines the scope
and content of the science of physical economy, both as Leibniz founded it during the
1671-1716 interval of his life's work, and as I have reconstructed it in connection with
my refutation of the "information theory" hoax.
To address this consideration, we must now pause, as promised above, to bring certain
readers into the picture. This includes, notably, those who were victims of the influence
of "New Math" and kindred pedagogical obscenities, during their secondary and
university education.
We have referenced a term here, "LaRouche-Riemann Method." Since Riemann was
born ninety-four years before my birth, and died nearly seventy years before I took up the
study of Gottfried Leibniz's work: Why "LaRouche-Riemann;" why not
"Riemann-LaRouche"? Two important considerations demand that the former, and not
the latter, must be used in an intelligible representation of the content of this
discovery. The first, relatively simpler point, is that after I had made a set of
discoveries of principle, I then recognized that Riemann's work supplied the necessary
clues for solving those problems of measurement posed by my earlier discoveries.(23) The second consideration, is a far more profound one, a
consideration on which I have reported in various published locations, including my
October 2, 1996 "The Essential Role of 'Time-Reversal' in Mathematical
Economics."(24) The most efficient route to
understanding both of the notions underlying the usage "LaRouche-Riemann
Method," begins with the subject of the student's pre-science grounding in Classical
Euclidean geometry.
Although any relatively sound representation of Euclidean geometry to secondary pupils,
will suffice to provide a foundation for intelligent discussion of the elementary issues
of scientific method, no further comprehension of the subject could be realized without
reference to the implications of Plato's dialectical method in shaping the origins of
Euclid's geometry, and in enabling us to proceed from that geometry, to higher ones: to
physical geometries.
The entire collection of Plato's dialogues must be studied, not only for the particular
topics addressed, but for the single method which underlies each and all among them: the
Socratic dialectical method.(25) Ask the question: Whence
are derived the kinds of definitions, axioms, and postulates which underlie a formal
Euclidean geometry? The Socratic method demonstrates the answer. The Socratic dialectical
method exposes a rigorous approach to "smoking out" otherwise hidden
assumptions, assumptions treated naively as if they were "self-evident,"
assumptions underlying the choices between propositions which are believed, and those
which are not. Euclidean geometry, is thus largely a product of the Socratic dialectical
method, which was developed, through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, under the
continuing influence of Plato's Academy of Athens. This, so viewed, is the exemplar of all
formal systems of thought which are premised implicitly upon propositions sharing a common
basis in a single set of definitions, axioms, and postulates.
The application of this same Socratic dialectical method, of Plato, to that geometry
itself, led to discovery of new, superior geometries. The most significant such
discoveries began with the seminal work founding modern experimental physical science, the
De docta ignorantia of a chief organizer of the 1439-1440 Council of Florence,
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.(26)
Cusa's work on the matter of methods for experimental development of physical science,
led directly to the work of such among his explicit followers as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da
Vinci, and Johannes Kepler. This work, together with the added materials supplied from
Pacioli, Leonardo, and Kepler, was the common foundation of such Seventeenth-Century
leaders in science as Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huyghens, and Gottfried Leibniz. That
approach, as enriched by, and reflected within the labors of, most notably, Lazare Carnot,
Carl Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann, served as the guide to my own work in the science of
physical economy.
The vicious fallacy in permitting the replacement of competent mathematics instruction
by the so-called "New Math," is demonstrated by the fact that the "New
Math" evades the existence of the most important issues of geometry in particular,
and mathematics in general. These are the same issues indispensable for access to higher
geometries.
Modern science has shown, that the principal errors of assumption of Classical
geometry, are the following:
1. That geometry presumed, in error, that its axiomatic notions of space and time were
self-evident principles of the universe, existing independently of any experimental
proof.
2. The prevailing, erroneous axiomatic presumption among Aristotelean,
neo-Aristotelean, and other philosophically reductionist commentators on this geometry,
was that extension in space and time was perfectly continuous as a matter of principle. In
other words, that linear extension could be subdivided infinitely to such a degree that no
margin for existence of discontinuity could occur within perfect extension.
Although the first comprehensive refutation of these two errors was supplied by
Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, Riemann's discovery was implicit in much of the
work of Plato and his followers, such as Eratosthenes. The most devastating event in
refuting perfectly continuous extension, appeared in Cusa's De docta ignorantia, as
Cusa's discovery of the fact that pi was not the type of incommensurable which
Archimedes' quadrature had presumed it to be, but of a higher type, named later
"transcendental."(27) The error of the
assumptions of Descartes, Newton, et al., on this account, was addressed by Leibniz, who
used both the issue of the catenary ("hanging chain") curve, and the
Huyghens-Roemer-Leibniz-Bernoulli proofs of the isochronic characteristics of refraction
of light,(28) to show that a mathematics derived simply
from Euclidean presumptions of extension and continuity could not map the reality of the
physical universe.
For a student who is well-grounded in both Euclid and Plato, understanding of the
matter is more or less readily accessed. The shift to a "New Math" program of
instruction, has devastating, disastrous effects, on this account. The use of the radical
demands of Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, in the manner the "New
Math" ideology does so, arbitrarily denies the existence of the crucial, ontological
problems of Classical geometry: the false presumption, that extension in space and time is
simply, self-evidently, both linear and perfectly continuous. All fundamental progress in
modern science is premised on efficient acknowledgement of the reality, that space-time
extension is neither self-evidently linear, nor perfectly continuous.
If the student is able to recognize this issue, an understanding of the relevant
problems is reasonably well charted. Lacking that recognition, comprehension is most
difficult, if not impossible.
This same recognition provides us the proper distinction between a lunatic sort of
"ivory tower" mathematics (including making a virtual god of statistical
methods), and physical science.
