From: rparson@spot.Colorado.EDU (Robert Parson) Newsgroups: sci.environment Subject: Re: CO2 data, current and ice cores Date: 7 Jul 1997 02:08:15 GMT Message-ID: <5ppj2f$a7@lace.colorado.edu> In article <33d2d30d.13133171@nntp.a001.sprintmail.com>, Wm James wrote: >Ther is an excellent artical on this in the spring 1997 issue of >"21st Century Science and Technology". "21st Century Science and Technology" is a crackpot magazine edited and mostly written by the associates of Lyndon LaRouche. Not everything in it is crackpottery - they occasionally reprint articles from other magazines, and some of these are ok - but most is. My favorite issue is Winter 1995/96. On the cover we read: Riemann Refutes Euler Suppressed Writings on Epistemology, Gravitation, and Light. The magazine does indeed include some unpublished writings of Riemann, who for some reason is one of LaRouche's idols. (LaRouche believes that the principal theme in the history of modern science is the struggle against an evil conspiracy that was founded when agents of the Venetian Signoria took control of the British Royal Society. Newton, Maxwell, Darwin, Euler, Cauchy, and Bertrand Russell all acted to further this conspiracy. Kepler, Leibniz, Ampere, Humboldt, Riemann, and Cantor all helped to defend us from it.) A single excerpt should help to convey the flavor. From p. 46: + The counterposing of the developmental (for example, not-entropic) + and Kant-like mechanistic views is noted by Riemann, in the first + of the referenced papers. Crucial is the demonstration, that, as + in the case of Euler's absurd 1761 attack on Leibniz' _Monadology_, + the presumption of that Kant-like, mechanistic views, from which + Rudolf Clausius, Lord Kelvin, and Hermann Grassmann concocted their + chimerical "Second Law of Thermodynamics", is "axiomatic linearization + in the small." Create a mathematics, in which all is subsumed under + the axiomatic assumption, that everything in the universe is + consistent with the Euclidean blind faith in the universality of + perfectly continuous linear extension, even into the extremely + great and extremely small. The true believer then regards any + formulation which is inconsistent with such a mathematical 'proof' + as 'disproven', and everything which must be assumed to preserve + consistency within the theorem-lattice of such a mathematics, is + considered as 'proven' by all of the awesomely credulous professorial, + head-nodding dupes attending the relevant conference. No, Alan Sokol did not write that, although I suspect he would like to have :-) LaRouche goes on like that for 12 double-column pages. Nor is this bizarrerie confined to LaRouche himself - his staff, who write most of what's in the magazine, are just as kooky although they can't quite match his style. In the same issue Staff Biologist Carol Hugenin has an article entitled "Bury Darwin - It's Overdue!" Yup, the LaRouchies are antiDarwinists, but they put their own unique spin on it. After reminding us of Darwin's intellecual debt to Malthus, Hugenin writes (p. 11): + Malthus, in turn, had taken his thesis on carrying capacity from the + Venetian monk Giammaria Ortes. The Venetians were the ones who would do + anything, even pirating and selling their fellow European Christians + into slavery, to maintain power. And later: + Should we, therefore, give up science and join the fundamentalists in + declaring the subject to be the unknowable act of an unknowable + Aristotelian God? I think not. Instead we should broaden our study + of epistemology and look at the historic fight between the Aristotelians + and the Platonists. The Aristotelian dominance of academia has hidden + the better approach of the Platonic currents: the Christian Platonic + tradition that developed the concept of man as _imago viva dei_. + The 'Philosophical Fragments' of Bernhard Riemann...give a conceptual + overview of this alternative. In the tradition of Plato, as defined by + Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Gottfried + Leibniz, Riemann developes a hydrodynamics approach to the Universe + in which the universe transforms itself by generating singularities. + These singularities redefine the potential and topological + characteristics (including chage in metric and change in state) of the + spacetime manifold of the universe. + In short, Riemann develops a notion of an evolving, hydrodynamic + self-transforming universe, in which entropy is not primary. Lyndon + LaRouche is the most prominent thinker today developing ideas based + on this tradition. All in all, _21st Century_ is a lot more entertaining than the _Weekly World News_, although the WWN has better pictures. ------ Robert "The root of the mechanistic world-view, which the empiricist world outlook of modern Britain acquired from its ancient master, Paolo Sarpi, is always the presumption of percussive causality within a universe that is axiomatically linearized in the very small." _ Lyndon LaRouche