Science Isn't Dogma, You're Just Stupid (Response to Formscapes)

Hey everyone, you may remember some debunks I’ve made regarding Electric Universe and other pseudoscience in the realm of astrophysics. While they don’t create as big a stir as my content exposing creationists, they do result in some butthurt contrarians making videos whining about how indoctrinated I am. One such video has surfaced recently, and I’d like to dissect it for you, so let’s get started.

The video is called “How Science Became Unscientific”, released last month on a channel called “Formscapes”. It’s a small channel and the video didn’t really get a lot of views, so I would normally ignore it just like I would any random flat earther. But in this case I wanted to respond because it’s such an immaculate example of the precise brand of anti-science rhetoric that is rampant in society today. It’s a manipulative epistemological poison that has the potential to kill off the human race, and it’s alarming how popular this type of narrative has become, even among moderately educated people.

The basic premise is that real science, the kind that has given you the computer and internet and satellites that are allowing you to watch this video right now, is dogmatic, an ideology, a tyrannical worldview wielded by the powers that be to indoctrinate us, while ignoring newer, better theories from super awesome rogue trailblazers. The part of the video where he talks about me is towards the end, regarding my very first debunk on Electric Universe. But there is quite a lot of build up, so let’s leave that for the cherry on top and start from the beginning.

Wow, lots of ancient stuff! I can see how he fell for the Thunderbolts charlatans. Let’s get a quick sampling of his general vibe. It’s simply not realistic to expect a two hour long video to convince most people that their most basic convictions about the world might be deeply distorted. Those convictions serve a very real and significant psychological purpose in establishing a person’s sense of groundedness and certainty about the world that they are a part of. And letting go of those convictions is far from easy or trivial for very good reasons. For many people this video will probably feel like I am attempting to shatter the core beliefs which ground one’s sense of religious faith. This is how cult leaders talk. They feed you the narrative that everything you know is a lie, so that you are receptive to the script of lies they are about to unload.

And the first part of this script is about a guy named Robert Maxwell, the one-time owner of Pergamon Press, a popular platform for scientific publications, and the only purpose here is to manipulate the viewer. It is through Robert Maxwell’s business career in publishing that the world of academic journalism as we now know it would come into being. This was a very lucrative business model, as Maxwell’s clients were predominately state-funded institutions such as libraries and universities. Ultimately it was taxpayers who fronted the bill for such exclusive access to these academic publications, even though the general public itself was not granted public access to them. And through this monopolization of access, Robert Maxwell and his family were able to become wealthy affluent. Maxwell was well known to live an immensely flamboyant lifestyle, sailing the world in his luxury megayacht named the Lady Ghislaine, named after his youngest daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell. Over the course of subsequent decades, Robert would expand his interests into the realm of international politics, developing relations with Eastern European totalitarian regimes and becoming involved with Israeli state intelligence services. In 1991 Maxwell would skip a scheduled meeting with the Bank of England to cruise in his yacht among the Canary Islands, and during this time he would be reported missing, later to be found dead floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Following his death investigation would come to reveal an immense entangled web of fraud, financial malpractice, and theft which would result in the utter collapse of his business empire.

What is significant for our current purposes is that Robert Maxwell was the man who was, in many ways, responsible for how academic science came to be shaped after the end of the second world war. As he notes, Maxwell enriched himself by running scientific journals, then eventually fell out with the law and died a suspicious death. A picture of his famous daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell of Jeffrey Epstein fame, is flashed to add more drama to the implied conclusion: scientific publishing is a racket, associated with embezzlement and child sex trafficking!

Any reasonable person would ask: why fixate on Maxwell? Did Maxwell create the scientific publishing industry? Of course not. It has existed for centuries and there are many other, far more important publishing houses than Pergamon Press. Did he have a disproportionate influence on the way publishing is done? Not by any stretch of the imagination. But Formscapes reduces the entire industry to one man in order to instill in the naïve viewer the impression of widespread corruption in the science world. It’s a sleazy manipulative tactic.

Then he explains how science is published today. Academic institutions require their researchers to publish research, and academic journals are able to actually charge researchers for publishing their papers. This system works, because under most circumstances the researchers themselves aren’t required to actually dip into their own pockets to make such payments to the journals. Rather, research grants typically include provisions for such publishing fees, meaning that it is you and I who actually pay for the racketeering practices which were instantiated by Robert Maxwell and those who followed in his footsteps.

There are elements of truth here, but the conclusions are fallacious. Scientific publication involves research, paid for by research institutions. This is refereed by scientists who perform this service for free, then entrusted to a journal which publishes the work, and charges a fee for people to read it to recover publication costs. The claim that the published work is not freely accessible is more or less correct. The first problem is that the primary literature is typically not available to the general public. Of course hardly anyone is willing or able to read a paper in the Journal of Theoretical Physics. But Formscapes pretends that science is elitist as it hides behind exclusive and expensive portals. The second problem is that universities and other research organizations don’t have enough funds to subscribe to the expanding bulk of journals, so we are left with a Darwinian race for survival. The best journals are subscribed to, and the others are ignored or accessed only when researchers want to purchase one specific article. It is not an ideal world, but it works. To suggest that this shows corruption in science, or even that this constitutes a racket, is extremely irresponsible. The process of reliable scientific publication costs money to provide, so it costs money to consume. It’s like complaining that Netflix isn’t free. They need money to make the content, so they charge you to watch it. Nevertheless, they are legitimate problems, and to address these problems, free-access journals have arisen. Here scientists and publishers work for free to disseminate their knowledge. But many of these journals are of mediocre quality and poorly refereed. Even in the major journals, the expensive ones, some articles are freely accessible. The author is usually required to pay a small fee to make their article accessible to everyone, and this is happening more and more. In any case, publishing houses, which carry out the important task of organizing the review, refereeing, and publication of our best science have a right to earn a living, just like doctors and janitors and teachers and everyone else. It’s how society works.

Finally, the video claims that an author has to pay a fee to the journal before their work is published. This is not true. Could you or I publish a paper in a scientific journal cost-free? Yes, of course: there are plenty of journals which do not charge. However, any paper will be scrutinized by referees and has to meet stringent criteria of novelty and quality. To claim otherwise is a blatant lie.

