Reflection. Why do these blogs?

[Originaly posted 6/10/2013 (June 10, 2013), returned to draft 20160916, resurrected 20210407]

Basically the primal scream thing, I guess, .. and therefore an infantile narcissistic indulgence, because if I were to say I did it for any other reason I'd be making excuses.  So, .. here they are:-

1.  Because the internet makes their effective dissemination possible.  And therein ('effective') is a facility the world hasn't seen before.  With the press of a button information can detonate the world.  Bottom-up people-power democratises the world, .. and for better and worse, removes it from institutional control (Wikileaks).  In the academic world it provides a ring-road around the exorbitant paygates that assure a consensus of convenience headed up by the literati.   For all the hype that represents science as a field of discussion and debate the reality is quite otherwise, scientists do not regard controversial views that go to the heart of the matter very favourably..  They may allow, and indeed thrive on, differences that relate to the flounces and feathers of the Eamperor's wardrobe, but anyone drawing attention to nudity gets very short shrift indeed.  Dissenting views on what constitutes fashion are not tolerated.  Therefore the next 'why' is :-

2. 'Jihad': Protesting a number of things, the first of which is ostensibly the ill-founded consensus view that Plate Tectonics presents a credible model for Earth science when it patently doesn't.  Anyone reasonably cognisant of the basic premises of Plate Tectonics can pick any number of holes in it.   The reason they don't is because to do so simply states what everybody else already knows - that they are pejoratives that could potentially throw the field into chaos (and reputations with it) - and because to detract from the consensus view invites opprobrium.  Better to go with the flow and remain within the stated consensus by deliberately ignoring the inconsistencies, or if they must be mentioned then to disingenuously represent them as positively as possible, as "opportunities for more research", thereby elevating what is really crass nonsense to some sort of respectability.  And if you don't self-censor, then others will do it for you.

But just to digress here from the 'whys' of these posts for a moment it seems to me that these inconsistencies can actually be turned to serve a double purpose.  On the one hand ignoring (/omitting) them helps to cement a consensus, which is the vehicle that scientists must ride if they wish to secure funding and career advancement.  And on the other hand (since they *are* obvious contradictions and so hardly require mention at all) to actually draw attention to them as positives ancillary to consensus is a kind of silent code that says, "We recognise these disconnects would up-end the apple cart if we focussed on them and so we won't, we'll leave them aside for now and trot them out later when a significant alternative is identified that consensus can recognise as *useful to purpose* - purpose being funding and career advancement.  [Not useful to science, because if so then they would be voraciously examined as soon as identified.]  Obviously contradictions of consensus are not by themselves opportunities for research, they must be framed in a positive context, not one that highlights deficiency.

But science is our truth-teller, and its enterprise should be to establish truth.  The holes and obvious contradictions should be the devices by which the field is questioned at every turn, but even a cursory review of the literature will show a complete absence of anything that interrogates Plate Tectonics in a subtractive way in order to better appraise it.  So in a way these errors are potential trump cards that carry with them the communicability of memes that everyone knows but holds close to the chest to be played at a convenient time in the future.  They are not things to be *discovered* in the future, .. they are already known and, though unstated, well known, .. they are at once the 'don't-go-there' means that could undermine and destroy, and at the same time be the gems of memes by which future change will be clinched.

Thus they carry more weight, more real currency, than the eventual, pivotal *element* of change, and will overwhelm it.   Moreover the drowning of that element will be silent, unstated, self-evident, and belong to everyone.  Thus the element by the same token is relatively insignificant, and (in geology) is itself already branded an 'everybody-knows' thing.  No-one will, or can (!) claim any pivotal role because everybody knows them already. It's already in first-year textbooks.

In the context of Earth expansion the element of change identified here is boudinage, or large-scale boudinage, or regional boudinage, or (one step further) boudinage of the lithosphere.  The term was coined at the outcrop scale, but it occurs on all scales, and was identified as such in the beginning; Lohest who coined the term (in 1908) identified the uplift of the entire Bastogne region of Belgium as a result of boudinage.  That this scale factor has been ignored for nearly a century is irrelevant because it is validated in the principle of scale-invariance that has similarly existed, and thus belongs to everyone.  There are no marks for pointing out the significance of scale, because all that's doing is potentially drawing attention to others' deficit in not having done so themselves, but who would insist is not a deficit at all, .. they just "never bothered" (because it is self-evident, .. in first-year text-books and everybody knows it already so why should they?).  To do so just invites a defensive  "Yeah-yeah, so what, .. everybody knows that", but at the same time elicits an unstated but epiphanous, "..Actually, we never saw it quite like that.."  But there are no marks for drawing attention to the whole, the pattern, "the whole being more than the sum of the parts", when the parts are already well known.   And no marks either for highlighting the unstated contradictions of Plate Tectonics that undermine that paradigm, and that will eventually lead to change.