The lunatic presumes that the appearance of the physical universe is something given to
us by an "ivory tower" type of mathematics, that the laws of the universe can be
derived, as Russell insisted, in the Principia Mathematica, as elsewhere, from a
mathematics as he defined it. In contrast to the hesychast from the ivory-tower
mathematicians's virtual space-time, the scientist, such as Riemann, insists, that the
function of mastering mathematics is to perfect one's ability to construct an appropriate,
previously non-existent mathematics, on the occasion of any validatable discovery of
physical principle which refutes the assumptions of a previously adopted mathematical
physics.
Riemann's crucial breakthrough on this account, was to assail the previously persisting
delusion, that extension in space and time were self-evident notions, rather than, as they
are now shown to have been, principles subject to the tests of experimental validation.
For example: for Riemann, as for Carl Gauss and Wilhelm Weber, the proof, by Weber, of the
existence of the Ampere "longitudinal force" in electrodynamics, already
sufficed to demonstrate the non-existence of linearity in the microphysically small. As
Riemann insisted, it is in the domains of the very large (astrophysics) and very small
(microphysics) that we must anticipate violations of the naive notions of linearized
extension in space and time.
Out of the combined work of Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann (most notably), a refined
general principle of experimental physical science emerges. In modern agro-industrial
economy, this development falls naturally into the domain of the economic tradition of
France's Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Leibniz's sometime sponsor) and one among Leibniz's more
notable followers in science, France's Lazare Carnot. The essential task of a theory of
knowledge,(29) is to define the means by which the
appropriately developed cognitive processes of the individual mind, react to ontological
contradictions (metaphors) by generating experimentally validatable new principles of
nature and cognition itself.
For this purpose, we must represent the process of physical-scientific progress in
terms of successive generations of valid new physical principles. Thus, as this case has
been identified above, we must represent scientific knowledge, by an ordered sequence of
successively more powerful hypotheses, using the term "hypothesis" here,
in the Platonic sense, as typified by a coherent set of definitions, axioms, and
postulates in a Euclidean geometry. In this image, the sequence is to be defined by the
efficient principle which generates that succession of hypotheses.
That principle is the efficient principle expressed by successful generation of
validatable new principles. For this purpose, it is convenient to describe the process of
generating the discovery of such a new principle as a four-step process:
1. The posing of an ontological paradox. This is representable in communication
as a paradoxical, confrontational juxtaposition of valid new empirical evidence with that
empirically validated, previously established system of belief, which implicitly prohibits
the existence of the new evidence considered.
2. The generation of an experimentally testable new principle which generates a
new system of belief consistent with all the evidence. This action, which occurs behind
the opaque screen of sovereignty of the individual's cognitive processes, is not
representable in any system of communication.
3. The statement of a proposed principle of solution, expressed in terms of the
paradox addressed. This is representable.
4. The experimental design, which tests the efficiency of the discovered principle.
This is representable.
It is the second of those four steps which is troublesome. Although it is not directly
representable in any deductive system, including a mathematics, it is knowable through the
replication of the same four-step act of discovery by other minds, such as those of
students. Furthermore, the accuracy of the experience of those minds, is verifiable in
terms of the implications of the four-step replication. Thus, it is, contrary to
empiricist and positivist dogma, a knowable conception, or, what Plato identifies by the
term idea. In other words, persons who have replicated that discovery within their
own minds, know that discovery as step two of the four-step process identified here. They
may then use words, or other representable expressions to identify, by reference, the
existence of that idea as the subject of their thought.
For scientific progress, it is not a defect, but rather a superlative advantage, in
such an idea, that it can not be derived by means of grammar, or any deductive device.
Since the discovery of validatable principle which resolves an ontological contradiction
is truthful, those who condemn ideas, as Plato defines ideas, are persons incapable of
truthfulness, and therefore most untrustworthy types of scientists.
Similarly, a competent performance of a Classical musical composition can not be
accomplished by a literal reading of a printed score. In Classical composition, as opposed
to the bang-bang parodies of musicality, the musical idea is of exactly the same
metaphorical origin as a discovery of a validatable new physical principle. The musical
idea is located in the equivalent of our Step Two of a cognitive process, here. The same
principle reigns in all Classical forms of plastic and non-plastic art. It is within these
qualities of idea, that our essential humanity lies, that we exist as made in the image of
God.
In science, of course, the obvious point, is that these ideas are the most efficient
power in all human practice. Thus, they are superbly real, far more real than any mere
object of sense-perception. All efficient physical principles are of this same ontological
quality.
In Plato, the process of generating successively more powerful hypotheses, by what we
have represented as a four-step cognitive action, is referenced as an efficient, and
knowable principle (idea) of higher hypothesis. That is to say, that the development of
the creative powers of the cognitive processes of the student, through the successive acts
of recreating discoveries by the indicated four-step method, rather than merely learning
those discoveries in a text-book fashion, trains the cognitive processes to attack
ontological paradoxes in a certain fashion. This developed method of attack, as expressed
through successively successful applications, represents, thus, a knowable idea. This
quality of knowable idea corresponds to the notion of higher hypothesis. The
generalization of the improvement in higher hypothesis, provides the idea corresponding to
Plato's "hypothesizing the higher hypothesis," the cognitive aspect of Plato's
principle of "Becoming."
Thus, in this light, science becomes the matter of organizing the mental and related
activities of groups of scientists and others, around a task-oriented process --a
mission-- of perpetuating scientific progress, in this sense, as a series of successively
more powerful hypotheses represents such progress.
This brings us to the second point, the matter of "time-reversal."
Let us agree to describe propositions which are not-inconsistent with any among the
definitions, axioms, and postulates of a formal hypothesis as theorems of that
hypotheses. Thus, we have, corresponding to a fixed such hypothesis, an expandable array
of theorems so defined: a theorem-lattice. Within such lattices, there is an
associated notion of sequence. For example, the fact that the derivation of some
proposition is conditional upon the preceding derivation of another proposition,
represents a sequence. This is the epistemological form in which the notion of
"time" appears, not as a self-evident, linear form of extension, but, rather, as
a relative form of extension rooted in experimental physical science, rather than a merely
formal mathematics.