After this idiotic claim of racketeering, the video claims the majority of scientific papers are fraudulent, and there is a replication crisis: scientific work is getting more and more difficult to reproduce. At this point we have all probably heard the murmurs of what has come to be dubbed the “replication crisis” within academic research. The notion of replicability is generally considered to be of central significance within the apologetics of academic science. Idealistically speaking, replication is believed to serve as a means of ensuring that the findings produced by scientific research do actually point towards the regularities of nature which science strives to reveal. If a finding cannot be replicated, then that of course casts doubt on whether the original research actually uncovered such a regularity.

Again, this is very manipulative because it is based on a kernel of truth. As science becomes more sophisticated, it becomes harder to reproduce, and it is something scientists actually take seriously. The malice lies in presenting this problem as a major crisis in science. Speaking from the little research experience I have, chemistry procedures are hard to reproduce. A chemical reaction may contain a dozen variables, and sometimes one of them is not controlled because it is not clearly identified and this may result in discrepancies. This phenomenon is well recognized, so it’s not a dirty secret. Many experiments are never reproduced because they do not create any particular interest. If the interest exists because of some broad industrial application, the procedures are repeated by many labs and eventually any discrepancy is solved via well-planned analytical procedures. That’s chemistry. Now imagine a science like biology, where experiments may contain dozens or hundreds of variables. Or clinical psychology, where thousands of individual factors may affect the quality of the results. Why is it surprising that scientific data are difficult to repeat? Important science eventually gets clarified, and less important, flawed experiments remain innocuously in the literature, perhaps until someone decides, 100 years later, that they were important, and they are eventually cleaned up or refuted. Humans are not perfect. Science is not perfect. Imperfection does not make science invalid.

Essentially, this whole narrative only works on people who have never done science and have never read any primary scientific literature. They have absolutely no clue what it is to do and publish scientific research, so they are unencumbered by reality in weaving this ridiculous story about how all published science is false or agenda-driven. This is a shortcut for science deniers with zero ability to refute real science, as it’s much easier to just pretend that the scientific community is invalid at its core. In order to substantiate this, some screenshots of cherry-picked fringe essays are flashed, as though the entire body of scientific knowledge can somehow be rendered invalid just by shouting “fake news”. This idea of most research being wrong is preposterous clickbait. Chemists develop new reactions, and publish summaries of their methodology. Zoologists discover new species, and publish their findings. Molecular biologists sequence genomes and map biomolecule interactions, and publish their results. Astronomers discover objects in the night sky and publish images of them. The overwhelming majority of scientific output is not even remotely controversial. It’s just “here’s some stuff we did, throw it on the pile of human knowledge”. Science deniers try to paint all of science as a conspiracy, because then they don’t have to prove anything wrong. They can just point to the conspiracy they fabricated, which is what this guy does for two hours.

Here is his ridiculous attempt to give a concrete example. If for example I am a sociological researcher, who is conducting research which investigates a possible correlation between political beliefs and life expectancy, I could very easily produce which seems to show such a correlation simply because of inadequate controls. If the majority of the people surveyed are people who live in a specific geographical location, or who predominately belong to a specific economic class or ethnicity, then it could be that my research findings come up to misleadingly depict a correlation between political beliefs and life expectancy when in reality the patterns detected by my research are due to factors which I have simply failed to take into consideration. So he makes something up about sociology, which is not a physical science, and he just lists a bunch of things that sociologists have to control for when doing research, as though they somehow don’t know about them and totally do those things. He is pretending that sociologists don’t know how to do sociology. Reality is of course extremely complicated, and due to the fundamentally relational nature of reality, it is never actually possible to completely isolate the factors which we wish to study scientifically, which means that there is always going to be a risk of such false positives no matter how rigorous we try to be. He says that because reality is “relational”, it is “never actually possible to completely isolate the factors we wish to study”. This is totally moronic. If you’re studying an ideal gas, the variables that describe it are moles, pressure, temperature, and volume. Hold two constant, measure the isolated relationship of the other two. This is an example from high school chemistry. When molecular biologists do experiments to ascertain something about gene expression, or any number of other biological processes, there are painstaking measures in place to control every possible variable with different plasmids that have varying combinations of resistance to one antibiotic or another, presence or lack of a particular gene of interest, internal control vectors, empty vectors, and so forth. Scientists are clever and know how to isolate variables. But for now we simply need to be aware of the fact that even the most thorough and stringent research can and does fall victim to such false positives, and therefore even if we were able to entirely eradicate fraud and malpractice, it would nonetheless inevitably be the case that many research findings would still fail to replicate.

There is something so enchanting about listening to someone who doesn’t understand science, improperly describe the scientific process, upon a backdrop of stock footage featuring actors who are cosplaying as scientists. Wow, we looked in a microscope and now I’m pointing to some random meaningless image on my laptop! But the narrator said we didn’t properly isolate a variable! And nobody can possibly replicate this! Nobody else can look through a microscope like we did. It would be funny if it wasn’t so offensive.

And now we get to what is supposed to be the payoff of all this. A great deal of public and professional confidence in scientific research hinges upon the assumption that the research findings which are reported as factual are findings which have been successfully replicated. Beginning with a series of controversies which emerged during the 2010s, however, this confidence would come to be damaged in an utterly catastrophic manner. The replication crisis can be traced back to research published in 2011 by the Cornell University social psychologist Daryl Bem, within which Bem alleged to have produced experimental evidence suggestive of extrasensory perception. Unsurprisingly Bem was viciously criticized for this research, and in an effort to discredit his findings, Bem’s critics highlighted what they regarded as serious methodological flaws in his research. Essentially these criticisms amounted to the claim that the statistical methods used by Bem in analyzing his data were inadequate. Yet as Bem pointed out in his response to his critics, the supposed flaw in his research was in fact common practice within psychological, medical, and sociological research in general. If Bem’s parapsychological findings were to be thrown out on those methodological grounds, then an enormous amount of psychological, medical, and sociological research would need to be thrown out as well for the exact same reasons. That’s right, all published science is wrong and dumb, which means that pseudoscience that can’t manage to get published must be right. This guy Daryl Bem pretended to have evidence of ESP. Of course scientists pointed out what was wrong with his methodology, but the narrator baselessly pretends that he was unfairly debunked. There is no attempt to elaborate or actually discuss the study, because he has no clue, and his viewers don’t care. In actuality, what happened is precisely what I described earlier. Publishing ESP results is a bold claim. So bold that many people tried to reproduce the results. Reproducibility in a social science like psychology is much more complex than with a simple chemical reaction, so a lot of studies tried to do it. Absolutely nobody could, so it was labeled bad science. Formscapes wants to label this process corruption, but it’s the opposite of corruption. It’s precisely how science works. Sometimes extraordinary claims get published. Even in fields like chemistry or physics. Fedyakin’s polywater sensation in 1961. Benveniste and water memory in 1988. Fleischmann and Pons’s cold fusion in 1989. These are glamorous examples that the press sometimes runs with in an irresponsible way. Because of the extraordinary nature of the claims, they were scrutinized, demonstrated to be irreproducible despite countless attempts, and thereby invalidated. If extraordinary claims were to represent real, viable phenomena, reproduction of results would occur, they would be deemed revolutionary, and scientists would pursue them eagerly, as has also happened many times in the history of science. It’s not that hard to wrap your head around a scientist chasing their own ego in presenting themselves as the harbinger of scientific revolution. Even highly respected and eminent ones, hence the so-called Nobel disease. In stark contrast, the idea that scientists would collectively hide new discoveries because they contradict current paradigms is just an asinine narrative to excuse delusional behavior.

