戴榕菁 2023年我贴出了“当哲学被藐视之后。。。。”及“当哲学被藐视之后。。。。（更新版）”介绍我去年贴出的英文文章“When Philosophy is Disparaged”。最近我将该文扩展为一本4万多字的书。下面是该书的内容： When Philosophy is Disparaged (2024ed.) Rongqing Dai Contents PREFACE.. 4 INTRODUCTION.. 6 PART ONE RELATIVITY.. 9 1. The Baffling Ignorance of the Irreversibility Entailed by the 1st Postulate of Special Relativity. 10 2. The Jaw-dropping Relativistic Chronology. 12 3. The Misleading Diagnosis for the Apparently Longer Lifespan of the Muon. 13 3.1. Reasonable considerations for investigating the muon lifespan issue. 14 4. The Stunning Worldwide Acceptance of Two Obviously Problematic Experiments. 16 4.1. Hafele-Keating experiment 16 4.2. Pound-Rebka experiment 17 5. The Denial of the Galilean Superposition for the Sake of the 2nd Postulate of Special Relativity. 19 5.1. Sagnac experiment --- the hilarious fate of an good experiment 19 5.2. The disproval of special relativity by Sagnac experiment 21 5.3. The influence of Sagnac’s goal and claim upon the misinterpretation. 21 5.4. More profound causes. 22 6. The Interesting Process of Denying the Absolute Space and Time. 23 6.1. The amusing roles of the most famous failed experiment and the nonexistent cosmic center 23 6.2. Time is not as soft as people have thought for the past century. 24 6.3. Inertial coordinate systems as the soft absolute coordinate systems. 25 6.4. Time is real 26 7. The Miscalculated Contribution of Mass to Energy (and vice versa) 27 8. Sheer Mathematical Expressions with Classic Names for Conservation Laws. 30 9. Stunning Satisfaction of Hilarious Natural Dependence upon Artificial Communication. 31 PART TWO QUANTUM THEORY.. 33 10. The Genetic Defect of Schrodinger's Cat 34 11. The Sad Tolerance of Intolerable Anomaly. 35 12. The Denial of the Uncertainty by Attosecond Experiments. 36 13. The Foundation of Action without a Clear Account 38 13.1. A force-based interpretation in the classical context 38 13.2. Discussion. 41 PART THREE ENERGY and COSMOLOGY.. 42 14. Anomalies of Energy Conservation and Perpetual Motion Machines. 43 14.1. Perpetual motion machines. 43 14.2. The myth of free energy for all 45 15. The Anti-Big-Bang Confusion. 47 PART FOUR MATH, LOGIC, and NONLINERITY.. 48 16. The Shocking Acceptance of the Continuum Hypothesis. 49 16.1. The trick of abusing the abstract notion of infinity. 50 17. The Limit of Turing Theory of the Halting Problem and Gödel Incompleteness Theorems. 52 17.1. Turing halting problem... 52 17.2. Semantically overruling the Turing conclusion. 53 17.3. Gödel incompleteness theorems. 54 17.4. A Family of self-referential theories. 55 17.4.1. The paradox of paradoxes. 55 17.4.2. Contribution to the knowledge of the difference between the whole and individuals. 57 17.4.3. The discrepancy between the reputation and the reality. 57 17.5. Discussion. 59 18. Mould Law of the Induction of Side Movements in Dynamically Nonlinear Motions. 60 18.1. Discussion. 61 PART FIVE UFO and THE REALM BEYOND NATURE.. 63 19. The Conception of Driving Flying Objects by Ionization of Air. 64 19.1. The implication of the saucer shape. 64 19.2. Questioning the antigravity speculation/rumor 64 19.3. An inspiration from nature. 65 19.3.1. The key technologies required for the conception of manmade flying saucers. 65 19.3.2. The expected functionalities with ionized propulsion system... 66 19.4. The implication of an internet image of flying saucer 67 19.5. Internal ionization propulsion system... 67 19.6 Discussion. 68 19.6.1. Potential hazardous environmental impact of using ionized propulsion system... 68 19.6.2. The real value of this section. 68 20. Nature, Supernature, Quasinature & Scientific Domain. 70 20.1. Nature as the starting point of knowing the world for humans. 71 20.2. Supernature as the Reality beyond Nature. 71 20.2.1. The difficulty of experiencing supernature. 71 20.2.2. Extra dimensions ---- the plausible account for the limit of human perception. 72 20.2.3. The proper definitions of nature and supernature. 73 20.3. Quasinature. 74 20.3.1. The extra spatial domain accessible to UFO’s. 74 20.3.2. Quasinature as a special part of supernature. 75 20.4. Scientific mandate and scientific domain. 75 20.4.1. The need to avoid involving practices with spiritual background in scientific endeavor 75 20.4.2. The proper new scientific domain. 76 20.4.3. The proper approach of exploring quasinature. 76 20.5. The identification of the quasinatural Domain. 76 20.6. Discussion. 77 PART SIX SLEEP and DREAM... 79 21. Sleep and Dream Logic. 80 21.1. An millenniums long endeavor of knowing sleep and dreams. 80 21.2. The metaphysics of sleep. 81 21.2.1. Difference in awareness. 81 21.2.2. Difference in the power of directing. 82 21.3. The philosophy of falling into sleep. 83 21.4. The logic of dreams. 83 21.4.1 The logical aspect of dreams. 84 21.4.2. The dreamer and the author in the dream... 85 21.4.3. Conclusions. 85 PART SEVEN ON THE ACADEMIA OF PHILOSOPHY.. 86 22. Academic Philosophy --- A Declined Discipline. 87 22.1. The diagnosis for the academic philosophy. 87 22.2. The replacement of truth with arguments. 87 22.3. The hijack of the title “philosophy”. 88 22.4. Wisdom expelled by “knowledge”. 89 22.5. The need for a parallel new community of professional philosophy. 89 FINAL REMARKS. 91 The causes behind the confusing ostensible disharmony. 91 Semiotic scaffolding role of scientific theories. 92 The more general role of language in the civilization. 94 A call for a revolution of the academic philosophy. 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY.. 96 ENDNOTES. 102
Over the past few years, I have been deeply shocked by my findings of what has happened in the prestigious academic world of physics and mathematics from the late 19th century to the present day. The academia of science has been constructing an ivory tower (i.e. conducting the most advanced intellectual explorations of the mankind) on a leaking foundation of cracks. More surprisingly, many mistakes in the theoretical models or experimental reports are obviously illogical, but still have been embraced as great achievements by the whole world; and the majority of the academics have been collectively ready to defend those mistakes at any time in case they are questioned or criticized. Years before I started my journey of investigating the problems in the foundations of physics and mathematics, I was first shocked by my findings of what happened in the academia of philosophy that was once called the queen of sciences. Nowadays professional philosophers would not even have the courage to proudly defend the foundational position of their discipline in the scientific world. In fact, the title of “queen of sciences” has been taken from philosophy by scientists and put on their most favorite field, which is mathematics, quite a long time ago. Then I found a profound correlation between the decline of the academia of philosophy and the problems in the academia of physics and mathematics. It was the lazy escape from the difficult to grasp metaphysical style philosophizing and the illusion of being able to advance science with observational (experimental) data and mathematical modeling alone without much philosophy that has caused both the decline of the academic philosophy and the disparagement of philosophy in the world across cultural domains. As we will see in this book, the global disparagement of philosophy combined with the decline of academic philosophy has taken a dire toll from this civilization. Consequently, despite the apparent rapid growth of global prosperity, the earth civilization is indeed rushing at a fast pace down a road towards a deep crisis. To make matters much worse, due to its intellectual challenges, the dwindling collective philosophical capacity in the world is not something that can be made up with some crash courses as for scientific and technological trainings. The decline of collective philosophical capacity would undoubtedly be hazardous for humans when facing expected or unexpected catastrophic natural disasters or man-made calamities. If there were interstellar competitions as ufologists claim, earth civilization would undoubtedly be at a scarily disadvantageous position due to the collapse of our own collective philosophical thinking capacity. This book will demonstrate through examples how philosophically erroneous thinking could lead to mistakes in physics, mathematics as well as some other areas, some of which have lasted for more than a century or even longer without being recognized. The stale status of the existing academia of philosophy would also be discussed with a viable plan of making change of it.
From ancient times to the recent past, scientific research has always been operating as a tripod engine with observation (experiment), mathematics, and philosophy as its three supporting legs to enrich the repository of knowledge. As Aristotle pointed out more than two millenniums ago in Metaphysics (Aristotle 350BC a) [[1]], all beings share the common logic for being qua being, and thus philosophy as the steward of logic has always been supposed to function as the agent to digest the knowledge acquired through mathematics and observations and thus serve as the tie to bind all scientific works together. Sadly, after civilization entered the modern age, science no longer operates as a balanced tripod machine, but instead a severely tilted bipedal robot with a shrunken philosophical tail. Metaphysical reasoning or speculative discourse in scientific writings has gradually vanished over the past century. Although there is no shortage of diverse hypotheses in today's scientific papers (especially theoretical physics papers), even the best ones rarely count as good philosophical speculation, because they are usually not the result of deep metaphysical reasoning, but mainly of imagination. Human imagination is often disconnected from reality. In fact, even the scientific literature written in the style of philosophical discourse around the turn of 20th century (which can now be regarded as historical records) was already at the end of the inertial flow of ancient philosophy. That was the time period when scientists began to put their faith mainly in mathematical modeling and observational data (from lab experiments etc). Besides, the drastic decline of academic philosophy began almost right before the end of the so-called classical scientific era and the beginning of the so-called modern scientific era. As a result, while the destitution of the capacity of high quality speculative thinking clearly accounts for the current stalemate of frontier physics, as well as in many other scientific fields, scientists still collectively despise the role of philosophy in the scientific enterprise simply because they have no idea what good philosophical thinking could do in scientific research for they never tasted it since their school days. To make matters even worse, nowadays scientific workers would often try their best to defend some logically evident errors left by their predecessors, simply because of their dearth of the required philosophical capacity to make full sense of the logical complexities behind the pages of fancy mathematical expressions and observational data. This book is devoted to demonstrating that simple logical mistakes due to philosophical weaknesses could not only have serious theoretical or practical consequences, but also persist for decades to centuries. In addition, this book will discuss the devastating staleness of the existing academia of philosophy and the need and vision for a parallel new professional philosophical community. The whole book is divided into Preface, Introduction, Part One to Part Seven, and Final Remarks. Part One Relativity contains sections 1 to 9 with subsections under some of the sections. In this part of the book I systematically disproved the special relativity which has dominated the discipline of physics (especially quantum physics) since 1905, by pointing out its logical defects and debunking some experiments claimed to verify SR; particularly, I modified the famous mass-energy relationship, etc. Part Two Quantum Theory contains sections 10 to 13 with subsections under some of the sections. In this part of the book I discussed some defects in the existing quantum theory; particularly, I corrected the famous de Broglie wavelength formula. Part Three Energy and Cosmology contains three sections. Section 14 is for the discussion of the anomalies in energy conservation issues, and clarifying the real meaning of perpetual motion machines with examples, and section 15 is for debunking the anti-big-bang claim. Part Four Math, Logic, and Nonlinearity contains three sections. Section 17 debunks the famous Cantorian scheme of counting infinite sets, by pointing out its delusionary nature of playing with the infinitely big repository of numbers. Accordingly, it disproves the Cantor continuum hypothesis that has been deemed a very difficult problem by the mathematical community and thus listed as the first problem of the famous Hilbert 23 open problems. Some mathematicians even claimed that they proved that hypothesis, but as demonstrated in section 17 that it is in fact a false hypothesis. Section 18 discusses the over portrayed logical significance of the so-called famous self-referential paradoxes. Section 19 is a demonstration of the importance of correct philosophical thinking through the introduction of the Mould’s law. Part Five UFO and Supernature contains two sections. Section 20 points out that after it has been officially recognized, the UFO phenomena should by default become a mandatory philosophical subject for humans on earth. In addition, section 20 also reviewed the logical loopholes of some existing speculative theory concerning the technology behind the reported UFO phenomena, and then presented a conceptual design of building flying saucers with known human technologies. Section 21 serves as a philosophical preparation for humans to explore beyond nature at this new era. Part Six Sleep and Dream contains section 22 with 4 subsections. In this part, the enrichment of human knowledge through metaphysical introspective examinations of sleep and dreams is presented to demonstrate the power of philosophy in knowing human psychology. Part Seven On the Academia of Philosophy contains section 23 with 5 subsections. This section discusses how bad the academic philosophy has become for the past one plus centuries and analyzes the causes behind the phenomenon. Most importantly, a viable remedy for the problem is proposed in this section. In the Final Remarks, in addition to the summarizing remarks, an effort is made to explain the confusing contrast between the apparent constantly thriving modern advanced technologies and the shaky foundation of academic philosophy and theoretical physics, discuss the patterns of scientific evolution, and call for a revolution in academic philosophy. ****** The metaphysical style philosophical analysis that I employ in this book is one of the basic types of ancient intellectual activity. But sadly, today's intellectuals have long forgotten this type of analysis. Not only are they unable to use it, but also would it be extremely difficult for them to read, which is indeed one of the most important causes behind all the hilarious mistakes made by the supposedly brightest class of people in this world over the past century or more.
For the past century, people have become familiar with basic features of the relativistic effects of motions prescribed by the special theory of relativity; but one important aspect of the effects that would be entailed by the theory of special relativity has been basically missing, which is the irreversibility of the relativistic processes. According to the mainstream claim of relativity, when the relative speed of two system decreases to zero, things would go back to the status at rest based on the Lorentz transformations. However, as discussed by Dai (2022a) [[2]], the first postulate of the special theory of relativity would logically dictate irreversible physical as well as chemical changes in the remote system, which is logically unreasonable and naturally impossible. The first postulate of the special theory of relativity is also called as the principle of relativity, which states that all inertial coordinate systems are equivalent in describing natural laws. In the meantime, according to the two most famous icons of the special theory of relativity, the Lorentz transformations and the Einstein mass-energy relationship, we know that when an object is in motion, it would contract by a factor of (1 - v2/c2)1/2 in the moving direction while the sizes in the other two spatial dimensions remain the same: L’ = L (1 - v2/c2)1/2, (1.1) and also acquire an increase of mass as: ∆m = ∆E/c2, (1.2) where ∆E is the acquired kinetic energy for the motion. The increased mass and decreased volume would logically lead to the following conclusion: [The density of the moving object increases as the result of its motion.] (*) The most troublesome thing is that according to the first postulate of special relativity, the above statement (*) is not pure imagination but rather physically real. This would entail irreversible physical and chemical changes that are impossible to happen in nature as demonstrated in the following two thought experiments: Experiment one: Permanent plastic change of a cuboid of plasticine Suppose we have a cuboid of plasticine with a longitudinal length of L and sectional area of A in a frame of reference K and there is an observer O’ in a frame of reference K’ that is moving at speed v relative to K in the direction parallel to L. Now according to FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis (1.1) and Einstein mass-energy relationship (1.2), we would have a volume reduction A∆L and a mass augmentation of ∆m, and thus a density increment of ∆ρ= (∆Lm+L∆m)/AL2 (1.3) where both ∆L and ∆m are positive. However, according to the theory of solid mechanics, the deformation of a solid in one dimension would also cause the deformation of the solid in the other two dimensions (e.g. Wikipedia, Deformation; Wikipedia, Poisson) [[3],[4]]; but in the case of a cuboid of plasticine, the non-relativistic deformation in the other two dimensions would be permanent and would not disappear even though the length in the moving direction could be assumed to restore to the original L after the relative motion stops according to special relativity. Experiment two: Melting wax Suppose we have an insulated box filled with air consisting of molecular nitrogen and oxygen only (Based on example from Wikipedia, Adiabatic) [[5]] at 38℃ and also containing a wax bar that will melt at 40℃. Now a spaceship at a distance away is launched and a while later it reaches the speed about 18% of the speed of light c. Then according to the special theory of relativity, the astronaut O’ in the spaceship who is knowledgeable of the insulated box would estimate that the density of the box and everything inside would have increased more than 1.6% due to the reduction of the volume and the addition of mass, and thus the temperature within the box should have adiabatically risen to exceed 40℃, which means that the wax bar is melting. Since the melting of wax is thermodynamically irreversible, the melted wax in the insulated box “observed” by the astronaut O’ will never come back to its original intact state again. Then the astronaut returns to the launch site and go to check the insulated box after he has landed. When he opens the box, if the wax is melted as he “observed” in space according to the special theory of relativity, then the whole universe would be in a complete mess. But fortunately, as we can say with confidence, the wax in the insulated box would not melt simply because of the motion of some irrelevant spaceship faraway. It is important to notice that in each of the above two examples, the observer O’ does not have direct connection with the observed object which could justify a cause and effect relationship, and thus O’ and the observed object could be just two randomly moving objects in the universe.
At the core of special relativity lies the peculiar light-seeing-based philosophy which claims that the happening of event P is meaningful to event Q only when the (imaginary) light emanating from the spot of P could reach the spot of Q according to the speed of light in vacuum c; vice versa. According to this special logic, to anyone in the spot of Q, P never happens until the light emanating from the spot of P could reach the spot of Q. If event P and event Q cannot “see” each other, they are considered as irrelevant in the universe. Both relativistic simultaneity and relativistic causality are established on top of this peculiar philosophy of determining the mutual reality of things. We might call this philosophy as relativistic chronological logic because it determines how a relativistic scholar should think of the sequential influence between things, including how to determine simultaneity and causality. The most famous manifestation the relativistic chronological logic might be the definition of light cone that was conceived by Minkowski (e.g. Wikipedia, Light) [[6]], which describes the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event at a single point in space and a single moment in time and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime; but the most astonishing application of the relativistic chronological logic could be found in cosmology where we often hear claims that it is meaningless to even talk about the happening of a cosmological event before we can virtually see it (according to the calculation based on speed of light). This would lead to the hilarious conclusion that the explosion X of a celestial body of 1000 light-year away 999 years ago happened later than the explosion Y of a celestial body of 5 light-year away 5 years ago, despite that the relativistic cosmologists would still study the explosion X as 994 years earlier than the explosion Y because they know that if they do not do so, the whole cosmological causality chain network would be messed up so that it would be impossible for them to correctly study the cosmological history and dynamics. Obviously, the light-seeing-based relativistic chronology creates a cracked logical framework that cannot be consistent with itself or with the logical and semantic systems of the general culture. As a matter of fact, even from the most utilitarian point of view, the abovementioned relativistic causality view is problematic because even before the observer sees the light from a cosmological event, physical events within each celestial body and interactions between all celestial bodies never cease to happen, which is not determined by whether it is possible for an observer to see anything of them at all. On the contrary, only if the observer respects the objective happenings before he could see them he could possibly understand them correctly.