In contrast, an hypothesis exists, relative to its theorem-lattice, as independent of
time, as seemingly "eternal."
Hence, in the adoption of an hypothesis, we have implicitly adopted the past, present,
and future propositions, theorems, events, etc., implicit in it. The case for higher
hypothesis is an analogous one. Hence, the decisions we make in generating validatable
principles of nature, have the form of letting the future consequences of our actions
guide our present actions: apparent time-reversal.
Such is the notion of laws of the universe. To the degree our perception of such laws
is accurate to within a given number of future centuries, millennia, and so forth, the
corresponding future, acting through us, is acting upon the present. This appears to be
"teleology," but, as we shall now indicate, a far different type of teleology
than that which is sometimes brushed against, briefly, in the undergraduate philosophy
semester.
--Kepler & The "Three-Body Problem"--
There are two points of caution to be emphasized at this juncture. First, we must
consider the possibility, that not only do mankind's notions of laws of the universe
change, but, that the laws of the universe themselves may change in a more or less
analogous manner. No sane scientist would be so reckless as to propose either a "Big
Bang" creation, or a universe according to Hoyle: except, as he, or she presented
such a thesis in the form of a question, such as: "Let us ask ourselves why some
people are lured into adopting a piece of cosmic dogma as absurd at this? What, ladies and
gentlemen, is the fallacy which is expressing itself in the putting-forward of such
absurdities?"
Consider the setting for what is frequently identified as the "three-body
problem."
The idea of a universal gravitation was introduced by Johannes Kepler in 1609, in his The
New Astronomy. This was a notion which he linked, there, to the phenomenon of
magnetism.(30) Kepler derived an expression for
gravitation from his famous three laws. Newton and his associates later plagiarized this,
Kepler's discovery of gravitation, and derived the famous Newtonian "law of
gravitation" as an algebraic manipulation of Kepler's original formulation.(31)
The seemingly curious result of the English empricists' plagiarism is, that Kepler's
notion of the ordering of the solar system worked, but Newton's plagiarized, reductionist,
algebraic derivation did not. The failure of Newton's method is a paradox known as
"the three-body problem." The solution to that paradox follows from the
seemingly "teleological" argument we have outlined immediately above.
The crucial issue permeating that paradox is the popular classroom fallacy identified
as echoing Thomas Hobbes' implied ideological blind faith in the existence of
linearization in the infinitesimally small.(32) To be as
brief as the subject itself permits, consider the following question.
Reference the example of Eratosthenes' estimate for the implied size of the Earth, from
his estimating the circumference of the Earth from the curvature of a measured interval
along the measured distance of the meridian-line between Syene and Alexandria in Egypt.
Compare this with the method developed, and employed by Carl Gauss, to demonstrate that
the newly discovered heavenly body, Ceres, was an asteroid with the harmonic orbital
characteristics which Kepler had specified for a missing planet's orbit, between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Compare this with a generalized notion of curved surfaces
developed for astrophysics, geodesy, and geomagnetism, by Gauss. The question is, can
we infer the trajectory of the entirety of a lawful motion from the curvature of an
observed small interval of that trajectory? Or, in the alternative: is the orbit
determined, from instant to instant, by the mechanical (e.g., "Newtonian")
interaction of bodies and related forces?
Kepler's argument, derived from the line of thinking of such adopted predecessors as
Nicholas of Cusa, Luca Pacioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, was that the lawful orbits of the
solar system were predetermined as knowable pre-orderings. In Kepler's work, this notion
underwent expression in differing forms. However, throughout, his principle was that these
orderings, which we might associate with the principle of Analysis Situs, expressed an
efficiently underlying, not-entropic principle. On this account, the entirety of his
astrophysics coheres with the view, that it is feasible, on principle, to derive a
measured curvature of a lawful orbit within a very small interval of observation, to such
effect that we can adduce the entirety of that trajectory from the characteristic
curvature of least action in that small interval.
This is the same method underlying the mathematical tactic developed by Gauss, by means
of which he solved the orbit of Ceres.
In other words, the determination of the apparent change (curvature) in a
lawfully-determined trajectory, as distinct from a kinematically determined one, is of the
order of an higher hypothesis, relative to any single hypothesis governing a mechanical
approximation of a portion of that trajectory.
Now, turn immediately to the case of the characteristic curvature of interaction of the
human species with the universe at large. As we have indicated, the characteristic action,
which distinguishes the human species from the higher apes, is the anti-entropic impact of
the generation of a validatable principle within what we have located as Step Two of the
Four-Step process of discovery of such a principle. This represents a change of curvature,
distinguishing the human species absolutely from all other species. This determines the
specific physical-space-time curvature of the human species' existence.
This curvature is located immediately in the very small: within the cognitive processes
of an individual mind, within a monad.
The same principle serves us, as it distinguishes particular processes which are
living, from particular processes which are not. What is the difference between the
characteristic of a carbon atom as a functional part of a living process, as distinct from
the same carbon atom which has moved on to become part of a non-living process.
Categorically, consider the distinction between anti-entropic and entropic processes as a
matter of "curvature" in the Gauss-Riemann sense of that term.
Consider another useful illustration of the issue, before turning directly to the
relevance of this to the subject of "environmentalism."
Consider the rather commonplace, fallacious argument, that thermonuclear fusion of
like-charged material is fatally resisted by mutually repulsive "Coulomb Forces"
in the vicinity of atomic-nuclear distances. On what authority is it asserted, that the
simple "Coulomb Force" operates throughout the atomic-nuclear scale as it
appears to act on the macro scale? Wilhelm Weber's successful demonstration of the
efficiency of an electrodynamical agency called the "longitudinal force," more
than a hundred years ago, had already shown that the assumptions usually attributed to the
"Coulomb Force" do not operate in that same fashion once a certain smallness of
distance from the nucleus has been reached.
