I knew that science was under siege from;

Careerists

Instrumentalists

Mathematics

Sine wave

EMC Incubus

Only yesterday did I realise that academics and mathematicians are one and the same.

Ivor Catt 30 August 2018

Remarkable coincidences.

I deviated from my usual reading to read P W Musgrave, “Sociology, History and Education”, Pub. Methuen 1970. Chapter 4 by J. Wellens;

“…. At least up to the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 the Industrial Revolution owed little or nothing to the universities or to men with university training.

“Thus was created that estrangement between the worlds of industry and education which persists in some measure to this day [1959] and which has had such grievous consequences. …. …. the painful birth of industrial man, the universities remained calmly aloof. …. …. Conflict between the two worlds ….”

I myself, graduating from Cambridge in 1959, experienced the divorce between academia and hi tec industry.

As my hero is Heaviside, I always went along with his; “Then there were the remarkable researches of Faraday, the prince of experimentalists, on electrostatics and electrodynamics and the induction of currents …. The crowning achievement was reserved for the heaven-sent Maxwell, a man whose fame, great as it is now, has, comparatively speaking, yet to come.” (“Electromagnetic Theory” vol. 1, page 8)

I went along with Heaviside’s respect for Maxwell, even though Heaviside did write; “Now, there are spots before the sun, and I see no good reason why the many faults in Maxwell's treatise should be ignored. It is most objectionable to stereotype the work of a great man, apparently merely because it was so great an advance, and because of the great respect thereby induced.” O. Heaviside, “Electromagnetic Theory” vol 1 p68, 1893

However, straight after Wellens I went to Maxwell, and found him dreadful; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x88tmax.pdf

It got worse when I read his Introduction; pix; “When I had translated what I considered to be Faraday’s ideas into a mathematical form …. ”. Here we find confirmation of the idea that the unscholarly Faraday “could not and did not really effect his discovery of electromagnetic induction. Rather, he stumbled into it, but it could only be properly exploited decades later, after Professor Maxwell had placed a mathematical structure upon Faraday’s fumbling, unscholarly ideas.” http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/774c.htm

Only now did I realise that this was a takeover bid by the academic Maxwell of something achieved by the non-university, practical men. The appalling mathematics was dumped on my (and Faraday’s) physical subject by the academic Maxwell and all academics since then, as they further added to the ridiculous maths.

The primary role of an academic is to stabilise the knowledge, to ensure lecture notes and text books continue to sell. Students connive in this (contradicting Pauli), not wanting the knowledge they are learning and taking examinations in to be subject to confusing change. More can be added to the extraordinary maths, but the fundamentals must remain the same. The mathematics is the incantations of shamans. The less intelligible, the more effective.

The problem for this system for capturing scientific advance and burying it in incantations is that there are errors in the incantations which cannot be admitted. More mathematics can be added, but none can be removed, or the text books and lecture notes are in danger.

http://www.ivorcatt.org/ic3804.htm ; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x18j73.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x18j184.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x18j190.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x18j197.pdf