Scott,

Thanks for the reply.

I do think I should clarify why I know I shouldn’t be part of these discussions and the fact I seem to see through various fallacies really is bizarre.

I grew up on a horse farm and spent my life working in various aspects of the business, with most of the people I know fairly integral parts of the local industry, so I have tremendous respect for the dedication and focus it takes to be expert in anything. As the old saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

As my work has always been physical, reading was my entertainment. In fact I barely made it through high school, mostly because I skipped about a third of it. So my reading started off with fiction and history, then on to other subjects I was drawn into. My interest in physics grew out of a need to better understand the processes flowing through life. Though for me, it isn’t so much following the topic in a book, as not getting myself seriously hurt, or whatever made the business function. Thus a tendency to see it in more life and death terms of knowing what I was doing and what my own limits were, rather than being a part of a social structure.

So I understand the tribal impulses tying say, religion and politics together, but I naturally assumed the hard and fast facts of life prevented too much nonsense building up in the sciences. Presumably trial and error means accepting when the theories don’t fit the evidence.

So finding the degree to which dogma dominates has been a bit surprising.

For example, I’ve had enough debates with people involved in astronomy, over the point I raise about Big Bang Theory using the premise of spacetime to argue space itself expands, totally ignores the central premise of GR, that the speed of light is a Constant in any frame, to know it really is overlooked.

This isn’t simply being so involved in the math and mistaking the map for the territory, as with spacetime, but it’s completely lousy logic and math! They ignore that two metrics of space are being assumed, both based on the same light and the speed is still being treated as the denominator. The unit by which this expansion is measured. If these people tried making it in horse racing, they would quickly go broke.

Reading your reply, it is evident you’ve run up against the same logical inertia. Presumably it can’t last forever, given the various fields are at extremely loose ends, with strings and multiverses, etc, but there doesn’t seem to be anything about to unseat those who run things and careers are bound up in this.

As that interview with Carver Mead shows, as well as my travels around the internet, there are many people with careers in adjacent fields that sense this total disconnect, but no one has the pin to pop it.

That’s sort of why I’ve given up trying to discuss things like the nature of time with the more academically minded and try tying it into broader issues, as I do in those essays.

I have heard of Bohm and he does offer a more coherent description, but he seems sidelined as well.

Given the current monetary bubble seems closest to popping, I’ve tended to push the economic aspects more forcefully. As I mentioned in the essay, I think the James Webb will be an eye opener for astronomy and eventually physics, given it requires a wave basis of light to explain redshift as other than recession.