‘Philosophy’ is the historic name for the widest mode of seriously practised rational discourse about the nature of the physical world, the meaning of mathematics, the conditions for tolerable social wellbeing, and comfortable relationships between people (ethics).

But today all these discourses are wilting badly, even visibly disintegrating, because of something which happened in the 1920s.  In that hopelessly demoralised, shell-shocked, nihilistic, post WW1 decade, the key elites of maths and physics disgracefully adopted fudged solutions to the apparently bottomless pits of incomprehensibility which their predecessors had discovered at the end of the 19^th century: Michelson-Morley and Russell’s contradiction.

Why did they do this? 

Because they were at their wits’ end. They had been struggling for more than twenty years trying to figure-out the explanation of Russell’s shocking contradiction… without the slightest success. The situation in physics was even worse. The intrinsic relativity of the behaviour of light, as discovered by Michelson-Morley, had been supposedly “explained” (also after more than twenty years intense puzzlement) by adopting the assumption that <<time is a kind of space>>.  In effect it froze time, and banished the very notion of activity. It was creating another bottomless pit of incomprehension, because everyone is acutely aware that time is passing… This is what we are most conscious of. (Aso dimensions represent degrees of freedom, but we have no freedom whatever to move about in time.) So how fast is the “Now” —the vivid scene we are currently, temporarily conscious-of— moving along the dimension of time?  This is an utterly unanswerable question, because there is no “super-ordinate kind of time” to apply to this “acutely experienced movement” along the time dimension.

These fudges (Zermelo-Fraenkel for Russell’s Contradiction, and “spacetime” for Michelson-Morley) made it appear —were designed to make it appear— that the difficulties had been overcome.  So now any open-minded observer had extra bottomless pits of difficulty to contend with:  to unravel these disgraceful officially authorised fudges, and to try to solve the original diabolically unsolved problems.

The maths and physics elites had effectively put their reputation on the line by sending out the message: <<no one can explain these things properly, so we are officially putting out the appearance of explaining them instead!>>.

This is an abject capitulation to scientific despair.  It is saying that the cleverest thinkers on the planet have utterly failed to understand our universe, and have come to the conclusion that nobody ever will.  It is the epitome of being unscientific.

We have been living in this “Corridor of Dire Despair” since the 1920s. In the 1970s the full extent of the failure of maths to throw light onto the spacetime problem became clear.  Spacetime undermines maths, science, governance, justice, morality, creativity, art, education and person-to-person relationships.  It ruins the lives of young people, because it categorically bans hope-for-the-future, the vital elan we all need to flourish in what has become a deeply muddled, competitive, scruples-free, dog-eat-dog no-mans-land.  The elites have failed us, but they have also destroyed their own previous historic authority. (Maths has been worst hit:  it is the one most obviously in the dog house, because its core heartland has been rubbished by the Barons of Silicon Valley.)

The good news is that a new cognitive landscape is beginning to emerge, founded on Anti-Maths, the new modelling logos which is twenty times more likely to explain the physical universe than static, timeless, wooden maths.  This is a new page of history. Its great attraction is that —for the first time ever– it explains how the universe-with-us-in-it can be self-determinating.

 PS The P E R Group’s new BULLETIN can be found on-line at:  PERtinence.co.uk/pertinence-news-1/

 YOU CAN COMMENT on themes on this website: email your thoughts to per4group@gmail.com   CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st July 2025