For Our New Readers: An Overview of Meta Science

In the 1960s and early 1970s, funding sources for astronomy research were still fairly diversified, with government, universities, and industry all major players. But as the space program grew, gradually Big Science elbowed Little Science aside, and funding became more centralized. Today, there is little recourse outside NASA or NSF. The decadal funding review committees would frequently recommend programs for adoption in order of cost, putting in as many big-ticket programs as possible. Ignored were meritorious programs costing very little because all budgeted funds would already be allocated to expensive projects before the little ones came up for consideration.

The long-term effects of these changes were not evident for many years. One such effect was to squeeze out independent researchers in favor of large teams working on grand projects. A more harmful effect grew up in the 1980s when funding became tight. NASA and NSF tended to “adopt” certain theories as “established” and cut funding for research on alternatives. This effectively curtailed the possibility of scientific revolutions. A third side effect is that NASA was forced to adopt political policies inappropriate in science, such as justifying its annual budget by telling the U.S. Congress that their space telescopes would find proof of the Big Bang, “black holes”, “dark matter”, “dark energy”, etc. This led to publicizing the latest evidence favoring each of these ideas as the annual budget consideration approached, and to downplaying or ignoring counter-evidence. A fourth problem is that NASA started citing and urging recipients of its funding to cite other NASA programs and scientists, ignoring credit to non-NASA-funded scientists – again for the nominally “good” purpose of justifying maximum funding for everyone who could be funded, with priority of course to those who helped get the funding by splashy findings using previous funding.

Many younger scientists and researchers have never known a time when things were any other way.

Beginnings of Meta Science

Meta Research was founded in 1991 to deal with the problem that many alternative models worth pursuing by all valid scientific criteria could no longer get funding from the usual sources. Our Meta Research Bulletin began publication in March 1992, reporting on such research. But it was soon evident that most alternative models were no better than the mainstream models they hoped to replace. Typically, a replacement model takes exception to some particular aspect of a mainstream model but accepts all the rest. The motivation for that exception is often appreciated only by the originator and at most a few others, but offers little real advantage to understanding nature and introduces a new set of existing or potential problems to replace the ones it “solves”. These minor variants on mainstream models are in almost unlimited supply, so they have come to have very low value in the scientific community.

In the book that led to the founding of this organization (Meta Research), Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, we propose a fundamentally different approach to developing and judging scientific theories than that in current use. Virtually all present theories are formed by induction – we observe something and try to figure out its cause. But such an approach is non-unique and literally equivalent to educated guesswork. It commonly leads to hypotheses that must be continually patched or augmented to keep them viable.

The cited book discussed many examples of the new approach of developing theories by deduction. This requires a starting point or starting premises, but with the huge difference that everything follows uniquely from the starting premises through a series of logical syllogisms with little or no room for guessing and little opportunity to stray from a single, inevitable path. Precisely because deductive theorizing is so tightly constrained and has so few degrees of freedom, most starting positions lead quickly to contradictions with observation or experiment and are therefore falsified within a few steps. This explains the lack of popularity of the method because getting the starting position right is hard and can be frustrating. But the reward of the method is that, once a valid starting point is found, the deductive theory will provide deep insight into cause and effect and will have an excellent record at making genuine predictions even against long odds. It has the ability to teach the scientist many things he/she might never have imagined.

There is a second way in which Meta Science and mainstream science have parted ways. Science is about forming and testing hypotheses. But it also recognizes that the biases of the experimenter or observer are formidable and likely to dominate all results if not kept in check. When the results of a test are favorable to a hypothesis, they are rarely scrutinized, challenged, or even verified. When the results are unfavorable, they receive intense inspection. Reasons for discarding the “worst” of the data are easy to imagine. If all else fails, inventive scientists can always imagine an ad hoc helper hypothesis to explain why the data is not applicable, or how the data can be made consistent with the hypothesis anyway.

Scientific method forbids all these bias-reinforcing procedures. Testing is supposed to be performed by setting up a protocol that, once set, cannot be changed as results start to come in. Ideally, both experimenters and observers are isolated from the data, or at least from its implications, until the point when the data and its implications are inevitable and unchangeable. This procedure is called “controls”. Without controls, any test of any hypothesis by any scientist (or lay person, for that matter) will inevitably tend to confirm one’s starting biases. Falsification of hypotheses becomes as difficult as the biases are deep. Mainstream science has almost complexly forgotten the importance of controls for the pragmatic reason that, if they were used, many favored hypotheses (including some that bring in lots of funding) would immediately fall. Meta Science insists that controls must be in place for science and knowledge to advance because the most interesting new things to be learned are those that go against our biases and present beliefs.

