The evolving Darwin debate

In an effort to influence high-school science curriculum standards, more than 50 Ohio scientists issued a statement this week supporting academic freedom to teach arguments for and against Darwin's theory of evolution.

Released Wednesday, the statement was signed by 52 experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including entomology, toxicology, nuclear chemistry, engineering biochemistry and medicine. Some are employed in business, industry and research, but most teach at state and private universities. A third of the signatories are employed by Ohio State University.

To enhance the effectiveness of Ohio science education, as scientists we affirm:

That biological evolution is an important scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom;

That a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science;

That a science curriculum should help students understand why the subject of biological evolution generates controversy;

That where alternative scientific theories exist in any area of inquiry (such as wave vs. particle theories of light, biological evolution vs. intelligent design, etc.), students should be permitted to learn the evidence for and against them;

That a science curriculum should encourage critical thinking and informed participation in public discussions about biological origins.

Religious or anti-religious indoctrination in a class specifically dedicated to teaching within the discipline of science;

The censorship of scientific views that may challenge current theories of origins.

Signatories released the statement as the Ohio State Board of Education works to update its curriculum standards, including those for high-school science classes, in accordance with a demand from the state legislature issued last year. Advocates of inclusion of evolution criticisms believe the Ohio scientists' statement echoes similar language in the recently passed federal education law, the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001." Report language interpreting the act explains that on controversial issues such as biological evolution, "the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist."

As part of its efforts to update the science standards, the Board of Education held a moderated panel discussion on the question, "Should intelligent design be included in Ohio's science academic content standards?" The debate was conducted during the March 11 regular board meeting and included two panelists from each side of the issue, who were given 15 minutes each to present their arguments. One of the panelists in favor of including "intelligent design" arguments (the idea that biological origin was at least initiated by an intelligent force) was Dr. Stephen Meyer, a professor at Whitworth College in Washington state and fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.

Meyer has written extensively on the subject, including a column for WorldNetDaily in which he criticizes the PBS series "Evolution." The series, he wrote, "rejects – even ridicules – traditional theistic religion because [religion] holds that God played an active (even discernible) role in the origin of life on earth."

Additionally, Meyer co-wrote a February 2001 Utah Law Review article defending the legality of presenting evolution criticism in schools. The article states in its conclusion that school boards or biology teachers should "take the initiative to teach, rather than suppress, the controversy as it exists in the scientific world," which is a "more open and more dialectical approach." The article also encourages school boards to defend "efforts to expand student access to evidence and information about this timely and compelling controversy."

Dr. Robert DiSilvestro, a professor at Ohio State and statement signatory, believes many pro-evolution scientists have not given Darwin's theory enough critical thought.

"As a scientist who has been following this debate closely, I think that a valid scientific challenge has been mounted to Darwinian orthodoxy on evolution. There are good scientific reasons to question many currently accepted ideas in this area," he said.

"The more this controversy rages, the more our colleagues start to investigate the scientific issues," commented DiSilvestro. "This has caused more scientists to publicly support our statement." He noted that several of the 52 scientists on the list had signed after last week's Board of Education panel discussion.

However, panelist Dr. Lawrence Krauss, chairman of Case Western Reserve University's physics department, said intelligent design is not science. ID proponents, he explained, are trying to redefine "science" and do not publish their work in peer-reviewed literature. In a January editorial published in The Plain Dealer, Krauss wrote that "the concept of 'intelligent design' is not introduced into science classes because it is not a scientific concept."

Promoters of ID bemoan "the fact that scientists confine their investigation to phenomena and ideas that can be experimentally investigated, and that science assumes that natural phenomena have natural causes," his editorial continues. "This is indeed how science operates, and if we are going to teach science, this is what we should teach." By its very nature, Krauss explains, science has limitations on what it can study, and to prove or disprove the existence of God does not fall into that sphere of study.

Krauss was disappointed in the Board of Education's decision to hold a panel discussion on the subject, saying the debate was not warranted since there is no evolution controversy in scientific circles.

"The debate, itself, was a victory for those promoting intelligent design," he said. "By pretending there's a controversy when there isn't, you're distorting reality."

But Meyer counters that a controversy does exist over the validity of Darwinian evolution, as evidenced by the growing number of scientists publicly acknowledging the theory's flaws. For example, 100 scientists, including professors from institutions such as M.I.T, Yale and Rice, issued a statement in September "questioning the creative power of natural selection," wrote Meyer in his WND column. But such criticism is rarely, if ever, reported by mainstream media outlets and establishment scientific publications, he maintains.

At the Board of Education's panel discussion, he proposed a compromise to mandating ID inclusion in science curriculum: Teach the controversy about Darwinism, including evidence for and against the theory of evolution. Also, he asked the board to make it clear that teachers are permitted to discuss other theories of biological origin, which Meyer believes is already legally established.

