Quantum indeterminacy has left us with a universe in which the drive to know is constrained by our search for knowledge. Existence seems to be built to challenge our hubris, forcing us to think about our flaws, limiting us to dimensions and points in time, and asking us to accept what we cannot know.

The alchemists and astrologists who were the distant ancestors of modern science believed in a world of absolute truths. Uncovering the right formula, searching the sweep of sky, offered total control over the otherwise mysterious forces of the universe. Our current knowledge of the way that things are tells us that while the universe may have absolute realities, our understanding of them will never be so.

Quantum indeterminacy has left us with a universe in which the drive to know is constrained by our search for knowledge. Existence seems to be built to challenge our hubris, forcing us to think about our flaws, limiting us to dimensions and points in time, and asking us to accept what we cannot know.

The universe is not a machine that we can take apart and rebuild. It is built to be partly unknowable.

And the more we study the universe, the more we understand the importance of the observer. Science is not the genius jumping out of his bath, shouting, “Eureka”, and running through the streets, without the benefit of his cloak, to jot down the formula: it’s the ability to defy the variability of the universe by achieving the intended results, and replicating them over and over again by different observers.

That’s why there are a million worthless studies announced every year that are just birdcage liners.

In the middle of a pandemic in which experts rule the land and elected officials discard the Bill of Rights while claiming to be religiously following the science, it is more vital than ever to remember that the true scientific search for knowledge provides us with more doubts than certainties. A model is an evolving guesstimate and following it does not invest any politician’s actions with infallibility.

Science isn’t something you believe. It’s what you do and how you do it. And how someone else does it.

Believing in science, like believing all women, has become a mark of cultural virtue. Yet the people most likely to say that they believe in science are the least likely to value objectivity and healthy skepticism. Science, for such people, has taken the place of religion in providing certainty in an uncertain world. When science is used to signal virtue and provide certainty, it’s not science, but a hollow religion.

Science isn’t a creed you follow. No priesthood of experts can ensure you make the right decisions. To know more about a subject is important, but is not the same thing as a correct conclusion. In science, the assumptions of knowledge can be nearly as perilous a trap as ignorance. That is why every great scientific revolution begins with the overthrow of the experts. That’s why they call it a revolution.

But the modern ruling class, like ancient emperors and sultans, demands certainty. A science that doesn’t predict the world is useless and a science that doesn’t affirm their view of the world is heretical. The roots of the elite are in universities that began as divinity schools before losing the divinity, and they still want to believe in an absolute truth as long as it is the one that they already happen to believe in.

“Veritas,” says the Harvard seal. “Lux et Veritas,” proclaims its Yale cousin.

Along the way, veritas became gravitas. The importance of the expert overshadowed the verifiability of his claims. The decline of the divine in the lives of the ruling class had not diminished its desire for absolute truths. It sought these truths in the tangled recesses of the human psyche, before realizing that the quantum indeterminacy of the universe was nothing compared to the indeterminacy of the human mind, and in societal models that sought to understand people as a collective when they could not be grokked as individuals. The new astrology was a science of collectives experimented on by force.

The exploration of the human mind had come up against the quantum indeterminacy of free will. Collectives could be compelled and manipulated on a macro scale to eliminate the free will problem. And then the results would always match the ones that the experts had predicted. Instead of using science to understand people, people would be used to uphold the pseudoscience of the ruling class.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]