Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS)

Basic philosophy

My basic philosophy is the empirical school, mainly developed by Sir Francis Bacon, Marquis St. Albans, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was a Courtier and developed the famous philosophy of the Idols after being removed from Court on what are now known to be false charges brought by the Duke of Buckingham in a conspiracy. Nothing much changes in that respect. Bacon was a contemporary of Shakespeare, who was probably well known to the very young John Harvard, founder of the University. John Harvard's father was a butcher who married a friend of the Shakespeare family from Stratford. The Harvard House in Stratford is owned by the University, and is a half timbered Tudor house. Shakespeare's father was a glovemaker, and his younger brother Edmund is buried in the Harvard Chapel of Southwark Cathedral. Bacon founded the Invisible College, which evolved into the Royal Society.

Sometimes Bacon's philosophy is known as the British Empircal School, based on comparison of any theory with data. This was always strongly emphasized by Mansel Davies, who would have described personal antipathy and asbtraction in science as "theology". A lot of modern physics does not live up to Bacon's standards, notably string theory and dark matter. Anderson of Princeton, the Nobel Laureate, has described string theory as pre Baconian, i.e. mediaeval. I regard antagonistic attitudes, theory against theory, as mediaeval, not scientific.

A table of some of the major EXPERIMENTAL successes of ECE vis a vis the standard model is available on www.aias.us. Modern physics is at a standstill because physicists are forced into applying concepts such as string theory by peer pressure. This is meaningless to a real scientist, adn there are strong pressures on physicists to confrom, e.g. arXiv and IoP use author blacklists of imaginative people, even of imaginative Nobel Laureates. This is not science at all according to the Bacon philosophy, it is anthropomorphism. Chemistry has no such thing as an arXiv system. It was tried and there was no interest.

MWE

23 August 2007