In this section let’s look into a famous claim among the so-called experimental testing of time dilation that the apparent elongated lifespan of muons travelling through the atmosphere is the result of time dilation. The theory normally goes like this (e.g. Wikipedia, Experimental) [[7]]: The emergence of the muons is caused by the collision of cosmic rays with the upper atmosphere, after which the muons reach Earth. Suppose T is the lifespan of the muon measured in the earth inertial frame S, and T’0 is the lifespan of the muon according to the proper time of a clock in the inertial frame S’ comoving with the muon, corresponding with the mean decay time of the muon in its proper frame, then because of time dilation we have T = γT’0 > T’0, (3.1) Where the Lorentz factor γ = 1/(1 - v2/c2)1/2, from which the relativistic scholars conclude: the reason why the muon can pass through the thickness of earth atmosphere within its supposedly very short lifespan is because when observing from the earth inertial frame S its lifespan becomes longer thus it can move farther with the same value of the supposed lifespan at the same relative speed v. Then when stepping from S into S’, the relativistic scholars would use time dilation no more but shift to length contraction as follows L = L’0 /γ < L’0, (3.2) where L’0 is the proper distance in S’ that the muon could travel within its lifespan, and L is the distance that the muon can travel in S when calculated in S’, from which the relativistic scholars conclude: the reason why the muon can pass through the thickness of earth atmosphere within its supposedly very short lifespan is because when observing from muon’s inertial frame S’, the earth atmosphere becomes thinner thus muon needs shorter time to pass through it at the same relative speed v. Here we should take heed of the typical asymmetric uses of the Lorentz transformations: time dilation is cited when the discussion is based on the observation from S while length contraction is cited when the discussion is based on the observation from S’. This asymmetric uses of Lorentz transformations in S and S’ when explaining the seemingly longer lifespan of the muon is not accidental but due to inevitable causes: If they continue to use time dilation when stepping into S’, since the relative speed v would not change with the Lorentz transformation, we would have L = vT = vT’0/γ = L’0 /γ < L’0 (3.3) Although (3.3) and (3.2) look exactly the same, they actually read very differently because with (3.2) we are focusing on the relativistic change of spatial span while with (3.3) we are focusing on the relativistic change of temporal duration. More specifically, (3.2) reads as “the thickness of the earth atmosphere in S that the muon needs to pass through becomes thinner when observing from S’”, but (3.3) reads as “the distance L that the muon can travel in S within its lifespan is shorter than the distance L’0 that the muon can travel in its own frame S’ within its lifespan”. Obviously, the effect indicated by (3.3) would logically cancel out the effect indicated by (3.2): even though now the muon only needs to travel a shorter distance in order to pass through the earth atmosphere, it would also die within a shorter distance therefore it might still not be able to pass through that shorter distance. Here the catch that causes this confliction is that the speed v and the lifespan T’0 of the muon in S’ are two constants for the analysis. Therefore, when we make observation from S, we might conclude that the muon can travel a longer distance at the same speed v because the earthly observed lifespan is longer than T’0, but when we make observation from S’, we would find that a shorter period of time T in S would be corresponding to T’0 in S’ according to Lorentz transformation for time dilation, which entails that the muon would only travel a shorter distance in S within its lifespan T’0. Obviously, these two conclusions contradict each other. This need of asymmetric treatment due to the difficulty of symmetric treatment is a common problem with special relativity. In fact, if we cite length contraction instead of time dilation when observing from S, it would right away lead to the opposite conclusion of a longer lifespan for a moving muon: we might find that when observed in S whatever distance the muon travels would become shorter and thus the muon would die within a shorter distance than calculated in S’. Obviously, it is logically unsound to assume that time dilation is the cause of the apparent longer lifespan of muons in the earth atmosphere. Philosophically speaking, the reasonable approach to investigate the said phenomenon should be conducted by taking into consideration of the following two aspects: 1) Given that air density is much higher in the lower atmosphere than the upper atmosphere while cosmic rays are constantly penetrating the atmosphere with high magnetic rigidity (Viel, 2021) [[8]], it would be more reasonable to question the validity of the assumption that muons in the atmosphere are solely created at the upper atmosphere. This is because the increase of air density near the ground compared to the upper boundary of atmosphere is tremendous while the reduction of cosmic rays due to the influence of earth magnetic field is only a small portion as pointed by Viel (2021) [8], and thus there would be more chances for the cosmic ray to create muons in the lower region with higher air density. 2) It would also be meaningful to investigate the impact of the dynamics of moving in the earth gravitational field upon the lifespan of muons until some definite knowledge can be obtained for the issue.
20th Century is famous for many experiments that have earned the global century long fame for the claimed verification of the special and general theories of relativity, among which the most famous ones would be the Hafele-Keating experiment and the Pound-Rebka experiment. However, as Dai (2023a) [[9]] demonstrated, the above mentioned experiments either disproved the relativity theories or failed to provide any logical support to the relativity theories. 4.1. Hafele-Keating experimentIn 1971, physicist Hafele and astronomer Keating took a set of the most advanced atomic clocks at the time and flew eastward and westward around the earth on commercial airliners to verify what they called as the relativistic clock paradox (i.e. the famous twin paradox) once and for all. However, in their experimental report (Hafele and Keating 1971) [[10]], they set their frame of reference at the top of the North Pole in order to make it an inertial system without being impacted by the rotation of the earth. When doing this, they astoundingly overlooked is that the twin paradox applies only for twins, not for any group of more than two parties. For example, suppose there are triplets A, B, and C. If A and B fly out in opposite directions at the same speed and C stays on the earth, then C would conclude according to the special theory of relativity that that both A and B are younger but they should be equally young, while A and B would not consider themselves as equally young according to the special theory of relativity since they are moving relative to each other. Now when conducting their theoretical analysis by setting their frame of reference at the North Pole, while their investigated objects were either on the airplane or in the U.S. Naval Observatory, both moving relative to the frame of reference selected for analysis, Hefele and Keating practically turned their analyzed problem into a triplet game instead of a supposed twin paradox issue. Hence, the analysis of Hefele and Keating about their experimental results by selecting the frame of reference over the North Pole would not only be completely meaningless for the twin paradox issue that they were meant to verify but also definitely lead to results that defy the special relativity, just as demonstrated in the above example of triplet A, B, and C. However, surprisingly, they found their experimental data matching their erroneous analysis very well. Further, the data collection of Hafele-Keating experiment was also problematic because, according to Hafele-Keating’s report (1971) [10], their data were provided by the airliners at that time based on very rough discrete record drawn on blackboard at that time: [The eastward trip began on 4 October 1971 at 19h30mU.T. and lasted 65.4 hours with 41.2 hours in flight. The westward trip began during the following week on 13 October at 19h40m U.T. and lasted 80.3 hours with 48.6 hours in flight. Flight data necessary for numerical evaluation of Eq. 4 were provided by the various flight captains. In most cases they traced their flight path on an approximate flight map and recorded the time and aircraft ground speed and altitude at various navigation check points along the flight path. This information divided the eastward trip into 125 intervals and westward trip into 108 intervals. The latitude and longitude for each check point, read directly from the flight maps, combined with time (U.T.) over each check point permits calculation of an average ground speed, latitude, and eastward azimuth for each interval. The average altitude for each interval was taken as the average of the altitudes at the end points. This information then permits numerical evaluation of the integral in Eq. 4. Table 1 gives the predicted time differences resulting from these calculations.] This obviously did not hold up to the desired precision for verifying the expected non-classical effects of relativity. Later in 1975 to 1976, a team of University of Maryland did similar experiments based on the idea of Hafele-Keating experiment with a turboprop plane flying at a lower altitude and a slower speed, in the local skies. Their experimental outcome was demonstrated to be basically in consistence with the outcome of the Hafele-Keating experiment. In 1996 National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of United Kingdom imitated the Hafele-Keating experiment by flying a round trip from London to Washington DC and back; in 2010 the same lab once again repeated the experiment in a similar way by flying around the globe along the route of London - Los Angeles - Auckland - Hong Kong – London. Both of the NPL experiments demonstrated good consistency with the Hafele-Keating experiment (Wikipedia, Hafele) [[11]]. In 2010 NIST tested the gravitational impact upon time (NIST 2010) [[12]] and the outcome at a linearly extrapolated scale was very consistent with Hafele-Keating experiment as well. Now with the awareness that the theoretical analysis of Hafele and Keating completely defied the special relativity and their data collection was problematic, based on the fact that all the above mentioned experimental results including the Hafele-Keating experiment and all other subsequent ones conducted by others were in very well consistency with the theoretical analysis of Hafele and Keating, the simple and straight logical conclusion we can draw is that all those experiments have demonstrated that the special relativity is wrong. Accordingly, the worldwide acceptance of Hafele-Keating experiment as the verification of both special and general relativities are indeed stunning. 4.2. Pound-Rebka experimentIn 1959, Robert Pound and Glen A. Rebka Jr conducted an experiment in a tower at Harvard University's Jefferson laboratory to test the time-dilation theory of general relativity (Wikipedia, Pound) [[13]]. They put a source of gamma rays at the top of the tower which would shoot gamma rays downwards to a receiving apparatus with substances that would only absorb photons of the frequency close to the emitting frequency located at the bottom of the tower. They claimed that due to the gravitational effect, according to general relativity, time goes slower at the bottom of the tower than at the top of the tower, and thus the frequency of light would increase when the photon moving downward from the top and cause blue-shift, which they argued could be offset with the red-shift effect created by the upward movement of the source so that some photons would be absorbed by the receiving apparatus when reaching the bottom of the tower, serving as the proof that light does experience blue-shift when moving downwards in the gravitational field. They installed their source of gamma rays on a vibrating speaker in order to create the upward movement of the source. As the outcome of the experiment, they reported that the red-shift caused by their artificially created upward movement of the source was offset by the blue-shift effect as predicted by the general theory of relativity. However, they astoundingly overlooked the fact that it was impossible for their experiment to discern between the impacts of the upward and downward movements of the source with true objectivity without a subjective presumption when the source was installed on a vibrating speaker no matter what kind measures they took. In case that the frequency of the downward light does not increase as general relativity predicted but rather decreases with the same proportionality, they would get the same outcome. Further, since during the vibration on the speaker, the source would also experience the moments of zero speed when changing its direction of movement, their experimental outcome could even be good for the case with no red-shift or blue-shift effect of gravity to the light at all. The only reason why they could draw the conclusion of having observed the blue-shift of light in the gravitational field through their experiment was because they assumed that the prediction of time-dilation by the general theory of relativity was correct. That is to say they knew the results before the experiment and used their relevant knowledge to judge the results of the experiment. That makes their experiment meaningless or at least redundant. Once again, it is utterly surprising that the Pound-Rebka experiment could be hailed as the verification of general relativity by the whole world since 1959.
In classic mechanics, the Galilean superposition could be expressed as follows: when there are two objects A and B moving with respect to the coordinate origin O, if the velocity of A with respect to O is VA, the velocity of B with respect to O is VB, and the velocity of B with respect to A is VBA, then we have: VB = VA + VBA (5.1) When applying this formula to the speed of light, assuming the speed of the light source A with respect to coordinate origin O is VA and the speed of light with respect to the light source is c, then the speed of light with respect to the coordinate origin O would be: CO = VA + c (5.2) where the speed of light c is one of the fundamental physical constants with a value that is exactly equal to 299792458 meters per second. It is exact because, by a 1983 international agreement, a meter is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299792458 second. This particular value was chosen in order to provide a more accurate definition of the meter that still agreed as much as possible with the definition used before. The time unit second is in turn defined to be the interval of time occupied by 9192631770 cycles of the radiation emitted by a caesium-133 atom in a transition between two specified energy states. (e.g. Wikipedia, Speed; NIST, 2019) [[14], [15]] The special theory of relativity is constructed by denying the validity of formula (5.2), and assume as its second postulate that the speed of light in vacuum c is constant to all observers. However, as discussed by Dai (2022b) [[16]], this postulate of invariant speed of light in vacuum is not only logically defective for its entailment of impossible results as demonstrated with a recently designed thought experiment, but also has been experimentally proved wrong more than a century ago by Sagnac and others. In 1913 French physicist Georges Sagnac conducted an experiment which substantially challenged the second postulate of the special theory of relativity. During the experiment, a beam of light is split into two beams which are made to follow the same path but in opposite directions, and on return to the point of entry the two light beams are allowed to exit the ring and undergo interference as recorded by an interferometer. When Sagnac (Sagnac, 1913) [[17]] let the table on which the light paths were established to rotate slowly (1 to 2 revolutions per second), he recorded the difference between the paths of those two beams, which was a clear indication that the speed of light relative to the observers obeys the classic Galilean rule of superposition. The mechanism of the Sagnac experiment has been named as Sagnac effect and devices built with Sagnac effect are routinely used in guidance and navigation systems for commercial airliners, nautical ships, spacecraft, and in many other applications. We might see in the work presented on Mathpages (2022) [[18]] when the author even admits that devices made of Sagnac effect are capable of detecting rotation rates as slight as 0.00001 degree per hour. However, the physical revelation of the Sagnac experiment has been surprisingly misinterpreted for the past more than a century period of time as a typical example of the correctness of relativity. The most hilarious part of this is that the relativistic derivations of Sagnac effect would always share the commonplace of first admitting that the speed of light of those light beams in opposite directions equal to c - v and c + v, and then managing to prove that the constant speed of light in vacuum makes sense in Sagnac experiment by citing the Lorentz transformations. The following image is captured from ( Wikipedia, Sagnac) [[19]], which shows a critical step in all mathematical derivations to demonstrate that Sagnac experiment proves the constancy of speed of light would apply the Galilean superposition:
Image 5.1. Critical steps of proving that Sagnac experiment denies the Galilean superposition. (Source: Wikipedia, Sagnac) [19]. The mathematical steps shown in the above image are typical Galilean superposition that is familiar to any good student in high school introductory physics class; but they are also indispensible critical steps for all mathematical works (e.g. in Mathpages 2022 [18] as well) claiming to be the demonstration that Sagnac experiment proves the constancy of speed of light in vacuum, i.e. disproves the Galilean superposition, although different authors might present the relevant steps with different mathematical symbols or different expressions just like different text books might present the same Galilean superposition in different forms. The reason for the above shown steps to be indispensible for the “proof” of Sagnac’s support to the constancy of speed of light is because we would have t1 = t2, or Δt = 0 in the result if we use the constancy of speed of light instead of the Galilean superposition in the derivation, which means there would be no more Sagnac effect in the result at all. Now we see that the academics of physics have been using Galilean superposition to directly “prove” a conclusion that would deny the validity of Galilean superposition all along since 1913, a kind of false operation normally only seen in failed test sheets of disqualified high school students. The correct interpretation of Sagnac experiment would be that it experimentally proved that the Galilean superposition applies to the motion of light as well, that is to say, fromula (5.2) is valid. But as mentioned earlier, the special theory of relativity was established by denying the validity of (5.2), and thus the experimentally verification of (5.2) indeed provides a direct experimental denial of the validity of the special theory of relativity. Further, as shown by Dai (2024a) [[20]], by assuming VA < c, and A moves at V1 with respect to object B1, and B1 has a velocity of V2 with respect to B2,... B n-1 has a velocity Vn with respect to Bn, if assuming Vi ≈ c for any number i from 1 to n, then we have: Cn ≈ (n+1) c (5.3) As n goes to infinity, Cn goes to infinity. Respecting truth and denying untruth should always be the ultimate principle for scientific explorations and thus humans do not have any excuse for making collective mistakes such as misinterpreting the outcome of Sagnac experiment for more than one hundred years. Nevertheless, it might also be meaningful for us to notice the distractive effect of Sagnac’s goal for his experiment and correspondingly his claim of what his experiment proved. Sagnac was trying to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether and claimed that he succeeded in doing so while the connection between his results and the existence of aether was not soundly convincing. As we could see from the above discussions, the need to assume the velocities of light to be c + v and c - v by the relativistic scholars has already proved that the constancy of speed of light in vacuum is wrong. That is to say, the result of Sagnac experiment could be well explained without the need of the superfluous notion of aether that is attached to extra unneeded attributes. However, more than one hundred years ago, when the scientific focus was still not completely off the topic whether space was filled with the luminiferous aether, Sagnac’s goal of searching for aether and his claim of having found it could have practically played a role of distracting the attention of scientists and caused them to ignore the fact that Sagnac experiment had offered a good example that speed of light in vacuum is not constant to all. But on the other hand, humans should not use any excuse to shed off the collective responsibility for such a long-lasting mistake, just like that a failed student cannot blame some intentional distractions of tricky questions in a test. We need to introspect about our worldwide culture in the scientific community to find more profound social cultural causes behind this phenomenon. By looking into the century long misinterpretation of the Sagnac experiment, we might find at least three profound philosophical causes behind. First, we might see from this phenomenon that people often defend something simply because the big name of the thing makes them feel that they should defend it instead of that they really understand what they are defending. This mindset of placing social benefits above truth is against the fundamental principle of philosophy which values truth above utilitarian needs. Second, despite that human intelligent capacity (especially the intelligent capacity of scientific elites) is often unrealistically exaggerated, intellectually humans are indeed quite weak in general, vulnerable to various kinds psychological distractions, and could even be collectively under some distractions for very long time without being able to pull out from the social psychological trap. Third, more importantly, the misconception of the separation of science from philosophy has sadly caused the social disparagement of philosophy in the scientific community for the past centuries, which has severely crippled the human collective scientific capacity in general while human self-puffing-up confidence in human scientific capacity has reached its pinnacle. This issue is at the root of the above two issues.
In 1687, Isaac Newton formally put forth the notion of absolute space and time in his masterpiece Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, it then became the backbone of the classic mechanics until it was banished and replaced by the relativistic spacetime at the turn of 20th century. The failed efforts of searching the luminiferous aether and the cosmic center played an important role in the process of denying the absoluteness of space and time (Dai, 2022c) [[21]]; however, the logic behind this process is very amusing and thus philosophically interesting as we might see from this section. Nevertheless, in the end of this section we will also learn the unintentional role of this process in a semiotic scaffolding practice that helped humans to reach a meaningful destiny of knowing the nature of space and time. 6.1. The amusing roles of the most famous failed experiment and the nonexistent cosmic center 19th century was the time when physicists were exploring the electromagnetic world by making analogies to the classic mechanics. Naturally, they had the idea of supposing a medium to support light just like air or water as media to carry sound waves or surface water waves, and they called that medium as luminiferous aether as an analogy to the ancient notion of aether for the medium of gravity (van Lunteren, F.H., 2002) [[22]]. This idea instigated a surge of researches trying to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether or even to find a way to measure it. This goal failed badly, and the most famous of those efforts was the experiment conducted by American physicists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 and published in November of the same year (e.g. Wikipedia, Michelson–Morley) [[23]]. Since then the Michelson-Morley experiment has been called the most famous failed experiment in history because it became an important catalyst for the birth of the special theory of relativity. Starting from 1880’s, a peculiar aesthetical fondness drove scientists to demand that the Maxwell equation should look the same in all inertial frame of references, which is undoubtedly the origin for the first postulate of the special theory of relativity, i.e. the principle of relativity, which could be deemed as an extension of the Galileo's principle of relativity (e.g. Wikipedia, Galileo) [[24]]. But even if the Maxwell equation looks the same in all inertial frames of reference, the need of a media for light to propagate might become an important reason for people to think that the actual speed of light could change with respect to the observers of different velocities. Therefore, the missing of aether shown by the failed Michelson-Morley experiment made many to believe that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back because they thought that the missing aether is the proof that the speed of light should be constant in vacuum to all observers, which became the second postulate of the special theory of relativity. The establishment of the special relativity in turn caused the denial of the notion of absolute space and time by claiming that space and time are relatively relating to each other through the Lorentz transformations. As we have seen since early 2022, the special theory of relativity is wrong and the failed outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment could be easily and definitely explained by the following equation based on the revised postulate of speed of light in vacuum (Dai, 2022d) [[25]]: cab = c + ∆vab (6.1) where cab is the speed of light in vacuum between two objects a and b, c is the speed of light in vacuum given by the Maxwell formula, and ∆vab = va// - vb// is the relative speed between objects a and b. From (8.1) we can see that the reason why the Michelson-Morley experiment failed is because with their experimental set up, ∆v = 0, and thus in theory we should have cab = c; of course, since the surface of earth is not in pure inertial motion but with slight acceleration, with high precision Michelson-Morley style experiments, we might still detect the tiny ∆v caused by the acceleration of earth. Another important reason for the notion of absolute space and time to be banished at the turn of 20th century accompanying the birth of theories of relativity, as indicated by Einstein (1916) [[26]], was the thought that Newton’s absolute space and time would require a centre of universe with a maximum density of stars. The failure of identifying such kind of cosmic center became another reason for denying the notion of absolute space and time. However, as discussed by Dai (2022c; 2022d) [21,25], we do not need any fixed coordinate system, not to mention a universe center, for us to make sense of absolute space and time. Now when we look back to the whole thing, we might find that the above logic of using the failed Michelson-Morley experiment and the unfound cosmic center as the reason of denying the absoluteness of space and time is amusingly ill-founded. Here we see such a strange role of the failed Michelson-Morley experiment and the unfound cosmic center in the banishment of the notion of absolute space and time: people first artificially fabricated the concepts of aether and cosmic center and tried hard to prove their existences, then the failures of proving their existences were used as the evidences that the space and time should not be absolute but rather relatively relating to each other. In other words, scientists first created some nonexistent things so that they could prove their nonexistence and then used those proofs to conclude that space and time are not absolute. If this type of logic is allowed in everyday life, we could imagine what might happen to this world. In addition to the Lorentz time dilation, Einstein’s general relativity proposed that time could be impacted by gravity. Nevertheless, Einstein himself provided contradictory pictures about the gravitational impact upon time. In the framework of general relativity, it has been commonly known that time is assumed to go slower with a greater gravity influence; however, in a 1912 paper, Einstein (1912) [[27]] himself provided an excellent example to contradict his own theory of gravitational impact upon time in which what is called by Einstein as the “gravitational clock” would run faster when the gravity is greater. Therefore, as discussed by Dai (2022e) [[28]], the notion of time dilation depicted by either special or general relativity is problematic. Nevertheless, here I would not completely deny the possible change of the tempo of time, rather, I would just point out that time would not be dilated in the ways that the special and general theories of relativity have told us. But on the other hand, if the variation of the tempo of time in certain way could be scientifically proved someday, we could once again appreciate the semiotic scaffolding roles of the special and general theories of relativity. Now we know that special relativity is incorrect because both of its postulates are wrong, and the gravitational time dilation of the general relativity is wrong, but we do not seem to be entitled to claim that we have come back to the old Newtonian absolute space and time. First, traditionally, the notion of absolute space and time was deemed to be tied to the notion of an absolute coordinate system or preferred coordinate system. Now as pointed out by Dai (2022d) [25], all inertial systems that move with regard to each other at constant speeds without the impact of gravity are absolute coordinate systems. In this soft absolute space and time, light would still travel rectilinearly in all inertial systems (i.e. absolute systems) and the speed of light relative to the vacuum between two moving objects would also be the same to all inertia systems. This might sound a lot like the second postulate of special relativity, but it differs from the latter in that the speed of light between two objects varies with the relative speed between those two objects. Further, the speed of light in vacuum is no longer the limit of speed in this 4 dimensional space and time universe. Second, although the invalidation of special relativity would lead to the separation of space and time, so far we do not have sufficient reason to deny the softness of the 3 dimensional space in the gravitational field as claimed by the general theory of relativity. Further, as mentioned earlier, despite that we know time dilations claimed by special and general relativities are not correct, we do not have sufficient reason to deny the possibility of the softness of time in some other unknown conditions. Here, by “softness” of a dimension I am referring to the possible variability of the measure of the dimension. Personally, I tend to accept that both space and time are not absolute rigid except that they are not coupled to each other as claimed by the special theory of relativity. As for space, it sounds reasonable for us to continue to accept the gravitational impact described by the general relativity after it is decoupled from time and after the gravitational impact upon time is denied. Closely related to the relativistic chronology, relativistic physicists and philosophers have proposed various theories claiming that time is not real. The most famous ones are the so-called block theory (Thomas 2016) [[29]] and the unreality of time paradox (McTaggart 1908) [[30]]. While the absurdity of the block theory reflects the logical defect of special relativity, the unreality of time paradox itself offers a good example of the confusion of 20th century academics of philosophy and the weird extensive embracement of obvious illogical thinking by many of the academia. The logic of argument that McTaggart presented for his so-called paradox not only evinces his confusion about the difference between human subjectivity and objective reality in our nature, but also provides a good example of how confused the post Hegelian academic philosophers are about Kantian and Hegelian philosophies. While McTaggart’s own mistaking of Hegelian position of time was obvious, his confusion about the objectiveness of Kantian notion of time could be greatly attributed to the defective exposition of Kant in his own work. Nevertheless, as professional philosophical workers, people like McTaggart cannot shirk their own responsibilities in mistaking classic philosophies. One important the reason that cause some people feel time not real might be that for anything to be real there should be energy or mass attached to the thing, and energy or mass seems to be closely attached to space instead of time. In fact, even Aristotle did not seem to put much weight on time when he endeavored to depict the realness of the substance (Aristotle 350BC) [1]. Modern physicists in quantum field even stride a step further to propose that empty space is full of energy while time seems at most a measuring quantity only. However, the fundamental role of time as the common measure of happenings in our nature as discussed by Dai (2022e) [28] could not only invalidate the time dilation by kinematic motion or gravity as mentioned earlier, but also serve as good evidence of the realness of time in the sense it is not a so-called relative subjective illusion of individuals in the world. The spatial realness that is related to energy or mass is not in contraction to the fact that natural events all experience time for real.