Here he is again just pasting clickbait titles from magazines as though they adequately address science, while mixing in some pandemic-related paranoia for good measure. This is very deliberate as he is now going to pivot to medical science. The phrase “trust the science” is sometimes repeated like a kind of shibboleth or mantra. Nobody who advocates for science has ever said “trust the science”. This is a dumb trope used exclusively by science deniers who try to pretend that science requests blind faith. It doesn’t. People who learn and understand science know how it works and therefore are aware of the reliability of empiricism, as well as the degree to which various principles in science are at this point essentially irrefutable. This whole schtick is just a meme. Professional journalists use terms like anti-science or science denial as labels to slap on whatever group needs to be designated as the villain within whatever political narrative is being evangelized this week. Yes, people who deny the validity of science are called science deniers. It’s just literally what you are. There are no “science evangelicals” or “science apologists”. They’re just people who understand science and try to explain it to those who deny it, so that humanity doesn’t destroy itself.

In spite of how oft repeated and ubiquitous this attitude towards science is, the reality seems to be that we cannot and should not trust the science. Yes, you should learn basic science so you can understand it, instead of baselessly denying it all over the internet. The very ideal of science is an attitude of unbiased inquiry which does not pay reverence to established dogmas or doctrines. The great promise of science is that of knowledge which one is able to uncover through one’s direct engagement with nature, rather than knowledge which is bestowed from on high by authority figures and institutions. The very concept of scientific practice would seem to be diametrically opposed to the notion of pious adherence to a corpus of established beliefs which are officially endorsed and authorized by an institutional bureaucracy. This is another pathetic angle they take. They pretend to have reverence for science while denying science. Look at Galileo, who defied authority to change the way we look at the cosmos! First, Galileo didn’t develop heliocentrism. That was Copernicus followed by Brahe and Kepler. And Galileo helped to overturn religious dogma, not some imaginary scientific dogma. Geocentrism was not dogma. It was just the best model we had until a certain time where better telescopes were built and more sophisticated measurements could be made. He made astronomical observations and performed computations, just like modern astrophysicists. The “unbiased engagement with nature” is indeed how science is done, and yet we will see him deny this obvious fact countless times as we move forward.

Within this notion of trusting science we can begin to see that the very idea of science has come to split into two primary currents. On the one hand there is the notion of science of a continual practice of investigation. Actually engaging with the natural world and thereby coming to reveal the inner workings of nature. On the other hand we have the notion of “the science”. More stock footage, this time of fake students in a fake classroom, which again perfectly exemplifies the artificiality with which the narrator pretends to know what happens in real science classrooms. Chemistry students don’t recite dogmatic axioms about chemistry. They go in the lab and do chemistry. They run reactions, and learn analytical techniques to ascertain the identity of what they produce. Physics students don’t just sit there and take dictation. They do physics. They replicate landmark experiments from pioneers in physics and derive these laws for themselves. This notion that science education equals indoctrination is the most transparently idiotic narrative imaginable, exclusively peddled and believed by people who have never taken a single science course in their entire lives. Science understood as a body of facts which we are authorized to believe, or even obligated to believe, by a priesthood of professional academics whose sociological function is to tell us what is and is not a defensible belief. Ultimately “the science” is in essence a fundamentally doctrinal form of spirituality. This is another pathetic aspect of this narrative. People have been doing science for centuries. In particular the 20th century saw unbelievable progress in every scientific field. As such, an enormous mountain of knowledge has been produced. If you want to learn science, you have to learn about what people have already done. That means learning facts pertaining to the history of science that has led to our current understanding. That’s just how it goes. Pretending this process is somehow dogmatic is like pretending that learning a foreign language is dogmatic. Look at these priests, all reciting the same script about what these strange words mean! None of them are free thinkers, they just regurgitate their indoctrination! They all give the same definitions because that’s what the words mean. This is how you learn a language. And it’s also part of how you learn science. You learn facts about what we have already uncovered about the physical world, and the context in which we learned it. If you’re too much of a lazy crybaby to do that, just admit it to yourself and keep quiet. Because science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid.

Beneath the specific empirical claims made by actual researchers, or the facts and theories which are formally sanctioned by textbooks, we find within the core of “the science” a very specific complex of metaphysical assumptions about what the world must be like and what can or cannot qualify as true or real. It is furthermore a system of belief which conditions the way we think about what sorts of opinions can be considered respectable, and thus the structure of “the science” comes to condition the relationships between belief and social capital. Those who are well-informed and well-educated believe certain things, and therefore such beliefs come to serve a sociological function as a signifier of social respectability. And this is where he pivots, knowing that he’s totally incapable of refuting actual science, so he starts to blabber about metaphysics. He has to generate a false dichotomy. There is reality, which he refers to as a “belief system”, and then some fabricated alternative which he can use to promote his fantasies and try to put them on level ground alongside reality. In actuality, people who get an education actually learn things. That’s the social capital. They’re educated and can apply their knowledge to actually create and achieve things. People who get engineering degrees can build machines. People who get chemistry degrees can build molecules. People who don’t study these subjects can’t do these things, and just whine about it on the internet.

