Blowing Up a Little Truth
It was an amazing experience. I was sitting on the couch, reading a book by Plato, and from these pages a warm and soft-spoken voice ended up sitting right next to me. Millennia apart, I am sitting on the couch having a conversation with Plato.
He did all the talking, and it was hard to disagree with what he had to say. But in the end, I knew what he had done. He walked me to a lie and presented it as a truth.
Naturally, no one believes a lie, so Plato did something quite smart.
First he presented Position A that was obviously true. Then, Plato presented Position B, a direct conclusion based on Position A, so that was quite true as well. Next, he presented Position C and then Position D, and while all conclusions were of the utmost quality and even the last position fully connected to the previous one, Plato presented the last position as if it were fully connected to Position A. He presented it as the Truth. In reality it was just a little truth, correct within the specifically presented circumstances.
He presented a clear case of linear thinking. With Plato, I had walked step by step into a rabbit hole, and in that hole there was indeed a little bang. He tried to make me believe the little bang was all there was, that it was a Big Bang.
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Physicists are using Plato’s logic. They take A to get to B, and use that to get to C and then D. Linear thinking is not always bad, but when it is the only path, then it is easy to end up missing the big picture in the storyline. The tree becomes the forest.
With the Big Bang theory, scientists walk the storyline back in reverse. Yet instead of telling us their lines from D to C to B to their final A, they are in reality telling this story from J to I to H to their final G.
The lie is that they don’t tell us they stopped at G. We are being presented a G as if it is A. Scientists describing the big picture let G hang in the air as if G is the first thing there was. The little bang is presented as a Big Bang.
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What physicists should have done is find the model first. Today, they walk themselves back with all the tools and data they have. Yet they did not worry about the model…