From many analogous examples, it should have been clear to all serious scientific
thinkers, centuries before this time, that lawful physical principles are expressed as
such, in manners which suggest that the present action according to such a principle
of lawfulness, functions as if it were a response to a future state of that same process.
In other words, from the kinematic standpoint of the empiricist or materialist, it must
appear to the alarmed empiricist or materialist ideologue, that forces are also acting
through time-reversal as we might imagine forces to be acting, contrarily, in the
present, to generate future states.
This paradox is demystified, immediately we introduce the notion of higher hypothesis.
Relative to any sequential mathematical scheme cohering with a consistent hypothesis, the
relevant hypothesis is operating with relatively equal efficiency, simultaneously, in
past, present, and future. Relative to any ordered sequences of hypotheses, or of the
changes in physical states corresponding to such sequences of hypotheses, the implied
higher hypothesis is fixed as operating, simultaneously, and efficiently, in past,
present, and future. Look at the Crab Nebula, for example, with regard to the anomalous
case of the attributed speed-of-light distances among the component points of that
coherently changing object.
Is this merely the present author's conjecture? Not at all. It would appear to be
merely conjecture, only if one commits the blunder of accepting Aristotle's fraudulent
notion of the detached observer. Once we recognize that scientific knowledge is obtained,
not by contemplating the universe, but by studying how we may generate those thoughts
which enable us to efficiently act to change the universe, then the principles of
cognition underlying the discovery of lawful physical principles, are the epistemological
basis for defining the underlying determination of validatable physical laws.
--Examples from Physical Economy--
Pedagogically, the simplest and clearest, experimental demonstrations of the issues and
principles, are from my field of specialization, the domain of the science of physical
economy. The most economical choices of examples, reference five historical cases: The
revolutionary reconstitution of France by King Louis XI (1461-1483); the first
science-driver model of economic growth, that directed by France's Minister Jean-Baptiste
Colbert; the invention of the steam-powered industrial revolution, by Gottfried Leibniz,
during his work of 1671-1716; the 1792-1814 science-driver "crash program"
devised and directed by France's Leibnizian, Lazare Carnot, the originator of the
machine-tool industry, and his former teacher and collaborator Gaspard Monge of the
1794-1814 Ecole Polytechnique; and, the American model of modern industrial economy, the
most successful form of economy developed to the present date, that 1861-1876 development,
devised by economist Henry Carey, begun under President Abraham Lincoln, and successfully
introduced to Japan, Germany, and Russia during the 1870s. For our purposes here, we sum
up the principles adducible from the Carey-Lincoln, updated version of that
Franklin-Hamilton model of the Leibnizian "American System of
political-economy," the updated version developed in the 1861-1876 U.S.A., and then
copied by Germany and Russia, in cooperation with Henry C. Carey, beginning 1876. Again,
that latter was the model which made the U.S. economy the most powerful nation-state
economy of the world, and the technologically most advanced, during the course of the
1861-1876 industrial revolution.(33)
In the course of summarizing that point, we bring the discussion to focus on two
crucial expressions of policies which have destroyed the U.S. economy and popular culture,
including a correlated general degeneration in religious culture, during the recent
thirty-odd years. We come to those cases at the appropriate point below.
The secret of the highest rates of progress in conditions of life of a nation and its
population, is typified by the program of the Ecole Polytechnique under Gaspard Monge's
direction. The center of that program was the education of what were named
"brigades" of adolescent students, producing, thus, the most advanced and
powerful center of scientific and engineering work in the world up to that time. For the
key to this success, refer to the Four-Step model of original discovery and education,
which I have outlined above. Refer also, to Lazare Carnot's invention of the machine-tool
principle of high-precision mass-production, which France's "Organizer of
Victory" Carnot introduced, during 1792-1794, to effect the rout of all of the armies
invading France at that time, and to suddenly, during that two-year period, establish the
armies of France as the most powerful and technologically most advanced in the world at
that time.
Trace the combined role of a Four-Step model of Classical secondary and higher
education and the machine-tool-design principle, within the setting of the Carey-Lincoln
economic revolution of 1861-1876 and its emulation by Germany and by the Mendelyeev-Witte
faction of industrial development in 1876-1905 Russia. Compare this to Franklin
Roosevelt's economic revolution during World War II, and with the German-American
aerospace program of the 1945-1966 interval.(34) See
accompanying Figure 1, a flow-chart outlining the principles of a
machine-tool-design driven economy.
It is the development of the (creative) cognition of the individual student's mind,
through repeated experiences of the type described by the Four-Step method, which enables
those students to focus the thus-developed creative powers corresponding to Step Two, for
the solution to problems posed in the form of an ontological paradox of science, or a
metaphor of Classical art-forms.(35) As Figure 1
portrays, that generation of validated discoveries of principle, which occurs as a product
and, largely, a by-product of such Classical-humanist modes of secondary and higher
education, produces both a flourishing of new machine-tool-design principles, and also a
highly adaptive labor-force, capable of mastering the newly introduced technologies.
That example typifies the fact, that a sustainable net profit of a national economy is
generated only through the anti-entropic impact of this, or related modes of proliferation
and investment in the benefits of scientific and technological progress. The agency which
generates that realized anti-entropy, is the agency expressed as Step Two of the Four-Step
process.