In 1905 Einstein (1905) [[31]] proved the famous mass-energy relationship E=mc2 in a clear and easy to comprehend mathematical procedure; however, the idea of the convertibility between mass and energy had been floating around for a while. In 1881 J.J. Thomson provided the formula of E = (4/3)mc2 (Rothman 2015; Ricker 2015) [[32], [33]]. In 1900 Poincaré (1900) [[34]] deduced the equivalent of E = mc2. In 1904 Hasenöhrl (1904) [[35]] deduced m = (8⁄3)E/c2 and Abraham (1904) [[36]] worked out E = (4/3)mc2. In addition to the abovementioned mathematical derivations, Mayer (1867) [[37]] made the following remark even earlier: [If a mass M, originally at rest, while traversing the effective space s, under the influence and in the direction of the pressure p, acquires the velocity c, we have ps = mc2. Since, however, every production of motion implies the existence of a pressure (or of a pull) and an effective space, and also the exhaustion of one at least of these factors, the effective space, it follows that motion can never come into existence except at the cost of this product, ps = mc2. And this it is which for shortness I call ‘force’] Preston mentioned in his book “Physics of the Ether” (Preston 1875) [[38]]: [To give an idea, first, of the enormous intensity of the store of energy attainable by means of that extensive state of subdivision of matter which renders a high normal speed practicable, it may be computed that a quantity of matter representing a total mass of only one grain, and possessing the normal velocity of the ether particles (that of a wave of light), encloses a store of energy represented by upwards of one thousand millions of foot-tons, or the mass of one single grain contains an energy not less than that possessed by a mass of forty thousand tons, moving at the speed of a cannon ball (1200 feet per second); or other wise, a quantity of matter representing a mass of one grain endued with the velocity of the ether particles, encloses an amount of energy which, if entirely utilized, would be competent to project a weight of one hundred thousand tons to a height of nearly two miles (1.9 miles).] Later, Olinto de Pretto (1903) [[39]] decalred: [Ma tale deduzione ci conduce a delle conseguenze inattese ed incredibili. Un chilogrammo di materia, lanciato con la velocità della luce, rappresenterebbe una somma di tale energia da non poterla nè anche concepire. La formula mv2 ci dà la forza viva e la formula  ci dà, espressa in calorie, tale energia. Dato adunque m = 1 e v uguale a trecentomila chilometri per secondo, cioè 300 milioni di metri, che sarebbe la velocità della luce, ammessa anche per l'etere, ciascuno potrà vedere che si ottiene una quantità di calorie rappresentata da 10794 seguito da 9 zeri e cioè oltre dieci milioni di milioni. A quale risultato spaventoso ci ha mai condotto il nostro ragionamento? Nessuno vorrà facilmente ammettere che immagazzinata ed allo stato latente, in un chilogrammo di materia qualunque, completamente nascosta a tutte le nostre investigazioni, si celi una tale somma di energia, equivalente alla quantità che si può svolgere da milioni e milioni di chilogrammi di carbone; l'idea sarà senz'altro giudicata da pazzi.] Nevertheless, as pointed out by Dai (2023b) [[40]], all the abovementioned mass-energy relations, including the famous E = mc2, failed to provide the correct equation between mass and energy. Compared to all the precedent works, the derivation of Einstein provided a viable approach for the derivation of a correct equation between mass and energy after the special theory of relativity is dropped out. By replacing the relativistic Doppler’s formula with the non-relativistic one, Dai worked out the correct mass-energy equation as: E = mc2/2 (7.1) The literal expression of the relation E = mc2/2 indicates that the total energy of mass m could be the kinetic energy when all the mass imaginarily moves at the speed of light. Of course it could not be the kinetic energy of a macroscopic object of mass m moving at the speed of light, not because of the speed limit claimed by relativity, but because when a macroscopic object of mass m moving at the speed of light, it still has its internal energy, which is what E = mc2/2 is really about. More specifically, we might imagine a perfect nuclear reaction that leads an object completely turn into pure photons. Let’s visualize in our mind such a scene that the object would gradually disintegrate into smaller and smaller parts with an (average) mass of δm and an (average) speed of v, and thus an (average) kinetic energy of δmv2/2. Without losing generality for the purpose of this thought experiment, we might even assume that all the small pieces of mass turn into pure photons simultaneously at one moment so that before that moment we would have the sum of all δm equals m, and thus the sum of all δmv2/2 equals mv2/2 until all the m finally completely “evaporated” or sublimes into pure photons. During that virtual subliming process, the (kinetic and potential) energies contained within that object would gradually turn into kinetic energies of those small parts so that the (average) speed v would increase towards the speed of light c, while the total mass remains as m because of mass conservation. In the meantime the (average) mass δm of all small pieces would gradually diminish to a minimum limit while their kinetic energies gradually increment so that mv2/2 as the sum of all the kinetic energies would gradually approach to mc2/2. Finally, when all the mass turns into pure photons, the total energy of those photons would be E = mc2/2 and the total (whether in virtual or real sense) mass of the photons would still be m. Here one implicit presumption is made for the above thought experiment: the average speed of massive particles generated during the virtual subliming process would not exceed the speed of light in vacuum. This is not a replica of the speed limit claimed by the special theory of relativity, but rather is a reasonable understanding based on such a consideration: during the disintegration of an object without external acting power the smaller piece of the mass would be of greater speed because of the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy, therefore it is reasonable to assume that all those transitional pieces of mass would not move faster than photons since they are heavier than photons.
From late 17th century to the beginning of 20th century, the theories of energy and momentum conservations experienced more than two hundred years extensive empirical verifications from transportation vehicles to war weaponries and countless engineering and technological applications all over the globe. But in early 20th century, those two conservation laws were extended to the following relativistic energy and momentum expressions: E = γmc2, (8.1) p = γmv, (8.2) E is the so-called total relativistic energy, m the mass, p the relativistic momentum with its magnitude being denoted as p, and v the velocity of the object with its magnitude being v, and accordingly, the magnitude of momentum is: p = γmv, (8.2a) and γ is the Lorentz factor. While physicists have the liberty to call those two mathematical expressions (8.1) and (8.2) whatever they want, they do not have the liberty to apply the conservation laws that were established empirically in the classic mechanics unless they could provide the same level of empirical verifications for those two mathematical expressions as for their supposed classic counterparts or they could demonstrate the intrinsic logical deductions from the said classic quantities to their relativistic counterparts, which unfortunately hold for none of the cases. As pointed by Dai (2023c) [[41]], the main problem of the conservation of the relativistic momentum p was that the relativistic momentum p can never be meaningfully reduced back to its classic counterpart except for a single point when p = 0. In other words, the so-called relativistic momentum is utterly a new definition with the above expression (8.2) instead of a physical extension from the classic notion of momentum. As for the conservation of the relativistic total energy, in addition to the lack of empirical establishment, as we know from the above discussion in section 7 it will face the issue that the total energy at rest should be E = mc2/2 instead of E = mc2, even though the so-called relativistic total energy does meaningfully reduce to its classic counterpart for a particle at rest.
Entanglement at a distance has been known as a core element of quantum theory, according to which if two very distant particles A and B are in entanglement, when a change of status happens to A, then B would sense the change instantly. Physicists in general seem to agree on this. However, in the meantime they would always add a hilarious annotation to this natural phenomenon, whenever they talk about it publicly, that instant information transfer between A and B does not violate the speed limit prescribed by special relativity because some artificial act of communication would be required from a person (or system) in the place of A to notify the person (or system) in the place of B to complete the information transfer in a controllable fashion (e.g. Lincoln 2020; Lykken 2023) [[42],[43]]. Worse than the abovementioned hilarious statement that mixes the assumed natural speed limit with artificial communication is the satisfaction of the professionals in the community of physics with this kind of hilarious statement, which is a typical symptom of collective philosophical weakness. We might even call this particular symptom as the apparently collectively hypnotized symptom. As we have learned from the discussions earlier in this writing, the so-called natural speed limit as the speed of light in vacuum prescribed by special relativity is wrong. However, even without the knowledge that special relativity is wrong, we could clearly see how philosophically wrong to mix the speed of information transportation during the quantum entanglement related processes with the speed limit prescribed by special relativity: 1) A common claim familiar to the public because of the popular science programs of quantum physicists is that quantum physics is fundamentally different from classic kinematics, while the so-called speed limit as the speed of light prescribed by special relativity is a (erroneously) assumed kinematical law which did not have any logical or empirical root at all in the quantum field during its development. How could anyone even come up with the idea that the entanglement process must not violate that assumed kinematical law? Even with the consideration that there should be some fundamental space and time connection between quantum and kinematic processes, a philosophically rational mind would suggest to modify the assumed kinematic law based on the empirical evidences instead of the opposite. 2) Even if it was true that the information transfer with quantum entanglement cannot be fulfilled in a controlled manner faster than the speed of light in vacuum, it has nothing to do with the natural speed of information transfer during quantum-entanglement related processes at all. How could the professionals from the community of physics unexceptionally relate these two things together only for defending the validity of special relativity? The stunning behavior of the scientific community discussed here is much graver than the quantum-entanglement related natural phenomena themselves. This is because this kind of philosophically hilarious behavior of the scientific community would severely ruin its credibility. If this philosophical weakness of the community cannot be changed, we could expect much more ridiculous things to come in the scientific world.
In 1935, Schrödinger proposed his famous superposed cat (e.g. Wikipedia, Schrödinger) [[44]]. Since then it has become a household legend. While Schrödinger’s original motive for fabricating his cat was to challenge the idea of quantum superposition, the seemingly rigorous logic in Schrödinger’s argument has made his cat a favorite intellectual artifact for the study and education of quantum mechanics around the world for the past century. However, in fact, as Dai (2023d) [[45]] pointed out, there was a logical defect in Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment which has fascinatingly evaded the attention of the academic elites: Schrödinger was implicitly assuming that the macroscopic cause-effect relationships could be directly applied to the quantum superposition states. If it is just a fairy tale, we do not need to be picky for its logical details. But obviously that is not what Schrödinger's Cat was about and that is not how the scientific community has treated the Schrödinger's Cat in the past century. Because of its scientific significance we need to be very careful about the rigorousness of the logic that makes up the cat story. In fact, the missing proof of the above logic in Schrödinger’s making of his cat could potentially be a pitfall for researches in general in the quantum area. Of course, Schrödinger could have made his implicit assertion as a postulate or assumed axiom. But unfortunately he never did that either, and the whole world has not seemed to notice the necessity of having that kind of presumption in order to have the Schrödinger’s cat to be a logically meaningful scientific model before scientists started their passionate quests of a proper interpretation for the cat’s ending. During the century long quest for a reasonable interpretation of Schrödinger’s cat, no one seems to have come up with a proposal of how to prove that the scientific knowledge of cause and effect relationships that humans acquired from macroscopic practices could be directly applied to the quantum superposition states. Sadly Schrödinger fabricated a genetically defective cat, and it has been a scientific darling cat of the whole world without being questioned about its genetic fitness since then.
In his PhD thesis, de Broglie (1924) [[46]] presented to the world his famous formula for the wavelength of what he called as “phase wave” of a moving body, which was later named as matter wave (Wikipedia, Matter) [[47]], as follows: λ = h/(mv) (11.1) where λ is the wavelength of the matter wave, h is Planck's constant, p = mv is the momentum of the body with its mass being m and velocity being v. Since then a popular enlightenment from (11.1) has been taught around the world that the reason why we cannot observe the matter wavelength in the macroscopic world is because the mass m would be too large so that the wavelength λ would be too small in the macroscopic world as reflected in (11.1). However, it seems to have been ignored by all when delivering the above enlightenment that a basic characteristic of macroscopic objects is that they do not always move rapidly as microscopic particles are supposed to do, and accordingly it is a common thing for us to observe the world by sitting in a position that is at rest with many macroscopic objects so that their speed would be zero. With that in mind, we can see an obvious problem when applying (11.1) to macroscopic objects with the speed of zero: their matter wavelengths would be infinity according to (11.1), no matter how big the mass would be. By looking into the steps of de Broglie when he worked out his formula (11.1), we could see that the above mentioned anomaly was caused by applying Lorentz transformation and the E = mc2. As demonstrated by Dai (2024b) [[48]], if we stop using Lorentz transformation and replace E = mc2 with the corrected mass and energy relationship E = mc2 /2, we will get the following corrected formula for the matter wavelength: λ = 2(v2/c2) h/(mv) (11.2) The correctional coefficient 2(v2/c2) in (11.2) contains two factors: 2 and v2/c2, which come from two corrective steps in the new derivation: 2 comes from the adoption of the revised mass-energy relation and v2/c2 comes from the cessation of using the Lorentz transformation of special relativity. Obviously, those factors act in opposite directions for subluminal speed v, and thus we might see the corrected wavelength to be close to the value calculated with the original de Broglie formula for a range of speed v. For example, when v = √2/2c, we will have the same wavelength from (11.2) as from (11.1).
In 1927, in accordance with the concept of Born’s probability wave, Werner Heisenberg published his famous uncertainty principle (Wikipedia, Uncertainty; Heisenberg 1927) [[49],[50]]. Since then the uncertainty principle has been treated as one of the most fundamental laws of the quantum world, and also deemed as reflecting the nonlocal characteristics. However, for the past two decades, experimental physicists have defied the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in a definitive way after expanding their territory of measurement into the attosecond scale. The team of 2023 Nobel laureate Ferenc Krausz does not seem to have any difficulty to characterize their attosecond laser beams with the term carrier-envelop (CE) (Baltuska et al 2003) [[51]], a term that could be perfectly accepted by classic physicists when studying macroscopic wave packets that are categorically local. Krausz himself even pointed out that they are capable of learning the instantaneous status of moving electrons with attosecond technology (Krausz 2023) [[52]], which as Dai (2024c) [ [53]] demonstrated would utterly deny the narrative of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Let’s assume the relative errors of time measurement and displacement measurement in Krausz’s experiments to be both around 10% (which could be reasonably assumed higher than the real order of magnitude of errors in their experiments), then the relative error of the speed calculated with their measured displacement and time interval would be around 20%. The mass of the electron is a standard value that can be obtained from literature, so its error can be ignored. Therefore, the relative error of the kinetic energy calculated from Krausz's experimental data should be within the range of 20% to 40%. The kinetic energy of the electron can also be found from literature to be 4.55×10 −25 J. Therefore, the error of the electron kinetic energy experimentally obtained by the team of Krausz should be on the order of 40%×4.55×10 −25 ~ 10 −25 J. Because 1 attosecond is 10 −18 seconds, with the assumption that their time measurement error is 10%, the error of their time measurements would be on the order of 10% × 10 −18 ~ 10 −19 seconds. The famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle could be expressed as: ΔtΔE ≫ h/4π (12.1), where t is the time measurement, E is the energy measurement, Δ represents error, and Planck’s constant h = 6.62607015×10−34 J⋅Hz−1. However, as demonstrated above, now we have: ΔtΔE ~ 10 −25×10 −19 ~ 10 −44 J⋅Hz−1 on the left side of the inequality (12.1), and h/4π=6.62607015×10−34 J⋅Hz−1/4π ~ 10-35 J⋅Hz−1 on the right side. The left side of inequality (12.1) is obviously 9 orders of magnitude smaller than the right side, but the Heisenberg uncertainty principle requires that the left side should be much greater than the right side! Surprisingly, after the attosecond experiments were rewarded with the Nobel prize in physics, the academia of physics seems to still feel very comfortable to talk about both attosecond technology and Heisenberg uncertainty at the same time as if they are of perfect compatibility (e.g. Copeland 2023) [[54]]. This complacent of logical inconsistency without being aware of it reflects a general philosophical numbness in nowadays academia. The definitively deterministic nature shown in attosecond experimental reports would also indicate that the Born’s probability interpretation and the Bohr’s complementarity principle are both problematic as well. Considering that the ultimate value of any theory is its guiding role for actions in the real world, the most troubling sign here is that experimental physicists seem to have no need of worrying about the probability issue, the uncertainty issue, or the complementarity issue when conducting their attosecond experiments to pin down the locations of electrons or even manipulate the movements of electrons.