Many scientists aren’t exactly all that eager to publish findings which might call into question, for example, the adequacy of Darwinian natural selection in actually explaining the nature of life, even though there are many reasons to believe that natural selection does not give us a complete understanding of how life evolves, whence life originated, or how speciation actually occurs. Yet to question the Darwinian paradigm would be to risk affiliating oneself with creationists or other structures of belief which have been deemed anti-science. He finally decides to make specific scientific references and immediately humiliates himself. Surprise, surprise, he’s an evolution denier. He starts regurgitating the apologist script about how natural selection doesn’t explain everything, when every biologist from 1900 onward would tell you that themselves. There are many evolutionary mechanisms, not just natural selection. This moron knows about none of them. He just spews “neo-Darwinian” like he’s an intern at Discovery Institute. We’ve beaten this to death in my Discovery Institute debunks, so let’s move on.

But if we understand the controversy in terms of doctrine, ideology, and notions of sacred knowledge, then the motivations at work here begin to become much clearer. The letter of protest against the New Trends in Evolution conference was not about science, it was about “the science”. The conception of science as a body of sacred doctrines. Whether one affirms questions or denies such sacred knowledge is much more a matter of moral commitment to a particular ideological structure than it is a matter of evidence or rational arguments. Yes, if we look at it in the context of ideology, we see that only ideology could be responsible for pushing anti-science rhetoric as real science. Part of this ideology involves pretending that the fruits of empirical science are an ideology. A denial of evolution is a denial of the field of biology, so biologists will point out this absurdity, and charlatans will call that “adherence to doctrine”, because they have zero ability to actually discuss science. Remember, science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid.

Often times the rhetoric and apologetics of “the science” tends to take the form of an implied distinction between real science and pseudoscience. We are often assured by scientific media outlets and science popularizers that there is a clear and definitive difference between science and pseudoscience. Science can be true or false but pseudoscience is said to be somehow worse than false. Pseudoscience is said to violate the rules of science and therefore it is not even worthy of consideration alongside the real respectable science which is said to follow the ritualistic procedures of science in the correct orthodox manner. He basically just defines pseudoscience and then baselessly scoffs at the definition. Yes, pseudoscience is charlatanry masquerading as science. Like Deepak Chopra, whom he flashes from this famous clip where Sam Harris shits all over him to thunderous applause. He pretends that people use the term to pseudoscience to brand science they don’t like, when in reality, science deniers just use words like dogma and indoctrination to brand real science THEY don’t like. Educated people can indeed explain in great detail why something like homeopathy is pseudoscience, and have done so countless times. Science deniers just ignore it and spew their anti-establishment script.

Do those ideas allow us to make sense of things that previously seemed mysterious? Do the ideas allow us to see things which previously went unnoticed? If yes, then we continue to use those ideas, at least until we find ourselves at an impasse, at which our ideas are no longer adequate and therefore are in need of reevaluation. If not, we simply go back to nature and back to the drawing board, and try again. This is subtle but important. He’s pretending to value the scientific process, and shows stock footage of a telescope, and photosynthesis, and is admitting that we can do science that produces useful knowledge. But then he says that when an impasse is reached our ideas need reevaluation. What is this impasse? And what does reevaluation mean? Usually by “impasse” they are referring to something totally fabricated that science doesn’t seek to explain because it isn’t a real thing. And by “reevaluation” they mean throw away an entire field of science that does successfully explain and predict many things. This is what frauds do with astrophysics. They want to inject their pseudoscience into the scientific discourse, so they manufacture some kind of crisis, something science can’t explain, sometimes real sometimes imaginary, and then pretend that their pseudoscience can explain it, which it can’t, while also ignoring everything that real science does explain. When charlatans try to assert this narrative, they hope that the viewer does not understand a very basic and obvious principle of scientific progress, which is this: No matter what new innovations occur, no matter what new data arise, no matter how dramatic a paradigm shift, new science must always explain observable phenomena as well or better than existing science. You can’t strip away a theory, whether ancient or modern, and replace it with absolutely nothing, something that fails to explain what the previous theory explains trivially.

When you look at the advent of modern physics, equations in relativity and quantum mechanics all break down to Newtonian equations in the limit of the slow and large. Newtonian mechanics emerges from these equations in these limiting cases. I’m not speaking metaphorically, this is literally true. When you look at the time dilation equation, if you input a velocity that is negligible compared with the speed of light, it algebraically reduces to normal kinematics. Classical conceptions of momentum emerge from quantum mechanical equations. The old paradigm is contained within the new one. So modern physics does not negate Newtonian mechanics. Far from it. It is an extension of the physics we already know, thereby continuing to explain everything we already understood, but then also elucidating previously cryptic areas like the realm of the subatomic and things traveling near light speed. Classical physics is still profoundly useful in realms where relativity or quantum mechanics would complexify things unnecessarily, like macroscopic terrestrial motion.

For those who don’t like physics and math, here’s an analogy. There’s a crime scene. You have a dead body, a murder weapon, some footprints, some fingerprints, blood stains, and all kinds of other pieces of evidence. A detective will try to figure out what happened by determining what best fits the evidence. According to a receipt, this weapon was purchased by person X. Their fingerprints are at the crime scene, and they had a motive, so person X is likely the killer. This could be right or wrong, but it is objectively the most likely explanation, and if someone wants to propose an alternate explanation, it has to have at least equivalent explanatory power as what exists. Let’s say someone suggests that instead, a tiger escaped from the zoo and killed the victim! Alright, based on what? Is there any specific tiger-related evidence? Did you find tiger hairs? Tiger footprints? Are there any reports of tigers escaping from nearby zoos? The victim was shot by a gun, how did a tiger do that? How do you explain the fingerprints and blood that match the suspect? When there is a hypothesis that is supported by evidence, and an alternate explanation is put forward that is not only baseless, but also has no ability to explain the data as well as the existing hypothesis, it’s bogus. The detective will call it out as ridiculous not because he’s being dogmatic, but because he knows how to do his job and he knows when someone is full of shit and shouting tiger for no reason.