This agency, this sovereign cognitive potential of the individual person, is the
location of that which defines man and woman as each made in the image of God. The passion
associated with the kind of creative activity represented by Step Two, is termed agape
in the Classical Greek of Plato and the Apostle Paul. Paul's I Corinthians 13,
exemplifies that principle as at the center of all Christianity. Christianity is love of agape,
both agape as the passion of characteristically, distinctive human activity (i.e.,
creative cognition), and fostering of that quality which is "made in the image of
God," agape, within each human being.
In contrast, it is fair to describe social theories such as the definitions of
"human nature" by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and Adam Smith,
as satanic. The idea of "free trade," or, as Francois Quesnay terms it, laissez-faire,
is best understood by recognizing it as a relic of Manicheanism, the Bogomil form of
Manicheanism most notably. This represents a denial of the efficient existence of that
which defines the individual as "made in image of God," creative cognition, and
the substitution of lusty bestial alternatives, such as the Seven Deadly Sins, for agape,
in the ordering of the interpersonal behavior of society. So, "free trade," is
nothing other than the doctrine Mandeville and his devotee von Hayek described it to be;
they insist, that good comes only from giving unrestricted license to evil. For them,
there is nothing in man, but the linear extension of those passions which are
associated with the Seven Deadly Sins. The essence of Friedrich von Hayek's satanic
definition of "freedom," were best described by the motto, "Let the inner
sow loose!"
Thus, as institutionalized practice shapes the expressed "curvature" of the
individual person in society, so, we determine the characteristic feature of the
trajectory which the history of that society will follow.
Look at the general principle once again, in light of that example from the domain of
political-economy.
In determining the nature of the lawful interactions among ostensibly non-living,
living, and cognitive processes, we must proceed by recognizing that these processes are
distinguished from one another in terms of differing characteristic physical-space-time
curvatures, notably in their infinitesimally small intervals of action. If one, then,
proposes to define an interaction among processes of such characteristically, mutually
distinct curvatures, by use of "models" which arbitrarily presume
mechanistically linear interactions in the very small, the resulting calculation can be
guaranteed to be absurd, totally false to reality.
Notably, if one projects "environmental" calculations which leave out the
role of human cognition in the technological development of economy, the resulting
judgment on the relations between man and nature will be totally false to reality. The
spread of disease, as a result of the banning of DDT, the increase of morbidity rates in
populations around the world, as a result of impact of the "Ozone Hole" hoax on
refrigeration of the food-delivery again, and the threatened accelerated increase of
death-rates, globally, from the "Global Warning" fraud, are warnings of the
dangers involved in linearizing thinking about the living processes.
It is more than fair to sum up that point, respecting the fallacy of linearization,
thus: If one assesses the impact of economy upon ecology, by reference to any of the
generally accepted varieties of classroom economics doctrine today, the resulting
conclusion is necessarily a fraudulent one.
--In The Matter of Proof--
In the matter of what might be termed carelessly "environmental science,"
there are two broad classifications.
One, is the standard of scientific proof generally accepted by specialists in the
relevant fields prior to 1962-1972. Proofs from this quarter may have their problematic
features, but the standard of practice from that period was "within the
ball-park" of truthfulness and competence. This standard worked, not because the
mathematics employed was particularly good; it worked, usually, despite bad mathematical
models, because the standard applied for purposes of policy shaping, was that of
crucial-experimental demonstration of principle, rather than reliance on mathematical
models as such.
The second standard, is the ideological one associated with the influential "1001
Club" which was established under Britain's consort Prince Philip and the Netherlands
drone Prince Bernhard, as adjuncts to the 1961 founding of the World Wildlife Fund. The
prescriptions of this second standard, are usually not merely incompetent, but outright
hoaxes. Three prominent examples of such frauds are those just cited above: Rachel
Carson's fraudulent allegations against DDT --for which no scientific proof was ever
supplied, F. Sherwood Rowland's "Ozone Hole" hoax, and the "Global
Warming" hoax.
One of the most revealing case-studies is found in the campaigns against the use of
nuclear fission as a source of energy. In response to the critics' question: Whence shall
we secure the needed energy-supplies to replace nuclear-fission sources, the replies by
the anti-nuclear propagandists were invariably either frauds or simply the foolish
babbling of wild-eyed illiterates.
The most crucial, rule-of-thumb parameters for defining the principal energy-sources of
society, are power per kilogram of fuel, and "energy-flux density" in the
available mode of generation of usable power. That is, in the latter case, the amount of
usable energy-flow passing through a cross-sectional area per second. Kilowatts per square
centimeter, is one such rule-of-thumb measurement. This is a notion as old as the Ecole
Polytechnique's Sadi Carnot, and as durable. The higher, and the more coherent the
organization of the energy-flux-density, the more efficient the energy-flow per watt-hour
transmitted.
The issue is not simply crude heat-efficiency, but the relationship of
energy-flux-density in the very small to threshhold values for certain types of physical
reactions. Thus, the level of technology, and thus of average productive powers of labor,
which could be achieved, is constrained by considerations of energy-flux-density, related
considerations of coherence, and so forth.
Today, for example, in physics generally, the forseeable future improvements in
energy-sources, are, first, successive generations of improvement in controlled
thermonuclear fusion, and, second, the calculably still-higher orders of energy-density,
if it proves possible to control a matter/anti-matter reaction as an energy-source in, for
example, inter-solar-system and stellar explorations.
In these matters, the political proponents of "soft" energy-supplies are
illiterate fanatics. Politically, they are dangerous llliterates. They typify a society
which has substituted the "encounter group's" notion of "sensitivity,"
for both truthfulness and even sanity. In other words, they are essentially immoral
people. If they are to be judged "sincere," then one must say that they are as
"sincerely immoral," as, perhaps, the followers of Satan should be.
