Science in Crisis

 

I have an uneasy feeling about how things are going.

Years ago I was involved in clinical studies that examined the effectiveness of treatments for acute stroke. I participated in four of these. Each one took years and enrolled thousands of patients. We were one of hundreds of centers worldwide that did this work. All in all dozens of different medications for the treatment of acute stroke were tested. The idea was that people who had a stroke would receive one of these medications, and this would reduce the disability the stroke caused. They were supposed to work in various ways — reducing toxicity, reducing inflammation, inhibiting oxidation, etc. — all of them having been tested in labs and found to work in tissue cultures and animals prior to being tried in patients. At the end of it, not a single one of these medications worked when they were tried on human beings.

It was an incredible disaster. Billions of dollars were spent by drug companies trying to develop these drugs, and it was a total bust.

Looking back we can still only guess at what went wrong, but a big part of it was poor methods in the lab. When studies were rigorously controlled and blinded the positive results in the lab often disappeared. Some of the fundamentals of lab science had been forgotten. We already knew there were problems and results were inconsistent, but this was ignored in the rush to be the first to come up with a proven treatment.

Now I think there’s not a single drug company anywhere that would ever trust the claims made by academic scientists doing this sort of work. Pharma is doing all the basic research themselves, in their own labs, if at all.

So it didn’t surprise me when I learned that most scientists don’t trust more than half of what is reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals to be true. This is true of all fields of science, even the hard sciences like physics.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics, dissected the situation in her own field of science in her book “Lost in Math”. Particle physics is concerned with the most fundamental of nature’s building blocks, fundamental particles, like the electron, photon, and quark, some of which can only be studied by smashing atoms together in powerful accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and examining the debris. Fundamental particles are particles that can’t be smashed into smaller particles but combine to make other larger particles like protons. (Three quarks combine with gluons to make a proton.) Particle physics is in crisis, she says, because no advances have been made in particle physics in 40 years. The LHC was built at a cost of billions to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson but was expected to also uncover a whole host of other new fundamental particles. The discovery of these particles would confirm the new theory of particle physics, called Supersymmetry, most widely expected to replace the Standard Model of particle physics. The LHC did indeed find the Higgs Boson as expected, but not a single one of the other hoped-for particles was found. It was an almost total bust.

This happened, thinks Hossenfelder, because the physicists stopped being strictly scientific. They started putting the cart before the horse. Science is supposed to proceed by first gathering data and information, then coming up with a theory to explain it, then testing the theory against new data. Because new data are so hard to come by in particle physics the physicists started coming up with theories in advance of any data. They based these theories on hunches and aesthetics. They tended to be attracted by theories that looked good, simple, elegant, even beautiful. But beauty and elegance are not scientific criteria. When the theories are finally tested they usually fall flat. Scientists basing their ideas on aesthetics have historically often been wrong.

But these physicists have often refused to give up on the theories even in the face of contrary data or absence of data Some of them have even militated for the abolishment of the need for testing, thinking that theories can be validated on the basis of aesthetics alone.

Some of the theories other physicists are talking about can never be tested and will never have anything to do with the real world. These include such ideas as the existence of a multiverse, i.e., multiple universes that exist in parallel to our own; the many worlds theory, the idea that all possible outcomes of an event exist in an infinite number of worlds parallel to ours; and ideas about what came before the Big Bang. It’s all perfectly useless, and yet it’s showing up in scientific journals.

To be sure, a lot of senior members of the physics community view these developments with disgust and alarm. “We’re taking a 2,000-year step back,” said one. To paraphrase another, we are in the process of forgetting the fundamentals of science.

Proponents of the Supersymmetry theory want an accelerator even bigger than the LHC to be built to search further up the energy ladder for the missing particles, convinced without much evidence that their theory is right. They have forgotten the non-scientific source of the whole supersymmetry thing. Hossenfelder cringes to think what might happen if billions more are spent just to come up with nothing. Will theoretical particle physicists ever be trusted again?

It’s time to step back and take a hard look at our ideas, she thinks.

Hossenfelder goes on to point out how the same malady is affecting other fields, like economics, where economists have become over enamored with the elegance of their math over against accurate descriptions of the real-world economy.

All across the West people are forgetting the fundamentals that made the West so great. Not just in science but in other areas as well.

Published in Science & Technology
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  1. Postmodern Hoplite Coolidge
    Postmodern Hoplite
    @PostmodernHoplite

    Roderic: All across the West people are forgetting the fundamentals that made the West so great.  Not just in science but in other areas as well.

