Part One
A wonderful article was published in Nature, "A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex"
doi:10.1038/nature18933
Definitely read it if the brain interests you - I am still digesting it, so will not summarize here.
What it REALLY made be think was, most of our scientific models have not caught up with new data. Seems every scientific discipline is very primed for some major revision.
The "Brain Map" that is in most textbooks is 50-100 years old. Not that it is wrong. It was based upon data at the time. And it has been very useful for medicine, philosophy, and those of us that just love to think about what it means to have our consciousness embedded in a biological system.But one sees so clearly that the model needs revision.
The cosmological models we have now are almost 100 years old. Einstein never incorporated plasma physics into his models. Think about that. He only included gravity - he did not include electricity and magnetism as being important in the large scale Universe.
Look at the theories about the evolution of life on Earth, most people in the field of Evolutionary Biology know that Darwin's model actually does not explain the data. Yet we as a culture have tenaciously held on to tenants like, "everything is mindless", "everything is driven by the survival of the individual and offspring", and other such things. Just ask the average PhD student in any field what is the current accepted theory of evolution and you will find such concepts. But evidence is overwhelming that changes to living organisms happen on what are basically impossibly short time scales and individual species generally factor very little compared to the collective interplay between groups of species. In other words, evolution does not proceed according to Darwin's model, and we are ready for a new model.
Every idea has its lifespan. Some ideas last a very long time - such as the ideas of Karma, or Recurrence, or what Emerson called Compensation - the idea that all actions have consequences and we live in some kind of a circle where all must be paid for, and everything must evoke its opposite.
Some ideas have a very short lifespan - such as that butter and eggs are bad for you. Actually, choose any idea about staying healthy, chances are it was only in vogue for about 25 years.
I was thinking about the system of peer review for publication in scientific literature. I really never thought I would find a problem with it. But it has become its opposite - as required by that long-lived law I just mentioned. The peer review system was once necessary to ensure the advancement of knowledge. Now it hinders just that, and has so, inevitably, become its opposite. The models of thought used by science have always changed - must always change. To deny this is to know nothing of the history of science. I guess one might argue that if scientific models were really ready to be changed, then all the scientists in power now would realize that and bring about the change. I hope one would not be so delusional about human nature to actually say that.
So bravo to the new brain map. I sincerely hope it goes far, and inspires young men and women to take it further.
But really taking things further would be, for example, to rally against the TED talk people for banning R. Sheldrake's and G. Hancock's recent talks. These talks were actually taken off the internet. Do you know how difficult it is to take something off the internet? It is extremely difficult. And why have these talks been given such an exceptional treatment, inducing Google to do something that the Department of Justice has a difficult time convincing Google to do? R. Sheldrake presented evidence from double blind studies - that have much better statistics than are required for the FDA to pass a new drug - that consciousness is non-local in space. That is, consciousness has properties and effects that go beyond the physical body. Such as, for example, dogs know when their owners are leaving the office to come home. What was G. Hancock's terrifying research that needed to be censored? That consciousness has different levels. That the level of consciousness we use to go to our jobs is not the only level of consciousness possible for humans. He even said that the possibility of access to other levels of consciousness is part of our design, a potential open to all of us just by virtue of being born a human being. Think about that. And next time you watch a TED talk, think about what is allowed, and what is not allowed to be presented in these talks.
We now have a scientific paradigm that systematically denies, and bans, any discussion of consciousness. By that I mean, any discussion of consciousness that would suggest that consciousness actually exists, and exists separate from matter. Why would this be such a volatile idea? Why would the un-named TED science advisory board, and the leaders of Google search engines conspire to NOT let such ideas be openly discussed?
Part Two
A good example is afforded by the recent article,
"It has been a surprise to find a planetary mass companion at 662 AU, or 662 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, from a primary star having only about 0.4 solar masses. According to the standard model, planets form in disks around the star. But none of the observed disks around such low-mass stars is large enough to form such an object...."
Full article: Astronomers Find Strange Star System Containing an Exoplanet With a 27,000-Year Orbit
We are "surprised" only because our models of planet and star formation are wrong. If we had better models we would not so frequently be surprised. If you have been following the exoplanet discoveries, a common exclamation from astronomers in the articles is "we are surprised to find..." Maybe the pace of understanding would move faster if more attention were given to those scientists whose models already fit the data.
Many of these "surprising" features are a natural consequence of including electricity in your models of star and planet formation.