Certainly, among the principal authors of the modern "anti-technology" cults,
British Consort Prince Philip, the 1961 cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund and
"1001 Club," is utterly evil, as also the Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,
the other cofounder, who took time on the day of his wedding to a Dutch princess, to sign,
"Heil Hitler," in a letter of resignation from the Nazi SS, which he sent
personally, directly to Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler. Over the recent decades, such would-be
Mephistopheles have succeeded in recruiting a large number of would-be Fausts. To
wit:
Generally, through the influence of foundations and other ideologically motivated
institutions fitting the same paradigm as the "1001 Club," a kind of industry of
environmentalist hoaxes has been established. Graduate students and others have found that
the easy way to make a living, is to go on the payroll of an institution which wishes to
have putative scientific support for one or more of these "environmentalist"
hoaxes.
Rowland is notable, not only because his personal celebrity was built around such
corrupt practices, but because he typifies the way in which computer technology has been
misused, as a substitute for science, in the concocting of the fraudulent studies produced
by professionals who have prostituted themselves to making their careers as the equivalent
of call-girls or street-walkers in this manner. The fact that this corrupt practice has
proliferated as long as it has, lends to the "environmentalist" juvenile
delinquents of yesterday's pseudo-science that bit of balding and touch of snow in the
thatch which is too often mistaken by the credulous onlooker, for sign of mature judgment.
Through the personal success of Rowland, and the growing cheapness of modern personal
computers, the "Ozone Hole" hoax has made the fraud of the "computer
model" the fashion leader of the "environmentalist" industry.
When a person has become immoral, in such ways as we have indicated here, it is not
required that we also prove them corrupt. To call the Devil wicked, it is not necessary to
prove that he takes bribes. In response to the thought expressed by one questioner,
doubtless a commonplace thought: to prove that Satan is evil, it is not necessary to
discover that he, or a slave-owner, for example, has been bought.
Let us conclude with a relevant observation on that concluding topic, the topic of
wickedness. Too often, when a horrifying type of crime has been committed, too many
speculate on what they imagine might have been the motive of Hobbesian or Lockean
"self-interest" which might have motivated the perpetrator to such hideous
extremes. The exemplary word of caution to those who dupe themselves into playing such
parlor games, is the fact, that sometimes a killer kills because he enjoys killing, and
kills in an extraordinarily nasty way, because his impulse will not be gratified
otherwise. Sometimes it is less that the victim has evoked hate, than that hate has sought
out a convenient victim for its expression. No one kills out of "impersonal
motives," and in times when the greatest degree of evil is afoot, it is increasingly
the case, that malice arises from perceived issues of "self-interest," less and
less often, than the expression of malice has become, in itself, the perpetrator's
"self-interest."
Many environmentalists are honestly illiterates, of whom we might say, "They know
no better." Many, like most of the "radicals" of the 1964-1968 campus
ferment, were brainwashed into what they became, because of the explosions of lability,
suggestibility, and desire for flight from reality, induced by such triggering factors as
the 1962 missiles-crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the nightly
horror of TV footage from Vietnam, and the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. However,
those, such as Princes Philip and Bernhard, or Dame Margaret Mead, who preyed upon these
victims, in order to induce in these unfortunates the aberrant states, were purely evil
persons, whose motivation was malice per se.
In any case, when the habit of rejecting truthfulness becomes a functional state of
mind, the condition of moral corruption has already taken command of that personality.
That evil mind then needs no special consideration to be prompted to express the quality
which that mind had acquired.
NOTES
1. (Washington, D.C.: 21st Century Science Associates, 1992).
2. ibid.
3. The "politically correct" language codes introduced at
some leading, present-day universities, typify of contemporary definitions of
"political correctness" cum "mainstream opinion," and recall
George Orwell's fictionalAnimal Farm and 1984. The non-fictional, real-life
precedent for the today's "mainstream opinion" was the Josef Goebbels' Nazi
Propaganda Ministry.
4. As I emphasized to my students in each of the courses on
economics which I taught at sundry campuses during 1966-1973, Marx noted that his
"model" excluded consideration of "the technical composition of
capital;" that "exclusion" is the formal root of the fallacy of his models
of "extended reproduction" and "falling rate of profit." That
admission reflects his exclusion of the relevant cognitive principle from his scrutiny.
The use of the term "Manichean," to identify Hobbes, Adam Smith, the Mont
Pelerin Society, et al., is neither simile, nor hyperbole; from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan
onward, the entirety of the English and British empiricist and the Franco-Austrian
positivist doctrine for economics, is derived explicitly from the continuing influence of
the notorious, neo-Manichean, Bogomil cult in the region of Toulouse and the Rhone.
Bernard de Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, the official "Old Testament"
of Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society, is explicit in its translation of Hobbes'
"each in war against all," into that doctrine, that good comes spontaneously
from awarding evil practices the license of laissez-faire. Like all varieties of
Manicheanism, the premise of the argument of Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam
Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John von Neumann, and others, is that Satan rules the universe of
the flesh (the material realm), while God (pending some Judgment Day) is confined to the
smaller, ineffable realm of spiritual life, within the person, family, and church. Hence,
the argument of these Manicheans, such as U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, that no moral purpose must be superimposed upon Satan's church, "the
marketplace" of Michael Novak's economics theology.
5. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The coming Pearl Harbor
effect," Executive Intelligence Review, Sept. 12, 1997.
6. ibid. Also, Hartmut Thieme, "Lower Paleolithic hunting
spears from Germany," Nature, Vol. 385, Feb. 27, 1997, p. 807.
