Truth Loop

         This blog is for those who who value Truth above wealth, totem-pole status, power or influence: who will understand, if not fully accept, Einstein’s dictum that even “happiness is a goal for pigs.”

A word about Truth. This Age of Endarkenment has included a darkening of the pursuit of Truth, what with resurgence from the woodwork of every crackpot idea ever conceived, losing scientific truth in the shuffle. Previously the turn of the quest for final Truth from Authority to Nature, especially the revelations of Newton’s Philosophia Naturalis with its Laws of Motion and Gravitation, pointed toward a Truth independent of all religious and cultural authorities, as noted early on by Montesquieu. Natural Philosophy became Science, which precipitated the Enlightenment, featuring this advance on Truth. But recently denial even of truth in science has been fomented by Kuhnian paradigm philosophy. Incommensurable shifts of paradigm like that from Newtonian mechanics to relativistic quantum mechanics suggest an endless turnover of received “Truths,” evermore mathematically inaccessible. And the hostility to new paradigms by monarchs of the old suggests corruption of the pursuit of Truth by Ego.            To evade such corruption, I endorse Georg Lichtenberg’s dictum that Truth is the asymptote of research [Wissenschaft], never attainable but indefinitely approachable. Nothing can be said that no one will dispute, but that science has gained on Truth in the past half-millennium is about as indisputable as can be. Even Gorgias, antagonist of Socrates who denied the very existence of Truth, might agree.                                                                                     In pursuit of Truth, I do not believe in belief, for it closes the mind.   T. H. Huxley’s “working hypotheses,” though we seldom know what they are, lie behind every Being and every Happening, conscious or not. It is the business of metaphysics to root them out and better them if possible, as Einstein did with the concepts of space and time. The idea of Mind as Energy is a working hypothesis similarly rooted out.

Men of scientific truth have widened our horizons and deepened our insights throughout history, with little or no pursuit of wealth or power. Consider Copernicus’ (or Anaxagoras’) demotion of Earth from cosmic center in favor of Sun. Hear Newton: What’s done before many witnesses is seldom without some further concern than that of Truth. Attend to Maxwell and Hertz, who revealed light as electromagnetic waves, and so introduced us to a universe of electromagnetic radiations of all frequencies, in which we are as totally embedded as in Newton’s material universe. Note Einstein’s answer when asked how much to pay him when he arrived at Princeton: $5000/yr. (Knowing they would look bad paying such a towering genius so little, they got him up to $20,000, relatively high in those times.) Today’s technological billionaires are exploitive poachers of the truths revealed by the likes of Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein: the injustice is flagrant.