How to Settle the Science, Part 2: Ban, Defund or Ignore Inconvenient Experiments or Observations

In my post How to Settle the Science: Ban an Applied Mathematics Textbook, I described how the introductory applied mathematics textbook, BodyAndSoul: Mathematical Simulation Technology¹, written by Claes Johnson, Emeritus Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH), was banned in 2010 by his university, while a course was being given using said book, simply because among the 227 chapters and 1693 pages, there are a total of 5 chapters covering 34 pages that are somehow related to, and sometimes critical of, the topic of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).

The banning of a mathematics textbook is a rare occurrence, something that had not occurred since the seventeenth century. Hence, it is an extreme means to settle the science. More efficient is to make sure that the results of carefully organized observations of natural phenomena or experiments in laboratories never reach the eyes or ears of the majority of the scientific community, let alone the general public, long before anyone gets around to writing scientific textbooks.

In this post, I will examine a few examples of important observations or experiments that were shut down—or at least there was an attempt to do so—by the authorities of the time. The first example, dating to the 17th century, is well known. The other four, from the 20th century, are far less so.

Antennae galaxies, among Halton Arp’s peculiar galaxies

Galileo Galilei Observes the Heavens through a Telescope

As I wrote in my post Galileo Enters Stage Right, in 1610, Galileo (1564-1642) published a 60-page pamphlet entitled Sidereus Nuncius [The Starry Messenger], in which he described hearing about a new invention, the telescope, making his own with a 20-fold magnification, and observing the following when he pointed it to the heavens:

• The Moon has a very uneven surface, with high mountains and low depressions.

• When the Moon is not full, the darker part of the disk is an ashen grey, partially lit by light from the Sun reflected on the Earth.

• The Milky Way is a region of the sky in which there are huge numbers of stars.

• The constellations of Orion and the Pleiades have many more stars than can be seen with the naked eye.

• Jupiter is accompanied by 4 satellites [Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto] which revolve around Jupiter.

Galileo’s announcements shook the entire world, and news thereof had already reached India and China by 1613.

Nevertheless, not everyone was impressed. In particular, Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631) and Giulio Libri (died 1610), both Aristotelian scholars, refused to look through Galileo’s telescope:

That certain Venetians scorned him did not bother Galileo; the satellites would continue to stay with Jupiter. The chief philosopher at Padua (Cremonini) had always refused to look, though Galileo had repeatedly offered to show him the new discoveries. The chief philosopher at Pisa (Giulio Libri) tried to argue the satellites out of the sky; these men seemed to think that philosophy was to be found in books, not in nature. [Drake², p.162]

When Libri passed away that same year, Galileo could not resist jesting:

At Pisa the principal chair of philosophy was left vacant late in 1610 by the death of Giulio Libri, another philosopher who, like Cremonini, had refused to look at the sky through the telescope. Galileo remarked sardonically that since he would not look at the new discoveries while on earth, he would perhaps see them on his way to heaven. [Drake, p.165, my emphasis]

The Sidereus Nuncius, that short text that Galileo wrote, which made him world-famous, was described by Italo Calvino as the best Italian prose ever written. See my post Italo Calvino Praises Galileo’s Prose.

Kristian Birkeland Creates a Terrella in his Laboratory

As I wrote in my post Kristian Birkeland Theorized that the Universe is Electric, Birkeland (1867-1917) conducted expeditions to the northernmost regions of Norway during the winters of 1899-1900 and 1902-1903 in order to study the aurora borealis, the Northern lights. In 1913, he published the book The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expeditions 1902-1903, from which I quoted:

According to our manner of looking at the matter, every star in the universe would be the seat and field of activity of electric forces of a strength that no one could imagine.

We have no certain opinion as to how the assumed enormous electric currents with enormous tension are produced, but it is certainly not in accordance with the principles we employ in technics on the earth at the present time. One may well believe, however, that a knowledge in the future of the electrotechnics of the heavens would be of great practical value to our electrical engineers.

