Schiller Institute science advisor Jason Ross opened the third panel of the Schiller Institute’s July 12-13 conference in Berlin today, prefacing his remarks with a Sept. 30, 2011 video clip from Lyndon LaRouche.
Lyndon LaRouche: The characteristic of life itself, and also of human life in particular, is that which is lied about by the Greenies, by the so-called environmentalists. All environmentalists are by nature, liars, and perverts. Why? Because contrary to the Great Lie, nature is not fixed, nor is there a Second Law of Thermodynamics, except in the minds of idiots. The record shows, for particularly over a half-billion years of study of life within this galaxy, under the influence of this galaxy, and what has happened? There is constantly an increase, there is not a decrease, there is not a depletion! There is no such thing as zero growth. There’s positive growth! The universe as we know it, and especially life, is characterized by positive growth.
Why do some animals become extinct? Because the standard for existence of animal life is increased! That the species which have not improved their energy flux-density become extinct, like the dinosaurs. And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is one big lie, based on the oligarchical system. There’s no truth to this idea, of that kind of system—it’s not true! Therefore, mankind’s existence is based on the fact that mankind is the only species of which we know, which has the willful power to increase the energy flux-density of life as a whole, on our planet Earth, and beyond. And that’s the meaning of this process.
The universe is moving upward, and leaving the Greenies behind! We have to understand that this process, that life—the work of Vernadsky and others point to this direction; there are many indications that point in this direction. But the nature of the thing is that an increase in energy flux-density throughout the planet, among the species that inhabit the planet, is the precondition for the survival of any species.
Any species that does not rise to a higher level, to progress, to greater energy flux-density—look, there’s an explanation for this, which is rather important to consider. What’s the problem? Why do people say that we’re using up energy? Why do they say we have these kinds of problems? Well, because the planet is polluted by a certain kind of human being, who believes that there are too many human beings on this planet. Or that mankind is consuming and producing too much power on this planet. They want it to stay back to a more modest population, like the British now have ordered—the British royal family has demanded, that the population, the human population of the planet be reduced, from the order of magnitude of 7 billion people, down to 1, or less! This is the official policy of the British Empire! It’s a policy of mass murder!
It also is a policy which, if carried out, means that the human species will become extinct, by the virtue of this policy!
The fact of the matter is, that mankind’s ability to exist as a species, on the one hand, is the fact that mankind is able to increase the energy flux-density, which we’re able to apply to the existence of human beings on this planet. And those who have a contrary view are called the oligarchical system.
The oligarchical system is a bunch of fruitcakes, to use the term politely, who believe that mankind is divided into two groups of people [LaRouche adopts British accent]: “a small, but honourable group of people, who believe that there are too many of the lower folk, and we have to reduce, and keep down, the number of lower-class folk,” in order that the degenerates who call themselves oligarchs will be able to enjoy themselves more freely. That’s what Bertrand Russell said: If we could kill enough people in each generation, people could procreate quite freely, because they were going to die conveniently, after having their little pleasures.
And so, the issue here, is that the destiny of humanity, as the destiny of any species, depends upon—as has been demonstrated, by a half-billion years of living processes’ investigation—depends upon increasing the energy flux-density per capita. It means increasing the size of the human population. Without those measures, there is no future! And with the oligarchs, we’ll have to become extinct, if they continue their policies. Well, if they wish to become extinct, that’s their business, but they should not meddle in our bedroom. [end video clip]
Jason Ross: I will discuss the scientific challenges confronting us in the New Paradigm, and the type of scientific inquiry that has historically shown itself to be the best in resolving them. Along the way, we’ll discuss the connection between science and economics, and the problems of information theory, and an opportunity for you to better get to know science from the inside. This is a chart [Fig. 1] of a type of life on Earth. It’s unlabeled; can anyone guess what it is? This is some kind of life on Earth; what is it? Human population growth? Crypto? This is a chart over the past 150 million years of the diversity of mammalian life. So, displacing the older age of the reptiles, the dinosaurs, the mammals are a higher level of technology. We’ve seen this growth over 150 million years.