The notion of falsification is often casually referenced in debates about such validity or the lack thereof. But this idea is very rarely examined in detail by science apologists. More often than not the idea is simply gestured towards as a way of casually dismissing ideas that aren’t supposed to have a seat at the table. It is said that real science must be falsifiable and that pseudoscientific claims are those which appear to be scientific but which are in fact unfalsifiable. He then goes on a long rant about Karl Popper and falsifiability as though he knows how to falsify scientific claims, and just generally demonstrates the problem with people who read some philosophy books and then pretend to know how science works. He predictably refers to Kuhn and the concept of paradigm shift, because he’s priming the viewer to believe that real science is nothing more than a failed paradigm that should be abandoned for pseudoscience, which he implies is a newer, better paradigm, rather than just some charlatans on the internet.

The early explorations of pre-science then give rise to what Kuhn dubbed normal science, within which the basic explanatory and conceptual structures of the developing paradigm begin to concretize as a morphologically mature program of research, with well-defined epistemological horizons which are delineated by the core metaphors which have now become the beating heart of the paradigm. It is within this phase of normal science that falsification tends to become essentially irrelevant. The core metaphors and thus the core theoretical frameworks which are erected around those core metaphors have come to be fully entrenched, and as such, conflicting evidence tends to be simply ignored, hand waved away or accommodated by minor ad hoc adjustments to the original theoretical frameworks. He pretends that theories can only make ad hoc adjustments rather than face being falsified, which is ridiculous. There are countless examples of theories being discarded after being falsified. When contemplating the mechanism of a chemical reaction, multiple possibilities may be put forward, and then studies are done to gather data that can potentially falsify some of the possibilities. This is how we discern reaction mechanisms. And most importantly, he pretends that because paradigm shift is a thing that sometimes happens, he can then point at any science he doesn’t like and just call it an obsolete paradigm without basis. These are the trap doors that the science denier uses to cast doubt on the body of modern scientific knowledge, amongst people who never studied science and have no ability to validate this knowledge for themselves. He flashes phylogenetic trees as if to imply that evolutionary biology is undergoing some sort of crisis, which is totally idiotic. The implication is that because taxa can be rearranged, that the whole concept of the phylogenetic tree should be abandoned. In reality, taxonomy is a perfect example of where his philosophical mental masturbation totally breaks down. The tree of life is profoundly solid. There are broad aspects to its organization that absolutely will not change. Only if you zoom way in, and look at individual phyla or much smaller taxa for which specimens have only been collected over the past few decades, then there is more research to be done regarding morphology and genetics that will help us place smaller clades where they ought to go, and indeed these placements are constantly being revised by zoologists, microbiologists, and other researchers. But these revisions, and the fact that such revision occurs at all, specifically strengthens the tree of life. Its principles are being used in conjunction with novel techniques in genetics to great efficacy by thousands of researchers to produce agreement about the natural world. This is the precise opposite of the “priesthood protecting sacred knowledge” he intends to convey. Science is somehow dogmatic and unchanging but also constantly going through paradigm shifts. The moron can’t make up his mind.

If we are led to believe that there are no metaphysical or ideological presuppositions which underpin science, then we are much less likely to raise awkward questions about whether or not those presuppositions themselves might be distorting our conception of the world. This has thus allowed the apologists of “the science” to depict science as though it were a kind of elite priesthood of individuals who are the appointed curators of a body of sacred knowledge. He then devolves into a seemingly never-ending sermon about metaphysics over stock footage of fractals that can be summarized as “but how do you know science is right when there’s all this crazy magic I want to believe”. He again pretends that falsifiability is a charade because theories are always revised to evade falsification, obviously remaining intentionally vague because there have been countless instances in which theories have been conclusively falsified and abandoned. Spontaneous generation. Miasmatic theory. Phrenology. The aether. Einstein’s static universe. Phlogiston. Geocentrism. And it happens all the time today as well, in astrophysics, molecular biology, everywhere. Furthermore, antithetical to paradigm shift, when models are revised to fit new data, this is also how science works. In 10th grade chemistry we are all supposed to learn about the evolution of atomic theory. From Dalton’s little billiard balls to Thomson’s plum pudding model, to Rutherford’s nuclear model, to Bohr’s energy levels, to Schrodinger’s conception of electron orbitals. This is the clearest depiction of the progress of science imaginable. None of these models were wrong, they were just less complete than the model that came next. Bohr’s energy levels define the principal quantum number, which is part of the system of quantum numbers that describe the atomic orbitals. Even going all the way back, Dalton’s laws of definite and multiple proportions that he used to substantiate the existence of atoms are still true today. When subatomic particles were discovered, it didn’t render atomic theory obsolete, it became more refined. The model improves to fit the data. If someone wants to propose some alternate model for the structure of the atom today, they have to be able to explain everything that every chemist has ever done for the past 150 years. So if some science illiterate fraud on the internet tried to do that, any chemist would laugh right in their face, not because they’re being “dogmatic”, but because their knowledge of chemistry affords them the ability to see how preposterous the fraud is, and how demonstrably false their script is, totally incompatible with an enormous interconnected body of knowledge that already exists. Science isn’t dogma. You’re just stupid.

Many of the theories which we have looked at on this channel in previous videos, such as electric universe theory, morphic resonance theory, inheritance of acquired characteristics and even integrated information theory, have been denounced as pseudoscience in such a way so as to imply that these theories somehow violate the supposed rules of science. And we finally get to the meat of what this guy pushes, electric universe. He can cry all he wants, electric universe is pseudoscience. It is magic masquerading as science. The people who push it don’t actually do science. Certainly not anyone at Thunderbolts, and no, not even SAFIRE. I’m not going to rehash all my debunks on this topic, so let’s just see where he takes it.

Such machine technologies came to directly condition the manner in which science was practiced, and even condition the form of scientific theories themselves. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, came about specifically through efforts to develop and understand the behavior of steam engines. As such, these laws prove they are useful in the development of such technologies, but beneath the surface we can see that this metaphor was being extended to nature in general. Scientists came to generalize these laws to the cosmos as a whole, and essentially came to think of the entire universe as being like a vast expanding container of cooling steam. First he goes on a long rant about how much of what we know regarding thermodynamics was developed through studying steam engines, therefore physicists arrogantly view the universe as a machine and misplace assumptions about how the universe works. This guy clearly has never studied any thermodynamics. Chemical reactions are not machines, and we study the energy transfer associated with chemical processes. Energy is a concept that is absolutely fundamental to the natural world, and he knows nothing about it.