    Well said, @rhfabian, a very good read, and I hope it is promoted to the Main Feed. I think the problems of innumeracy, and ignorance of what makes “science” science are contributing significantly to the growing tear in our national fabric.

    • #1
  2. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Outstanding article.

    And I agree.  I’m becoming more and more skeptical of everything I read, even in scientific journals I respect.

    We abandon the scientific method at our own peril.

    • #2
  3. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    I believe that you underestimate the importance of beauty in physics.

    But you do understand correctly that beauty is not a sufficient condition for a good theory of physics.

    All true physics theories are beautiful, but not all beautiful physics theories are true.*.I always think of Einstein and his reaction to the news of the first positivist “proof” of general relativity, years after he’d published it.   The positivists were sure that he would be as thrilled as they were when he heard that experiment had “confirmed” his theory!  He was not surprised, only surprised that anyone would be surprised. He knew the theory, as far as it went, was correct because it was beautiful and logical.  Centuries after the Copernican revolution, many scientists and all of the public were still oblivious to the nature of true scientific inquiry.

    Of much greater social harm was the defeat of scientific economics at the height of its greatest success, at the hands of the economic positivists. The latter had an added motivation: not only did their busy-bee measuring and ex post facto arbitrary curve-fitting require no ability at all to think scientifically, but it got them all good jobs telling statist politicians what they wanted to hear, which was the opposite of what the true economists had discovered.

    *The physicists in the house will remember the name of that guy in the early 1900s who came up with a beautiful theory to explain quantum results which was also consistent with the new anomalous  data, but which turned out to be so only by a strange  coincidence!  As far as I know that only happened once in the history of physics.

    • #3
  4. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    All that math and science is male-centric, colonialist, and racist. (Or so I have been informed.)

    • #4
  5. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Oh please.  Everyone knows that Dr Sheldon Cooper and Dr Amy Farrah Fowler-Cooper proved Super-Asymmetry.

    And they won the Nobel Prize for it!

     

    • #5
  6. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    What an alarming state of affairs! And the thought that this sloppiness in the name of beauty is pervading science and other fields does not bode well. Fascinating post, Roderic.

    • #6
  7. Roderic Coolidge
    Roderic
    @rhfabian

    Mark Camp (View Comment):
    All true physics theories are beautiful, but not all beautiful physics theories are true.

    Quantum field theory is, in my understanding, some of the best physics we have, but most people don’t regard it as beautiful.

    Hossenfelder is concerned that by putting emphasis on beauty we might ignore a good theory because it’s not considered to be beautiful.  This is especially concerning then the degree of conformity required in academe is considered. 

    Also, people can be convinced of beauty in a theory if the data forces them to look for it.

    There is a strong tendency to hold on to theories regarded as beautiful for decades despite no supporting data and many bad predictions. String theory, for example.

    • #7
  8. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    Roderic (View Comment):
    Quantum field theory is, in my understanding, some of the best physics we have, but most people don’t regard it as beautiful.

    This is very interesting!

    But I don’t know what people find in quantum field theory that is not beautiful (unless you are referring to the lack of unification with theory of gravity).   I would love to learn this.  But it’s getting late in life to be returning to my first love, physics, and I have a new love in science, economics, that still presents me with urgent, unacceptable patches of ignorance to fill in.  And economic science is of critical importance to the survival of my country.  The more I learn, the more I can teach, and the better off the world is (microscopically and marginally).  Theoretical physics was only important if I could unify it into a single theory with my Christian beliefs, which I never got close to doing, I think because it is not God’s will that I know these mysteries.

    I stopped exploring physics when Scientific American was wrecked by progressivist ideologues and panderers to the stupid and gullible class of society.  It was my source, and now it is a combination of the worst features of Washington Post and People Magazine.

    • #8
  9. MiMac Thatcher
    MiMac
    @MiMac

    There has been an ongoing crisis in replication of scientific studies for years now. It has gotten so bad even Vox ( you know the liberal explainer web site were leftist can go to get the party line) has figured out- they published an article about it in 2020-but the Weekly Standard wrote about in 2015-

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/making-it-all-up%3f_amp=true

    and First Things in 2016-

    https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress

    the left-a pound short & a penny late since Robespierre….

    • #9
  10. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    It was fascinating to realize the fact that even modern day physics is slanted toward proving things that the people at the top desire to have investigated. Even if they never find the companion particles to Higgs-Boson, the people at the top did get all of that wonderful bountiful cash to0 play with. So  except for those of us who still want science to exemplify Truth, who  would ever care about the wastefulness of that vast expenditure of time and money and scientific brain power?