With all the glamorous auras on its head, the mathematical framework of modern physics is constructed with “action” which has never been fully understood, let alone clearly interpreted. Before the era of modern physics, Newtonian mechanics was dominating the classical physics; however, after physics entered the quantum age in the 20th century, because of the theory of wave-particle duality and the Copenhagen interpretation, physicists no longer apply Newtonian mechanics to the motion of microscopic particles; instead, Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which are based on the principle of least “action” and are considered equivalent to Newtonian mechanics in the classical context, were chosen to be the mathematical framework for describing the state of motion in the quantum domain. But the problem is that never has the exact physical meaning of “action” or what exactly it is been clearly explained by anyone, whether in classical physics or in modern physics. Unlike the classical notion of force with the universally unequivocal meaning in all scientific fields, “action” takes different mathematical forms in different context without a clear consistent interpretation. Even at the very basic level, it could be presented as kinetic energy minus potential energy integrated over time….or sometimes the integral of momentum over distance…. or the integral of the Lagrangian function with respect to time. In fact, the establishment and application of the concept of “action” as well as the failure of a clear explanation for it over the history has revealed to us such a dim picture of the scientific status of “action”: it is only a mathematical pattern discovered by physicists of 18th century after immersing themselves in the mathematical play of mechanical problems for a long time, with no one able to explain exactly what this mathematical pattern means up to nowadays quantum era. This complacency of the academia of physics when building the edifice of their ivory tower on top of an unaccounted foundation profoundly reflects a common contempt of philosophical understanding and a common blind reliance upon mathematical knowledge. However, as we have witnessed in previous sections of this writing, unfortunately, the 20th century physics is indeed full of loopholes and it has been commonly deemed as causing the whole physical science stalled for a very long time. This awkward situation should have reminded us of the importance of a habitual curiosity of the philosophical comprehension of mathematical patterns in nature, which could often help us either to fathom deeper essence of the subject or to identify false mathematical modeling. As Dai (2024d) [[55]] pointed out, we might find that it would be indeed easier for us to make a better sense of its physical meaning in the classical domain. Now let’s suppose T0 to be the initial kinetic energy and V0 to be the initial potential energy, and L0 to be the initial difference between T0 and V0: L0 = T0 – V0 (13.1) Let’s also suppose ∆E to be the amount of energy transferred from potential energy to kinetic energy from time t0 to time t, and then at time t the integrand of “action” would be: L = T – V = L0 + 2∆E (13.2) If during this time interval the potential energy increases (or the object tries to escape from the potential field), then ∆E is negative, and if during this time interval the potential energy decreases (or the object moves towards source of the potential field), then ∆E is positive, and if during this time interval the potential energy changes not, then ∆E is zero. Suppose during the small time interval ∆t, the incremental action is ∆S, the displacement of the object (mass point) is ∆r, the potential (energy) force is F, then we have: S = ∫∆S = ∫(L0 + 2 F∆r)∆t (13.3) The value of the kinetic energy would change from one frame of reference to another, and we can always hypothetically choose our frame of reference with a constant velocity of the same as the initial velocity of the object (mass point) in question so that the initial kinetic energy T0 would be nil, then we would have: S = ∫∆S = ∫(– V0 + 2 F∆r)∆t (13.4) where V0 could be envisaged as the work of a preexist virtual force P by slowly (without acceleration) pulling the object from its end position to the initial position of that object in the motion, i.e. So S = ∫– P ∆r ∆t +∫ 2 F∆r ∆t (13.5) From equation (13.5) we can have following conclusion about the “action”: In classical mechanics, the essence of the (seemingly mysterious) action is indeed the integral of force over distance (displacement) and time. In general, the two integrations in (13.5) could take different paths. But since P is a virtual force, we can select its path the same as the real path of F, then (13.5) would become: S = ∫(–P∆t + 2 F∆t) ∆r (13.5a) The reason why we still need to leave ∆t in the integrand is because we have previously assumed that the pulling of P was slow without acceleration, and in that case theoretically it will take the virtual force P an infinitively long time to pull the object from its end position to the initial position of the motion, while ∆t for the real force F would be real limited duration. However, once again, since ∫–P∆t∆r is the virtual work done by some virtual force, we might assume that the direction of P varies so that it first pull the object to accelerate and then push the object to decelerate in order to assure that the object would have zero velocity at the beginning and at the end of the pull. By doing that we might take ∆t in (13.5a) out of the parentheses and get: S = ∫(–P + 2 F) ∆r∆t (13.5b) Here an obvious advantage of viewing “action” as the sum of the products of force and time and distance is that it can provide us with a more intuitive sense of “action” than simply energy multiplied by time or momentum multiplied by distance, since force, time and distance are the most fundamental dynamic elements (physical quantities) in everyday life. After all, in classical mechanics force is the form of the interaction between objects while time and distance are the ranges of interactions between objects – this might be why the 18th century physicists called the integration of energy over time or momentum over distance an “action”. The fact that P in (13.5b) is a virtual force would make the sum –P + 2 F also a virtual force despite that F is the real force. With this force-based view of “action”, we might draw the following conclusion concerning the essence of the principle of least action in the classical mechanics: In nature, the integral effect of some virtual force over time and distance would tend to be minimal. Or In nature, the sum of the product of some virtual force with time and distance would tend to be minimal. For the sake of brevity, we might name the above expressions as force-based expression of the principle of least action. Now by bringing “action”, the fundamental building block in the modern physics, back to the classical context, we could acquire a better understanding of the essence of “action” and the corresponding principle. The purpose of doing so is mainly to help to answer what the action really is, which the academia of physics has failed to do for the past centuries. One problem that can be easily spotted from (13.5b) is that it does not contain information about velocity, while the well known action-based Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics can be used to solve the full ensemble details of the motion. We might find out the reason behind this from equation (13.2) and (13.3) when we reduce the dynamic L to the constant initial value L0 and the energy transfer ∆E, and then turn ∆E into the work of the potential (field) force F. By doing so, we lose the information of velocity of the motion. But on the other hand, we gain the benefit of seeing the physical essence of the seemingly mysterious ancient “action” that the academia of physics has failed to explain to us. Consequently, the force-based view of action and the force-based expression of the principle of least action are not advantageous for mathematically solving the dynamics of motion but advantageous for comprehending the essence of the principle of least action. This better comprehension of the essence of the principle of least action itself is very meaningful for the future development of physics given that principle of least action is part of the theoretical foundation of quantum mechanics. The above-presented force-based view of “action” seems to be missing in any physics textbook or literature, either classical or modern. While the seldom access to the aged literature from long ago by nowadays readers (e.g. the author of this writing) might account for why the said view appears to be missed in the classical literature, the missing of that kind of view in the modern literature is not a surprise - because the modern literature would not explain “action” in this way at all. The reason why the modern physics does not interpret “action” in terms of force is actually very simple: in modern physics, force is no longer the most fundamental element as it was in the classical physics. The general theory of relativity says “gravity is not a force”; in quantum field theory, energy can pop out of empty vacuum and then disappear without any work done by any direct force. Modern physicists have strived to make energy and momentum as the most fundamental elements of nature, thereby depriving force of its title of the fundamental element of physics. Accordingly, it is naturally impossible for the modern physics to use the product of force with time and distance to explain the meaning of “action”. But unfortunately, with energy and momentum modern physicists could only give different mathematical definitions of “action” in different circumstances without a clear account for the essence of “action” in general. Consequently, for the past hundred plus years, modern physicists have been building the edifice of theoretical physics with complex mathematical representations of “action” as its fundamental notion, but have never satisfactorily answered the question what the action really is. Considering that action S in physics sometimes take the maximum values instead of minimum values, the principle of least action has been often called as principle of stationary action (Wikipedia, Action) [[56]].
PART THREE ENERGY and COSMOLOGY
Over-confident of the existing textbook knowledge is a common philosophical error over human history. One typical example is about the notion of energy conservation, which was first established by Émilie du Châtelet in 18th century based on the transfer between kinetic energy and potential energy in mechanics, and became the first law of thermodynamics and was later extended to all forms of energy and the transfer between different forms of energy (e.g. Wikipedia, Conservation) [[57]]. While the notion of energy conservation and the corresponding equations have been one of the critical composing part of scientific derivation in any branches of modern science (especially physics), scientists are not as sure about the meaning of energy itself as the public might have supposed. So far the scientific notion of energy has been completely constructed on top of the concept of conservation established by Émilie du Châtelet, and thus it is almost impossible for scientists to think about energy beyond the conservation of that invisible and intangible natural vigor. However, when it came to the quantum era, the claim that energy could pop up in the form of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs out of empty space (or in other words, out of nowhere) because of the so-called vacuum energy fluctuations (Wikipedia, Vacuum) [[58]] has literally turned the strict conservation law of energy into a statistical conservation law. More surprisingly, we might find that, even without any bold speculative hypothesis like the vacuum energy fluctuation, the existing system of energy calculation is not self-consistent when looking at the universal dynamic blueshifting and redshifting scenarios (Dai 2021a) [[59]]. Further, even in the classical macroscopic domain we could find anomalies to the energy conservation law through practically viable designs as Dai (2021b; 2022f) [[60],[61]] has demonstrated with rigorously logic. Therefore, the claim that the law of energy conservation can never be violated is incorrect; but since the scientific notion of energy has been constructed based on the concept of conservation and transfer, the above mentioned cases in which energy is not conserved have exposed the ignorance of the scientific community about either the true essence of energy or the mechanism of its creation and annihilation. Closely related to the notion of energy conservation is the idea of perpetual motion machines. Throughout human history, when talking about perpetual motion machines it has been referred to the notion of effortless nonstop movement in the gravitational and atmospheric environment of our earth planet; within the scope of this environment the motionless stillness is considered to be the true destiny of everything that is not sustained by an external propelling power. But outside this scope, perpetual movement would be the ultimate law in the universe until the end of the whole universe according to the modern cosmological prediction. When we launch an object at a speed greater than 16.7 km/s (i.e. the escape velocity from the sun), it will fly out of the solar system if not encountering any object in its way out, and then will move in the open space perpetually until it hits another object. Accordingly, all the excitements about the notion of perpetual motion arise simply because of its contrast to the notion of motionless stillness within the gravitational and atmospheric environment of our earth planet instead of in reference to the perpetually moving reality in the vast space of the universe. But on the other hand, the possibility of perpetual motion has been usually denied in a universally general way by examining whether the motion would consume any form of energy at all or whether the motion would cause any irreversible physical changes at all through the strictest scientific scrutiny based on the known physical laws. The philosophical inconsistence between the original earthly restriction behind the concept of the impossibility of the perpetual motion and the negative attitude towards the efforts of studying the possibility of perpetual motion in the earthly environment based on the supposedly universally general principles would lead to such a negative consequence: it would artificially set up unnatural barrier for people to investigate the dynamic nature of energy movement and thus could practically close the door to some possible unknown aspect of energy balance and transfer, while the whole scientific edifice including fields from mechanics to quantum physics and chemistry has been constructed by applying the energy balance and transfer equations in all kinds of derivations. Historically, having a perpetually working machine was a sweet dream back to ancient times. That dream became tarnished when people started to realize that it would cost energy to make any machinery work for human benefits as determined by the thermodynamics laws. The term “perpetually working machine” even became pejorative after repetitive failures of the stubborn pursuit of that kind of apparatus by quite a many (Kilty 1999; Verance 1916) [[62],[63]]. However, since the thermodynamics laws are synthetically induced empirical laws, strictly speaking, the previous announcements of successfully making perpetual motion machines, no matter proved to be false how many times, could at worst only demonstrate the intellectual incapacities of those who failed, if not due to other incidental misunderstandings, which could not serve as the exclusively rigorous proof of the logical impossibility of making a perpetual motion machine in violation of the known thermodynamics laws, although they do literally increase the statistical confidence level of the impossibility of making a perpetual motion machine. Therefore, a complete denial of the viability of the notion of perpetual motion machine might hinder the efforts of learning some unknown energy-related mechanisms in nature, and thus a cautious open mind in the relevant matter would still be desired when circumstances occur with some perplex phenomena that might not easily get along with the existing inductive laws. 14.1.1. The Essence of Perpetual Motion In fact, the validity of the thermodynamics laws would be more of a philosophical issue than a pure scientific issue in the nowadays society; similarly, the impossibility of the perpetual motion machine would be more of a philosophical than a scientific or technological issue. Therefore, a better philosophical understanding about the essence of perpetual motion would help us to explore potential ways that are still unknown to us earthlings for utilizing natural energy. Back to the ancient times before humans even had the modern concept of energy or before Simon Stevin declared that the perpetual motion machine is impossible in 17th century (Dijksterhuis 1970) [[64]], the concept of perpetual motion was only pertinent to the benefit of costless perpetual easiness itself instead of the energy benefit as modern people would normally demand, which would be the true essence of perpetual motion machinery to the general public. It is the modern perception (established through the well upheld thermodynamics laws) that any motion would not only cost energy but also imperfectly cost useful energy that relates motion to useful energy and thus makes the concept of perpetual motion fundamentally tied with the consumption of the useful energy. This leads to the conclusion of the impossibility of the three kinds of perpetual motion machines. However, by tightly binding the notion of “perpetual motion machine” to the meaning of being free of consuming useful energy or being able to generate energy for the external world in scientific sense, it is already different from what the ancient people referred to as perpetually working machine for effortless or costless resource of easiness. Practically, if a machine can continuously do nonstop work for the human users without the need of manual replenishment of energy, even if it consumes some energy from sun or earth all the time, it would be a perpetual motion machine to humans. We don’t need look at the issue with a universally valid perspective in the sense that no useful energy would be turned into wasted energy and no non-reducible entropy increase would be produced at all or even exclude the use of energy from the natural environment. Much bigger troubles would overwhelm the issue of the validity of a perpetual motion definition in case our sun or earth would stop functioning properly or we might lose our atmosphere. Therefore, it is more important for us to get to know about how nature might provide mechanisms for locally perpetual motions, instead of discouraging or even forbidding the claim of the perpetual motion machine by scrutinizing whether the machine would consume extra energy or external material resources in the strictest universally valid sense. But on the other hand, if a machinery could actually violate the energy conservation law (which would make it also violate the second thermal dynamics law by default), then it would be a perpetual motion machine by definition. Even if it only partially violates the thermal dynamics laws as in the examples of DDWFTTW (Dai 2021b) [60] that has been practically tested by many in history and ETDPMS that was designed by Dai (2022f) [61] following rigorous logic, despite the inevitable material wear out of the parts made them not strictly perpetual motion machines, their violation of the thermal dynamics laws during the motion still make them valid perpetual motion machines, at least theoretically. Closely related to the topic of perpetual motion machines is the idea of free energy for all. We often heard someone talking about the dream of free energy for all like this: we will have free energy for all as long as we can have “the alien technology” or “the perpetual motion machines” or even “artificial suns by using unlimited seawater through fusion technology”, and so on. However, as Dai (2024e) [[65]] discussed, for the society, the productivity of power generation is more important than whether humans can get energy for free from nature or not, and for individuals, the possibility of getting energy for free is next to nil no matter how the power companies get the energy from nature. In fact, a major misunderstanding behind the dream of free energy for all is the confusion between these two things: 1) the need of consuming of raw materials by companies that produce energy for consumers; 2) the daily consumption of energy in life by the public. This confusion is due to the ignorance about the reality that even if the power companies could produce unlimited energy from nothing or almost nothing, people would have to get energy for their own daily consumption from the power companies, and those companies would not give energy to the general consumers for free because of various reasons, some are technically legitimate, and some others are deeply rooted in human social divisions. A more profound misunderstanding behind the above misunderstanding is the failure to recognize that in the modern industrial age, the issue of energy consumption has always been more of an issue of resource allocation than an issue of whether or how we can obtain energy from nature. Behind the resource allocation is the distribution of social power and the corresponding social hierarchy. People at higher level of the social hierarchy would normally have the privilege of occupying the resources even if those resources are gifts from nature (e.g. forests, beaches). Of course, if power companies need to spend huge amount of money to procure the raw materials needed for power generation, they will definitely add the associated costs to the price of electricity. In this sense, once the power companies do not need to continually consume raw materials for power generation, we should expect the electricity price to fall under certain conditions. But even so, power companies can still find excuses to raise the price when the prices of other goods and services in the market rise. In the end, the so-called free energy for all would be just a sweet dream in this human materialist world. Accordingly, the study of the mechanisms of perpetual motion machines as I did in the past years would be more beneficial for knowing the physics of nature better than to help the citizens of the society to achieve energy freedom.
The weakened collective philosophical thinking capacity does not only affect the mainstream way of thinking, but also impact the way of thinking of those who intend to challenge various mainstream or official theories. The anti-big-bang ferment (especially after James Webb space telescope sent back the images that are supposed to be from the earliest part of the universe) is one example of how academic rebellion activities could be spoiled by poor philosophical capacity as well. Although the existing big bang theory may be defective in some details, it lacks philosophical rationality to try to prove (as many have been trying) that the big bang or big band like event never happened. Unlike when the big bang theory was proposed nearly a century ago, today, in order to completely deny that the big bang ever happened, one would have to deny not only the expansion of the universe, but almost all of today's theories about the universe. For example, he needs to deny that the sun shines by burning its internal energy through nuclear reactions. Why do you say that? This is because if he admits that the sun shines by burning its internal energy in nuclear reactions, then he will admit that the sun will have an end because of the exhaustion of energy, and if he admits that the Sun has an end, then he will admit that the sun has a beginning. But if he admitted that the sun had a beginning, he would have to face how it began. In addition, he also has to deny that there are billions of sun-like stars in the universe. If he did not deny this, and in the meantime admitted that the sun had a beginning, then he would have to face the question of how countless stars like the sun began. Now the philosophy of having a big bang provides the most inclusive and consistent theory for the beginning of all the celestial bodies in our four-dimensional universe. One can revise the details of the theory, but to philosophically disprove the big bang or any big bang like event, they would have to either completely deny the knowledge that the sun needs energy to burn, or replace the big bang with infinite incompatible “small bangs” to explain the origins of the stars in our four-dimensional universe. This is obviously undesirable.
PART FOUR MATH, LOGIC, and NONLINERITY
In 1870’s Georg Cantor developed his set theory by establishing the notion of the equal size of two infinity sets based on one-to-one correspondence between the sets: if we can find a one-to-one correspondence rule between two sets (i.e. matching the elements of those two sets through a seamless one-to-one correspondence), then they are considered to be equally long or have equally many elements, which means that they have the same cardinal number; or otherwise they are not equally long, but of different cardinal numbers. Along this Cantorian philosophical line, in 1878 Cantor proposed the continuum hypothesis (CH for its acronym) (Koellner 2019) [[66]], which could be expressed as "There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the natural numbers and the real numbers." In 1900 Hilbert listed CH as the first of his 23 open problems, which has been considered unsolved by the academia of mathematics to today. However, as discussed by Dai (2022g) [[67]], the real cause for the mathematical academics including the most famous ones to have failed to solve the Hilbert first problem is the illusive nature of the above mentioned Cantorian philosophy of measuring the length of an infinity set, or the Cantorian cardinal system. In 1873, Cantor provided a proof (Veisdai, 2021) [[68]] that there are as many rational numbers as natural numbers, which can be briefly presented as follows: Let us arrange all the rational numbers (ratios of natural numbers) in an infinite table as such: 1/1 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/5 ... (16.1) 2/1 2/2 2/3 2/4 2/5 ... 3/1 3/2 3/3 3/4 3/5 ... 4/1 4/2 4/3 4/4 4/5 ... 5/1 5/2 5/3 5/4 5/5 ... ... ... ... ... ... Next, starting in the upper left hand corner, move through the diagonals from left to right at 45 degrees, starting with 1/1, then 1/2 and 2/1, then 3/1, 2/2 and 1/3 and so on, write down every new number we come across. We will obtain the following ordering: (1) 1/1, (16.2) (2) 1/2, (3) 2/1, (4) 3/1, (5) 2/2, (6) 1/3, (7) 1/4, (8) 2/3, (9) 3/2, (10) 4/1, …. which is not just well-ordered, but also in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers in their natural order. This proves the countability of the rational numbers by natural numbers, and thus according to Cantorian philosophy, he proved that there are as many rational numbers as natural numbers. Based on the same philosophy of counting infinite sets by one-to-one correspondence with natural numbers, in 1874 Cantor proved that real algebraic numbers are countable (by natural numbers) as well. In 1874 Cantor also provided a proof showing that real numbers are strictly more than natural numbers. Therefore, up to that point he had effectively divided the infinite series within the domain of real numbers into two categories, one is of the same size as natural number, and another is with all real numbers, and the continuum hypothesis says that there is no other infinite set strictly sitting between these two categories. Once we accept the above conclusions of Cantor, it is then very hard for anyone to find an infinite set with its cardinality strictly greater than natural numbers but strictly smaller than real numbers. This is the reason why Hilbert’s first problem has been lingering for such a long time. In the time of Johann Bernoulli and L'Hopital, humans already knew that the so-called infinity is not an empty abstract logo, but with real meanings that we can use to compare the magnitudes of different infinities (e.g. Wikipedia, L'Hôpital) [[69]]. But Cantor used the notion of “infinity” as an endless repository for him to withdraw numbers whenever he needs for his schemes. By doing this, he effectively eliminated the difference in the speed to go to infinity as Johann Bernoulli and L'Hopital noticed. If we actually count the series of rational numbers following the above Cantorian procedure, no need to go too many steps we will find that the natural number that is used to mark the largest rational number would be much bigger than its rational counterpart. This tells us two things: 1) if we count the numbers of elements for a given magnitude, the rational would go to infinity much faster than the natural; but 2) if we count the numbers one by one then the natural would go to infinity much faster than the rational. Both of these two facts tell that rationals are much more than naturals, instead of being equal to naturals as Cantor demonstrated with his trick. Obviously, the trick of the Cantorian scheme of measuring is to borrow from future for the current spending, and he did not have the need to worry about running out of resources as economists would do when dealing with deficit economies, because he had an endless repository of supply for his expenditure whenever dealing with infinity, even though obviously his expenditure would potentially outrun his storage whenever the infinity line of supply is cut off. Then the audience might ask such a question: “does the Cantor's scheme of abusing the notion of infinity make any real sense?” The answer is “no” except for playing brain-burning games for fun or for idiotizing youngsters with meaningless tricks. In fact, we might expose the absurdity of the deficit spending that Cantor conducted for his counting game by cutting the series of rational numbers at a randomly large value, e.g. 1 quadrillion, and we will see that there are far great more rational numbers than natural numbers. This tells that the Cantorian counting scheme is meaningless for any real world thing except for his fictitious infinity, because all numbers involved in real life issues, no matter the count of money, population, or the particles in a block of matter, or the toners used to print a drawing etc are all finite instead of infinity, no matter how big the number is, and thus you will always find that rationals are way much more than naturals. In fact, as demonstrated by Dai (2022g) [67], it is very easy to find an infinite series of rational numbers as follows: 1/2, 1/3, 1/4,...,1/m,1/(m+1),… 2/2, 2/3, 2/4,...,2/m,2/(m+1),… m/2, m/3, m/4,...,m/m,m/(m+1),… (m+1)/2, (m+1)/3, (m+1)/4,...,(m+1)/m,(m+1)/(m+1),… (16.3) where m is a random natural number, with its cardinal infinitely greater than the cardinal of natural numbers. To ease the imagination, let’s just pick up 1 and 2, then we can find that there are infinitely many rational numbers between them (e.g. 1.1,1.2,1.3,…,1.999999,….).