It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulæ, but in “empty” space. [Birkeland³, Second section, p.720, my emphasis]

His detailed observations in extremely harsh winter conditions were complemented by detailed experiments in laboratory conditions with his terrella [small earth]. There, he subjected the terrella with varying electrical currents, thereby provoking aurorae on its northern and southern parts. I discussed the term terrella in my post On Little Earths and Little Suns.

More than a century after Birkeland’s work, the idea of electrical currents in space is still considered to be fantasy. The response to Birkeland’s initial northern voyage was an outright refusal, because William Thomson, later Baron Kelvin, had stated that there was no matter between the Sun and the Earth:

As the book⁴ was published in French, it received only limited reviews. In particular, the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society attacked the book and gave it a low rating. The basis of this negative review was a remark by Lord Kelvin published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (1892). Kelvin believed that the Sun could not affect the Earth’s magnetic field and that apparent correlations between solar and geomagnetic activity were illusory. He regarded interplanetary space as devoid of matter. Few British scientists were prepared to take public issue with Kelvin’s conclusion. [Egeland and Burke⁵, p.56]

But none played a greater rôle in preventing Birkeland’s work from being accepted than the British mathematician Sydney Chapman (1888-1970). Eric Lerner, in his The Big Bang Never Happened⁶, recounts the frustrations endured by Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995)—who continued Birkeland’s work—when he tried to engage Chapman:

Because Alfvén’s theory completely contradicted Chapman’s dominant ideas, he found it nearly impossible to get it published. In the end it was published in a relatively obscure Swedish journal. Worse still, Chapman refused to debate his ideas in any way. Despite Alfvén’s polemical presentations at conferences Chapman would rise, say briefly that he and his colleagues disagreed, and add, “We are presently preparing a paper that will clarify these issues.” Alfvén would protest, but Chapman would sit down and the matter would be closed.

For thirty years, until Chapman’s death in 1970, Alfvén vainly tried to engage him in debate. Their personal relations remained friendly despite sharp scientific differences. On one occasion, Alfvén and his wife, Kersten, were Chapman’s guests at Cambridge. Chapman took Alfvén, twenty years his junior, on a walking tour of the ancient campus. It proved a frustrating experience for the younger man. Alfvén recalls, “Every time I tried to raise our differences, when I started to say, ‘Doesn’t it seem reasonable that, in the substorms…’ Chapman would politely interrupt and point to some quaint old tower. He would then go on for a half hour about its history. Then I’d try again to get the conversation back to science and the same thing would happen.”

Another year, Chapman was Alfvén’s guest in Sweden. Instead of a tour of Stockholm, Alfvén had carefully prepared a modern replica of Birkeland’s magnetic sphere experiment. Perhaps Chapman, seeing the currents “in the flesh” would at least discuss why he thought they couldn’t exist in space. “But he flatly refused to go down into the basement and see it,” Alfvén remembers. “It was beneath his dignity as a mathematician to look at a piece of laboratory apparatus!” [Lerner, pp.184-185, my emphasis]

The mathematicians would strike again, against Maurice Allais, as we will see below.

Dayton C. Miller Demonstrates the Existence of the Æther

When we read about Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) theory of special relativity, we are told that it explains the null result of the interferometry experiment conducted in 1887 by Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward W. Morley (1838-1923). However, we are not told about the far more extensive work, in the same direction, by Dayton C. Miller (1866-1941) over a period of some 25 years, from 1902 to 1926.

Miller published a full-length summary article of this work in 1933 in Reviews of Modern Physics⁷ and then a short note the following year in Nature⁸. The origins of this work come from a proposal made in 1878 by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879):

The first suggestion of a method for measuring the relative motion between the earth and the ether by means of an optical experiment was made by James Clerk Maxwell in the article on “Ether,” which he contributed to Vol. VIII of the 9th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1878. It is assumed that the ether as a whole is at rest, that light waves are propagated in the free ether in any direction and always with the same velocity with respect to the ether and that the earth in its motion in space passes freely through the ether without disturbing it. The experiment is based upon the argument that the apparent velocity of light would be different according to whether the observer is carried by the earth in the line in which the light is travelling or at right angles to this line. It would thus be possible to detect a relative motion between the moving earth and the stationary ether, that is to observe an “ether drift.” The orbital motion of the earth has a velocity of thirty kilometers per second, while the velocity of light is ten thousand times as great, three hundred thousand kilometers per second. If it were possible to measure the direct effect of the earth's orbital motion on the apparent velocity of light, then the velocity measured in the line of motion should differ from the velocity at right angles to this line by thirty kilometers per second, that is by one part in ten thousand. [Miller, p.204]

