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The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle

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leaving only the details to be filled in.

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This is a very wide spread belief in our society.

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It's the kind of belief system of people who say

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I don't believe in God, I believe in science.

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It is a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world.

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But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry

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based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective investigation

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and science as a belief system or a world view.

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And unfortunately the world view aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict

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the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavor.

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Since the late 19th century, science has been conducted

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under the aspect of a belief system or world view

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which is essentially that of materialism. Philosophical materialism.

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And the sciences are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of the materialist world view.

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I think that, as we break out of it, the sciences will be regenerated.

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What I do in my book 'The Science Delusion' - which is called 'Science Set Free' in the United States -

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is: take the ten dogmas or assumptions of science and turn them into questions,

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seeing how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically.

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None of them stand up very well.

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What I am going to do is first run through what these ten dogmas are,

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and then I will only have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail.

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But essentially the ten dogmas which are the default world view

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of most educated people all over the world are,

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first that nature is mechanical or machine like, the universe is like a machine,

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animals and plants are like machines, we are like machines.

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In fact, we are machines.

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We are "lumbering robots" in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase,

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with brains that are genetically programed computers.

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Second, matter is unconscious, the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter.

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There is no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants,

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and there ought not to be any in us either, if this theory is true.

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So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years

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has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.

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So the matter is unconscious, then the laws of nature are fixed. This is the dogma three.

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The laws of nature are the same now as they were at the time of the Big Bang

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and they will be the same forever.

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Not just the laws but the constants of nature are fixed which is why they are called constants.

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Dogma four: the total amount of matter and energy is always the same.

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It never changes in total quantity except at the moment of the Big Bang when it all sprang

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into existence from nowhere in a single instant.

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The fifth dogma is that nature is purposeless, there is no purposes in all nature

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and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.

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Dogma six: the biological heredity is material, everything you inherit is in your genes

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or in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It is material.

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Dogma seven: memories are stored inside your brain as material traces.

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Somehow everything you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings phosphorylated proteins.

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No one knows how it works,

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but nevertheless almost everyone in the scientific world believes it must be in the brain.

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Dogma eight: your mind is inside your head.

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All your consciousness is the activity of your brain and nothing more.

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Dogma nine, which follows from dogma eight: psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible.

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Your thoughts and intentions can not have any effect at a distance

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because your mind is inside your head.

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Therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory.

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People believe these things happen but it is just because they don't know enough about statistics,

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or they are deceived by coincidences or it is wishful thinking.

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And dogma ten: mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

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That is why governments only fund research into mechanistic medicine

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and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.

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Those can't possibly really work because they are not mechanistic,

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they may appear to work because people would have got better anyway or because of the placebo effect.

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But the only kind that really works is mechanistic medicine.

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Well, this is the default world view which is held by almost all educated people all over the world,

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it is the basis of the educational system, the national health service, the Medical Research Council,

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governments, and it is just the default world view of educated people.

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But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable

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and when you look at it, it turns they fall apart.

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I am going to take first the idea that the laws of nature are fixed.

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This is a hangover from an older world view before the 1960's when the Big Bang theory came in.

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People thought that the whole universe was eternal, governed by eternal mathematical laws.

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When the Big Bang came in, then that assumption continued,

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even though the Big Bang revealed a universe that is radically evolutionary about 14 billion years old.

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Growing, and developing, and evolving for 14 billion years.

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Growing and cooling and more structures and patterns appear within it.

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But the idea is, all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the Big Bang,

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like a cosmic Napoleonic Code.

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As my friend Terence McKenna used to say,

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“Modern science is based on the principle: give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest."

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And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe

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and all the laws that govern it from nothing in a single instant.

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Well, in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't the laws themselves evolve?

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After all human laws do, and the idea of the laws of the nature is based on a metaphor with human law.

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It is a very anthropocentric metaphor: only humans have laws, in fact only civilized societies have laws.

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As C. S. Lewis once said,

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"To say that a stone falls to earth because it is obeying a law makes it a man and even a citizen."

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It is a metaphor that we got so used to, we forget it is a metaphor.

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In an evolving universe I think a much better idea is the idea of habits.

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I think the habits of nature evolve, the regularities of nature are essentially habitual.

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This was an idea put forward at the beginning of the 20th century

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by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce.

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And it is an idea which various other philosophers have entertained,

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it is one which I myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis,

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the hypothesis of morphic resonance

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which is the basis of these evolving habits.

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According to this hypothesis, everything in nature has a kind of collective memory.

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Resonance occurs on the basis of similarity.

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As a young giraffe embryo grows in its mother's womb,

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it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes,

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it draws on that collective memory, it grows like a giraffe,

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it behaves like a giraffe because it is drawing on this collective memory.

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It has to have the right genes to make the right proteins, but genes in my view are grossly overrated.

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They only account for the proteins that the organism can make, not the shape, or form, or the behavior.

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Every species has a kind of collective memory. Even crystals do.

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This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time,

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the very first time you make it, it won't have an existing habit.

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But once it crystallizes, then the next time you make it there will be an influence from the first crystals

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to the second ones all over the world, by morphic resonance it will crystallize a bit easier.

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The third time there will be an influence from the first and second crystals.

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There is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world,

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just as this theory would predict.

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It also predicts that if you train animals to learn a new trick,

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for example rats learn a new trick in London,

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then all round the world rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker

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just because rats have learned it here.

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And surprisingly, there is already evidence that this actually happens.

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Anyway, that is my hypotheses in a nutshell of morphic resonance,

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everything depends on evolving habits not on fixed laws.