3.  Belling the cat.  So, no marks for pointing out what everybody "already knows" - that the change to Earth expansion is inevitable, that it is already in motion under the aegis of lithospheric boudinage, that it belongs to everyone through the simple geological principle of scale-invariance, and therefore that it very much *does*present a challenge to physics.  Physics already knows it has more problems than you can poke a stick at ("boson-like particles discovered on the stroke of a funding midnight" notwithstanding).  But who will bell *that* cat?  The excitement attached to the scale-invariance principle in that field that has led to the creamery of Big Bing theory could just as well be read as an applecart in disarray.  The increase in the Earth's curved surface area with time is not in geological question, but the implications for a mantle volume /mass increase very much is, and must be found in physical theory.  So again theory will be pitched against fact, so we shouldn't expect resolution any time soon.

4.  Advertsing serendipity as a means to discovery before 'science' encountered 'The Method'. (Boudinage as an organising principle for the location and formation of ore deposits => boudinage as a key to Earth expansion.)  Serendipity of discovery is all about pattern and the larger-scale context.  The scientific method is the antithesis, .. all about elements and reductivism, and claiming relevance when some inevitable correlation is 'discovered' (/noticed) - as it invariably must, since elements are part of  pattern.  But without context the correlation is disembodied (the pale cadaverous body-parts of Plate Tectonics, levitated by faith and belief in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,  versus the in-your-face Beauty of Mother Earth, turning, .. ever turning. 

5.  Putting money where the mouth is.   And the name as well.  If Institutions of learning can make a fool of themselves by promoting Plate Tectonics, then I don't see why I can't by promoting Earth expansion.  Why not (?).  Though paying for a service provider just to get spammed, stiff knees and constipation is not going to happen for very much longer, even if it is for Sophie More's edification.  (The 'Teams of Researchers' intent on putting "Jesus Christ on a stick" can look after themselves and will get there anyway, eventually - once most of them die off).  Well, .. maybe it won't work.  I just fancied the idea of Sophie taking a shortcut and splitting her jeans on a pesky maneuver - like connecting the dots between gravity, mantle growth and magnetic field ('mechanism').  Though I don't know about a Big Bang. (That's a memory Lane thing.) 

6.  Subtexts - of which there are many.  How science is done.  The role of institutions of learning in these days of the internet ('Grooming' for institutionalisation).  Public funding of exorbitant paygates available to the 'groomed'..  Science as a career rather than a calling, and the opportunistic 'paedophiles' it attracts to itself (grooming again).  "Scientists Believe" rather than scientists think.  "The Church of Plate Tectonics."  Degredation rituals as an analogue for excommunication.   'Plank-by-plank' pussyfooting, instead of getting to the point.  'Game-playing' :: the bearpits of academia masquerading as parlours of respectable discourse. And heaps more.  I'll add them if you suggest any.

7.  What does it matter?   To think it might is a conceit of the first order.  If we had to rootle around in the bottom of the bag we might come up with the one about focussing where ore deposits are most likely to occur, .. which I guess is useful to the economic affairs of man, but that's old hat now.  And anyway with the amount of red and green tape obstructing whichever way we turn that might no longer be so now.  Use has been usurped by expediency.  It's all got too hard.  The fun's gone out of it.  In some strange way we seem to be living in an increasingly dystopian and despotic world sold to us, as marketeers will, as 'democratically improved', but isn't.  Or maybe it is, and that's just the price that has to be paid when a boundary is crossed and things no longer work the way they should according to the rules..

As far as Earth expansion is concerned the Earth is not going to blow up any time soon, .. so what does it matter?  Geology has little to say about the quantum world ever since physics demonstrated its p-p-pyrotechnic p-p-pomposity'.


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So, .. drawing a line.  That concludes about ten years of posting on the net (1. sci.geo.geology (don's blog), 2. website, 3. Rationalskepticism, 4.  Blogger).  There are a few loose ends that remain to be tidied up, but the gist of it is all there ("I-Ching").  The Earth is getting bigger, .. "expanding".   For sure.

Which returns me to the question why did I bother (stating the obvious that has been stated before)?  To which the best answer I can give is "Just because".  Self-assertion is like that. I'm a bully at heart when I can hide behind the internet with an identity that nobody would bother to steal,  but like others I would be a coward when confronted with the discipline and retribution that the institutionalised power of the academic world can muster, if I was part of that.  Which I'm not.  Which is why I can do it. And those who are, can't.

Now I have to go and put the rubbish out - which has accummulated (somewhat; ten years, after all), then go out to play.  Get a life.

A big thanks to all readers for indulging me this.  The thought of that, and the needle instigating Jihad in the first place has largely been the motivation for writing it. 

Ciao.

[20210407.  Well that was nearly (/ effectively was) a decade ago.  Memory Lane.  You do get strangely afflicted sometimes. It's a kind of madness, I guess, but out of that deeper exploration does arise a sense of connectedness and meaning (maybe) that eludes younger years. (But to what end?)]

[ See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-
http://www.platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/