The first attempt to conduct the experiment was made by Michelson in 1881 in Berlin. A much more ambitious experiment was conducted by Michelson and Morley in 1887 in Cleveland, at the Case School of Applied Science, now Case Western Reserve University. Notwithstanding the claims found all over the Internet and in dozens of publications, the 1887 experiment did not find a null result, but, rather, a velocity in the order of 8 km/s, as opposed to 30 km/s. Since it was the latter figure that was expected, the 8 km/s was assumed to be experimental error.

Now the Michelson-Morley experiment was undertaken for a total of six hours spread over four days. Miller undertook the experiment repeatedly over a period of 25 years, from 1902 to 1926, with the most sophisticated study taken in 1925-1926, over four epochs (April 1st, August 1st, September 15th, 1925 and February 8th, 1926), each time continually for three days and nights. The conclusion is inescapable: there is diurnal and seasonal variation in the measurement of the speed of light.

It should be understood that Miller was no lightweight. During his career, he was head of the Physics department of the Case School of Applied Science for over 30 years, President of the American Physical Society, and President of the American Acoustical Society.

It was understood by no less than Einstein himself that Miller’s results, were they to be accepted, would sound the death knell for special relativity, hence of general relativity. So Miller’s results had to be declared invalid.

This task was enthusiastically taken up under the leadership of one of Miller’s former students, Robert S. Shankland (1908-1982), conveniently after Miller had passed away. The article, with four authors⁹, claims that Miller did not properly take into account temperature variance. This, despite the fact that Miller’s 1933 article refers to the arrangements made to ensure consistency of results with respect to temperature fluctuations on 10 pages out of the 40 pages of text!

James DeMeo, in his book The Dynamic Ether of Cosmic Space¹⁰, is just scathing in his assessment of Shankland, with a chapter entitled “The Shankland, et al. Hatchet Job on Miller”! [A hatchet job is a fierce, ill-intentioned attack, typically devoid of valid reasoning.] Here are a couple of DeMeo’s paragraphs:

With encouragement from Einstein, and working with a team of Einstein's followers at Case School, the Shankland, et al. study “New Analysis of the Interferometer Observations of Dayton C. Miller” was undertaken and published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1955. The title of the Shankland paper suggested the authors had made a serious review of “the interferometer observations” of Miller, to include some kind of a new thorough-going and serious evaluation. Such was not the case.

The very first sentence in the Shankland team's 1955 paper repeated the widely parroted falsehood, that the Michelson-Morley experiment had a “null” result. The third sentence in the Shankland paper was similarly false, claiming that “All trials of this experiment except those carried out at Mount Wilson by Dayton C. Miller yielded a null result within the accuracy of the observations.” This kind of chronic misrepresentation of the positive results of many interferometer experimenters, including Michelson-Morley, Morley-Miller, Sagnac and Michelson-Pease-Pearson, exposed an extreme bias and deliberate misrepresentation. The fact that this is a very popular prejudice does not excuse it. By redefining all the positive results observed by what may in fact have been the majority of ether-drift researchers, as mere expressions of “observational inaccuracy”, Shankland and friends narrowed their task considerably. [DeMeo, p.214, DeMeo’s emphasis]

And it appears that Einstein was no innocent bystander:

It appears Einstein was a part of this incompetency or deception. According to Shankland’s 1 Dec. 1954 interview with Einstein, (Shankland 1963), Einstein was pleased to have already read a prepublication copy of their forthcoming paper. He was 76 years old at the time the Shankland paper was published, and died only four months later on 18  1955. I therefore cannot believe Einstein was ignorant of what Shankland and friends had done, or were preparing to do… [DeMeo, p.223]

Maurice Allais Demonstrates Gravitational Anomalies with a Paraconical Pendulum

I introduced Maurice Allais (1911-2010) in my post The Precession of Mercury's Perihelion Can Be Derived from Weber's and Riemann's Force Laws, Without General Relativity.