7. The term, "LaRouche-Riemann Model," was introduced at a
November 1978, New York City meeting of representatives of both Executive Intelligence
Review (EIR) and the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF). The topic of that meeting was the
securing of declassified Soviet reports which showed that the Soviet design for the
"hydrogen bomb" had relied upon the principles of isentropic compression derived
from Bernhard Riemann's Über die Fortpflanzung ebener Luftwellen von endlicher
Schwingungsweite [Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, H. Weber,
ed., (New York: Dover Publications reprint, 1953), hereinafter identified as Riemanns
Werke: pp.156-175]. The focus of the discussion was the stubborn adherence to
doctrines axiomatically premised upon the absurd axiomatic presumption of linearization in
the infinitesimally small, prevailing among otherwise gifted circles of leading plasma
physicists and others engaged in aspects of fusion-energy development. Into this
discussion, the present writer pointed out two suggested practical considerations. First,
that the Riemannian shock-wave effect is also characteristic of the domain of physical
economies, where it is expressed in transitions to higher technological domains, and,
also, collapses into lower states. Second, that the principles applicable to relevant
plasma problems could be illustrated by a quarterly, computer-assisted forecasting model
for the U.S. economy which EIR could produce, with cooperation from FEF scientists. The
present author supplied the set of constraints to be used in transforming U.S. official
data into the form needed to produce such forecasts. However, it must be recognized by all
concerned, that the measurements to be made in connection with that modelling, must be
interpreted from the standpoint of the implications of Riemann's 1854 habilitation
dissertation, Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen, Riemanns
Werke, pp. 272-287. Hence "LaRouche-Riemann Model." That latter name was
used for the most successful of any published quarterly forecast reports for the U.S.
economy, from late 1979 through the Third Quarter of 1983. As I informed a nationwide TV
audience during early 1984, the forecasting was dropped at the close of 1983, because of
the wildly fraudulent, "cosmetic" statistical practices of the U.S. Government
and Federal Reserve System, introduced during the closing period of 1983. The crucial
issue there, "linearization in the very small," is also the crucial issue in
this present report. See below.
8. LaRouche, op. cit. Also, A. Chaitkin, Treason in America,
(New Benjamin Franklin House, New York, 1984).
9. There is no true art, in any form, without metaphor. Metaphor is
not merely a required feature of all art; it is the common, principal subject-matter of
the entirety of any and all works of art. "Classical" is rightly employed as a
term derived from reference to ancient, Classical Greece, in the latter's role as the
origin of all of European civilization's post-Archaic art-forms, to the present date. We
are obliged to employ the qualifying term, "Classical art," because of a
misguided, widespread opinion, the latter which includes works violating the Classical
principle of metaphor under the rubric "art."
10. Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen,
op. cit.
11. On Analysis Situs: various locations.
12. Riemanns Werke, pp. 509-538.
13. In the Carl Friedrich Gauss Werke (Hildesheim-New York:
Georg Olms Verlag, 1981), the relevant Gauss writings, as known to Bernhard Riemann during
the 1850s, are to be found as follows: biquadratic residues: Vol. II, pp. 65-148; curved
surfaces: Vol. IV, pp. 188-334; on the influence upon Riemann exerted by Gauss's work on
hypergeometric series, see Riemann's Vorlesungen über die hypergeometrische Reihe,
Riemanns Werke, pp. 69-108. Compare the latter paper of Riemann with Gauss's
diagrams, and the commentator's associated text, as presented on pages 102-104 of Ludwig
Schlesinger's Über Gausses Arbeiten zur Funktiontheorie [Werke, Vol.
X]
14. ibid.
15. To qualify the use of Leibniz's term, Analysis Situs,
here: The writer's discoveries of the 1948-1951 phase of his project of refuting Wiener,
et al., defined "Analysis Situs" as follows. In examining the way in which
mankind's continued existence depends upon successful interaction with the universe at
large, scientific method must proceed from recognition that the evidence to be considered
touches three distinct qualities of function, as these are expressed in terms of three
distinct qualities of specific forms of empirical evidence. The specific forms of
empirical evidence are assorted among: 1) Relations which are knowable directly through
sense-perception: Macrophysics; 2) Relations in the very large, which can not be
observed directly through the senses, Astrophysics, 3.) and, relations in the very
small, which lie totally beyond the reach of direct activity of the senses, Microphysics.
The functional distinctions, encountered in all three of the foregoing forms, are: A.)
particular processes which are ostensibly non-living in themselves, including non-living
organic processes; B.) particular processes which are ostensibly living; C.) cognitive
processes. Thus, Analysis Situs pertains to all possible, functionally significant
permutations among the nine "cells" defined by this three-by-three array.
Ultimately, Analysis Situs is the notion that a single ordering-principle implicitly
subsumes the ordering of all those permutations. This higher ordering-principle is
equivalent to Plato's notion variously identified as "Becoming," or
"hypothesizing the higher hypothesis."
16. As indicated by Riemann, in his referenced, 1854 habilitation
dissertation, we can not derive the metrical characteristics of physical space-time merely
from the dimensionality of the manifold. We must also consider the non-linear colligation
among the physical principles represented by these dimensions. In other words, we must
measure, experimentally, the metrical characteristics of the actual physical space-time
representation by the manifold. The methods employed for this purpose by Carl Gauss, as in
adducing the orbit of the asteroid Ceres, exemplify the conceptual approach
required.
17. It was also established by these Greek mathematicians and
astronomers, long before the frauds of the hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy, that the Earth
orbitted the Sun.
18. e.g., angular differences between successive plumb-bob lines of
the series of sundials.
19. e.g., in first estimate, the radius is assumed to correspond to
the plumb-bob line: were the Earth a sphere, and could one assume that the gravitational
"forces" to be considered were, for practical purposes, those assumed by Isaac
Newton's crude notions.
20. In the case that the curvature within a very small interval of
continuing (but, not necessarily "continuous") action, is non-constant, we are
approaching the transition from the curvature of conic sections into the domain of
hypergeometric, modular cases of "compounded," non-constant curvatures. For a
simple example, the product of a cycloid and a conic section. This is a crucial, relevant
point, addressed below.