Turing halting problem and Gödel incompleteness theorems have become lofty elements of nowadays world culture so that we could frequently see their citations in both serious scholastic theses and popular writings in all areas of social life. They have been, along with some other similar theories, the symbols of the enlightenment concerning our self-awareness about the intrinsic defects in our historically-assumed perfect logical system. However, although those theories are undoubtedly great contributions to humanity, as Dai (2021c) [[70]] pointed out, their actual roles in real life practices of either logical thinking or computer-related tasks are far less influential than their reputations stand for. A semantic subtlety behind this global phenomenon is the resemblance between the concept of “the whole set of all” and “all of the whole set”. While both the Turing theory about the halting problem and the Gödel theorems only apply to the whole set, they have been widely and confusingly presented as a general truth that would apply to all members of the relevant set. In this section let’s discuss the reason behind the global misconception about the roles of Turing halting problem and Gödel theorems as well as a whole family of the relevant theories in human civilization. 17.1. Turing halting problemAs a famous computability problem, Turing’s halting problem could be described in different ways, and one simple way in plain English goes like this (Wikipedia, Halting) [[71]]: [The halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. The halting problem is undecidable, meaning that no general algorithm exists that solves the halting problem for all possible program–input pairs.] Despite that the Turing halting problem has been given a great weight by academics not only for the foundation of computer science but also for philosophy in general, and despite that whether a program can finish running normally or be halted infinitively is the one of most common concerns for any professional who would write computer programs and run them on computers, people don’t really use or need the Turing theory of the halting problem for daily practices with computer software and hardware or any other practices in any area except for the teaching and theoretical discussions of the theory itself or other theories with similar nature. In fact, when facing a halting problem in real life, no one would use an abstract program or conceptual algorithm as Turing did when proving the impossibility for judging the halting problem. People would always deal with specific computers and specific programs in real life, and never use conceptual impossibility to deny to practical possibility in reality. The reality is that, luckily for human beings, none of the halting problems cannot be diagnosed and fixed in real life, or otherwise we might have had much more troubles in the world than we have been crying about. Although defects may cause crashes or failures of software programs in the real world in countless ways, they would all fall into limited patterns, such as an infinite loop (for example, from point A to point B, and then Go back to point A and repeat infinitely), deadlock, livelock, starvation, or some other common issues (e.g. the process failed to send a message that is waited by another process for its continual execution); besides, all computer programs will be turned into the machine code in order to run on any computer. When a program running, the cause for halting the program might repeat endlessly until being forced to a stop, but the length of the machine code is always limited regardless how long it is, and the number of sections in the code that might lead to those halting patterns is always limited no matter how big the number is; besides, based on the machine code, with an architectural analysis, we can always sketch the diagrams of the logical and data flows of the program. Therefore, in the worst case scenario, in principle, we humans could manage to examine the tediously long machine code of the given problem compiled for the given machine to check the limited number of (no matter how big the number might be) looping sections, resource-acquiring sections, function calls or subroutines, as well as message and data exchanges, to analyze the possibility of causing endless repetition or waiting, which would lead to a definitive verdict whether the program would be halted during its execution or not. Fortunately, in real life scenarios, software engineers or IT developers might never need to go through that kind of extreme situations, but instead, it would be far much easier for them to determine the possibility of halting by simple reviews of code at the level of advanced languages, or at most the assembly language, with the aid of analyzing logs and traces ---- This is what real computer professionals are doing everyday in the real world to solve the halting problem so that with full confidence we can say that the halting problem itself in principle would not be a threat to the wellbeing of humans at all. Therefore, we can practically judge the possibility of halting for all the programs despite that we cannot conceptually judge the halting problem for the collective all as Turing proved. Considering that the correctness of the Turing theory about the halting problem has been proved not only by Turing but also by many others during the past almost a century’s time, it would be futile for any attempt to find the logical defect in the rigorousness of the conclusion made by Turing in the context of the common programs and the so-called Turing machines. Nevertheless, the fast advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has indeed made it possible to semantically overruling the conclusion that there will not be any algorithm or computer program which can be used to judge whether any program on a proper computer (i.e. not a dysfunctional one) would halt during execution or not. We might notice that, because of the fact that we humans can always solve halting problems in real life practices as discussed above, in the context of AI, we actually could semantically overrule the conclusion made by Turing. That is to say, it is possible for us to find some program or algorithm in the context of AI to determine the possibility of halting for any given machine-program pair (in the following discussion we would always assume that a program would run with any intended input for the program) for the reason that would discussed as follows. Despite all the challenges for actually creating such a program that can be used to judge whether any given program would halt on a given computer during the execution, its concept of possibility is indeed simply straightforward: the goal of AI development is to imitate the intelligent work of humans, especially the task with specifically defined goal, and accomplishing the task of judging the possibility of halting as humans are doing everyday is clearly a well defined achievable goal of task for AI, and thus is possible. One important factor to shore up the possibility for AI to accomplish the above mentioned task is that in case one AI program fails to accomplish the above task in a specific case, it would be either feasible for the AI itself to learn the lesson or easy for the engineer to add one piece of logic into the AI program so that it could accomplish the same task when the program is rerun for the next time ---- this is the ability of learning and adjustability which would make an AI program very different from any ordinary single task computer program as envisioned by Turing at his time. Furthermore, since humans (e.g. the AI engineers) can always diagnose the problems with the AI programs, the very AI program that we would create for judging the possibility of halting would also be made able to diagnose other AI programs including the code of its own, which would guarantee that the AI program we are conceptualizing here would not fall into the self-referential trap as used in the proof of the Turing theory of the halting problem. Since an AI program is a computer program or an algorithm in essence, the conceptual possibility of accomplishing the task that is proved impossible by Turing (and many others following Turing) has indeed already overruled the conclusion made by Turing for the famous Turing halting problem. Of course, one might still argue in defense of the meaning of Turing’s conclusion based on the difference between the program or algorithm referred by Turing as well as others who offered proofs for the Turing theory of halting problem and the AI program discussed in this context; but on the other hand, since Turing did not exclude AI program in his conclusion (which is impossible for him to do at his time), at least semantically his conclusion concerning the halting problem could be overruled with the above discussion. Turing halting problem has been considered closely related to the famous Incompleteness Theorems published by Gödel (Raatikainen 2021) [[72]] in 1931, which have been expressed, proved, interpreted in many different ways over the past almost a century’s time, and could be colloquially stated as (Wikipedia, Gödel) [[73]]: [The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.] The Gödel theorems are often cited in support of claims like “human logical system is defective”, “mathematical modeling is always incomplete”, which sound like very big deals regarding human logical thinking in real life. However, the truth is that, similar to the situation with the Turing halting problem as discussed above, no one would encounter any logical snag or miss anything in their planned logical construction in real life simply because of the logical defects identified by the Gödel theorems, unless some attempts are made to do things like applying “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself. But most people would not attempt to apply “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself, because that would be obviously senseless to them, except for some special interests in academic researches or in entertaining each other. Turing theory of the halting problem and Gödel theorems are the most famous of a collection of similar theories including Russell paradox (Irvine and Deutsch 2021) [[74]], Berry Paradox (Weisstein) [[75]], and a few others, that has been categorized as the so-called self-referential paradox theories. These theories are often collectively symbolized by the above mentioned application of the self-referential sentence “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself. While this collection of self-referential paradoxical phenomena might be intriguing and good for mental work out, their practical role as philosophical enlightenment is often exaggerated, even though the processes of proving them might be fruitful in terms of the execution of ingenious ideas. The self-referential nature of the above mentioned family of theories has been widely portrayed as the manifestation of the paradoxical nature of human logic. However, this claim itself might be paradoxical in some sense. For an issue to be a paradox there should be the conflict between the human reasonable expectation and the reality that defies the expectation. In the case of the Turing halting problem, if it is a reasonable expectation that humans should be able to judge all the possibilities of halting for all the computer-program pairs with a general (non AI) algorithm and the reality as proved by Turing contradicts the assumed ability, then the Turing halting problem would be a paradox. However, the above assumption itself is an unreasonable expectation of human ability due to lacking knowledge about one difference between the behavior of “the whole set of all” and the behavior of “all members of the set”, i.e. the difference between the behavior of the universal and the behavior of members of the universal. As attested by the fact that no one would have any trouble in dealing with any halting problem in real life although as Turing proved that we could not have a general algorithm to solve all the halting problems. In this sense, Turing halting problem should not be reasonably considered as a paradox, just like we cannot assume any false statement as a reasonable paradox. Accordingly, what the Turing halting problem really manifested is not the paradoxical nature of human logic, but rather only the revelation of the mismatch between some exaggerated expectation of human capacity and what humans are really able to do. Similarly, the paradoxical nature of the Gödel theorems at best is only the reflection of the conflict between what a few elite mathematicians dreamed about and what humans can really do. While the Turing halting problem might have spotlighted the disappointment of some popular unreasonable human expectation of many, what the Gödel theorems has accentuated would be the disappointment of the unreasonable dream of very few, and an important reason for the Gödel theorems to have attracted more attention than the Turing halting problem is because the opinion of those very few weighs out the opinion of many due to their renowned fame. The improperness of considering Turing halting problem and Gödel theorems as the reflection of the paradoxical nature of human logic could be better appreciated if we compare them to some classic paradoxes. Here I would like to call your attention to the famous Sorites paradox of which the main theme could be briefed as: [When we pile up sand grains one by one, we will never be able to discern the very one grain of sand that would turn the collection of sands into a heap. Or reversely, if we take off sand grains from a heap one by one, we will never be able to identify the moment when the heap is no longer a heap.] Although this paradox has often been assumed to be constructed upon the definition of heap (Warburton 2016) [[76]], it is actually constructed upon the very nature of human perception and the variation of the substance of heap, and any attempt of changing that common definition of heap in order to make that paradox no longer a paradox would make the term no longer correctly reflect human perception of the physical heap. On the contrary, the Turing halting problem and the Gödel theorems would no longer be paradoxes once humans correctly set our expectations of what we could do with our logic. Similarly, in the case of applying “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself, as long as we agree that it is not proper to applying “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself since it is utterly meaningless, then we would eliminate another assumed paradox. Nevertheless, semantically we might still consider the family of self-referential theories as theories of paradoxes based on their literal expressions, if we could tolerate their substantial defects in constructing the supposed legitimate human expectations. Besides, the literally paradoxical expressions do help to reflect the tension between the nature of the whole and the nature of the members of the whole as correctly revealed by those theories which will be discussed in the next section. Closely related to the tension created by the self-referential operation is the revelation of the knowledge about the fact that we should not unconditionally extend our expectation towards a randomly selected (i.e. any) element of a system to the expectation towards the whole system because in general they might logically different from each other through the self-referential operation. Accordingly, this family of self-referential theories deserves the credit for their excellent job of bringing that enlightenment to the society and thus set human expectations to a correct level. In the case of the application of the sentence “this sentence is false”, “this sentence” could be pointing to any sentence, and thus representing the sentence-based language in general, and its predicate could be about anything that people would use language to describe. Therefore, “this sentence is false” could be a verdict about the mismatch between the content of the any sentence and the targeted reality. However, when “this sentence is false” is applied to the whole language which is represented by “this sentence” at that moment, the conflict arises from that special use of that sentence based on its grammatical and semantic meanings. The best examples for exhibiting the tension between the set of all and all of the set are of course the Turing halting problem and Gödel theorems. For the former, according to Turing, there is no one algorithm available to be capable of diagnosing any computer-program pair in general, while in reality, none of the halting problems cannot be diagnosed correctly in principle; for the latter, based on the common understanding of Gödel, we cannot have a theory that would consistently cover all the elements either in a formal system or in our whole logical system, while in reality, no one would encounter any obstacle due to any kind of fundamental defect in our logical system. In fact, this tension between the whole of all and all of the whole can be grasped from the use of the method of reductio ad impossibile in the proofs of those theories, because the contradiction, and the only contradiction, employed during the proofs of those theories is caused by the self-references, which have gained them the title of self-referential paradoxes. This determines that these theories play against some general possibility in the relevant system of interest only with one logical anomaly, which is the self-referential anomaly. Oddly, the above mentioned great contribution by the family of the self-referential theories to the revelation of the tension between a randomly selected (i.e. any) element of a system and the whole system has been somehow shaded by the exaggeration of their role in the advancement of the civilization. Instead of the already identified limited tension between the system as a whole and the randomly selected (i.e. any) element of the system, those theories have been treated as if dealing with some common problems existing across the whole range of each system. The Turing theory of the halting problem has been widely entitled as the evidence of human defect in detecting halting problem in general and the Gödel theorems has even been popularly portrayed as the revelation of the defect in the whole system of human logic. One important subtle factor behind this discrepancy between the widespread exaggerated reputation of the family of the self-referential theories and their practical roles in real life is the use of ambiguous language in the description of these theories. For example, the above mentioned narrative of the Gödel theorems are referring to the whole system, while the actual proofs only deal with the single individual instance in the system for each case, which is the only anomaly as could be embodied by the application of “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself. What makes matters more complicated here is the semantic ambiguity between “the whole system itself” and “everything in the whole system”. The narrative of Turing theory of the halting problem could be interpreted in either way, but only “the whole system itself” is the correct interpretation, while unfortunately it has been generally interpreted in the other way, not only colloquially in popular culture, but also by scholars in serious contexts. This is because, without an explicit annotation about the unique applicability of the theory itself, by pairing up the name of the common “halting problem” with the expression of “any possible program” it has created an effect of insinuating a universal applicability of the theory to the halting problem in general while it actually only applies to one single case in the most general sense: the grand collection of all computer-program pairs. Obviously, this confusion about the nature of the grand universal of a kind and the nature of any individual member in the universal is what the Turing theory of halting problem and similar theories are supposed to serve to eliminate; but unfortunately, the exaggeration of the role of the Turing theory of halting problem makes itself a victim of the confusion instead, and thus further exacerbates the confusion in the public. If the self-referential case is not the only anomaly in the targeted system, meaning there could be many anomalies in the system and the use of the self-referential instance is only for the convenience of using the method of reductio ad impossibile, then we could understandably tolerate the interpretation of those theories of self-referential paradox as referring to “things in general of the whole system” instead of “the whole system itself”. However, after decades of teaching and studying of those theories, that is obviously not what happens, and people could only identify one anomaly for each case of that family of theories, which is the self-referenced instance. This is indeed the reason why people would like to use the application of “this sentence is false” to the sentence itself as the representation of the ensemble of all those theories. Therefore, it is not a proper practice for the society, no matter within the academia of science and philosophy or among people from other social sectors, to exaggerate the actual role of the self-referential theories for either the philosophical advancement or the practical guidance in the civilization, or otherwise it might confuse the public, especially young students from generation to generation. The family of self-referential theories as represented by the renowned Gödel incompleteness theorems and the Turing theory of the halting problem have indeed contributed to the advancement of human civilization greatly, not only with the conclusions of the theories, but more importantly with the methodology and techniques of proving the conclusions. Their influences are not limited within the field of logic and computer science where they originally belonged to, but have extended to the general culture of social life around the world as the intellectual enlightenment for the awareness that the might of human logic is not unlimited as previously often assumed by many. Nevertheless, due to various reasons as discussed in this article, their actual role for advancing the civilization has been untruly exaggerated, not only in the contents of popular culture, but also in serious scholastic discussions. This would indeed not help to honor the theories and their authors, but hurt their due reputations since untruth would always hurt the wellbeing of humanity in this or that way, and when the negative effect amounts to a certain degree to be noticed by future generations, people would forget the original positive contributions but focus on the practical negative impacts, as has always been the case in the course of the development of human civilization. Therefore, it would be for the benefit of the reputation of the theories, as well as the benefit of the society for which those authors strived diligently to serve, that we present the unexaggerated true worth of those theories to the society instead of the misleading exaggerations of the philosophical entailment of those theories.
18. Mould Law of the Induction of Side Movements in Dynamically Nonlinear Motions The Mould law of the induction of side movements in dynamically nonlinear motions was summarized by Dai (2022h) [[77]] based on the analysis behind the famous Mould effect or chain fountain phenomenon (Wikipedia, Chain) [[78]], which states: [The consequence of the struggle for a dynamic balance between the driving cause of a movement and its resistance could spawn a (violent) side movement, in case the driving cause is neither too weak nor overwhelmingly strong compared with the resistance, plus there is no other dominating environmental factors.] The chain fountain phenomenon is a highly nonlinear process, and its most confusing part is that during the motion, the chain does not take the shortest path to fall when dragged by gravity as people would normally expect based on the common impression of least efforts (action) in nature. This anomaly to common knowledge makes the researchers attempting to find some external forces from the environment that covertly pushing the chain up to the air. Accordingly, they had focused on analyzing the interaction between the chain and the supporting base of the chain. However, with a careful scrutiny, we might find that it is impossible for any supporting force from the base to buff up the motion of the chain into the air above the rim of the container. Accordingly we have to find the cause behind the chain fountain from the dynamic nature of the motion itself; that is to say that we have to find how the pulling down of gravity actually causes the chain to shoot into the air like a fountain, no matter how counterintuitive it might sound. By reasonably assuming that the motion would take a regular shape, Dai noticed that the chain fountain phenomenon is caused by the nonlinearity in the dynamic tug of war between gravity pulling and the resistant load in the container, and the most important thing about the resistant load is not how strong it is pulling the moving part back or how strong its counteracting force is pulling the unmoved part up, but instead, is how loose the pile of the unmoved part of the chain is and thus how easy it could be pulled up. The degree of the looseness of the pile accounts for the capacity to balance the increase of the pulling power, which is critical for the formation and growth of the fountain. If the unmoved pile is too loose, the gravitational pull on the falling part would be overwhelmingly dominating and the fountain would not occur; if the unmoved pile is too sticky, the dragging pull from the unmoved pile would take control and the fountain would not form either or would die out quickly after the initial boost; only when the looseness of the unmoved pile falls into a favorable range the fountain could be formed, maintained and growing. By laying out a complicated set of nonlinear equations, Dai (2022h) [77] noticed the important role of some sensitive time dependent terms of small values in the equations. In fact, the whole chain fountain phenomenon is an excellent example of how nature would automatically find the most favorable way to release its potential energy. Metaphysically, the chain fountain phenomenon manifests a profound approach of nature to manage energy and entropy to achieve certain principles: when the movement is hindered for some reasons, nature could manage to make sensitive dynamic adjustment so that the conflict between the driving cause and the hindering cause might be alleviated so that the movement would continue more smoothly. We might even find patterns similar to the chain fountain in the social domain. With different social resistances or social inertias, the social effect of a political or economic drive initiated by the influential agents upon the society might well be beyond the expectations of the initiators. Although the initiating agents might still manage to drive the (human or material) energy to their targeted destinations, it might spawn some severe or even violent side movement (similar to the chain fountain). On the other hand, sometimes, we might wish the chain-fountain-like induced side movement to occur in order to speed up the flow out of a troubled area. Similar to the mechanism of chain fountain, the side movement in the social domain might not happen if the resistance is too strong (so that the original drive would be completely ignored) or the resistance is too weak, or there is some other colossal restrictive power in the environment (similar to the case when the air drag is overwhelming). The difference is that with the natural chain fountain, the whole chain would finally end up on the ground in general, while in the social domain, the side movement might have a big chance to turn into a game changer and replace the original movement to become the main course. Nevertheless, a good understanding of the mechanism of the chain fountain in the natural domain could assist us to better understand or predict the chain-fountain-like occurrence in the social domain. Therefore, we can reach the Mould law of the induction of side movements in dynamically nonlinear motions as stated at the beginning of this section. The discovery and investigation of the chain fountain phenomenon involves both intensive experimental efforts and mathematical striving for years by researchers from different areas and different regions. Yet we have witnessed how people stumbled over this counter-common-sense phenomenon by steering into the wrong direction, which offers an excellent example of how important philosophy is to human understanding of nature. Whenever something apparently abnormal are observed, the foremost desire of many professionals in the academia is to declare that nothing is really surprising and they can offer all the answers to those things with a simple analysis using the known knowledge. This cliché has been put on to the global stage time and again no matter how far-fetched it might be. However, nature can always surprise us with something that could defy our existing knowledge as we see in the chain fountain phenomenon. It is worth noticing how mathematical modeling was carried out under some simple but wrong assumption about the cause behind the chain fountain phenomenon even though with a bit more careful and thorough analysis we can spot the erroneous nature of that premise as discussed by Dai (2022h) [77]. This once again shows that mathematics can do the right work only from a correct starting point concerning the physical reality and thus good philosophical mindset is more important than mathematical aptitude when facing new anomalies that people even do not know how to properly set the prerequisite for mathematical modeling.