    Everyone here should note: Unfortunately the cart before the horse now is not only the “confirmed” result of an industrial  scientific evaluation before the study has even been set up, it is we human beings ourselves.

    The entire situation has been in decline  over the  past 20 years. Circa early 2000’s, The New England Journal of Med came forward with an editorial that although for many decades,  they had been able to show a preference toward the use of studies  that were not funded by the Industry touting the safety of the product for which the study needed to come about, that was no longer the case.

    Those of us who had been looking into various aspects of pesticide safety knew that day was coming. Whereas in the late 1930’s, the approval of a med protocol to treat a disease could be fully investigated and then schlepped over to the FDA for its approval, once  the study of that  medical protocol indicated it would do as it was supposed to do without hurting humans. The cost of such a study back then?$ 20K to $ 30K.

    To do that same study now would require 10’s of millions, if not 100’s of millions. Meanwhile industry plays its games, such that doctors in the late 1990’s admonished breast feeding moms who soothed their babies’ colic-y tummies with peppermint tea. “Show us the studies, Ladies. Or otherwise quit using that tea, as it has no Golden Standard of crucial double blind tests.” Some of  the moms who were cynical about modern day science simply changed doctors. But others quit using the tea, & allowed infants to get vaxxed with the roto virus vaccine. (After all, the Big Pharma Industrial complex wouldn’t rush a product onto the market if it wasn’t safe, right?)

    Then it turned out the vaccine was not safe. Some 106  sick babies fell seriously  ill and one infant died.  The vax was banned.

    Now the same forces have authorized the murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the USA thru their withholding remedies used in other places across the globe. The result was already noticeable back on Nov 8th 2020: Japan had 2/125th the COVID fatality rate of the USA. Although Japan’s 1,900 COVID victims increased by a bit over 100%, even so they remained under 5K deaths in a nation of 126 million as of Jan 13th 2021.

    • #10
  11. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Roderic: It was an incredible disaster. Billions of dollars were spent by drug companies trying to develop these drugs, and it was a total bust.

    A total bust isn’t the same as an incredible disaster.  Thalidomide was an incredible disaster.

    • #11
  12. Basil Fawlty Member
    Basil Fawlty
    @BasilFawlty

    You mean it isn’t settled?

    • #12
  13. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    It was fascinating to realize the fact that even modern day physics is slanted toward proving things that the people at the top desire to have investigated. Even if they never find the companion particles to Higgs-Boson, the people at the top did get all of that wonderful bountiful cash to0 play with. So except for those of us who still want science to exemplify Truth, who would ever care about the wastefulness of that vast expenditure of time and money and scientific brain power?

    To do that same study now would require 10’s of millions, if not 100’s of millions. Meanwhile industry plays its games, such that doctors in the late 1990’s admonished breast feeding moms who soothed their babies’ colic-y tummies with peppermint tea. “Show us the studies, Ladies. Or otherwise quit using that tea, as it has no Golden Standard of crucial double blind tests.” Some of the moms who were cynical about modern day science simply changed doctors. But others quit using the tea, & allowed infants to get vaxxed with the roto virus vaccine. (After all, the Big Pharma Industrial complex wouldn’t rush a product onto the market if it wasn’t safe, right?)

    Then it turned out the vaccine was not safe. Some 106 sick babies fell seriously ill and one infant died. The vax was banned.

    Now the same forces have authorized the murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the USA thru their withholding remedies used in other places across the globe. The result was already noticeable back on Nov 8th 2020: Japan had 2/125th the COVID fatality rate of the USA. Although Japan’s 1,900 COVID victims increased by a bit over 100%, even so they remained under 5K deaths in a nation of 126 million as of Jan 13th 2021.

    CarolJoy,

    I think you are confusing theoretical science with applied science.  They are not the same thing.  Their goals are completely different.

    Everyone has an economic interest in applied science (like medical science).  Not everyone has an interest in theoretical science.  Those who aren’t will naturally oppose any spending whose purpose is to advance theoretical science, regardless of his or her political philosophy.

    You are in the second group, I think, and of course you have a right to express your opposition to any spending at all on theoretical science.  I only bring this up because I want to make it clear that there are two separate policy issues.

    • #13
  14. OmegaPaladin Moderator
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    I think that we have a number of problems in science generally.