Given this alleged weirdness of the quantum world, the mechanistic manner of understanding nature proved to be simply inapplicable. Atoms, molecules, and electromagnetic phenomena, could no longer be understood as being composed of tiny machines. But in the wake of this inadequacy, academic science did not simply throw out the machine metaphor. The metaphor had simply become far too entrenched within academic culture, and moreover, Western countries were beginning to become even more drastically technologized. And science was beginning to fully assume its role as a kind of priesthood which would serve to legitimize these social transformations through perpetuating the meta-narrative of scientific, technological, and liberal democratic progress. Now we get to the quantum realm, and some pageantry about how the indeterminacy of this realm somehow invalidates the process of gathering scientific knowledge and creating technology with it. This is bananas dumb. He is labeling the scientific community as a priesthood that is defending the creation of technology without bothering to acknowledge that the mere existence of technology is proof that our scientific understanding is valid. If our understanding of the universe was illusory, we wouldn’t have technology. We wouldn’t have light bulbs and refrigerators. We wouldn’t have planes and satellites and computers. Quantum mechanics exists, and we also make machines. There is no contradiction here. There is no “sacred mystery”. Physicists who study quantum phenomena learn about them and come to understand them. People who don’t study these things, don’t. That the quantum realm is profoundly counterintuitive, and can rightfully be perceived as strange by our human brains, doesn’t mean that it is a dimension of magic and mystery like charlatans pretend it is, in order to sell books and meditation retreats, as we discussed in my debunk of quantum mysticism.

The vast majority of the things which astrophysicists believe they know about the history and structure of our universe, the vast majority of the conclusions which are triumphantly proclaimed on public television by figures like Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, are such inferences which are built upon the assumption that our cosmos is driven primarily by gravity, and that gravity operates through spacetime curvature. Throughout the subsequent history of the 20th century, following the development of general relativity, astrophysicists would come to make many extremely confident proclamations about the origins of our universe, the age of our universe, the expansion rate of the universe, the life cycles of stars and galaxies, the ultimate fate of our universe and the existence of unobservable entities such as black holes. Every step of the way, all of these inferences were depicted as factual, and the general public was repeatedly assured that these inferences were made with extreme confidence on the basis of incontestably well-established theories by elite professionals using the most cutting edge technology available to mankind. All the while, every single one of these inferences was made on the basis of a theory that was demonstrably incomplete at best, and at worst simply false. And we now get to his pathetic posturing about how nebulous our understanding of the universe truly is, how it’s just a bunch of assumptions based on relativity. Cosmology and the age of the universe, astrophysics and the life cycle of stars, it’s just a bunch of conjecture! It totally isn’t based on centuries of painstaking observation and calculation. This really is the main problem with science deniers like this. Because they never studied any science, because they have no clue how science is done, they confidently assert their profound ignorance over the entire scientific community. The mountain of observational evidence that supports figures like our estimated age of the universe, that being the cosmic microwave background radiation, galactic recession velocities, observable ratios in elements as well as subatomic particles, successful simulations, it all simply doesn’t exist to them, because they refuse to learn about it, and they act as though their laziness negates the scientific process. He sarcastically mocks well-established theories, professionals, and cutting edge technology that are all used to validate the existence of things like black holes, and just baselessly denies them. He pretends that scientists wake up every day in a cold sweat, worried about public perception of their work. It’s totally delusional. Scientists do their science. They don’t need the approval of some jerk on the internet who will never lift a finger to learn about what it is that scientists do.

Thousands of professional academic careers came to be built upon a foundation which was known to be at best incomplete, and yet the professionalization and institutionalization of science over previous decades had created incentive structures which strongly discouraged skepticism towards the prevailing paradigm. There was a lot of money on the line, and resisting the mainstream meant risking the possibility of being ostracized by one’s professional community, and therefore risking one’s career and livelihood. This narrative never ceases to perplex me. He acts as though all the grant money in a field is tied to a specific theory. Grant money is tied to science that produces results. If that means further corroborating a theory, the money is there. If that means falsifying a theory, the money is there. Whatever advances science into new territory has a shot at practical application, and could thus potentially be lucrative and worth funding. This narrative of all scientists clinging to a failing paradigm for cash is just so profoundly idiotic and antithetical to how science works, and how money works, that it discredits any person who spews it at face value. People don’t waste billions of dollars for pride. Period.

As early as the 1930s, astronomers who attempted to calculate the mass of distant galaxies realized that if galaxies are indeed held together by a gravitational force, which operates in a manner implied by general relativity, then galaxies do not have nearly enough mass to actually produce the gravitational force needed to actually hold them together. In other words, if general relativity were correct then we would expect these galaxies to fly apart rather than maintaining their form, and moreover, they shouldn’t have been able to actually form in the first place. There is no known phenomenon within the standard cosmological which can account for this discrepancy, and so one might idealistically assume that this would have led astrophysicists to cast doubt upon the veracity of general relativity. But for reasons which we already examined, astrophysicists were unwilling to actually do so. And those who were willing to express skepticism towards relativity cosmology were typically ridiculed as out of touch quacks. Instead, physicists proposed the existence of dark matter as a way to resolve this discrepancy. Then it’s off to the races whining about dark matter, which will surprise nobody. It’s all just crazy ad hoc lunacy to save relativity! Or it’s science you don’t understand and baselessly attack just because physicists have enough whimsy to refer to it as dark matter instead of non-baryonic matter, and this triggers your little pea brain into attack mode. Of course he makes no mention of all the countless calculations and observations that validate general relativity, the perihelion precession of both mercury and stars closely orbiting the supermassive black hole at galactic center, gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, and more, because that wouldn’t suit his narrative, now would it?

If for academic doctrinal science, science which has come to be understood as an elite priesthood of sacred knowledge, this conclusion is simply unacceptable. There is simply too much at stake. For many decades now, science popularizers have repeated and reinforced the idea that the knowledge which has been sanctioned by the elite is knowledge which can be relied upon with certainty. Thousands of professional careers have been built upon the theories which have come to be regarded as doctrine.