As I wrote in that post, Allais was an ardent supporter of Miller’s work. Here, however, I want to introduce the work that Allais conducted during the 1950s with a paraconical pendulum, in which the fulcrum itself is free to move, which he himself invented. Conducting repeated experiments that lasted days at a time, he was able to demonstrate that his pendula swung to and fro with a period of 24h50min, and that there were gravitational anomalies taking place during lunar and solar eclipses.

Allais’s work was initially received with interest, and several of his papers were presented to the Académie des Sciences. And then, all of a sudden, there was a categorical refusal for his papers to be further presented to the Académie, and for any further funding for his experiments.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1988, Allais returned to physics, and wrote up much of his experience from the 1950s. In his book The Anisotropy of Space¹¹, he explains that his experiments were shut down by the vehement opposition of Henri Villat (1879-1972) and Jean Leray (1906-1998), each in turn President of the Mechanics section of the Académie des Sciences. Both were mathematicians, and neither had ever conducted an experiment. Both refused to visit Allais's laboratory to observe the experiments. Shades of Sydney Chapman refusing to visit Hannes Alfvén’s laboratory, or of Cesare Cremonini and Giulio Libri refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope.

For example one of my most eminent interlocutors, Henri Villat (1879-1972), professor of fluid mechanics at the Faculty of Sciences and president of the Mechanics Section of the Academy of Sciences, declared to me on 3 December 1956: “Replace your steel balls with balls of agate, and you will see: everything will be different.”

Nevertheless, in answer to my invitation to visit my laboratory at IRSID, he answered: “Well, you see... It would be of little use for me to trouble to travel to Saint-Germain, because I am not an experimenter.” [Allais, p.148, Allais’s emphasis]

Allais wrote further about his being persecuted:

I was much reproached (by Henri Villat in particular) for having set up my Conference of 22 February 1958 at the Ecole Polytechnique, and in his previous letter of 6 February 1958 Henri Villat did not hesitate to assert in advance that the discussion that was anticipated to follow would be “absurd”.

It even seemed intolerable that my Conference was organized by the Alexandre Dufour Circle, and in my letter to Albert Caquot of 18 February 1958 I was impelled to write:

“During recent private conversations, the lack of objectivity of my adversaries became incredible. Thus it seems that the fact that I have accepted the invitation to speak under the aegis of the Alexandre Dufour Circle tends to compromise my own contentions, because, among the members of the Alexandre Dufour Circle, there are certain persons who are anti-relativists and thus judged to be anti-scientific.

“One would think that one had returned to the age of Galileo.” [Allais, p.215, Allais’s emphasis]

Halton Arp Makes Inconvenient Discoveries Looking Through Telescopes

I introduced the U.S. astronomer Halton Arp (1927-2013) in my recent post Surely Quasar Occultation Measurements Prove General Relativity? Arp was a maverick astronomer, and is best known for his articulating that the high redshifts of quasars are intrinsic, i.e., coming from the internal structure of the quasars themselves, as opposed to extrinsic, i.e., coming from some forces external to the quasars.

This position of Arp on quasars, and on other astronomic topics, led to his losing access to U.S.-controlled telescopes. I will let him describe what happened:

I had tried to make a customary tennis date with an old and valued Caltech friend who had been a long-time opponent on the subject of quasars. He was embarrassed and evasive. On the following day, the six-person telescope allocation committee, of which he was a member, sent me an unsigned letter stating that my research was judged to be without value and that they intended to refuse allocation of further observing time. In all honesty I must say that in my life the sun would never shine as brightly or the morning smell as fresh after this day.