    First of all, science requires a lot of money.  This means government grants or being in an industry that attracts near universal hatred for its vast appetite for cash.   Grants require interesting published results to get rolling, and there is thus a constant pressure for papers.  Publish or perish is how academia runs.

    This has led to vast numbers of journals, with a vast range in prestige.  Getting a paper in PNAS, Cell, Nature etc. and that goes on top of your CV and worth a party.  Something in JACS Biochem is pretty good.  Biochemistry Journal, JBC, other more niche publications?  Nice work, now start on the next paper.   I think that’s what the 50% of scientific literature that is not trusted actually means – we have increased the volume of papers and journals without increasing the volume of good science.

    • #14
  15. drlorentz Member
    drlorentz
    @drlorentz

    Roderic: Science is supposed to proceed by first gathering data and information, then coming up with a theory to explain it, then testing the theory against new data.

    This middle-school-level understanding of the scientific method is nonsense. One need only look at the example of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (General Relativity in particular) to see that’s not always, even mostly, how it works. Theories sometimes precede experiments; they are in a complementary relationship. Experiment guides theory and vice versa. The kinetic theory of gases is another excellent example. Boltzmann killed himself because the positivists complained no one had ever seen a molecule so the theory must be wrong. Turns out Boltzmann was right after all.

    The lack of understanding of what science is and how it works among non-scientists leads to a host of ills, including the fools among the Woke who love science and are always screaming about how one must follow the science. Most of them wouldn’t recognize science if they tripped over some.

    I’m certainly not going to defend high-energy physics. There are significant sociological problems with the kind of group work for big money that goes on there. One of the worst things to happen to the field is that it has become woke. However, the notion that “no advances have been made in particle physics in 40 years” is counterfactual.

    It wouldn’t hurt if those who wish to opine on the state of science learned something about the philosophy of science first. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Or at least read a Wikipedia page about it. Hayek’s Nobel lecture on scientism is pretty good too. As an economist Hayek had a deep understanding of the relationship between theory and observation in the natural versus the social sciences.

    • #15
  16. drlorentz Member
    drlorentz
    @drlorentz

    Roderic (View Comment):
    Quantum field theory is, in my understanding, some of the best physics we have, but most people don’t regard it as beautiful.

    Not sure who these “most people” are. Would they be people who actually understand the theory or just randos on Twitter? In my opinion, it is an elegant theory that made the most significant change in our understanding of the natural world since Newton. But that’s just one person’s opinion.

    • #16
  17. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Mark Camp (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    It was fascinating to realize the fact that even modern day physics is slanted toward proving things that the people at the top desire to have investigated. Even if they never find the companion particles to Higgs-Boson, the people at the top did get all of that wonderful bountiful cash to0 play with. So except for those of us who still want science to exemplify Truth, who would ever care about the wastefulness of that vast expenditure of time and money and scientific brain power?

    To do that same study now would require 10’s of millions, if not 100’s of millions.SNIP 

    Now the same forces have authorized the murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the USA thru their withholding remediesSNIP

    I think you are confusing theoretical science with applied science. They are not the same thing. Their goals are completely different.

    Everyone has an economic interest in applied science (like medical science). Not everyone has an interest in theoretical science. Those who aren’t will naturally oppose any spending whose purpose is to advance theoretical science, regardless of his or her political philosophy.

    You are in the second group, I think, and of course you have a right to express your opposition to any spending at all on theoretical science. SNIP  there are 2 separate policy issues.

    That is an important distinction and it is one I am glad you made.

    After all, there is a thin red or blue or black line that separates the theoretical from the applied science.

    At one point in time, an applied science relating to medical protocols was a bit next door to  the theory.

    But the world of theoretical science pertaining to medicine or products like pesticides and personal care products was rather wide open. When penicillin was discovered, it opened up the world of medicine to a pharmacological miracle drug, whose existence had not been considered prior to its discovery. No one was there like Dr Fauci, to say: “Don’t use it until we have undertaken a double blind clinical study taking several years. Any product being available without those studies is heresy to the principles by which we in science are governed.” Instead it was used rather quickly. There was no inner circle at Big Pharma to say to themselves “Oh noes, if this gets on the market our vaccine programs will not be allowed to legally come forth.”

    The world of Modern Medicine has monetized patient care, to a point that the actual theories governing med have been pushed aside. We saw our society shut down even though no isolation of the  COVID virus existed. Some 100 yrs ago, that isolation would have been insisted upon and those upholding Koch principles would have laid down the letter of that principle’s law.

    We’ve allowed Corporate Science to substitute profit for theories, every step of the way.