21. In referring to "Wiener's hoax," we are not attacking
his useful outline of principles of design of automatic control systems; his hoax was his
act of sleight-of-hand, in claiming that all human knowledge could be reduced to the
mechanistic terms of such automatic control systems. This was the same blunder made by
Wiener's fellow-Russell acolyte, John von Neumann, both in advancing his 1938 claims to
have discovered the secret of all economy in "systems analysis," and his later
emulation of Wiener's "information theory" hoax, in defending the delusion of
"artificial intelligence."
22. As I have identified the definition of economic anti-entropy
above.
23. If one wished to insist upon the strictest term, the choice
would be "Leibniz-LaRouche-Riemann Method." On the basis of internal features of
his work, Riemann was as wholly indebted to an adolescent grounding in Leibniz as I was.
It was that commonality of grounding which led us, along different tracks of
investigation, to converging conclusions, respecting the notion of a physical geometry, as
distinct from a merely formal one.
24. Executive Intelligence Review, Oct. 11, 1996. Later
republished in Fidelio, Winter 1996.
25. Which has an important relationship to the work of Heraclitus,
but no principled congruence with the so-called "dialectical method" of Immanuel
Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, or Karl Marx. Kant and Hegel are followers of the anti-Plato,
reductionist, Aristotelean dialectic, and Marx is in the same genre.
26. The institution of the Papacy had been wrecked by the
Fourteenth Century "New Dark Age" and its aftermath. Theologian Cusa, who had
been a member of the so-called Conciliar movement, through his writing on the principles
of the modern nation-state, Concordancia catholica, was self-persuaded by this very
line of argument that the Christian Church must be reunited around a common principle
represented by a single, common spokesman. This led to the reestablishment of the formerly
shattered Catholic Church itself, through the initial successes of the Council of
Florence. Cusa had aimed to bring the eastern and Latin rites together in reconciliation,
around agreement to the so-called "Filioque" principle of the Augustinian
reading of the Nicene Creed. Through his scholarly work in Byzantine centers, Cusa turned
up Byzantine documents which proved to leaders of the eastern Rite, that Byzantium,
according to its own documents, had been in error in opposing the Augustinian doctrine.
The result was the temporary reunification of the eastern and Latin rites effected during
the 1439-1440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence. In this process,
Cusa's work in Greek scientific manuscripts (many among which had been lost to the west
since the 1350 death of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II), led to his formulation of
the principles of modern experimental physical science.
27. To relieve some readers of the mistaken apprehension that I
have overlooked certain relevant mathematical matters: I have shown elsewhere, repeatedly,
that the commonly taught (and credulously believed) dictum, that the discovery of the
"transcendental" character of pi was due to the successive work of
Leonhard Euler, Lambert, Hermite, and Lindemann, is a myth built upon a series of frauds,
beginning with Leonhard Euler's defense of Dr. Samuel Clarke's argument on this
account.
28. In reality, it is easily shown, by references to complexities
of compounded orbits, that the cycloid approximates, but is not actually representative of
an isochronic principle. The actual isochronic curvature brings us immediately into the
domain of the catenary.
29. i.e., epistemology
30. Johannes Kepler: New Astronomy, William H. Donahue,
trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
31. Cf. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., The Science of Christian
Economy (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991), pp. 374-377, 470-473.
32. Hobbes was educated in mathematics by the personal lackey,
Galileo Galilei, of the Ockhamite nominalist, the de facto post-1582 ruler of Venice,
Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi, whose leading allies in England at that time, featured the Cecil
family, and, therefore, Francis Bacon, was the actual teacher whose notions of physics
were faithfully copied and presented by Galileo. Hobbes, a very, very intimate associate
of Francis Bacon, applied the mechanistic misconceptions of causality which he had learned
from Galileo, to social processes. This produced the mechanistic, "statistical gas
theory" view of social process made infamous by Hobbes' assertion of "each in
war against all. The coupling of this mechanistic notion with the method which Descartes,
another Sarpi network asset, employed in plagiarizing what is known as "Cartesian
geometry," is the axiomatic basis upon which depend the notion of linearization
through infinite series later defended by Dr. Samuel Clarke and Leonhard Euler, and the
introduction of the "limit theorem" by Augustin Cauchy, et al., in their
fanatical attacks upon the work of Gottfried Leibniz.
33. Although the 1876 U.S. was the most advanced, and most powerful
nation-state economy of the world, in totality, and per capita of labor force, the most
powerful political and financial agency of the world was the British Empire and its
London-centered Anglo-Dutch international financial oligarchy. In per capita values, the
United Kingdom of 1876 was vastly inferior to the U.S.A., to say nothing of the basis of
London's power, in the misery imposed upon its imperial and other victims abroad. But for
the treasonous elements, such as the House of Morgan and the August Belmont influence,
serving as British agents inside the U.S.A., London could not have succeeded in creating,
"George Soros" style, the financial crisis of 1873, nor in corrupting a
sufficient number of members of the U.S. Congress to pass the Specie Resumption Act and
related "British gold standard" measures which kept the U.S. in chronic
financially-induced economic depression-cycles during the 1877-1907 interval.
34. Under heavy pressure from the pro-"systems analysis"
forces within the U.S. "establishment," the U.S. government introduced heavy
cut-backs into the U.S. aerospace program, beginning 1966-1967. U.S. aerospace progress
since 1967-1969, has been chiefly, overall, coasting downhill, presently nearing absolute
bottom.
35. Even in the educational programs which have gone from bad to
worse in this century's evolution of U.S. secondary and higher education, a similar
benefit may occur through the personal initiative of an egregious student who rejects the
generally accepted classroom and textbook methods of those institutions, and prefers to
work through rediscoveries of principle independently, by some approximation of the same
Four-Step method. In such a case, as experience of education during the recent five
decades typifies, the result is that most of the graduates will learn to sing for their
supper (a paid career), not for the benefit of music (science); a dwindling handful will
be committed to truthfulness in knowledge.
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