News of this denial of telescope time spread with amazing rapidity. A front-page article appeared in the Los Angeles Times based on the letter which had been released by the new director of my observatory upon the request of the newspaper. Soon, copies of that article and others on the same subject were hanging on bulletin boards of observatories all over the world. A number of directors of other observatories as well as other well-known astronomers communicated to the director of my observatory strongly supporting my research and opposing the action of the allocation committee. I challenged members of the committee to debate the actual scientific facts. But none of this prevented the inevitable last act. My observations on the 200-inch telescope at Palomar terminated in 1983, and at Las Campanas in 1984. [Arp¹², p.167, my emphasis]

Arp was ultimately able to get a position at the Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik in Munich, Germany, and continue his work. But for the rest of his lengthy career, he was ostracized from polite circles.

In all of the examples that I brought forward above, some group has self-appointed itself as the arbiter of truth, and undertaken its utmost to prevent the results of careful observations or experiments from being known to the wider scientific community.

Reading about these events is, of course, maddening, but Arp points out, correctly in my view, that these decisions are often not just about the contents of a specific scientific fact. Here he focuses on Galileo:

Galileo had argued for the coexistence of two authorities—an experimental authority for science and the Bible for everything else. This amiable view made no impression on the Vatican, however, because his recantation was directed by the authority derived from the Edict of the Council of Trent. That august committee, sitting more than a century before, had decreed that in all matters in which the Bible stated the nature of physical events, that the Bible had to be accepted as literally true. No other interpretations were permitted.

The ruling of this committee was used as the final authority against the new Copernican science. It is interesting that it was not only science that the Council of Trent was trying to suppress. In his opera “Palestrina” Hans Pfitzner dramatized the attempt of the papacy to hold back the developing art forms of polyphonic music. He also succeeds in dramatizing the intolerance and hypocrisy beneath the holy apparel. Of course, we all think of the Galileo incident, with its overtones of the threat of torture and recantation, as having taken place in some remote, barbaric age in the far past. But that is not so; as far as his life span goes, Galileo could have been a faculty member at Harvard. [Arp, p.170, my emphasis]

It is clear that each of the above examples is deserving, at the very least, of its own blog post. Nevertheless, it seems to me that introducing them together gives a feel for the direction that I want to give to the blog for the coming New Year.

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1. Claes Johnson. BodyAndSoul: Mathematical Simulation Technology. Draft, 9 June 2010. https://www.dropbox.com/s/mbw3xjabwbjwlet/bodysoul%202.pdf?dl=0

2. Stillman Drake. Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography. University of Chicago Press, 1978.

3. Kr. Birkeland. The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expeditions 1902-1903. Volume 1: On the Cause of Magnetic Storms and the Origin of Terrestrial Magnetism. Christiana: H. Aschehoug & Co., First Section: 1908. Second Section: 1913. The two sections are available as a single PDF file from the CERN Document Server: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1395529/files/norwegianaurorap01chririch.pdf

4. Kristian Birkeland. Expédition Norvégienne de 1899-1900 pour l'étude des aurores boréales : résultats des recherches magnétiques. Christiana: Dybwad, 1901.

5. Alv Egeland and William J. Burke. Kristian Birkeland: The First Space Scientist. Springer, 2005.

6. Eric Lerner. The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe. New York: Times Books, 1991.

7. Dayton C. Miller. The Ether-Drift Experiment and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth. Reviews of Modern Physics 5(3):203-254, 1933.

8. Dayton C. Miller. The Ether-Drift Experiment and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth. Nature, February 3, 1934, pp.162-164.

9. R. S. Shankland, S. W. McCuskey, F. C. Leone, and G. Kuerti. New analysis of the interferometric observations of Dayton C. Miller. Reviews of Modern Physics 27(2):167-178, 1955.

10. James DeMeo. The Dynamic Ether of Cosmic Space: Correcting a Major Error in Modern Science. Ashland, OR: Natural Energy Works, 2019.

11. Maurice Allais. The Anisotropy of Space. The necessary revision of certain postulates of contemporary theories. English translation by Thomas J. Goodey, René Verreault and Arjen Dijksman. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019.

12. Halton Arp. Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies. Berkeley, CA: Intersteller Media, 1987.