But such an agreement would only serve to compromise scientific research, according to Krauss. "It's not that it's inappropriate to discuss these ideas, just not in a science class," he concluded.

Wrong. These are not alternative theories. Light is both a wave and a particle, depending on how you set up your test.

There is at least one test which shows light to be neither a wave nor a particle, but rather an instantaneous force between two points.

Albert Einstein was trying to use relativistic time to account for the fact that light does not obey the ordinary additive laws for velocities. This was based on what he called "thought experiments", such as the mirror-clock experiment, rather than upon anything resembling real evidence or real experiments. Thought experiments, it turns out, are not a terribly good basis for physics. Moreover, the basic approach is unsound. Louis Carrol Epstein ("Relativity Envisioned"), uses the following analogy: a carpenter with a house in which everything worked flawlessly other than one door which bound, would usually plane the door until it worked. He COULD, however, purchase a couple of hundred jacks and jack the foundation of the house until the one door worked, and then try to somehow or other make every other door and window in the house work again... Light is the one door in the analogy; distance, time, mass etc., i.e. everything else in the house of physics are the other doors and windows. Epstein assumes that relativity is the one case you will ever find in which that sort of approach is the correct one, nonetheless, common sense tells us it isn't terribly likely.

It turns out there is another way in which one could account for light not obeying additive laws, and that this other way is the correct one. That is to assume that light simply does not have a velocity; that it is an instantaneous force between two points, and that the thing we call the "velocity of light" is the rate of accumulation of some secondary effect.

The story on this one lives HERE

The basic Ralph Sansbury experiment amounts to a 1990s version of the Michelson/Moreley experiment using lasers and nanosecond gates, which Michelson and Moreley did not have. Wallace Thornhill, an Australian physicist, describes it:



>I mentioned a few weeks ago that an epoch making experiment had been
>performed in the realm of fundamental physics which had great
>importance for Velikovskian style catastrophism (and just about
>everything else for that matter). The experiment, performed by Ralph
>Sansbury, is amazingly simple but has amazing consequences.
>
>Sansbury is a quiet spoken physicist from Connecticut.  He is
>associated with the Classical Physics Institute, or CP Institute, of
>New York which publishes the Journal of Classical Physics. In the
>Notes to Contributors we find the focus of the journal: "Marinov's
>experiment, Bell's theorem, and similar works reveal increasing
>discontent with the dogmas of modern physics. Some physicists
>postulate that blackbody radiation, atomic spectra, nuclear reactions,
>electron diffraction, the speed of light and all other phenomena which
>Quantum Wave Mechanics and Relativity were designed to explain will
>require different explanations. It is the viewpoint of this journal
>that the new explanations probably will be consistent with
>Aristotelian logic and Newtonian or Galilean mechanics." Volume 1,
>Part 1, in January 1982 was devoted to an article titled "Electron
>Structure", by Ralph Sansbury. The title itself should raise
>physicist's eyebrows since electrons are considered to have no
>structure. They are treated as being indivisible, along with quarks.
>
>The fallout from Sansbury's idea, if proven, is prodigious. To begin,
>for the first time we have a truly unifying theory where both
>magnetism and gravity become a derived form of instantaneous
>electrostatic force. The Lorentz contraction-dilation of space time
>and mass is unnecessary. Electromagnetic radiation becomes the
>cumulative effect of instantaneous electrostatic forces at a distance
>and the wave/particle (photon) duality disappears. Discontinuous
>absorption/emission of energy in quanta by atoms becomes a continuous
>process. And there is more.
>
>Sansbury's was a thousand dollar experiment using 10 nanosecond long
>pulses of laser light, one pulse every 400 nsec. At some distance from
>the laser was a photodiode detector. But in the light path, directly
>in front of the detector was a high speed electronic shutter (known as
>a Pockel cell) which could be switched to allow the laser light
>through to the detector, or stop it.
>
>Now, light is considered to travel as a wavefront or photon at the
>speed of light. Viewed this way, it covers a distance of about 1 foot
>per nanosecond. So the laser could be regarded as sending out 10ft
>long bursts of light every 400ft, at the speed of light. The
>experiment simply kept the Pockel cell shutter closed during the 400ft
>of no light and opened to allow the 10ft burst through to the detector.
>
>What happened?
>
>The detector saw nothing!!!
>
>It is as if a gun were fired at a target and for the time of flight of
>the bullet a shield were placed over the target. At the last moment,
>the shield is pulled away - and the bullet has disappeared; the target
>is untouched!
>
>What does it mean?
>
>Only that Maxwell's theory of the propagation of electromagnetic waves
>is wrong! Only that Einstein's Special theory of relativity (which was
>to reconcile Maxwell's theory with simple kinematics) is wrong! Only
>that, as a result, the interpretation of most of modern physics is
>wrong!
>
>As another classical physicist using a theoretical approach to the
>same problem succinctly put it:
>
>"... there emerges the outline of an alternative "relativistic"
>physics, quite distinct from that of Maxwell-Einstein, fully as well
>confirmed by the limited observations available to date, and differing
>from it not only in innumerable testable ways but also in basic
>physical concepts and even in definitional or ethnical (sic) premises
>as to the nature of physics. Thus a death struggle is joined that must
>result in the destruction of one world-system or the other: Either
>light is complicated and matter simple, as I think, or matter is
>complicated and light simple, as Einstein thought. I have shown here
>that some elegant mathematics can be put behind my view. It has long
>been known that inordinate amounts of elegant mathematics can be put
>behind Einstein's. Surely the time fast approaches to stop listening
>to mathematical amplifications of our own internal voices and to go
>into the laboratory and listen to what nature has to say." -
>Modifications of Maxwell's Equations, T E Phipps, The Classical
>Journal of Physics, Vol 2, 1, Jan 1983, p. 21.
>
>Ralph Sansbury has now done precisely that!
>
>In simple terms, Sansbury gives the electron a structure by proposing
>a number of charged particles (he calls subtrons) orbiting within the
>classical radius of an electron. A simple calculation gives the
>surprising result that these subtrons are moving at a speed of 2.5
>million light years per second! That is, they could theoretically
>cover the distance from Earth to the far side of the Andromeda galaxy
>in one second. This gives some meaning to the term 'instantaneous
>action at a distance'. (Note that this is a requirement for any new
>theory of gravity). (Also I have always considered it evidence of
>peculiar naivety or arrogance on the part of scientists, such as
>Sagan, who search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) by using
>radio signals. What superior intelligence would use such a slow, and
>therefore useless, interstellar signalling system?) Such near infinite
>speed requires that there can be no mass increase with velocity. The
>speed of light is not a speed barrier. All of the experiments which
>seem to support Einstein's notion are interpreted by Sansbury in a
>more common-sense fashion. When an electron or other charged particle
>is accelerated in an electromagnetic field, it is distorted from a
>sphere into an ellipsoid. The more electromagnetic energy applied to
>accelerating the particle, the more energy is absorbed by distortion
>of the particle until, ultimately, at the speed of light, there is an
>expulsion of the subtrons. Under such conditions, the particle only
>APPEARS to be gaining mass.
>
>Notably, in the past few months, scientists in Hamburg using the most
>powerful electron microscope have found on about a dozen occasions out
>of 10 million trials, relativistic electrons recoiled more violently
>off protons than had ever been seen before. This may turn out to be
>direct experimental proof of Sansbury's model of the electron having
>structure.
>
>To return to the experiment involving a "chopped" light beam: One of
>the major requirements of the new theory is instantaneous
>electrostatic forces between subtrons. This forms the basis of a
>radical new view of the basis of electromagnetic radiation which is
>now the subject of stunning experimental confirmation. In Sansbury's
>view, a signal from a light source is received instantly by a distant
>detector and the speed of light delay in detecting the signal is due
>to the time taken for the ACCUMULATED RESPONSE of the subtrons in the
>detector to result in a threshold signal at the electron level. This
>is totally at variance with orthodox interpretations which would have
>the light travelling as a discrete photon or wave packet at the speed
>of light.
>
>In terms of the gun and target analogy, it is as if particles of the
>bullet are being absorbed by the shield from the instant of firing, so
>that when the shield is pulled aside there is no bullet left to hit
>the target.
>
>It is not possible to overstate the importance of this work because it
>lends direct support to a new model of the electron in particular, and
>matter in general, which EXPLAINS magnetism, gravity and quantum
>effects without any resort to the kind of metaphysics which allows our
>top physicists to think they can see "God" in their equations.  The
>new classical physicists can mix it with the best of them when it
>comes to the mathematics but they are more prepared to "go into the
>laboratory and listen to what nature has to say."
>
>This work is of crucial importance for Velikovskian re-arrangements of
>the solar system in recent times because astronomers have been able to
>say that such scenarios defy the laws of physics - which is true,
>insofar as they know the laws of physics. To discover that gravity is
>a form of charge polarization within the particles that make up the
>atom, rather than a warp in space (whatever the hell that means),
>gives us a simple mechanism by which the solar system can be rapidly
>stabilised after a period of chaotic motion.
>
>There is an impression, as I reread the work of Sansbury and other
>classical physicists, that what we are facing is something like "Back
>to the Future". And like the movie of that name, the possibilities
>that we encounter will seem like science fiction come true. But it is
>well-known that science fiction writers are better at predicting the
>future of science than experts!

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