    • #17
  18. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):
    This means government grants or being in an industry that attracts near universal hatred for its vast appetite for cash.

    If you are speaking of pure science, it had a history of 2500 years of being funded voluntarily, not by government coercion. Pure science has never been funded by industry (except in the case of corporate PR spending).

    • #18
  19. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Mark Camp (View Comment):

    I think you are confusing theoretical science with applied science.  They are not the same thing.  Their goals are completely different.

    Everyone has an economic interest in applied science (like medical science).  Not everyone has an interest in theoretical science.  Those who aren’t will naturally oppose any spending whose purpose is to advance theoretical science, regardless of his or her political philosophy.

    You are in the second group, I think, and of course you have a right to express your opposition to any spending at all on theoretical science.  I only bring this up because I want to make it clear that there are two separate policy issues.

    Serendipity comes to mind.

    • #19
  20. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    Mark Camp (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    It was fascinating to realize the fact that even modern day physics is slanted toward proving things that the people at the top desire to have investigated. Even if they never find the companion particles to Higgs-Boson, the people at the top did get all of that wonderful bountiful cash to0 play with. So except for those of us who still want science to exemplify Truth, who would ever care about the wastefulness of that vast expenditure of time and money and scientific brain power?

    To do that same study now would require 10’s of millions, if not 100’s of millions.SNIP

    Now the same forces have authorized the murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the USA thru their withholding remediesSNIP

    I think you are confusing theoretical science with applied science. They are not the same thing. Their goals are completely different.

    Everyone has an economic interest in applied science (like medical science). Not everyone has an interest in theoretical science. Those who aren’t will naturally oppose any spending whose purpose is to advance theoretical science, regardless of his or her political philosophy.

    You are in the second group, I think, and of course you have a right to express your opposition to any spending at all on theoretical science. SNIP there are 2 separate policy issues.

    That is an important distinction and it is one I am glad you made.

    After all, there is a thin red or blue or black line that separates the theoretical from the applied science.

    CarolJoy,

    Thanks, interesting comment.

    We disagree on the following:

    I think that the goal of applied science and that of theoretical science are completely different.  (Obviously, in the pursuit of one goal one often accidentally advances the other, and some science is pursued with both goals in mind.)

    Doctors are only interested in the results of applied science, not theoretical science. 

    A firm, regardless of whether it is

    • in the pharmaceutical industry (your “Big Pharma“) or any other industry
    • organized legally as a corporation, partnership, or individual proprietorship
    • big (your “Big Pharma”) or small

    is only interested in applied science (engineering).

    • #20
  21. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    Mark Camp (View Comment):

    I think you are confusing theoretical science with applied science. They are not the same thing. Their goals are completely different.

    Everyone has an economic interest in applied science (like medical science). Not everyone has an interest in theoretical science. Those who aren’t will naturally oppose any spending whose purpose is to advance theoretical science, regardless of his or her political philosophy.

    You are in the second group, I think, and of course you have a right to express your opposition to any spending at all on theoretical science. I only bring this up because I want to make it clear that there are two separate policy issues.

    Serendipity comes to mind.

    Obviously, both historically and necessarily, pure and applied science are linked in both directions by serendipity.

    (Also by the practical dependency that the experiments required by theoretical scientists have on engineering: if you need a Bunsen burner to do some pure science, you need a Bunsen burner, and whether it was built by a tinker or designed by an applied scientist is a matter of no importance, as long as it gets hot).

    It proves my point: serendipity is the achievement of results that were not goals.

    • #21
  22. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    Many years ago, a physics geek friend had a short stand-up comedy routine using a mock picture of the result of traced subatomic particles—dots and squiggles. One repeating gag line was “of course, while we don’t see it here, we know it’s there.” The underlying message was that you could superimpose your theoretical biases on anything while pretending you were proving it.

    In so many professional and institutional environments, we can no longer count on the loss of respect from one’s peers as the ultimate sanction.  The worst thing about woke science is that where there should be shame and disgrace there is instead moral cover for being a servant of the narrative. But I have the feeling that the moral rot is much more than just ideological pollution.

    • #22
  23. MiMac Thatcher
    MiMac
    @MiMac

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    It was fascinating to realize the fact that even modern day physics is slanted toward proving things that the people at the top desire to have investigated. Even if they never find the companion particles to Higgs-Boson, the people at the top did get all of that wonderful bountiful cash to0 play with. So except for those of us who still want science to exemplify Truth, who would ever care about the wastefulness of that vast expenditure of time and money and scientific brain power?