PART FIVE UFO and THE REALM BEYOND NATURE
After decades of urban legendary rumors, the existence of the unidentified flying objects such as flying saucers in the skies of earth planet is finally confirmed through official formal channels in recent years. Undoubtedly the existence of flying objects exhibiting technologies that are beyond the comprehension of scientists from the most advanced countries of human world should by default a topic of interest for the community of philosophy that is supposed to take care of the ontological information about the beings of humans and our environments. Accordingly, the lack of showing interest from the academics of philosophy concerning the phenomena of unidentified flying objects becomes another sign that would distance the modern day academic philosophy from the ancient truth seeking philosophers. In this section we will discuss a viable technology that could be used to reproduce some of the characteristics of the UFO’s that have been reported for the past decades. Flying saucers are the most reported unidentified flying objects in the past. While speculations about the possible alien pilots of the UFO’s from another planet floating in the media, most people have overlooked a basic technical point that the saucer shape must be designed for flying through the air like the atmosphere of the earth. We cannot deny that there must be some superb technology to transport aliens across the empty space from lightyears away if the pilots of the UFO’s are indeed from another planet, but here we will focus on the flying objects that are designed to take the advantage of our atmosphere, and thus in the following discussion we will use flying saucer as the representative of all the UFO’s in our skies. When talking about the technology that drives flying saucers, the most heard buzz word would be antigravity. As the name itself tells, the so-called antigravity technology would make massive objects act against the gravity, which indicates that it will be pushed away by gravity instead of attracted by gravity as Newton’s law prescribed. One of the most popular speculations (or rumors) about the secret of antigravity capability of flying saucers is that they are made of materials of some rare element that does not naturally exist on earth and the mass of that element possesses antigravity power. However, a big loophole of the antigravity element theory is that it does not account for how the flying saucers can approach the earth or even land on the earth ground by overcoming their antigravity force. When people use the antigravity to explain the observation that the alien flying saucers do not have the earthly conventional propulsion systems to levitate the saucers to the skies, they seem to forget that they have not found any conventional propulsion systems on those flying saucers to push them down either. Besides, the antigravity concept cannot account for the observation that the alien flying saucers can also move swiftly horizontally. More importantly, when moving swiftly in the atmosphere, the biggest resistance does not come from gravity but rather from air drag. Antigravity theory does not account for how to overcome air drag yet. Therefore, anti gravity alone cannot be the answer to how the flying saucers can fly extremely fast without using the earthly conventional propulsion system; particularly, even if the flying saucers can possess some antigravity power through some mechanism, it cannot be the use of some material from special antigravity element to build the whole flying saucer. While the antigravity element theory as the seemingly most imaginable to account for the strange outfit and behavior of flying saucers, we might learn from our nature a mechanism that could be used to reproduce many of the reported flying saucer showoffs without the need of the conventional propulsion system --- the familiar lightning and thunder phenomena. Lightning is the result of air breakdown caused by the high voltage between different electrical charges in the cloud, which could make the impacted air several times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This extremely high temperature would then cause the air to rapidly expand due to a drastic sudden jump of the internal pressure, which would attempt to push away the surrounding air at a speed far beyond the speed of sound, and thus result in the special form of sonic booms --- the thunder. Compared with the power of thunders, which could shake tall buildings and be heard at tens of miles away, the thrust of conventional rockets could be ignorable. Inspired by the awesome power of ionizing air with high voltage in nature, especially after seeing online some people claiming having seen flying saucers with glowing flare on the surface of the saucers, Dai (2019a) [[79]] proposed the idea of building manmade flying saucers with the propulsion created by the imbalance in the surrounding air pressure as the result of the ionization of air by extremely high voltages distributed on the surface of the flying vehicle. The key preconditions needed to build a manmade flying saucer as conceived by Dai would be 1) having a powerful onboard energy source that could be used to continually generate the distributed high voltages on the surface of the saucer; 2) having the knowledge of manipulating the magnetohydrodynamic field of the ionized air plasma to achieve the desired thrust in the desired direction. The first condition could be satisfied by using a portable nuclear reactor, which humans have been able to make since 1960s. In fact, the frequently mentioned radioactive residues on the ground in the flying saucer sighting reports is a good indicator that those alien flying saucers are most probably still using nuclear energy source for their onboard power system. Further, human knowledge about magnetohydrodynamic flow of plasma became pretty mature in 1970s. Therefore, we have mastered the key knowledge to build a manmade flying saucer since long time ago. The main challenge that might have discouraged human engineers to develop technologies in this direction back to 1970s could be the difficulty of getting quality materials that can endure high temperature and high voltage. But in 21st century, the advance of material science could help scientists and engineers to get some qualified materials in this area. 1. Obviously with the above introduced technology concept, the manmade flying saucer would not need the conventional propulsion system for hovering in the sky and moving swiftly through the air; 2. Since it is possible to precisely controlling the voltage distribution on the surface of the saucer, the pilot could easily change the resultant thrust towards any direction. Due to the fact that the saucer do not have a head and a tail like conventional flying craft does, once the resultant thrust points to the direction that is different from the previous moving direction, as long as the thrust is big enough the saucer would be able to change the flying direction rapidly without the need to turn its body around. Considering that once the circuit configuration is reset the speed of redistribution of the voltage on the surface is near speed of light, the bottleneck of redistributing the voltage on the surface of the craft is human reflex speed which is pretty fast; in the meantime the speed of redistribution of the magnetohydrodynamic flow field is pretty much the speed of sound, which is also pretty fast but a little slower than the human reflex speed mainly due to the contrast in the involved sizes (the pilot only needs to move fingers while the redistribution of the pressure would cover the whole area of the craft). Nevertheless, the overall speed of changing the direction of the total thrust would be extremely fast compared to the relevant maneuver with the conventional flying craft. 3. Due to the fact that the ionized propulsion system obtains its propulsion from the surface pressure distribution, as long as the shell of the saucer is strong enough and the energy source (e.g. reactor) is powerful enough, if the shell material can be made quite light and thus the magnitude of the plasma pressure could far exceed the weight of the shell per unit area, then the bigger the size, the bigger the ratio of thrust to the craft weight would be and thus the bigger the payload would be; 4. As is well known that plasma can diffuse radio waves. Therefore, we can expect the flying saucer built with the technology discussed here could diffuse radar wave so that the saucers might not appear on the radar when people could spot them with bare eyes; 5. In fact, the frequently spotted silent fast moving fire balls in the sky indicate that high temperature air plasma could even help to diffuse shock waves of air so that the flying saucers could fly quietly even at extremely high speed (tens of Mach numbers); 6. The strong magnetohydrodynamic field generated by the powerful energy source (e.g. reactor) might even be able to disturb the normal function of the electronics in nearby areas. In his 2019 article Dai (2019a) [79] offered a very rudimentary approach of manipulating the magnetohydrodynamic field around the saucer by setting up a grid of conductor circuit on the surface of the saucer so that the pilot could control the ionizing voltage generated by the onboard power source through the grid. Coincidentally, in September 2022, a video on YouTube showed a photo of flying saucer with orange flare around it hovering in the sky which was claimed to be purchased from Chinese villagers by NASA (Dai 2023e) [[80]]. Its appearance matched to a great extent what a flying saucer built with the above conceptually discussed technology would look like. First of all, it has a grid on its surface resembling the grid in Dai’s 2019 article; secondly, the orange flare around the saucer looked very rudimentary which made it impossible to be of alien advanced technology but rather a very reasonable flare of manmade flying saucer using the above discussed technology. This is because the orange color shows that the temperature of the flare was not extremely high, which could be caused by two reasons: 1) the electricity power was not big enough; 2) the material used for the circuit grid or for the whole surface could not endure extremely high temperature and thus they did not dare to make the temperature too high even if they were able to do so. Besides, the most important thing to make the photo captured from that video (Dai 2023e) [80] most probably authentic is not how good it was but rather how rudimentary it was. This is because if someone would like to forge an impressive flying saucer, they would not select such a rudimentary image, let alone for the technologically advanced alien to own such kind of primitive flying saucer. The possibility of that flying saucer image to be authentic could indicate that after Dai posted the above discussed conceptual design online in 2019, someone might actually made a real one with the similar idea. Unfortunately, one year later that video was removed from YouTube. In May 20, 1967, Stephen Michalak reported a close contact with a flying saucer at Falcon Lake, within Whiteshell Provincial Park in the Canadian province of Manitoba. It has been called Falcon Lake flying saucer incident, and was officially recognized in Canada through the issuing of $20 non-circulating silver coin featuring the incident by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2018. The following are some details reported by Stephen Michalak (Wikipedia, Falcon) [[81]]: [The craft appeared empty, and as he walked away, three panels slid in to seal the craft, and when he touched the craft, he found it so hot that the fingertips of his gloves melted. Michalak says the craft then turned counter-clockwise, revealing a panel with a grid of holes that emitted a blast of heated gas which hit him in the chest, blew him backward, and set fire to his clothing. Michalak says he immediately tore the burning clothing off as the craft flew away. Michalak experienced burns on his chest and stomach which matched with his claims of being hit by the exhaust panel. A grid-like pattern of raised sores from his burns appeared on Michalak's body. ] Michalak’s report could be read as a strong indication that the flying saucer he encountered was using some kind of internally heated air plasma as its propulsion mechanism. Inspired by Michalak’s report, Dai (2024f) [ [82]] proposed a modification of the 2019 conceptual design discussed above to an internal ionization propulsion system, which would make the manmade flying saucer more resembling the reported alien style flying saucer. All the above mentioned characteristics of the flying saucers driven by the ionized propulsion system could be good imitations of the reported technologies of the alien flying saucers. Accordingly, the conception of the (internal and external) ionized propulsion system offers one alternative to comprehend the possible mechanism used by the flying saucers in the skies of earth. Nevertheless, the ionized propulsion system discussed here can only work in earth atmosphere and thus definitely cannot be used to transport aliens back to their home planets, that is to say aliens must have more advanced technologies for propulsion. While a limited use of the ionized propulsion system discussed in this section could bring benefits to the mankind, the abuse of the technology for large amount of flying objects could be hazardous to the environment for the following reasons: 1) The end products of ionizing air would be nitrogen oxides, which could hurt the environment in multiple ways, including forming harmful acid rains and worsening global warming, etc. 2) Unless we can find an alternative energy source that could continually provide the needed high voltage to ionize air for a long time, we might need to have an onboard portable reactor as mentioned above. This could also become a potential hazardous source not only to environment but also to public safety. Given the abovementioned potential hazardous impact to environment and public safety, and the existing signs (e.g. the Falcon Lake incident) that some of the existing alien style flying saucers are actually using some advanced versions of the technology that is conceptually discussed in this section, the real value of this section is not guide the audience to practically build flying saucers with the discussed technology, but rather to alert the public that precautions need to be taken at the international level to prevent a potential widespread of the discussed technology. The viability of making flying saucers by the ionization propulsion technology and its realistic potential hazardous impact on environment and public safety should remind Homo sapiens on earth planet that we do have the need to put down mutual political hostility and work together for the common good of humanity.
Since the dawn of human civilization, how the world should be viewed fundamentally, or more specifically, whether the world is essentially matter so that all things are only various forms and activities of matter has been deemed as the essential world-view question, which has differentiated people into various philosophical camps as materialist, idealist, atheist, theist, or of some other philosophical brands. However, during all these thousands of years, philosophers did not realize that the concern of the fundamental world-view could actually be better versed into a simple question: “Is what we called as nature complete, i.e. self-contained?” In fact, the positive answer to the above simple question has been a subconsciously certain confession of the majority of the society; even among the spiritual groups or religious circles people would not openly challenge this world-view because most people would either comfortably accept heaven or hell to be located as some parts of nature, or assume spiritual beings are in the same natural realm as earthly humans, or take celestial bodies as spiritual beings, or disregard this issue to be relevant to their believing life at all. Although some scientists of last century have come up with the idea that there might be some extra dimensions beyond our nature, they have tried their best to prove that those extra dimensions are all curled up into miniscule circles so as not to impact the outfit of our magnificent nature at all, or attempted to extend the notion of nature oddly into the supernatural realm without much concern of the consequent logical inconsistence. However, the official confirmations since 2019 of the authenticity of some recorded UFO videos, and more importantly the announcement made by US government that UFO phenomenon is a national security issue, would help to bring the focus of many philosophical arguments onto the above simple question. As Dai (2023f) [[83]] pointed out, after decades of bustling of UFO reporting around the world, people would soon realize that this civilization is not mentally ready to seriously face the UFO issue at all. In fact, no matter what final conclusions the mankind might get to concerning UFO, the official decision by governments around the world to take them seriously itself would demand a huge philosophical overturn and social psychological adjustment of the global society, which even the most fervent ufologist activists have not seemed aware of, let alone prepared for it. The foremost obstacle for earthlings to officially start serious all out investigations of the UFO phenomenon is not the ostensibly daunting contrast between human technology and the supposed UFO technology, but rather the philosophical unreadiness of the populace of earth planet, or more precisely, the lack of the proper vocabulary to conduct the proper philosophical thinking concerning the very issue. Through the whole life of an earthling, the most natural thing is nature, for all his surroundings that he sees, hears, smells, touches or physically feels in other forms (e.g. feels hot) are part of nature. Accordingly, human capacity of sensational apprehension becomes the foundation for the notion of the physical world or nature, from which by imagination humans could further abstract the external world in its entirety as the definition of nature that we can currently see in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, nature) [[84]]. In fact, the “external” in this definition should not be a physical limitation but rather a mental or psychological limitation since the whole physical body of a person would also be considered as part of nature. The Latin origin of the word nature refers to birth (Wikipedia, Nature) [[85]], which might be why in the western culture nature is given another name, Mother Nature. At first glance, the missing of the sensational verbal qualifiers of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching or physically feeling in other forms in the abstraction of nature in general is completely reasonable because it is common sense that nature itself goes far beyond the sensational reach of all humans. Further, the noun “entirety” is supposed to have already covered all that can be seen, heard, smelled, touched or physically felt and thus any extra sensational verbal qualifiers of seeing, hearing, smells, touching or physically feeling in other forms might sound redundant. However, in real everyday practices, the above mentioned verbal qualifiers would become critically important to demarcate nature from the supernatural reality. Since ancient times, for many who have been deemed as spiritual people or who experienced the spiritual realm, nature would not be the entirety of the whole world. However, their views and experiences of the world beyond nature are generally very hard to be shared by those who hold nature as the entirety, and the very reason behind this is that the absolute majority of humans can not normally see, hear, smell, touch or physically feel the spiritual realm in other forms despite a very small percentage of people do have the capacity to experience the spiritual reality. That is to say nature as a notion should be only a subset of the whole realm of existence. Accordingly, for the fair benefit of those who believe the existence of spiritual world, we need to have a notion that goes beyond the notion of nature when referring to the so-called external world. The notion of supernature (with supernatural to be its adjective form) could serve this purpose very well because it has become a common practice for people to refer things beyond the scientific realm as supernatural. Despite that supernatural as one of the counterparts of natural has been one of the common cultural elements in human society for a long time, it still seems to be a problem for the society to clearly define the line between natural and supernatural. The most typical way of distinguishing natural from supernatural is that the former fits into the framework of science and the latter does not, and the society does not seem to have found any other better way to do the job yet. However, this kind of definition comes with the cost of implicitly denying the meaningfulness of supernatural reality among many people given the psychological significance of being scientifically correct for the overwhelmingly large portion of nowadays world population. To make matters worse, the notion of nature itself is also at the core of the definition of science as well because any narrative that is not considered as fitting into the natural realm has been considered as not scientific. In this way, the society has fallen into a circular logic when attempting to differentiate natural from supernatural. This logical deficiency in handling the difference between natural and supernatural has offered a political convenience across the world for many to belittle supernatural talking by denouncing them as not scientific or anti-scientific; consequently, we could often see even people from spiritual groups or religious circles might shy away from admitting the existence of supernatural reality. In modern times, the scientifically educated populations around the world have no problem to accept theories like that the whole universe goes far beyond what we can see with the best telescopes, or matter is composed of the so-called fundamental particles which we cannot see even with the best optical microscopes. People can accept those theoretically pronounced realities despite no one in the world could possibly experience them even with the finest apparatus, simply because people could extend their potential reach through imagination and simple logic in the same spatial and temporal domain that they can personally experience every moment, which we might call as logical imaginations by borrowing the Kantian theory about the relationship between empirical knowledge and imagination, while the direct sensational experiences might be called as physical imaginations. Obviously, both logical imaginations and physical imaginations as named above are within the same sets of spatial and temporal frames of reference in our three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time. However, supernatural existences cannot be covered by any natural frame of reference no matter how far one might extend the axes of the coordinates. Even if the supernatural reality is right beside an ordinary earthling, he would not be able to experience that reality with his normal human sensational capacity. This is the proper meaning of “beyond the normal human reach” that would characterize supernature. Given that every earthling lives by his own natural capacities in his natural environment with all his faculties all through his life, it would certainly be natural for an earthling to wonder how anyone on earth could ever claim that the whole reality of the world indeed goes beyond human normal physical perceptions. People would at least need some plausible explanations to make this seemingly unbelievable but possible truth sound reasonable. The very idea of the extra dimensions proposed by scientists in last century (e.g. Wikipedia, Extra; Wikipedia, String) [[86],[87]]) has indeed helped to expand human language with the needed notion for handling the conundrum of the physical limit of human perception in general as discussed here. There have been various models of different number of extra dimensions of the world, but none of them could get close to the level of practically modeling the supernatural realm. Nevertheless, all of them share this common philosophical notion: the whole reality is of more than four dimensions and our physical (biological) bodies are located only in the four-dimensional subspace (i.e. three dimensions of space and one dimension of time) in the grand multidimensional space and time. A popular thought experiment that people would use to visualize how the extra dimensions could impact our spatial perception goes like this: Imagine an intelligent being on a two-dimensional surface. Since it can move around freely in that two dimensional surface, it would suppose that the surface in which it lives is the whole universe but would never know that we humans would be watching it from the third dimension above that two-dimensional surface. …… Obviously, the notion of extra dimensions (no matter how many extra ones) could conveniently provide an explanation to why we as three-dimensional earthlings living in the one-dimensional temporal processes normally cannot experience supernature ---- the supernatural reality is in the higher dimensions beyond our commonly perceived world of three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time. Although the fact that earthlings cannot normally experience supernatural reality does make our situation share some similarity with the scenario of the above thought experiment, the fact that we are talking about supernatural reality in this world tells that we humans are not in the exactly same situation as that two-dimensional being. As for why we cannot normally sense supernatural reality, it could be attributed to the empirically trained quality of our sensational faculties: since our bodies are made of three-dimensional matters as we know of them, our sensational experiences have been repetitively limited to the reinforced direct inputs from the three-dimensional spatial environment, and thus our faculties have been repetitively tuned for recognizing three-dimensional spatial objects in one-dimensional temporal processes only, and thus the majority of earthlings normally cannot directly experience supernatural reality. Since the biggest barrier for the majority of earthlings to logically share supernatural visions is the difficulty to physically perceive supernatural reality, the most straightforward way to differentiate supernature from nature would be to define them in comparison to each other based on the common human defects of perceiving the realty beyond all viable normal reaches (both physical and logical imaginations). Now with the notion of extra-dimensions, we might conveniently define supernature as beyond our four-dimensional space and time nature; accordingly, we could have the following definitions: Nature: the entirety of the world that could be envisioned within the four dimensional (three dimensions of space and one dimension of time) Cartesian frames of reference with their origins in the physical world that can be normally seen, heard, smelled, touched or physically felt in other forms by any healthy and sober earthling. Supernature: the extension of the perceivable physical reality that goes beyond the normal reaches of human sensational faculties and thus cannot be conceptually covered by any perceivable four dimensional (three dimensions of space and one dimension of time) Cartesian frame of reference with the origin in the physical world that can be seen, heard, smelled, touched or physically felt in other forms by any earthling, no matter how far one would extend the axes of coordinates. Since the middle of 2019, especially since the middle of 2023, the used-to-be legendary issue of UFO (or UAP) and extraterrestrial aliens have become part of the realistic popular culture in US and many other places around the world (e.g. Associated Press 2023) [[88]]. It is worth noticing that all the reported UFO sightings that have been considered as authentic with recorded evidences have exhibited phenomena that cannot be comfortably explained with the most advanced human scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the UFO phenomenon is at first a social dynamic issue with this basic question: “Are those UFO’s built by earthlings or by extraterrestrial aliens?”, and it would be easier for us to answer this question if we focus ourselves on the UFO related reports from before the rapid take off of human technologies in the 20th century. Given the long lingering UFO reporting history around the world, especially when it is found that even during the world