Now, here is the image I think people may have been expecting to see [Fig. 2]. This is human population over 5000 years. So, one-thirty thousandth of that last chart is what we see here. In effectively the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, we have fundamentally transformed the relationship of our species—and really all life—to nature and to each other. We’ve done this repeatedly.
So, what is the difference between these two types of growth? It takes millions of years to introduce what we may call a new biological technology, an evolutionary technology. The cellular nucleus of eukaryotes, photosynthesis, the move to land, being warm blooded, or flight; these all took a very long time. But human development occurs in an instant, as if through a discontinuous leap, an unbridgeable change from a fundamentally lower state to one that is higher in a way that is not quantitative, and not reachable or expressible in the lower form.
These leaps, these discoveries, occur in individual human minds. They are introduced socially, but they’re discovered in individual minds. This is a fundamental distinction between us and the animals. There are human individuals, but outside of their relationship to human culture, there are no historically important animals. Do the history books name the first otter to crack shells on its chest? Did they write history books? So, this is a fundamental change. We, by hypothesizing, and implementing a new kind of cause, we write new chapters in our history.
Four examples of this to give a sense of these stages. The first is fire. According to the Greek tale, as told by Aeschylus, the human species first became distinct from the animals when Prometheus stole fire from Zeus in heaven and gave it to us—along with many other intellectual gifts. This changed everything: safety from beasts; cooking, expanding what we can eat safely; working material through heating stones to chip them better; boiling water; textiles. Prometheus also lists other gifts—astronomy, the use of beasts of burden, the calendar, poetry, sailing ships, and number, to name a few.
But fire is what serves the best to exemplify the fundamental distinction of mankind from all beasts. We have the potential to create endless stream of future improvements. What else can you do with fire? When you use heat to transform water into steam, you’ve figured out a way to turn fire into motion. Just a small portion of the labor that used to be required for productive processes could be applied towards mining and steam machinery. Then you would liberate an enormous reservoir of power to save from human or animal effort production, and make things that were available only to a few available more broadly.
Two, Chemistry. While animals are limited to physical tools—sticks, stones, shells, etc.—human beings have the power to wield ideas to transform our relationship to nature; chemical technologies for example. The first major instance of this is metallurgy [Fig. 3]. This is a beautiful green rock; it has had many uses over historical time. The Egyptians used it for make-up. Does anybody know what you can make from this rock? What made it so industrially or culturally important later? You can turn that green rock into an orange metal [Fig. 4]. This is a natural formation of copper; it was possible to find some early in our history. But we could the rock into the metal by using the higher power of charcoal. This is the production of charcoal [Fig. 5] in the traditional way. You burn wood covered, so it doesn’t have access to oxygen, and you get basically a pure carbon fuel. It burns hotter than wood, it’s cleaner than wood, and it has the energy and the chemistry—namely plenty of CO when you combust it—to pull oxygen out of the rock, and liberate for our use the metal it contains.
Another example of chemistry is Mendeleyev’s development of the periodic system of the elements. He introduced a whole new chemical language. The physical terms like density, color, hardness, flexibility; these cannot describe the chemical world. For example [Fig. 6], if we compare graphite, charcoal, and diamonds, they are very different in their physical characteristics. But they are all compounds of just the element carbon. Diamonds are hard; graphite is not. Does carbon have a hardness? Graphite conducts electricity; charcoal does not. Does carbon conduct electricity? Does carbon have a density? Does carbon have a color? It has none of those things.
A chemical element has a susceptibility of participating in various compounds that do have physical characteristics. But there’s a new world and even language that we use to discuss chemistry itself; atomic mass, valence, enthalpy to understand chemical transformations. The expansion of chemistry in the 19th and 20th Centuries brought us internal combustion engines, synthetic dyes, dynamite, plastics, abundant nitrogen fertilizer, powered flight, heat pumps, and new types of pharmaceuticals, just to name a few.
