I’m a born Research Scientist – or in other words, I’ve been annoying my parents, family, teachers and colleagues since I could communicate by asking why things were the way they are. I decided early on to have a simple goal – determine how everything in the Universe works.
I believed it when I was told that I would eventually find out answers to questions like why clouds float, why ice doesn’t sink and how come if the Sun is a nuclear explosion why is it so stable once I went through University – but that didn’t happen.
After finishing University and becoming a professional Research Scientist (which I was for 20 years in TRL and CSIRO) I started to work out that a lot of “settled science” was far from it, and that my initial view as a child of scientists being dispassionate people who only put forward well-thought-out logical ideas was also wrong. We Scientists are just like everyone else – most of us are doing the best we can and are honest, hard-working individuals. However, there are a large amount of people who are in it for glory and profit, and these are the ones you often end up hearing about and seeing on TV, or who control the money and power behind the scenes, and use that power to make it extremely difficult for those who have opposing ideas to progress; they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
How do you tell who these people are? These are the ones who are sure about a particular idea or view of the world. We Scientists are sure of nothing; as British statistician George Box (kind of) said “All models are wrong, but some are useful” [1]. Even the so-called “laws of physics” are not really “laws”, they are just models of reality that give correct results in most of the situations we use them in. We may come up with better models in the future. If you have someone presenting a TV series with lots of impressive graphics and talking matter-of-factly about weird and wonderful phenomena as if they were certain that everything they said is settled science then they are not a Scientist – they are an Entertainer.
There is nothing wrong with entertaining people with ideas based on scientific theories, but these should always be presented with a disclaimer – “based on current research”, “this is what we think is happening” or perhaps (and often more accurately) “this is likely to be no more accurate than your average science-fiction movie, but it certainly sounds fascinating and you’ll love the special effects and will be more likely to give us money to spend on research, even though it will probably never result in anything useful”.
On this site I will be talking about the weird and wonderful that is NOT settled science, or about phenomena that are discussed by scientists but with explanations different to what you’ll find on Wikipedia and in the pages of Cosmos, Nature and Science. What I will be discussing is NOT something that I am certain of; as mentioned above, I can’t be and be a true Scientist. What I will be presenting are models that I believe are better than the conventionally accepted ones, with reasons as to why I believe this to be the case. As Arthur Schopenhauer is often misquoted as saying; “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident” [2]. On this site I’ll be talking about ideas and phenomena that are in the first two stages.
As nothing I’m talking about is certain, I will give a score of C0-C10 to say how confident I am with the model or description of phenomena in question. C0 means I’m nearly certain it’s wrong; C10 means I’m nearly certain it’s correct. C5 means I can’t work it out in either direction, and the other numbers indicate higher or lesser degrees of certainty (not linearly; I may draw a graph some day). Also if discussing experiments or testimony I’ll put down H with a number – H1 means firsthand (i.e. an experiment I conducted myself, or something I witnessed directly), H2 secondhand testimony, etc.
I should also stress that the information I present is based purely on my own research (generally collating the work of others), and in no way, shape or form represents the opinions of any of my employers; past or present.
I would suggest you start with my page on why I think that theories should be kept simple, then what for me was the breakthrough book by Per Bak, suggesting that at its core Nature and the Universe are based on simple mechanisms, contrary to what we’ve been taught since the early 1900s. This eventually led me to examining the work of Miles Mathis and the Electric Universe Theory, that I would otherwise probably have dismissed out-of-hand, as many of my colleagues still do.
On this site I will endeavour to present ideas, mostly of other people, and why I agree (or not, in the case of much of consensus science) with them. As such I will be basing my reasoning purely on those ideas and how well they appear to agree with our observations of the real world. Some of the people whose ideas I will be discussing have a range of beliefs concerning other areas that I may not agree with, but I will not be discussing those beliefs. Nor will I be dismissing someone’s ideas out-of-hand just because they do or do not have a PhD after their name – great ideas can come from people in all walks of life, and many of the great advances have come out of the backyards, kitchens and garages of tinkerers, or from someone with knowledge in a completely different field.
In fact, if you hear someone argue that an idea should be ignored purely on the basis that the originator wasn’t a recognised expert or because they had a personal belief that they didn’t agree with then that is a red flag – they’ve chosen to attack the person, rather than the idea, which suggests they might be unable to dispute the idea on its merits.
Further Discussions and Future Work
If you have suggestions, corrections, constructive criticisms or would just like to discuss the ideas I am laying out in these pages feel free to contact me via email at (all one word; sometimes it gets broken over two lines – there is no dash) honestscientisttas at-sign gmail dot com (spelled out to reduce the chance of harvesting by spambots).
Alternatively there are now a group of people, including myself, discussing these ideas at the Thunderbolts Forum, so if you’d like to contribute or just see what we’re talking about please set up a free account and join us at
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum3/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=648
In addition to discussing what is already here a number of helpful people on the forum have contributed ideas that I will eventually be following up in some detail in the future, including problems with the consensus model of black holes, and the importance of double-layers in plasma, especially for models of how the Sun works.