war II, before the first ever nuclear bomb was built on earth, highly advanced ghost-like flying vehicles called Foo Fighters were reported many times around the world (Wikipedia, Foo; Extreme Mysteries 2023) [[89],[90]], and it is found that even in a 1944’s American movie, humans already knew how the earth planet, especially the Great Wall of China, looked like when viewed from the moon (Nuclear Vault 2012) [[91]], the chance that the UFO’s with advanced technologies are all built by us earthlings is next to nil. In the meantime, as have been widely reported, UFO’s are obviously material and technological instead of spiritual, which means we humans with three-dimensional bodies living in one-dimensional temporal processes could also potentially build something similar to those UFO’s. But on the other hand, as we discussed earlier, the main difference between supernature and our nature is that they are located in different domains of space and time with supernature mainly in the dimensions extra to (or higher than) our three dimensions of space. Therefore, from the UFO related phenomena we might conclude that it might be potentially possible for us three-dimensional earthlings to take advantage of the science-based technologies to enter some part of the supernatural domain although it would be unrealistic for us to expect that the material UFO’s could act as supernatural spiritual beings. Based on the reports of UFO and other related phenomena as well as the ostensibly unnatural magic shows (Dai 2019b) [[92]]., we might reasonably speculate that within the supernatural spatial domain there exists a special area that is accessible to three-dimensional beings with biological bodies and material outfits. We might call that special area within the high dimensions of supernatural domain as Quasinature so as to identify it as higher than our natural domain of space and time but different from the rest of the supernatural domain. Since the birth of modern science, it has been defined as the practice and knowledge for knowing nature. The natural laws are at the core of all scientific discussions, and any talk that is not consistent with natural laws would be deemed as not scientific or anti-scientific. However, since the UFO (or UAP) phenomena have attracted more and more attentions of the mainstream society, more and more whistleblowers including some high profile ones have come out to testify the activities of flying machines maneuvered with technologies that are much more advanced than any known human technology, with the potential of defying the known natural laws for them to come here from lightyears away. As a result, it has become more and more realistic to the mankind that not only the whole realm of existence goes beyond the three-dimensional space which we soberly perceive everyday but also it is possible for material or non spiritual bodies to enter some part of the supernatural domain beyond our nature as defined above. In this sense, the UFO phenomenon has set a role model for mankind to catch up by advancing our own technology, which brings about a new mandate for human scientific community to explore beyond our natural environment. One of the biggest obstacles for humans to set off scientific exploration beyond our natural domain would be the temptation of trying to mix scientific explorations with religious and paranormal practices or even magic show performances, as we have seen in the past with some supposedly scientific endeavors of investigating some paranormal phenomena (e.g. Lee et al 2002) [[93]]. In fact, as we might see from the above discussions that while from the UFO and other related phenomena we could see the indication of the possibilities of entering the non-spiritual quasinatural domain through scientific means or physical and mental trainings, we do not have any reason to assume that we can scientifically and physically enter the spiritual realm solely with material means or human mental skills. Therefore, the attempt of getting into spiritual realm through scientific means does not have any signs of empirical foundation. Besides, it is even logically problematic to attempt to mix two kinds of practices that follow very different norms of conduct, and thus any attempt of mixing scientific exploration with practices of spiritual background would be logically wrong and should not be expected to lead to positive outcome. If humans intend to chase after the possibility of knowing beyond our nature as indicated by the UFO and other related phenomena through scientific ways, we need first to expand our scientific domain beyond the natural-law-based traditional domain; but on the other hand, in order to keep science to remain as a genuine publicly repeatable discipline with humanly verifiable logical traces we cannot go too far to allow scientific practices to mix with practices of spiritual background. This would lead to the conclusion that the above defined quasinature would be the proper new scientific domain for opening the door to the exploration beyond our nature. Throughout history, scientific observations were always the precedent of the establishment of any scientific field. Today with ever advancing video recording and broadcasting technologies, we do have the needed facilities to clearly capture all the natural traces of the quasinatural performance in magic shows. As for the study of UFO related quasinatural laws, if the rumor that earthlings have obtained and reverse engineered many alien flying machines is authentic, then the most efficient way for scientists to decode the quasinatural laws behind the UFO phenomenon would certainly be to start with the first hand data of those reverse engineering studies. Nevertheless, even if the rumor that humans have covert cooperation with aliens is authentic, it might still be quite a challenge for human scientists to truly comprehend the quasinatural laws if they do not have the necessary philosophical preparation as discussed in this writing. After conceptualizing quasinature to be the scientific domain within the supernatural domain as is done above, we would face this question: can we identify the whole quasinatural domain scientifically or how can we do it? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to that question. Historically, it took a long journey for human scientists to identify the natural domain scientifically with a set of so-called natural laws, and then assumed that this scientifically canonized domain is the complete and self-sustained whole of all existences. The scientific identification of a (relatively) clear boundary of the quasinatural domain, if possible, would certainly take a similar path as how the natural domain was identified scientifically. It might be much more difficult than identifying the natural domain due to the fact that it would be not viable for scientists to conduct predesigned experiments through the trial and error approach when exploring the quasinatural domain as they did for the natural domain; but on the other hand, it could also be relatively easier owing to the fact that humans are much well equipped today than a few centuries ago when the pioneering scientists trying to identify the natural laws. Further, the official confirmation of the technologically super advanced UFO phenomenon in general by US government since 2019, no matter their production place(s) being earth or some exoplanets, can serve as an indicator that no matter human scientists could definitively identify the complete quasinatural domain or not, it is potentially possible for us to learn some laws about the quasinatural domain so as to master some technologies for us to dabble our feet in that domain, without risking to mix our scientific endeavors with practices of spiritual background. The rapidly advancing video recording and broadcasting technologies are bringing this world into a new era that would substantially change our civilization in a way that humans could have never imagined before, which might completely change the mainstream world-view concerning the real picture of the whole existential reality. One fundamental change that earthlings are either witnessing at this moment or going to witness soon is the need for human scientists to look beyond our four dimensional nature that has been the complete domain of our natural-law-based science. Accordingly, some used-to-be anecdotal legendary type of reports are now appearing much more authentic than people previously thought, and the famous UFO phenomenon is the most typical example of this kind, which has received such a great deal of attentions in recent years that US government has officially announced it to be a national security issue. However, humans do not seem to be aware of the heavy weight of the radical challenge that we would face once the open society is determined to take the UFO issue seriously, let alone be prepared for the challenge. The biggest psychological obstacle for earthlings to understand UFO phenomenon would be the difficulty to envision beyond our familiar nature of four-dimensional space and time. For most people it is even unthinkable to accept the thought that our four-dimensional nature is not the whole picture of reality, due to the intrinsic limit of human normal perception of the reality beyond our three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. But in the meantime, as the UFO and other related phenomena become more and more accepted to be authentic among the populace of this planet, many have started to dream that humans might someday also be able to produce craft similar to the supposed alien UFO’s to carry us going out of our solar system. However, if humans truly intend to explore beyond our natural realm as the supposed intelligent lives behind the used-to-be legendary UFO’s seem to be able to, we would soon find that the first and foremost hurdle that human scientists (let alone the general public) would be facing to is not the difficult technology but rather the fundamental philosophical challenge for them to comprehend the meaning of “beyond nature”. The same naturally oriented mindset that has dominated the thinking of mankind since ancient times would potently hinder the basic understanding of how it is possible for anyone, no matter earthlings or aliens, to go beyond our familiar natural realm. This is undoubtedly a serious philosophical obstacle that humans need to first get over before it is even possible for us to walk out the first step of looking into the domain beyond our nature. In order to overcome this mental obstacle for humans to scientifically look beyond our four-dimensional nature, we need to first define the proper domain (within the supernatural realm) that we can dabble our feet in, and one of the most important parts of this writing has been devoted to define the quasinature as the proper domain for scientific exploration beyond our familiar nature, in addition to the clarification of why it is difficult for ordinary people to share others’ supernatural experiences. In fact, no matter the claim of the existence of aliens on earth finally turns out authentic or not, a clear demarcation between nature and supernature in scientific terms, and the identification of the quasinature for things like magic shows etc are still importantly meaningful. The goal of the above discussion is to establish the necessary philosophical framework for people to comprehend the complexions by clarifying the demarcation between nature and supernature and identifying the extended domain for scientific endeavors once human scientists start to look beyond our four-dimensional nature.
While philosophically incorrect thinking could cause serious consequences in scientific development as we have witnessed through the examples that have been discussed so far in this book, in fact, philosophically correct thinking is a very big challenge to the mankind all through the history. Accordingly, we could always identify philosophical immaturities in the course of social and scientific development. Unlike the mistakes that we have previously seen in this book, philosophical immaturities are a normal thing to the evolution of civilization due to the fact that human science can never be perfect but always in certain middle stages of development. But on the other hand, the correlation between philosophical immaturity and the degree of backwardness of the civilization highlights the importance of strong philosophical capacity for social and scientific advances and thus underscore the harm of disparaging philosophy. The evolution of knowledge about sleeping and dreams is an excellent area for showcasing how metaphysical-style philosophical thinking can help enrich the human knowledge base. This is because of two reasons: 1) The knowledge of sleep and dreams is open to the whole society, because sleep and dreams are not secrets that require special conditions for anyone to access; nevertheless, 2) after millenniums of study of sleep and dreams, human knowledge about sleep and dreams are still very limited. Because of the above two reasons, the knowledge that the author acquired in the past few years through introspective observations and metaphysical analyses about sleep and dreams could provide good examples of how philosophizing could help us to advance even in the most ancient field of human knowledge. Sleep was seen in culture as similar to death in ancient times; poets have written poems about the relationship between sleep and death. Sleep and dreaming have sometimes been seen as providing the potential for visionary experiences. Many cultural stories have been told about people falling asleep for extended periods of time. In the ancient Greek legendary story, Epimenides of Knossos slept in a cave for fifty-seven years. The attempt of interpreting dreams could also be traced back thousands of years ago. The attempt to systematically discuss the topic of sleeping (as well as sleeplessness) and dreams based on known scientific knowledge occurred relatively late, and Aristotle might be the most famous ancient sage for doing this (Aristotle 350 BC b,c,d ) [[94],[95],[96]]. However, his work was mainly identifying various related phenomena and attempting to metaphysically connect them with the known scientific knowledge at that time. Due to the very limited knowledge base available to Aristotle more than two millenniums ago, his main contribution concerning sleep and dreams was more taxonomic than insightful and his analyses were full of confusion and way off the marks when examined with nowadays known knowledge. Nevertheless, he did demonstrate the needed seriousness towards the topic of sleep and dreams and made the first jump for the race. In the modern era, the topic of sleep has attracted extensive attentions from scholars of various fields. Related research areas cover from brain waves in sleep, the sleep cycle of alternate NREM and REM sleep, awakening during sleep and sleep quality, the circadian clock and other common sleep phenomena, to neurophysiology studies of sleep and dreams, the genetic influences upon sleep, homeostatic sleep propensity, age factor of ideal sleep, etc (Wikipedia. Sleep) [[97]]. Psychologists and psychiatrists have joined in the venture of interpreting the meanings of dreams, while neurobiologists, neurologists, and scientists from some other fields have teamed up to form the field of oneirology specializing in the scientific studies of dreams, and not only human dreams but also the dreams of animals have become the subject of the so-called scientific researches on dreams in a speculative sense (Wikipedia, Dream) [[98]]. Nevertheless, for the past thousands of years (including modern days), one of the main areas of the dynamics of sleep and dreams has been missing in all types of mainstream explorations including the nowadays scientific researches and neurophilosophical discussions, which is the transcendental aspect of both the functional transition from wakefulness to sleep with dreams and the logic of dreams. Due to the special nature of dream, it is impossible to study this subject through modern scientific approaches, and thus we have to investigate it through introspective metaphysical approach similar to the Kantian (Kant 1781) [[99]] and Hegelian (Hegel 1807) [[100]] style phenomenological investigations. 21.2. The metaphysics of sleepIn order to better understand how to fall into sleep, it is important to have better knowledge about the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness since falling into sleep is obviously a transition from conscious state into unconscious state. It has become a common knowledge that conscious activities are supported by and closely coupled with unconscious activities (e.g. Le Roux 2014; Cherry 2023) [[101],[102]]; in the meantime, the activities of dreams are certainly part of unconscious activities. As Dai (2023g) [[103]] pointed out, the main difference between the conscious mind and dreaming lies in their contents of awareness and their power of directing, i.e. their capacity of knowing things and directing (mental) actions. When a person is awake, he is aware of all mental activities in his conscious mind, including logical, emotional, and sensational activities, which come into his awareness, and many of them do not follow his previous logical thinking but just pop up randomly. While many popping up activities might be ignored by consciousness, very often some of them interact with consciousness in such a way that a randomly popping up activity could drag the mind into an unplanned new thread of mental activity and then consciousness would take over the authority to lead the new activity. Although consciousness is in the final control in this scenario, it is more like being pushed into the controlling position by the originally unconscious activity and could continually be pushed by the latter all along until the mind changes its attention to something else. A typical example is that people often start to humming a song when the melody of the song just randomly pops up into their awareness system. When a person is dreaming, he is still aware of the content of the dream, but unconsciously instead of consciously. The fundamental difference between the conscious awareness and the unconscious awareness of dreams is that the conscious awareness is connected to physical reality and the unconscious awareness of dreams is only limited to the content of dreams. Hence, we might envision the existence of an awareness system with its control being shifted between consciousness and dream. When a person is awake, consciousness takes the control of awareness, and when a person falls into sleep, consciousness yields the control and thus the dreaming system takes it over. With this model, awareness itself never ceases working, and thus falling into sleep is the process when consciousness gradually yields its control of awareness to the dreaming system. Next to their different types of content of awareness, the power of directing is the second most important factor that differentiates conscious mind and dreaming. Although within dreams people do issue or receive nonpersistent and inconsistent directional commands, only consciousness could give definitive command with logical clarity. 21.2.3. Different relationships with memory In addition to the differences in awareness and directing power, consciousness and unconsciousness also differ in the relationship with memory. Memory functions in both conscious wakefulness and unconscious sleep; while conscious experiences can normally leave clear and long lasting memories, memories of unconscious experiences during sleep normally are unclear and short lasting or even cannot be recollected at all. Logically we cannot be assured that a subject was not experiencing any dreamlike visions even if he or she could not recall any content of dream after he or she is waked up. This is because awareness and memory indeed belong to two different logical faculties which indicate that they might not have the complete same biological roots. In fact, the human memory system may be more complex than psychologists claim, and dreams may use some deep memory mechanisms similar to those reflected in hypnosis. People might have all experienced such a scenario: some scenes in a dream were soon forgot but then the dreamer was surprised that those scenarios reoccurred as something familiar in the same dream or in some later dreams, and those reoccurrences could make those scenes to be remembered after the dreamer waked up. 21.2.4. Further discussion The rapid eye movement (Wikipedia, Rapid) [[104]] and non-rapid eye movement (Wikipedia, Non-rapid) [[105]] have been considered as two basic phases of sleep. However, due to the lack of metaphysical style introspective examination as this writing is doing, when modern psychologists assume that it is the neurophysiological or even biochemical undergoing that determines which phase a sleep is in and the phase in turn determines the characteristics of the dreams (in different phases), they miss the very possibility that it is the visions in the dream that inversely impact the movement of the eyes of the subject. Based on the above discussion we know that falling into sleep is the process of passing from the conscious mental state into the unconscious mental state of dreaming. But consciousness cannot direct the mind to take the authority away from consciousness itself because as long as consciousness directs the mind to do anything, it holds the authority without yielding it. Thus, consciousness can yield its authority only by not doing anything. While the conscious desire (to sleep) itself does send the signal to the mind-body system that the subject wants to get into sleep or wants to forsake the authority of knowing things and directing thinking, it would only serve as the intentional signal asking the mind to transfer the authority from consciousness to unconscious dreaming system and as an insinuation to relax the mind-body system, not serve as a command to act. Some anecdotal sleeping techniques require the subjects to think something (e.g. peaceful sceneries) or do something (e.g. counting the heads of a flock of sheep). But the only positive effects (if any) can those techniques bring to the feat of sleeping is to either cause the mind-body system more relax or magnify the fatigue of the mind-body system, it cannot serve as a direct command of sleeping. Consequently, the desire to sleep cannot be satisfied through any definitive intentional command like when we intentionally do other things because consciousness is the only source of definitive command with logical clarity. Therefore, we count on an unconscious signal mechanism for the unconscious dreaming system to take the authority of mind away from consciousness, and this signal mechanism does not take command from consciousness but works only in response to the general status of the mind-body system. Naturally, when the body feels fatigued and the mind feels sleepy, the unconscious signal mechanism for sleeping would attempt to bring the mind into sleep by shifting the awareness authority to the dreaming system, as long as the consciousness does not resist. The current human interests in dreams can be roughly divided into two general categories, one is concerning the recollection of the contents by the dreamers, and the other is concerning the physical (including neural and biological etc) foundation and mechanism of dreams. There is still a gray area between these two categories, which is about whether there might be supernatural causes behind dreams, since if some contents could be put into the dreams from outside as believed by many then its mechanism would be beyond the domain of oneirology or any kind of scientific studies. Besides, even without involving any supernatural interpretations, there have been some explorations of the external communications between the dreamers, during which pioneer researchers attempted to let two dreamers to talk to each other through so-called lucid dreams (Olson 2012) [[106]]. Nevertheless, as Dai (2021d) [[107]] pointed out, for the past thousands of years, a critical piece in the jigsaw puzzle behind the abovementioned categories of dreams has been missing in the mainstream investigation of dreams, which is the logical fabric of the dream contents, or the logic to get a dream to move on. Before we look into the logic of dreams, we need to make one assumption that we only examine the logic of what naturally happened in common dreams when the dreamer sleeping on the bed. Therefore, even though the dreams in question might end up with something that the dreamers could control with intention, the main courses should not be lucid and do not include sleepwalking type actions either. As a starting point, we need first to recognize that dream contents are not completely void of logic because otherwise there won’t be any recollectable dream story at all, since logic is fundamental for any narrative to be possible. On the other hand, dreams are also characterized by the frequent change of characters and scenes, and the changes do not need to follow any logic; therefore, the logic in dream scenes is neither persistent nor consistent, which would be the correct interpretation of the illogical nature of dreams. Besides, another important pattern of the logical behavior of dreams is that dreams would in general block the fulfillment of any effort for concrete results so that the dreamer cannot obtain or unveil the specifics of anything appeared in dreams. For example, if you see a box in a dream and attempt to open the box with your hands, you will have two possible results: 1) the scene will change to something else and you will forget that box soon; 2) you stick to that box and struggle with all your energy to open it, and then you will wake up from the dream. The rationale behind this is simple: you don’t really have the box in your hand and thus you will not be able to open it with your hands. Another dream phenomenon that is closely related to the abovementioned result-blocking rule is that under certain dreaming circumstances, dreams might turn into near-daydreams or daydreams when a certain degree of consciousness gets involved into the dreams to maneuver them in the directions favorable to the dreamers. For example, when chased by villains in a dream, the dreamer might design some scenario (e.g. flying like an ET, or jump into a river, or hide in a cave, or even turn back to knock down the villains) to prevent the tragic ending of being captured from happening, and then, as the involvement of the consciousness in the dream gets stronger, it might finally take over the whole thing and then the dream would turn into a complete daydream or a complete awakening. The dreamer could often be surprised and amazed by the responses from the persons with whom the dreamer has conversations in the dream. Sometimes, the other parties might say some words that the dreamer understands but not very familiar with, or at least the dreamer would unlikely to use them in real life; sometimes, the dreamer might be surprised by the knowledge of the other parties about something strange. All these scenarios actually belong to a more general phenomenon of dreams: dreamers do not know what are in the minds of their companies in the dreams. This phenomenon of being ignorant of what are in the minds of the characters of dreams automatically disproves a popular false claim that dreams to the dreamers are like narratives to the writers of fictional stories. This is because writers always know what are in the minds of the characters they create in the stories. More importantly, in order to have the dreamers amazed, the responses have to be meaningful, which means that the other parties in the dreams have to be intelligently responsive and capable of providing answers that could logically fit into the unfamiliar contexts of the conversations. This is a very strong indication that dreams do have their own way to work logically without the knowledge of the dreamers, for otherwise “the other parties” would not give the dreamers any logically correct response to surprise them. That alone tells that the intelligence (or intellectual self) of the dreamer is not the author in the dream. In fact, we might say that the unconsciousness, instead of the consciousness, is where the logic is processed in the mind since the consciousness is not at work during dreams. Dreams are not completely illogic and the logic of dreams follows some basic patterns and laws, among which are: 1) the logic in dream scenes is neither persistent nor consistent; 2) dreams would in general block the fulfillment of any effort for concrete results; 3) the involvement of a certain degree of consciousness could turn dreams into near-daydreams or daydreams; 4) dreamers do not know what are in the minds of their companies in the dreams.