But main stream cosmology does not allow electric fields and currents to cause anything like star formation. To the average scientist, or even to the average poet, this sounds peculiar. I cannot tell you how many times in my lectures I have had to say this, that current astrophysics does not allow electricity to cause anything. And the number of well-educate scientists, artists, and philosophers who come up to me afterwards and say, "This is strange. Why should this be forbidden? If electricity is manifesting everywhere around us, between bees and flowers, between people, in cell regeneration, in metabolism, in giga-ampere currents between planets and moons, ... then why would we say that electricity cannot play a part in star formation?" And I have to reply, you are right, we would understand our place in the Universe much better if we were to at least consider the ways electricity binds and connects all things.
Take for example this image of the the object called HL Tauri.
ref: http://wolaver.org/space/hl_tauri.htm
This was taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which is another in a series of true technological marvels created by some of the brightest engineers in the world. The ALMA array telescope is so exciting because it is collecting data at wavelengths that have been not well studied up to now. Of course visible wavelengths have been studied for centuries. In the 1970's we started collecting data from space in radio wavelengths. Someone should write a short history of that era in space exploration. For the first year or so, no one could get anything published about observing radio signals from space. From the little I have studied it, seems the reviewers simply stated that it is impossible for radio waves to come from space. I assume that was a manifestation of the contemporary scientific weakness which believes that if something has not been observed, then it is impossible.
The ALMA telescope looks at wavelengths longer than visible, but shorter than radio. Some common things we might see at these wavelengths are heat and dust. The ALMA telescope is quite literally opening a new window into the Universe.
Coming back to the image - this was recorded, it is beautiful - I find it somewhat mesmerizing, I cannot stop looking at it. And I suppose everyone will have their own impression of this image. When one asks, "what is this?", then things become less certain. And this is where we have to be very careful. In order to answer, "what is this?", you need to already know what you are looking at. This might sound circular, but it is the way human thought works, and it is the way science works. A scientist always needs to have a model, or a theory, for what they are looking at. For the image here, one scientist will say that we are looking at the gravitational accretion disc around a proto-star. In other words, that scientist's model is that matter in space collects randomly, and attracts only through the force of gravity, and we are looking at this gravitational accretion at a kind of mid-point. We are past the phase of a random blob of gas; but we are before the phase of distinct planets. And there are already papers published from looking at things this way.
A different model, a different starting point for, "what is this?", is to say we are looking at the natural pattern formation that happens when you push an electric current through a dusty plasma. It is very difficult to find published material on this, because mainstream astronomy has declared that electric currents are not possible in space. One notable exception is this paper by Don Scott, http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2015/PP-41-13.PDF which actually sets the stage for models that will explain this beautiful image from ALMA. The starting point explored by Dr Scott is that electric currents flowing through cosmic plasma will have certain naturally occurring shapes, patterns, behaviors. One such naturally occurring pattern is such as we see in the ALMA image, where material is forced into rings.
The average person asks, "But is it not possible to determine which model, which staring point, is correct?" The answer, if you study the history of science, is, no, it is actually extremely difficult to determine which model is correct.
Take another example, this image
http://www.stsci.edu/~inr/thisweek1/thisweek084.html
This is a strange and beautiful object. It is the size of a star. What is it? The published material about the object starts from the assumption, that only dust and gravity are at work here. We are told this is a star that has a thick belt around it, hence the dark band in the middle. The brilliant green jets up and down are seen as material ejected along magnetic field lines that happen to form in tight lines above and below the star.
A different approach is to acknowledge that this shape looks very much like manifestations in electric discharges. Here are some shapes of intense plasma discharges seen in the lab.
Have not found the Peratt reference yet
From A L Peratt and A J Dessler, Astrophysics and Space Science 144 (1988) 451-461
Have not found the Peratt reference yet.
http://scibible.blogspot.com/2012/09/thunderbolts-of-gods.html
These are all examples of electric discharges actually observed. No theory here. No computer simulations. This is what electricity actually does in our laboratories. Useful mathematics is hard to come by. Which to me is very exciting. We are at the experimental stage trying to figure all this out. I am not questioning Maxwell's laws. But anyone who uses them knows they are non-linear, they refer to themselves. So it's not simple like solving Newton's Laws for shooting pool balls. In a non-linear system it would be like the pockets on the pool table would change positions depending upon where the balls were, and the balls would not follow straight lines but instead would curve depending upon where the pockets are. So it would be maybe impossible to predict if a given shot would go into a pocket. Of course many shots would go into pockets. Just it might be difficult, if not impossible to predict. Plasma physics is a little like this. A certain number of phenomena have been predicted. But there might also be plenty of natural plasma behaviors that we have not predicted - and cannot predict with our current mathematical framework.
Again, a person might ask, "Is it not easy to determine which model, which staring point, is correct?" The answer is, no, it is not easy at all. Science, and human thought, always starts with a model. Maybe when we were babies we had no models for the world around us, and that is why we often had that ecstatic smile and were in such wonder.