In a previous post, I wrote a scathing assessment of the two main leaders of LIGO, Kip Thorne (CalTech) and Rainier Wiess (MIT). They started the project back in the early 1970s and it floundered until a re-design led by Barry Barish started in the 1990s. The project got its first result in 2016.
In this post, I’d like to take a look at the career of Barry Barish.
- He started his career by supporting the measurement of an unmeasurable, missing-link quark predicted by Gell-Mann. It was essentially the fudge factor in Gell-Mann’s reverse-engineered model. Since no one else had such an expensive, unique measurement device, no one could cross-check the result.
- He then attempted to cross-check the result through collisions of neutrino beams created with another unique and expensive measurement device. This was done in a time when many people didn’t believe that neutrinos existed. As in, he measured the collisions of things that didn’t objectively exist in many theoretical frameworks.
- After that, he spent seven years running an experiment in Italy that measured magnetic monopoles, things that most people understand are either impossible to directly measure because everything is made of them or that don’t objectively exist in most commonly used theoretical frameworks. In any case, subsequent experiments showed that what they measured must’ve been a fluke.
- Then he gave his voice to build the scientific case for the superconducting supercollider that was eventually shot down by Anderson of the famed Anderson Localization method of keeping physics fragmented.
- When that failed, he joined the LIGO collaboration to measure cosmic gravitational waves in a way that makes it impossible to verify that they were not caused by something more mundane and earthly. He re-designed the system so that it was easy to inject fake signals.
- Finally, he joined the effort to build the ILC – a collider that is even bigger than the LHC. There isn’t any real, concrete reason this needs to be built, but he thinks that curiosity is a good enough reason.
To say that this guy has been influential in shaping the sorts of experiments done through government supported physics research would be an understatement. In many ways, the story of his career is the story of government funded ‘big science’.
In each and every one of the experiments that Barry Barish supported, I see a fundamental misapplication of the scientific method and I can only conclude that this folly was allowed to persist by exploiting people’s confusion and their tendency to only see the facts that they want to see.
The folly was allowed to persist because people kept giving people like Barry Barrish billions of dollars to spend on recruiting gullible young people and indoctrinating them in such a way that they were never able to see how their work fit into a context that differed from Barry Barish’s warped vision of the world. He and others like him were like government subsidized cult leaders.
In Barry Barish’s cult, thousands of authors on a paper give the ideas therein the weight of truth, even when no single author understands everything claimed in that paper.
Through the years, these collaborations have grown to the enormous size we know today. But during most of my career it was roughly five or ten people, eventually growing to twenty or thirty. And now it’s as much as a thousand people on a huge experiment. It’s an enormous enterprise.
Barry Barish
The blame for this development can’t be laid on Barish’s shoulders alone. In a larger context, this is all a result of market forces combined with an encouragement to keep zooming in to the noise floor of empty space.
If I zoom in on a fundamental flaw in the experiment for which Barish won a Nobel Prize, I see that the device he constructed is sensitive to so many different earthly sources of noise that it is impossible to rule out all of them and thus impossible to claim that anything it ‘discovers’ can be attributed to black holes colliding in distant star systems.
The measurement is sensitive to lightning strikes and Schumann resonances that look exactly like the cosmic things they want to measure, and this provides a case study in how if you increase the number of authors enough, no single author understands the problem well enough to see the flaws in the analysis. One thereby gives the public the illusion that a large group of experts has studied the issue extensively and come to a satisfactory conclusion, when the truth is that a large number of authors more often indicates group delusion and agreement for the sake of agreeability and team spirit.
In this article about Schumann resonances and LIGO, twenty six authors from twenty three different institutes convinced themselves and the thousand member LIGO collaboration that Schumann resonances wouldn’t be a problem for the measurement of cosmic gravitational waves as long as enough magnetometers show that there was no fluctuation of the Earth’s magnetic field at the same time that LIGO detects a gravitational wave. Yet for most of LIGO’s claimed or prize winning gravitational wave detections, magnetometers were not in operation.
Something in this man’s eyes tells me that he knows the folly of big science, but he is such a team player, that he will defend it to his dying breath.
When I first understood how all of this worked, my first reaction was: do not give men like this any more money. He wants to lead your children on wild goose chases rather than let them do something that truly makes the world more beautiful.
I saw two roads.
- The boomers wanted to Make America Great Again with great scientific discoveries that impress the Russians but which might cause horrible diseases or materials to escape from labs.
- The millenials will want to Make America Beautiful Again through art, music, and infrastructure that will house the homeless and comfort the mentally ill.
They will become civil engineers or artists — not greedy government-funded scientists who build sand-castle empires and hotbeds for dangerous diseases.
But as in all things, we are all just trying to make things balance out so that people can live peacefully. We need heroes sometimes, but sometimes they can cause more trouble than they prevent.
I think Tina Turner said it best:
We don't need another hero We don't need to know the way home All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome
The novel I wrote follows the tradition of other scientists turned novelists who saw the folly of the research system into which they’d been pulled. A Canticle for Leibowitz might’ve been the book that triggered me to follow the same path.
Then again, what do I know? Idle hands are the devils’ playthings and I’m sure that some physicist has done a simulation of how communities evolve with and without the distraction of nonsensical, big science. They probably based it on those stupid mouse utopia experiments in which mice were enclosed in unnatural environments from which they could not escape. The mice all turned into serial killer cannibals who couldn’t care for their young and the researchers must’ve concluded that stupid, scientific busy work is the solution to such social collapse, even if it makes many people miserable. They must’ve forgotten that trusting in unverified simulation tools that promise to predict the future is a recipe for folly.
These ideas are shaping my next two novels. In one novel, two people get together and change the course of history – some bad things happen as a result, but those bad things serve as reminders to everyone to change their behavior. In the other novel, the two people do not get together and no one changes their behavior. This results in a much worse outcome overall, but in both stories, life goes on regardless and consciousness springs eternal, just on different scales.
I think I want to use them to say something about the folly of weaponized scientific research, about the folly of micromanaging situations that can only be understood from a more distanced perspective, and about letting love work its magic. Resisting an oscillation can make it larger and more painful later on.
….
To explore this apostatic perspective in more depth, I recommend my first nonfiction book:
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Kirsten Hacker 