And which have been systematically taught to students and the general public as facts, not as mere conjectures or possibilities. In the end, this script all rests on this one completely idiotic notion. That scientists all over the world would continue to do science that doesn’t work. That grant money would continue to magically appear all over the world for science that doesn’t work. You have to be an intellectual toddler to entertain this notion. It’s like pretending that the Wright brothers would keep trying the same failed model over and over again, never figuring out how to fly, while scoffing at other inventors that have blueprints for a plane that will fly, but for some reason never actually build it. This is what science deniers want you to believe.

Mr. Dave runs a very popular science YouTube channel, which serves essentially the same sociological function as other forms of science apologetics and his views are very standard with regards to forms of scientific research which fall afoul of institutionally authorized doctrines. And now we get to the section about me. Oh goody! Yes, my channel is nothing but a collection of accepted doctrines! All of these lectures on organic chemistry, it’s nothing but dogma! Molecules aren’t actually real, you see! Neither are cells! Or human organ systems! Anyway, as I said, he’s going to have a hissy fit about my very first debunk on electric universe. So here we go.

In this video, Dave tries his hand at dismantling the theoretical framework of electric universe theory, an alternative cosmological model, which we have looked at a bit already in previous videos. Electric universe theory is a theoretical framework which proposes that the primary driving force in cosmic evolution and morphogenesis is in fact electromagnetism rather than gravity. Electric universe theorists essentially abandon Einsteinian cosmology and instead try to model phenomena such as star formation and galaxy formation in terms of electromagnetic forces, rather than relying predominately upon the effects of gravity. Electric universe is not a theory. It’s pseudoscience. A theory is a model that correlates data and makes falsifiable predictions. Electric universe is a bunch of bullshit that charlatans spew to make money on the internet. That all cosmic phenomena are determined chiefly or even partly by electromagnetism is a non-starter at face value, because electromagnetism is both attractive and repulsive, while matter exerts an exclusively attractive influence. Gravity. Bulk matter is electrically neutral. That’s really all you need to prove that electric universe is stupid. But let’s continue.

We know for a fact that this equation describes our reality. We use it to calculate the trajectories of objects both on Earth and in space, and they are always corroborated to high degrees of precision. Alright, so I showed Newton’s law of universal gravitation, explain that it is used to make predictions that are corroborated to high degrees of precision, and this idiot comes back with “nuh uh”. Where did you see that, exactly? Because here’s reality. Every satellite in orbit. Every probe that has ever navigated the solar system. Every comet that shows up exactly where we say it will, when we say it will. How do we do that? Newtonian mechanics. Can you make those predictions, Formscapes? I know you can’t, even using real physics. But you sure as hell can’t do it without it. We landed a probe on a comet, for crying out loud. Using our physics, we performed calculations so sophisticated and precise, that we were able to launch a probe from Earth and make it land on a comet. What is that, Formscapes, blind chance? Can you land a probe on a comet? Can any electric universe morons land a probe on a comet? No? Then shut your dumb mouth. Newtonian mechanics isn’t invalid just because you’re too lazy to learn about it. Maybe one day you’ll find the courage to do so, and I have plenty of classical physics tutorials that can help you get started. But until then, try to accept that science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid.

Furthermore, we understand electromagnetism at least as well as we understand gravity. We have electricity, we have an understanding of materials science, semiconductors, batteries, and other assorted phenomena. So how is that we understand gravity so well, and electromagnetism so well, but not well enough to realize that one is the other? But, in the end, electric universe is just another flavor of paranoia and mysticism as I will demonstrate for you here. Now to begin with, we can see that Mr. Dave begins his entire deconstruction on the presumption that electric universe theory essentially amounts to a reduction of gravity to electromagnetism. This is already misleading. Not all electric universe theorists presume that gravity is an electromagnetic phenomenon. Then he flashes clips from Wal Thornhill and idiot copycats to pretend that I’m somehow misunderstanding what they say. I’m not, at all. It doesn’t matter whether they’re saying gravity can be replaced by electromagnetism, or that gravity has an electromagnetic component. It doesn’t matter the degree or flavor, it’s just wrong. He conveniently skips over all the ways in the video in which I demonstrate conclusively that it’s wrong. He says I’m being “flippant”, when in reality he is flippantly ignoring the fact that I spent 20 minutes outlining very simple and intuitive ways in which researchers could easily demonstrate an electromagnetic component to gravity with very simple experiments that could be done in a middle school classroom. He has no response, so he just pretends I didn’t do that. He says I’m not willing to consider any model EU proposes, but there is none. It’s all just stories of ancient civilizations making cave paintings about lightning in the sky, or stars as “anodes” and other laughable appropriation of scientific terminology in ways that contradict basic physics. When I conclusively prove that something isn’t true, and you refuse to engage with what I said to prove it, at all, you’re the one hiding behind ideology. You’re the one desperately clinging to the narrative where the underdog must dethrone the evil authoritarian dogma. He is totally incapable of engaging with the actual meat of the video, so he doesn’t show any of it, and retreats to his pathetic script about how we don’t know how gravity works, and that’s why dark matter and blah blah blah. Come on, Formscapes. Why can’t you do a point for point response to my video? Acceleration due to gravity changing predictably and measurably according to mass and distance from the center of the gravitational field, both on Earth and other celestial bodies. The ability to know where every celestial body will be at any given time in the future. Zero variation in the freefall behavior of objects with differing magnetic properties. A profoundly detailed description of the life cycle of stars which matches observations everywhere in the galaxy, their composition, their behavior. Line spectra. Magnetohydrodynamics. Doppler imaging. Satellite clocks and time dilation. Why don’t you have anything to say about any of this, big guy? And what about everything I’ve done to invalidate everything these EU nutters have ever said? When they propose their explanation of a star, I expose inconsistencies like negatively charged particles somehow streaming both to the star to power it and away from it in the solar wind. Positive and negatively charged particles inhabiting the same stream in the solar wind despite having opposite charge. Why can’t you engage with a single concrete scientific point I make in this or any other video on the topic? Because you don’t actually care about science. You care about stories. You show literally 30 seconds of my video where I summarize the insanity of electric universe, and pretend that’s all I’ve said in a video that’s nearly half an hour of hard science wall to wall. “He’s just a dogmatic overlord who is afraid of science!” Exclaims the coward who never makes even a half-assed attempt to actually discuss a single concrete phenomenon or experiment. You pretend that people like me just say “nuh uh” to pseudoscience, when in fact it is you and the pseudoscience peddlers you defend that are saying “nuh uh” to real science. You are completely incapable of engaging with a single concrete scientific argument, and don’t do it a single time in a two hour video. It's as though you’re pretending that this round peg doesn’t fit in this round hole, even though I’m showing you that it does, and insist instead that this square peg would fit much better, no matter how many times I show you that it objectively doesn’t. Instead of acknowledging anything I’m showing you, you just whine about dogma. But again, science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid.