PART SEVEN ON THE ACADEMIA OF PHILOSOPHY
The use of a past participle in the title of this section might make some people feel uncomfortable. But unfortunately that is a proper wording for this section despite it is a sad reality. The game has come to the end for the current academia of philosophy, and it is impossible to restart it from within. This is not to say that philosophy is ended as Heidegger (1969) [[108]] pronounced many decades ago, this just means that the game is almost over for the current academia of philosophy. The reason why it is not completely over yet is not because this academia still has academic vigor or potentially bright future. No, this current academia of philosophy has no future at all and the reason why it is not completely over is because it is still a huge global enterprise with hundreds of thousands of people to be taken care of and with huge resources including a colossal teaching team and large quantity of facilities and platforms. The correct diagnosis for the current academia of philosophy would be the academic autism which makes the academia indulged in its own fabricated games while utterly disconnected from the real social, natural, and humanistic courses. Professional philosophers are no longer able to carry out the ancient task of philosophically troubleshooting real life problems in natural science, technological development and engineering projects, economics and finance, cultural dynamics, domestic and international politics, industries and supplies, education and humanity, etc. They are even incapable of comprehending the descriptions of problems in real life social sectors beyond their own familiar language so that we are witnessing such an awkward situation that philosophers are less understanding when facing real life issues than ordinary people in the public while the opposite was supposed to be the case in ancient times. This academic autism is incurable because it is fortified by the existing interest-based power structure, which is not something that can be resolved through any academic or even political efforts. Truth has become not important for the academia of philosophy since long time ago. The academia has ingeniously deprived itself off the demand of truth by declaring that there is no common standard of truth in philosophy and everything is open to be argued without the need to reach any conclusion. The term “argue” has been assigned a new significance and “argument” has taken the place of truth to become the ultimate goal of philosophy for academics. This leads to the systematic dishonesty of the academia of philosophy. One of the most important factors that have led the academia of philosophy come to this sad ending is the collective poor reading capacity. It might stagger the general public if they are told that the academia is collectively incapable of correctly reading some classics of Hegel, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Lao Tzu, and so on. But unfortunately, that is the sad fact (see Dai, 2019c, 2020 a-b, 2021e) [[109],[110],[111],[112]]. This simple fact should have utterly disqualified the whole academia from the title of “philosophy” if we would gauge the academia with the same standard as we gauge high school students in their reading class. Of course, that will not happen since the society has fully entrusted the profession with the title of “philosophy” to handle anything that is related to philosophy with a faith that people in that profession would excellently handle the business of philosophy in the best possible way. Therefore, no one outside the academia would come to gauge the academia of philosophy as a profession with any standard; in the meantime, the academia itself would not admit the embarrassing reality of not able to read difficult classics. With this general background, we can see how much the replacement of truth with argument could help the academics of philosophy to extricate themselves from the embarrassment of poor reading capacity. Because of the reasons laid out above, we can see that the academia of philosophy is ruining the mainstream philosophy and misleading bright young academics generations after generations. They achieve this not by dictating a social doctrine and forcing everyone to repeat it as happened historically in some authoritarian nations, and they are not misleading the generations after generations of bright youngsters by pointing guns at their heads. They cause the damages through hijacking the title “philosophy”. The open society has endorsed the academia of philosophy generously because they expect that people in the profession with the title of “philosophy” would do the best for philosophy as the foundation of human civilization, and the youngsters enter the profession of philosophy because they assume that the profession with the title of “philosophy” would be the best place for them to serve the civilization with authentic philosophy. Therefore, what the society is really endorsing with high respect and rich resources are not those particular people in the profession of philosophy, but rather the name of “philosophy”. Accordingly, when people in the profession with the name of “philosophy” cannot live up to the name but still enjoy the prestige and resources brought by the name of “philosophy”, it would be indeed in a sense a hijack of the name of “philosophy”. Of course, the students would be finally molded into the same shapes as their professors by the selection mechanism of the educational system....anyone who does not agree with what their professors taught would not pass the examinations so that cannot be endorsed with the social resources that are supposed to endorse people work for the name of "philosophy".....even after they graduate, if they do not follow the steps of those who are controlling the platforms and resources that the society offers to people with the name of "philosophy", they would not be able to publish papers, and they cannot promote what they think to be correct but against the stale culture of the academia of philosophy, and they might not even hold their professional positions very long. One logical consequence of the academic autism and poor collective reading capacity plus systematic dishonesty is that wisdom that are supposed to be loved by philosophers has been expelled by “knowledge” in the professional writings of philosophy. One important reason that we need to put the quotation marks around the word knowledge here is because the academia has a culture of making up their own knowledge with collections of isms and names of famous players in the game. Despite of the disparagement of philosophy by the academia of science in the past few centuries, fundamentally humans indeed vitally need a good mainstream philosophy due to the foundational role of philosophy in the development of earth civilization. No need to mention how potentially dangerous this civilization is now because of facing a demising profession of philosophy. The long term solution for boosting the global societal capacity of philosophical thinking would undoubtedly involve revolutionary changes in philosophy education at all levels (from grade to graduate). However, fundamental educations would not suffice for meeting the global demands for advanced philosophical capacity in helping with practical needs in scientific, economical, political, environmental, and all other cultural areas. We need to have professionals of advanced capacity of metaphysical thinking in various decision making bodies to help avoiding detrimental actions, which the existing academia of philosophy is obviously incompetent of. The challenge here is that we need a new specialty to help the world with widespread demands while it is impossible for us to train people with this specialty like we train other professionals. This new specialty would require its professionals to be not only proficient in math and science but also in philosophy (metaphysics). This requirement determines that it would be like building another ivory tower in the academic world. Nevertheless, since we need it we have no other choice but start to build it so that we might get over the barrier of societal weak capacity of philosophical thinking. Obviously, the existing academia of philosophy would not be able to carry out this task at all and this academia cannot be changed from within. In the meantime, it is not practically realistic to attempt to replace the existing academia of philosophy with another one, for the reasons that I discussed above. This brings up a call to those who really cares about the wellbeing of this civilization and understands the vital role of a good academia of philosophy to the civilization: we need to form a parallel community of philosophy to compete with the existing one. Of course, it is impossible for any group of people to form another academia of philosophy in one shot. Ideally, the best approach would be to first have an independent school of philosophy outside the existing educational system (which is tightly bound to the existing academia of philosophy). In this school, natural and social sciences would be merged with general philosophy once again as they were many centuries ago. High level practical trainings targeting at real life issues would be parallel to the teachings of advanced new philosophy knowledge, and new platforms for publishing would be established. Accordingly, we need to have revolutionary curriculums for the students and high standards for the qualifications of the teachers, and we need to start with a small scale and to have it grow through practices. Most importantly, the new school would not be influenced by the interest based political structure of the existing academia of philosophy.
Partiality is a difficult to battle genetic defect of all humans. A common symptom of partiality is that when people focus on one aspect of an issue, they would tend to completely ignore the other aspects of the issue. The repeatedly occurring events of damaging the earth environment as the result of pursuing economic benefits is a typical sad example of the consequences of human partiality. Contrary to this, owing to the fact that philosophy is supposed to be the study of the nature of being qua being as Aristotle pointed out in “Metaphysics” around 2370 years ago, good philosophical thinking demands a thorough survey for involved connections. This does not mean that good philosophers would never miss any relevant connections, but at least with the kind of training in metaphysical thinking as reflected in those famous classics, human partiality could be overcome to a relatively great extent compared to the untrained mind. Sadly, human beings are now paying a dire price for disparaging philosophy in all facets of life, from the natural science as the most sophisticated explorations of nature for the survival and advance of Homo sapiens species to the social political and economic operations as well as all other social practices. In the examples discussed in this paper we have seen that scientists with the aura of most intelligent people on earth could easily be convinced by “simple, straight, and brilliant ideas” that would lead to various false knowledge and wrong practices, and then defend those ideas with all their lives for a long time, simply because they do not possess the capacity to discern simple philosophically wrong ideas. Very often those “simple, straight, and brilliant ideas” could bring aesthetically attractive conveniences with their logical defects hidden in various camouflages that could be easily identified if the society has been prepared with strong philosophical capacity of reasoning. We have also seen from the examples such hilarious historical scenes that scientists at high positions would make simple logical errors that are supposedly only school pupils would make and the whole world would embrace obvious mistakes as correct for a long time, simply due to the collective weak philosophical capacity around the globe. In the face of the dismal state of theoretical physics, which has been riddled with loopholes for more than a century, the public would naturally be deeply confused when looking around at the dizzying scientific and technological achievements and thriving industrial development. Such a question would arise: how could scientists and engineers make impressive and great technological advances on such a cracking theoretical foundation? A short answer to this question would be: technological progress and theoretical advance do not have a simple linear cause and effect logical relationship as people might have thought. In general, we might better understand the causes behind the technological progresses by looking into (at least) the following factors: 1) Despite the fact that human theoretical system of physics is now of many holes, it still possesses a lot valuable knowledge; further, the combination of the existing knowledge and new experimental results could bring about new theories. Even if both the previously existing and the newly developed theories are only partially correct, they could still help humans to modify the existing technologies or conceive and materialize new technologies. 2) In general, technologies could be viewed as having been curated and hatched in a grand worldwide technological family of thousands of years of history. This is because the influence of the old existing technologies upon the development of new technologies could often be much bigger than the influence of new speculative theories. 3) Even with the supposed most sophisticated theoretical guidance, in practice, the process of trial and error is the norm of the design and use of technologies, which often results in significant deviations from the known theories. In fact, deviations from the known theories have played an extremely important role in the development of new theories in human history. In fact, scientific discoveries often happened as random incidents that some people ran into or even unexpected gifts from the failures of apparently irrelevant endeavors, which could have little to do with the theoretical advances at those times at all. 4) The development of technology has been largely influenced by cross-field developments, which are often pretty much independent from the theoretical development in the target field. For example, the greatest advances in human science over the past hundred years are not in theories of physics and related technologies, but rather in computer technology, automation and artificial intelligence, as well as related telecommunications and information technology. The development of computers especially the development of computer algorithms and programming, is basically independent of the development of frontier physics, despite there have been some generally limited influences from the development of frontier physics upon the development of computer hardware. In terms of the development of computer hardware, classical physics has so far played a far greater role than the most advanced quantum physics. But on the other hand, the development of computer technology, automation and artificial intelligence obviously has a great impact on the advance of physics, both experimental and theoretical. There have been quite a few models in terms of how the science advances throughout the history. The most popular ones, which are also most traditional views in the past millenniums, can be summarized as: 1) the advance of science is like a relay race, with the new comers following the pioneers’ footprints to move forward; 2) the advance of science is like building an edifice, with every layer being the base of the next higher layer. Despite their contradiction to the fact that every single scientific researcher or engineering inventor could experience many failures in their careers, people do often cite the above ages long assumed patterns as a defense of the impossibility for the mankind to achieve tremendous technological advance if the supposed theoretical foundation is not in a good shape. In addition to the above two models that might only reflect ancient views of how human science would advance, many people might have also been familiar with a more modern assumed pattern of scientific advancement saying that every stage of scientific advance is only the approximation of truth, but a step closer to the truth. Further, an old adage reflects another popular theory about the scientific evolution by saying: “Failure is the mother of success.” The undertone of this adage is that humans would always learn from the mistakes to become smarter and then act correctly. However, the examples illustrated in this book could disprove all the above models. We have seen in this book that the global development of scientific theories in a whole field with millions of scientific workers and the most advanced facilities could be held back for more than a century because of some simple logical glitches in the theory, which cannot be deemed either as a step closer to the truth and or a example of relay race. What happened was that the whole world held some wrong theories as correct and built up new theories on top of the wrong theories for more than a century, which means during that whole hundred plus of years the mankind as a whole did not learn any lesson from the mistakes to become smarter; in fact, most scientists held the wrong theories as correct and fundamentally important to science all their lives during this time period. Hence, it defies another of the above models. In the meantime, as we have discussed above that human technologies do advance when the supposed theoretical foundation is full of holes, which defies the model of edifice building. But on the other hand, by carefully reviewing the path of scientific advancement for the past centuries, we might find that while the erroneous theories could not provide precise empirical guidance to the technological practices, they do often provide the needed language to the technologists or experimental scientists. More properly speaking, when advancing in their own independent empirical systems, technologists or experimental scientists would still use the terms coined or developed in the theoretical domain to organize their own practices even if they do not matches exactly the original theoretical definitions. In fact, we could even observe such a phenomenon that when the core of a theory cannot be deemed as one step closer to the truth or it might be a blocker for the complete field to move one step closer to the truth, some central notions employed in the theory could still contribute to the real advance of the field towards the truth. Here we just find another pattern of the scientific advancement in addition to the above mentioned three models, the semiotic scaffolding pattern. The term semiotic scaffolding here refers to that the notions or even the literal meanings of the names of some notions used in a theory could help to organize the future theoretical or technological advances, no matter the involved theory itself is valid or not. That is to say, while the advancement of science is like building an edifice as the old saying points out, scientific activities do not always contribute to the blocks of the building but sometimes helps to set up the scaffolding structure that could help others to climb up for construct the true building. The role of semiotic scaffolding in the development of science and technology is a manifestation of the general role of language in the advancement of the whole civilization. Around 2500 years, ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu made the following statement concerning the role of language in his famous Tao Te Ching: [The Tao that can be said is not an eternal Tao, The name that can be given is not an eternal name; There was no name at the beginning of the universe, Naming things is how we start to know them (i.e. the mother of the knowledge of things); So without a name, we would only perceive the nature of a being, With a name, we could discover the details and limits of that being (or notion); Those two things come from the same one but differ in terms of name (neither “differ by name” nor “differ in name”, since one of them is “no name”), So both are called mystery; One mystery after another, That’s the gate to the unknown knowledge of all things.] The above passage is the English version of the Chinese translation of Dai (2011) [[113]] for the first chapter of Tao Te Ching, which is one of the most erroneously translated chapters of the famous work of Lao Tzu. Considering that all words in a language are names of something (e.g. the noun is the name of objects, the verb is the name of actions, etc), names are indeed the basic building blocks of any language. With this knowledge, it is not hard for us to understand that the first chapter of Tao Te Ching is about the fundamental role of language in knowing everything. Lao Tzu was saying there that the process of knowing things is indeed the process of marking things with names.
Obviously, the process of marking the reality would not only involve nouns and verbs, but also adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions; it would not only involve individual words but also the organic combinations of words into sentences, and sentences into complicated pieces of text. Therefore, an effectively accurate reflection of the reality would not only involve sensitively detailed notions but also involve the correct presentation of the relationships between the notions. Nevertheless, as we have witnessed over the history of the development of science and technology, even if some knowledge is not correct or at least not accurately correct as a complete theory, the establishment of some notions in the theory still could help others to recognize some details of reality as long as the verbal records of the notions do partially but correctly capture some aspects of the supposed reality. On the other hand, without the previous accumulation of relevant notions, new explorers need new efforts to find those notions and they might even miss those notions in their practices, which could cause a big unwanted detour for the exploration. Therefore, the above millenniums old narrative could help us to better appreciate the semiotic scaffolding role of scientific language (notions) in the advancement of science and technology. The academic capacity of philosophical thinking has been severely crippled by the global collective misunderstanding and disparaging of the role of philosophy for the past few centuries. It is the outcome of complicated historical developments, mostly of the historical developments of both academic philosophy and academic science with profound causes in both prescribed and accidental forms. On the academic philosophy side, the collectively poor reading capacity and systematic dishonesty have led to the academic autism, which cannot be changed from within due to its tight connection to the interest-based political structure including the educational selection mechanism. On the academic science side, the erroneous perception that experiments plus math are sufficient for scientific explorations in the modern times with no room left for philosophy any longer have greatly weakened the position of philosophy in the enterprise of science. History is full of coincidences. A few decades before the academic world accepted Cantor’s set theory, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published his famous writing “The Emperor's New Clothes” (e.g. Wikipedia, The Emperor) [[114]], and then a few decades later, as we have witnessed from the examples discussed in this book, the community of scholars in mathematics and physics and philosophy, a group of elites that would be least possible to be related by the public to that folktale of Andersen, started to put on the real life show simply because of their collective dearth of strong capacity of philosophical thinking. Obviously we cannot go back in history to fix the historical causes but rather have to face the current challenges if we do want to have a change of the status quo with the academic philosophical weakness. One of the biggest challenges at this point of history for the world to deal with the fallout of disparaging philosophy for a long time is to admit that collectively disparaging philosophy has done huge harms to the civilization. This would be much more difficult to the academia than it might sound because it is always a popular tendency for people to focus on particular technical or conditional reasons for their mistakes or failures instead of the defects in their fundamental ways of thinking (i.e. their philosophical thinking) since hardworking people would always suppose that they have tried their best to muster up their good logical ability to take care of all the necessary aspects. Consequently, although due to the undeniable directional errors when we look back over the century-long course it would be very hard for serious readers to deny the philosophical causes behind the mistakes discussed in this writing, when similar situations occur in the future practices, people would most probably repeat the same mistakes if the negative societal mindset about the role of philosophy remains the same and the academia of philosophy remains to be the same society as it is today. A change of the mindset of disparaging philosophy by admitting the important role of philosophy in scientific endeavors and admitting the stale status of the academia of philosophy is of the utmost importance for us to improve human societal capacity of philosophical thinking. We need a revolution of the academic philosophy and we need to have a new professional community of philosophy parallel to the existing academia of philosophy.
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ENDNOTES
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Experimental testing of time dilation. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_testing_of_time_dilation#Atmospheric_tests. Last edited on 2 December 2023, at 17:05 (UTC). [[8]]Viel, D (2021) Muons atmospheric time dilation experiment. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/66182321/Muons_atmospheric_time_dilation_experiment [[9]]Dai, R. (2023a). Debunk A Few World Famous Experiments. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375002717_Debunk_A_Few_World_Famous_Experiments [[10]]Hafele, J.C. and Keating, R.E. (1972). Around-the-World Atomic Clocks: Predicted Relativistic Time Gains. Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4044 (Jul 14, 1972), 166-168. Retrieved from https://virgilio.mib.infn.it/~oleari/public/relativita/materiale_didattico/Hafele-Keating-predict_observ.pdf [[11]]Wikipedia. Hafele-Keating experiment. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment. Last edited on 8 March 2024, at 23:06 (UTC). [[12]]NIST (2010). NIST Clock Experiment Demonstrates That Your Head is Older Than Your Feet. Retrieved from https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/09/nist-clock-experiment-demonstrates-your-head-older-your-feet [[13]]Wikipedia. Pound–Rebka experiment. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound%E2%80%93Rebka_experiment. Last edited on 20 March 2024, at 02:31 (UTC). [[14]]Wikipedia. Speed of light, Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light. Last edited on 22 March 2024, at 18:25 (UTC). [[15]]NIST (2019) Definitions of the SI base units. physics.nist.gov. Retrieved from https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/current.htmlRetrieved 8 February [[16]]Dai, R. (2022b) Invalidating the Postulate of Constant Speed of Light with a Thought Experiment, Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362080277_Invalidating_the_Postulate_of_Constant_Speed_of_Light_with_a_Thought_Experiment [[17]]Sagnac, G. (1913) The luminiferous aether demonstrated by the effect of the wind relative to the aether in a uniformly rotating interferometer. Comptes Rendus, 157: 708-710. translated from French by Wikisource. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:The_Demonstration_of_the_Luminiferous_Aether [[18]]Mathpages (2022). The Sagnac Effect. Retrieved from https://www.mathpages.com/rr/s2-07/2-07.htm [[19]]Wikipedia. Sagnac effect. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnac_effect. Last edited on 4 January 2024, at 16:42 (UTC). [[20]]Dai, R. (2024a). When Galilean Superposition Is Experimentally Verified. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377358009_When_Galilean_Superposition_Is_Experimentally_Verified [[21]]Dai, R. (2022c) Absolute Space and Time Versus Aether, Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363795935_Absolute_Space_and_Time_versus_Aether_or_Cosmic_Center_Rongqing_Dai [[22]]van Lunteren, F.H. 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