    Everyone here should note: Unfortunately the cart before the horse now is not only the “confirmed” result of an industrial scientific evaluation before the study has even been set up, it is we human beings ourselves.

    The entire situation has been in decline over the past 20 years. Circa early 2000’s, The New England Journal of Med came forward with an editorial that although for many decades, they had been able to show a preference toward the use of studies that were not funded by the Industry touting the safety of the product for which the study needed to come about, that was no longer the case.

    Those of us who had been looking into various aspects of pesticide safety knew that day was coming. Whereas in the late 1930’s, the approval of a med protocol to treat a disease could be fully investigated and then schlepped over to the FDA for its approval, once the study of that medical protocol indicated it would do as it was supposed to do without hurting humans. The cost of such a study back then?$ 20K to $ 30K.

    To do that same study now would require 10’s of millions, if not 100’s of millions. Meanwhile industry plays its games, such that doctors in the late 1990’s admonished breast feeding moms who soothed their babies’ colic-y tummies with peppermint tea. “Show us the studies, Ladies. Or otherwise quit using that tea, as it has no Golden Standard of crucial double blind tests.” Some of the moms who were cynical about modern day science simply changed doctors. But others quit using the tea, & allowed infants to get vaxxed with the roto virus vaccine. (After all, the Big Pharma Industrial complex wouldn’t rush a product onto the market if it wasn’t safe, right?)

    Then it turned out the vaccine was not safe. Some 106 sick babies fell seriously ill and one infant died. The vax was banned.

    Now the same forces have authorized the murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the USA thru their withholding remedies used in other places across the globe. The result was already noticeable back on Nov 8th 2020: Japan had 2/125th the COVID fatality rate of the USA. Although Japan’s 1,900 COVID victims increased by a bit over 100%, even so they remained under 5K deaths in a nation of 126 million as of Jan 13th 2021.

    Please, you are not bring up that useless HCQ again….

    • #23
  24. OmegaPaladin Moderator
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    If I can survive people making crazy claims about mRNA from vaccines inserting itself into the genome, @mimac can endure the HCQ Cheer Squad. 

     

    • #24
  25. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):

    If I can survive people making crazy claims about mRNA from vaccines inserting itself into the genome, @ mimac can endure the HCQ Cheer Squad.

     

    Somewhere I once read that the vaccines alter the genome. 

    Now, lest I be immediately thrown into the “crazy” bin…I don’t believe it, because (a) I don’t know anything about how the vaccines work, and (b) it sounds too crazy, even for these crazy times, and (c) I would expect to have heard the assertion more than once if it were true.

    But OmegaPalladin, I have to admit that I don’t disbelieve it either, for the same reason that I have no knowledge of the facts. 

    They only other mention I’ve ever read on the subject almost, but didn’t quite, deny it.  Rather than saying that as designed, the vaccine alters the genome (in the sense that one’s post-vaccine children would inherit it) it said that there is a well-known, but very rare phenomenon whereby that would in fact occur.  Some sort of rare abnormal “reverse transcription”, to use my words.  (Much less of a worry, to be sure. The mutation would be rare and likely to die out.)

    Could you teach us non-biologists what we need to know about this question?

    • #25
  26. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Roderic: and ideas about what came before the Big Bang.

    First there was math. Then there was G-d the physists. G-d and his angels made physics, until Lucifer, breaker of chains rebelled for his freedom and the Big Bang because of the war. 

    • #26
  27. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    G-d and his angels made physics, until Lucifer, breaker of chains rebelled for his freedom and the Big Bang because of the war. 

    Lucifer is merely the Roman name for the planet Venus. Try again.

    • #27
  28. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Basil Fawlty (View Comment):

    You mean it isn’t settled?

    You beat me to it. My only comment was that no advances have been made in particle physics in 40 years because the science is settled.

    And of course as Carol Joy alluded to, science is a thing done almost exclusively my man, and there’s a lot more to humanity than curiosity and intellectual rigor.

    • #28
  29. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Is it a surprise that all that money supporting scientific effort corrupts?    That’s what government money does always everywhere.  It’s the price we have to pay if we want the government to be engaged in much of anything.    

    • #29
  30. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    G-d and his angels made physics, until Lucifer, breaker of chains rebelled for his freedom and the Big Bang because of the war.

    Lucifer is merely the Roman name for the planet Venus. Try again.

    Pretty sure the bible refers to Satan as Lucifer once. 

    • #30
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