Then he launches into attacking someone else, a scientist who calls out delusional narcissist crackpots for pretending they understand physics better than real physicists. This is a video by another very popular science YouTuber, who goes by the moniker acollierastro. This video is titled “Physics Crackpots”, and in this video, this person articulates a very colorful narrative about people who she deems to be crackpots, people who believe they are capable of actually doing theoretical physics, or at least criticizing standard physics, but who are, so we are told, really just a bunch of lunatics who have lost their grip on reality. Just like with me, he refuses to actually play a single clip of her saying anything concrete, any specific example of crackpots, and how we know they’re crackpots. He just mutes her and speeds her up, and spews his commentary while pretending she doesn’t say anything. He then moves on to referencing proven charlatans like SAFIRE project, which again, I debunked to smithereens in another video. If she is so wrong, why is he so afraid to let her speak, and actually respond to anything she’s saying? Instead he pivots to another video, where she talks about Avi Loeb, who does indeed exhibit some crackpot tendencies. Sometimes real scientists do that too. She doesn’t really say that crackpots are all amateurs, he just doesn’t actually show her talking. At all. Luc Montagnier won a Nobel prize for isolating HIV and now he’s a full blown crackpot promoting structured water and all kinds of other abject nonsense. It happens. Loeb pushes this alien thing for press. Pretending that he must be right just because other scientists point out the baselessness of his claims is just idiotic. He even shows clips of her discussing the periodicity of Oumuamua’s rotation, which is how we know it’s just a lifeless rock, but it’s sped up and muted. How pathetic.

If the evidence really were so firmly on their side, and there really were no major reasons to doubt mainstream physics or cosmology, then why bother making videos like these? Why not just demonstrate that the mainstream theories can actually be trusted? If the contradictions, failed predictions, and unexplainable observations don’t give us good reason to believe that mistakes were made along the way, then why not? Why reduce onself to making fun of other people with different ideas rather than actually handling oneself with maturity and authenticity? Why try to convince people not to take certain ideas seriously, if you really believe that those ideas cannot withstand careful scrutiny anyway? That is exactly what I do, you idiot. I make these videos specifically to show the public how the science they aren’t familiar with DOES work, and how people like you are just lying about it. The public is supremely susceptible to bullshit rhetoric like yours, and science denial is a huge problem, so you then have to be neutralized by me explaining with crystal clarity how you’re dumb and wrong. Sing it with me! Science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid.

Science is therefore the presumption that we can actually see the truth rather than simply receiving the truth as it is handed down to us by institutional structures of authority. The further science becomes removed from such direct experiential contact with the world, the more science ceases to be genuinely scientific and the more so-called science comes to be no more than yet another ideology conditioned by entanglements of financial, political, technological, and institutional power. We cannot and should not trust “the science” understood as a set of beliefs which are legitimized by an institutional elite. But we can instead trust science. The actual practice of bringing our ideas into engagement with the world, as a means of revealing the inner nature of the world.

And he wraps up with a reiteration of the same idiotic monologue. Don’t trust the science, which is how we get anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers, and all manner of other poisonous lines of thinking that could result in the obliteration of the human race. In the end, people like Formscapes are just delusional narcissists who desperately need to believe that they have a superior intellect. They want to be super special geniuses, who without any training whatsoever, don’t just understand the universe as well as figures like Einstein, but actually better! They pretend they can point out erroneous thinking in the work of scientists they don’t have a shred of ability to comprehend in the first place. Give a guy like this a general relativity textbook and watch him have a panic attack. What’s wrong with this page, Formscapes? What about this one? Can you show me where the dogma is? Or this one, can you show me what’s wrong here? Oh you have absolutely no idea, but it must be wrong because former computer salesman Wal Thornhill said so? This psychology is an attempt to drag real knowledge down to his own level of cluelessness, so as to then assert his own delusions above reality. He’s basically a flat earther with moderate competence in philosophical jargon. And his obsession with metaphysics does not save him from the power of science. There is some validity to the notion that science is a representation of reality and not reality itself, but nevertheless, if you can calculate at what point a bullet will hit you and kill you, you can save yourself with science. If you invoke metaphysics and argue that the bullet is just a representation and not actually real, there will be no time for debate, you’ll just be dead. In summary, this portrayal of science as religion is as tired a trope as one can imagine. The precise imperfection and revision he discusses is precisely why science is so reliable, and that theories change does not negate the fact that they actually work. We cure diseases, build rockets, and send people to the moon. These theories that enable us to do these things remain valid even when better ones come along. And indeed, there is plenty of room in science for new ideas. All the time, scientists propose new bold theories that challenge the scientific community. If they stand up to scrutiny, they are pursued further. If not, they are abandoned. Things like electric universe do not belong to either category. It is not a theory, which it would have to be in order to qualify for whatever paradigm shift Formscapes wants it to represent. This desperate attempt at validating crackpots under the veneer of epistemological revolution is a cancer upon the fabric of society, propagated by grifters who profit from the naivete of their listeners. This is the real crisis in modern science. Not that science has lost its way, or become corrupt, but rather that science progresses so rapidly that the world has changed completely over the past century, leaving so many people oblivious and dumbfounded, resulting in millions rejecting science out of bitterness for the loss of the blissful ignorance of the period before. Science doesn’t offer anyone delusions of being special, eternal, or loved by the universe. Real science correlates data and makes predictions. And the validity of science isn’t measured by whether it gives you a cool feeling of being a rogue trailblazer, no matter how much you like how that feels. So, Formscapes, the only thing you made clear in that two hour turdfest is that your singular tactic is to refer to well substantiated science as “dogmatic”, simply because educated people can so easily point out how pseudoscience is wrong, you’re just too much of a lazy coward to engage with it. Because, one last time: science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next time.