In summary, conventional science often says that every answer leads to many new questions. Deductive science has the opposite character: One successful starting premise answers many questions, both those already asked and those we did not yet know to ask. Meta Science is about replacement theories using deductive methodology with controls, which limits the field of possibilities to very few options. And those few options have had some excellent successes for aiding true insight and understanding, not being contradicted by later data, and making successful predictions even when the consensus says “no way”. To take just one of many examples: The exploded planet hypothesis predicted in 1978 that asteroid satellites exist and are “numerous and commonplace”. That was universally considered absurd by the mainstream until the first “official” asteroid satellite discovery in 1993. Now hundreds are known, and it is estimated that 5% of all asteroids have satellites large enough to be discovered by optical means. The percentage with smaller satellites will certainly be larger yet.

Deep reality physics

The ultimate search for a valid starting point occurs in cosmology. Meta Science eschewed all guesses such as “space can be curved” or “there can be any number of dimensions”. Only a small number of premises are available from logic alone without benefit of interpretation on the part of not-always-unbiased scientists. Of course, postulating a First Premise would be another type of guess. But it happens that we can do a lot with only a single useful premise – NO MIRACLES ALLOWED – on the grounds that a true miracle would be impossible to explain by definition, and would therefore end further inquiry. (We exclude apparent miracles that do ultimately have an explanation.) So for the very pragmatic reason that we wish to explain, understand, and predict natural phenomena, we don’t allow miracles at any stage. And if we are ever forced into a position where no possible explanation exists except a miracle, we would then be forced to conclude that our perception and experience is of an artificial reality, like a Star Trek holodeck reality, behind which is the one true reality inaccessible to us.

Safe premises, that follow from logic alone and are guaranteed to be valid because their opposite would be a true miracle, are developed in “Physics has its principles”. Here are some examples:

Let’s look more closely at one of these. It is easy to understand that “creation ex nihilo” (from nothing) is a true miracle. It is to be contrasted with creation from the vacuum, whose composition and nature are still beyond the reach of present instrumentation. But the vacuum contains light, gravitation, zero-point energy, and other manifestations of further contents. By contrast, the idea that anything, anywhere, anytime could be brought into existence from truly nothing instead of from pre-existing parts (visible or invisible) is miraculous and could never be explained by physics. It is relevant to note that neither this nor any of the other principles can be expressed in mathematical terms in the equations that try to describe empirical physics.

So the field of physics that excludes miracles and adopts the above premises and their corollaries when explaining natural phenomena is known as “deep reality physics”, to contrast with the Copenhagen school in quantum physics that includes some miracles within its premises and has concluded “there is no deep reality to the world around us”. Deep reality physics is a specific example of the kind of deductive starting point that Meta Science embraces. It leads to the Meta Model, the only viable cosmology derived deductively from the above starting premises without any inductive help from observations or experiments. It shows us a somewhat different meaning to the “familiar” concepts of space and time than the ones we have been taught. And it indicates that all physical phenomena can be explained by five and only five dimensions: three of space plus time and mass/scale. Amazingly, this allows the Meta Model to easily answer the ultimate question about the origin of the universe. The universe had no beginning and will have no end because that violates no principles of physics; whereas the alternative certainly does. With some thought, we can even come to understand how this makes sense in the same way that Zeno’s paradoxes make sense. (See the Dark Matter, ... book for details.)

Meta Science today

Meta Science is a methodology for developing theories that have great success in terms of their usefulness. Because Meta Science models do not start from mainstream models and are generally not influenced by them, they often are so different as to be initially unrecognizable as viable theories for familiar phenomena we have always understood in some other way. That characteristic is both a strength and a weakness. Its strength is deeper understanding and better predictions. Its weakness is greater resistance to adoption because the new models often require a complete restart and rethink of everything an expert knows, or thinks he/she knows. Few people whose careers and sense of self importance are tied to a mainstream model are eager to even consider such an alien alternative.

From these follow numerous corollary hypotheses or models for specific circumstances:

Why we don’t need “dark matter”, “dark energy”, “black holes”, “string theory”, etc.

“It is better to have nine of your ideas be completely disproved, and the tenth one spark off a revolution than to have all ten be correct but unimportant discoveries that satisfy the skeptics.” – Francis Crick to V.S. Ramachandran

For Our New Readers: An Overview of Meta Science

History leading to Meta Science

Beginnings of Meta Science

Deep reality physics

Meta Science today