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But I want to spend a few moments on the constants of nature too.

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Because these, are again, assumed to be constant.

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Things like the gravitational constant, the speed of light are called the fundamental constants.

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Are they really constant?

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Well, when I got interested in this question I tried to find out.

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They are given in physics handbooks.

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Handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants and tell you their value.

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But I wanted to see if they've changed, so I got the old volumes of physical handbooks.

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I went to the Patent Office Library here in London,

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and they are the only place I could find that kept the old volumes,

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normally people throw them away. When the new values come out, they throw away the old ones.

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When I did this I found out that the speed of light dropped between 1928 and 1945

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by about 20 kilometers per second.

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It's a huge drop because they were given with the errors of any fractions, decimal points of error.

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And yet, all over the world it dropped

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and they were all getting values very similar to each other with tiny errors,

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then in (1945) 1948 it went up again,

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and then people started getting very similar values again.

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I was very intrigued by this, and I couldn't make sense of it,

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so I went to see the Head of Metrology,

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at the National Physical Laboratory, in Teddington.

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Metrology is the science in which people measure constants.

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And I asked him about this, I said:

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what do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945?

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And he said, "Oh dear",

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he said "you uncovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our sciences."

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I said well, could the speed of light have actually dropped, and that would have amazing implications if so.

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And he said, "no, no, of course it couldn't have actually dropped, it is a constant!"

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Oh, well then how do you explain the fact that everyone was almost finding

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it going much slower during that period?

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Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting

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and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?

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"We don't like to use the word fudge."

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I said, well what do you prefer?

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He said, "well we prefer to call it intellectual phase-locking."

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So if this was going on then, how can we be so sure it is not going on today,

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and that the present values produced by intellectual phase-locking?

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And he said, "no, we know it is not the case."

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I said, how do we know?

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He said, "well, we have solved the problem". I said well how?

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He said, "well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972".

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So it might still change.

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He said, "Yes but we'll never know because we defined the metre in terms of the speed of light,

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so the units have changed with it".

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So he looked very pleased about that, they'd fixed their problem.

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But I said, well then what about Big G?

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The gravitational constant known in the trade as Big G, it is written with the capital G.

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Newton's universal gravitational constant. That has varied by more than 1.3 per cent in recent years.

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And it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time.

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And he said, "well there is a chance of errors, and unfortunately there are quite big errors with the Big G.

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So I said, what if it is really changing, perhaps it is really changing.

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And then I looked at how they do it: what happens is that they measure it in different labs,

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they get different values on different days, and then they average them.

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And then other labs from around the world do the same

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and they come out usually with a rather different average.

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And then the International Committee on Metrology meets every 10 years or so

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and averages the ones from labs from around the world to come out with the value of Big G.

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But what if G were actually fluctuating? What if it changed?

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There is already evidence actually that it changes throughout the day and throughout the year.

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What if the Earth, as it moves through the galactic environment, went through patches of dark matter

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or other environmental factors that could alter it? Maybe they all change together.

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What if these errors are going up together and down together?

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For more than 10 years I have been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data.

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In fact, I am now trying to persuade them to put it online on the internet,

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with the dates and the actual measurements,

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and see if they are correlated; to see if they are all up at one time, all down at another.

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If so they might be fluctuating together and that would tell us something very, very interesting.

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But no one has done this, they haven't done it because G is a constant.

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There is no point in looking for changes.

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You see, here is a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry.

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I myself think that the constants may vary quite considerably.

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Well within narrow limits, but they may all be varying.

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And I think the day will come when scientific journals like Nature have weekly reports on the constants

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like stock market reports in the newspapers.

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This week Big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light held steady,

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and so on.

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So, that is one area, just one area where I think thinking less dogmatically could open things up.

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One of the biggest areas is the nature of the mind,

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this is the most unsolved problem as Graham has just said.

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Science simply can't deal with the fact that we are conscious.

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And it can't deal with the fact that our thoughts don't seem to be inside our brains.

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Our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain.

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Your image of me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain.

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Yet the official view is that there is a little Rupert somewhere inside your head

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and everything else in this room is inside your head.

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Your experiences is inside your brain.

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I am suggesting actually that vision involves an outward projection of images,

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what you are seeing is in your mind but not inside your head.

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Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simple act of perception.

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I think that we project out the images we are seeing and these images touch what we are looking at.

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If I look at you from behind and you don't know I am there, could I affect you?

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Could you feel my gaze?

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There is a great deal of evidence that people can.

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The sense of being stared at is an extremely common experience,

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and recent experimental research actually suggests it is real.

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Animals seem to have it too.

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I think it probably evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships.

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Prey animals that can feel the gaze of the predator would survive better than those that couldn't.

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This would lead to a whole new way of thinking about ecological relationships between predators and prey,

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also about the extent of our minds.

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If we look at distant stars, I think our minds reach out in the sense to touch these stars

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and literally extend out over astronomical different distances.

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They are not just inside our heads.

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Now it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate in the 21st century.

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We know so little about our own minds that where our images are

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is a hot topic of debate within consciousness studies right now.

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I don't have time to deal with anymore of these dogmas, but every single one of them is questionable.

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If one questions it, new forms of research, new possibilities open up.

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And I think as we question these dogmas that have held back science so long,

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science will undergo a re-flowering, a Renaissance.

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I am a total believer in the importance of science.

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I have spent my whole life as a research scientist, my whole career.

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But I think by moving beyond these dogmas it can be regenerated.

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Once again it will become interesting, and I hope life affirming.

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Thank you.