A Message to Shamangineer Greg

What do you want to talk about? I would prefer to do it in the forum so other could benefit from the conversation.

I've got a few thoughts I was hoping to bounce off you, even if the unknown lux doesn't. I could either try to explain things fresh, or give some copypasta that i've been working on..... what the hell:

It was a hard conclusion to entertain, but I’ve been thinking that this entire “Grand Unified Theory of Everything” idea is a scientific snipe hunt. A sort of McGuffin of misdirection manifested to maintain and uphold the status quo.
This may seem like a bold assertion, arguing against one of the deeper and more glorified grails of our current scientific sensibilities – but I can assure you that I was a believer once myself. I thought that the answer was yet to be found, that we might find it, and that I might be able to help.
I wanted to know – how does this universe keep itself together? What makes atoms operate? I spent time learning the prerequisites, quantum mechanics, chromodynamics, the standard model, the alternatives to the standard model presented by string theory and the like. It seemed that the only consensus about the subject was that no one quite understood what was going on or how to model it mathematically. Each theoretical approach would gather a number of tenured professors who might obtain grants to pursue their pet theory, but there was no obvious route toward a deeper understanding. Science appeared to be busted, in a certain regard.
Worse yet, those in the best position to foster such an understanding were the most dismissive of any ideological critique. The high priests of physics are now unwilling or unable to have an open discussion with any outsiders to defend or justify the flaws in their models and beliefs, saying in effect “let the costs and absence of obvious benefit be damned! IF we don’t have the answer, how are you plebs going to get it?”
In that context, it seems natural that both trained and untrained citizen scientists would begin trying to contribute in a meaningful way outside the dominant paradigms. This has created no shortage of accusatory and inflammatory reactions between the cathedral of academic thought and the bazaar of fringe science, some reactions being more substantive than others. Certainly the argument that “fundamental physics is engaged in a snipe hunt” requires both elaboration and citation, otherwise it appears simply as a spitball from the peanut gallery. Let me attempt to restate this argument more in a more defensible tone with specific claims:
1. Scientific research in the western world has been managed, subject to the demands and expectations of the national security state created in the wake of post-WWII era. (see: PETER J. WESTWICK, “SECRET SCIENCE: A CLASSIFIED COMMUNITY IN THE NATIONAL LABORATORIES”, Minerva 38: 363–391, 2000.)
2. The extent and nature of this management is difficult to demonstrate definitively due to classification/compartmentalization, and difficult to discuss due to the role of disinformation, ridicule, and the disciplinary behavior of academia (ala Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, 1975).
3. Driven by nuclear-era concerns regarding (domestic or international) misuse of fusion and fission technologies, efforts to control or restrict future technological developments may have extended to:
a. use disinformation within the scientific world to limit the scope of what is considered possible or interesting
b. supporting (funding) efforts which redirect attention away from subjects considered sensitive or potentially threatening
c. shelving or classifying any work which would ‘let the cat out of the bag’
4. One product of this management was the creation of “Occulted Science”, which is hidden by classification (gov’t) and intellectual property/nondisclosure (corps).
5. The need to hide important scientific advances requires not just development in secret, but diversions in the open. This can be argued in a few ways, I think
6. The path of deeper understanding of nature is still open to us, and probably lying in plain sight. It may require some digging and some degree of suspicion toward every physics dogma implemented or solidified after ~1947. In many cases, only the historians of science know when certain ideas really began to become accepted ‘facts’.

Thoughts? Plenty of details to follow up with on this.

Oh snap, just listening to the second hour, and I'm stoked that you're talking about vortex knots. That stuff is my jam, and where I was trying to lead to with this..

Hit the nail on the head.

I read a very insightful book not too long ago about Grand Unifying Theories. It was the catalyst for my understanding of the forces in the Universe. It's called Science in the Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo.
I also love hearing about this stuff, and Thanks Shamangineer for discussing all that, can't get enough of it.

It may require some digging and some degree of suspicion toward every physics dogma implemented or solidified after ~1947.
~etherdias

Or, perhaps it was in 1687 with the publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica that the universal anomaly generator was planted in the bowels of cosmology, cosmogony, and physics at all levels and scales. We may have been hobbled by the LAW!

The gravitational Force: F is said to be equal to G (a multiplier to accommodate proportionally the factoring of a measure of meters with kilograms) times mass 1 times mass 2 divided by distance between the centers of each. In this equation, mass 1 and mass two are completely interchangeable. In the empirical experimentation that the equation was derived, one mass was this planet Earth (a known gravitor). The other mass was a cannonball. And so, this little equation, become law, has the built in assumption that what is dynamically true of planet Earth is dynamically true of the cannonball, and what is massively true of the cannonball is massively true of planet Earth. In other words, we have used Newton's cannonballs to weigh, or measure the masses, of all the celestial spheres. Upon this assumption is placed the mechanics of basically everything physical. And still we can't see enough mass to make the equation work for the observable universe, hence, dark matter, energy, big bangs, and black holes.

GRAVITATION, n.

The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportional to the quantity of matter they contain -- the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

from: The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

If anyone is interested, there is more.

Namasté,

Satya