The third of the four stages I want to mention is electricity. All energy is not created equal. Let’s compare two forms, for example; heat and electricity. Among forms of energy, heat is of a lower quality than the concentrated power that you can apply through an electrical process. Even when losing half of the heat by converting it into electricity—by boiling water, producing steam and running a turbine, for example—that lesser amount of energy in the more concentrated form does more work than a greater amount of low-quality energy. All the heat in the world—you could have the biggest pile of coal imaginable; it cannot take an x-ray of your broken bone, it can’t bond metals with laser precision. A pile of coal cannot serve web pages. Electricity is different.
Let’s take a look at this as a case study [Fig. 7]. Here you see energy use per person in the United States in blue, and in China in red. I think we’re all observing the same trend here. One of these is changing, and one is not. Let’s take a look at the more specific form of energy of electricity [Fig. 8]. Here we have electrical use per capita in the United States in blue, and in China in red. If we combine these graphs, we can look at what percentage of energy is electricity. Here you see in blue in the U.S. the percentage of our energy use that is electricity, and you can see in China the stupendous transformation in not just the amount of energy used per person, but the kind of energy used per person. This gets us toward LaRouche’s idea of energy-flux density that we heard him mention in the video we just saw. Human progress means more energy, more people, more capital intensity, and more dense applications of energy of a higher form.
The fourth and last stage I’d like to discuss is the nuclear era. Our current nuclear power plants already capable of providing reliable electricity from an extraordinarily small amount of fuel. A small amount of labor required to mine uranium, to process it, creates an enormous of energy. When we master nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, this could be a change akin to the introduction of the steam engine in terms of the importance it will have on the human species. Nuclear fusion was very important to Lyndon LaRouche, who formed the Fusion Energy Foundation in the 1980s, which published Fusion magazine, which was the leading promoter of this scientific breakthrough in the United States; and it also worked internationally.
So, with even more plentiful and inexpensive energy from nuclear fusion, we will have a fundamentally new relationship to many things. Our relationship to water, when we can desalinate water cheaply enough to use it for agriculture. Our relationship to materials, when we can process ores without requiring the chemistry of charcoal or coke like we do today. Space travel; the ability to reach Mars in a week, and to deflect dangerous asteroids. And it’s possible—this is a bit speculative—but we might have enough energy with the development of nuclear fusion to get air conditioning in Europe!
So, in these examples of these four stages, we see exemplified what the creators of the European Renaissance recognized as the identity of the human individual; of man made in the image of a creative God. In one of the pieces we heard and sang last night, Haydn set to music “Und eine neue Welt entspringt auf Gottes Wort.” (And a new world springs up at God’s command.) What new worlds will we cause to spring from our ideas? What’s next? What are the frontiers of science today, and how will we make progress in addressing them?
The nuclear domain is still not mastered. We can reliably use nuclear fusion to make enormously destructive weapons, but not yet to produce electricity or to power spacecraft. Energy storage technologies, whether they be chemical batteries or some new technology that is developed, will have a major impact on our energy supply and on transportation.
But even if we had extremely low-cost energy storage and covered the Earth in solar panels, we would still need nuclear fusion! All the solar panels, windmills, and coal power plants in the world cannot power a spacecraft; cannot power a mission to defend our planet from an asteroid that one day we will learn is going to impact us and destroy an entire continent or maybe life globally. Only nuclear fusion can ensure the survival of the human species, and really of all life on our planet.
A little more than a century ago, the twin discoveries made by Max Planck and Albert Einstein—the discoveries of the quantum and of relativity—have only begun to transform our understanding of light, matter, energy, space, and time. In fact, their two discoveries have proven to be fundamentally irreconcilable. What new hypothesis will allow us to reimagine both of their work in a new light that lets us reconcile the contradictions of quantum gravity, for example?
In galaxies—think of the spiral arms of a galaxy—the stars are rotating around the center. Well, those that are further from the center of the galaxy go too fast, based on what we can see of the other stars in the galaxy, we can predict a certain speed for their rotation around it. They move more quickly. Is this caused by dark matter; is it something else? Dark energy has been hypothesized to explain the surprising expansion of the whole universe. Is this the right approach?
In order to address these great problems of the New Paradigm, we must address the quality of thought being applied to them. The social effects of a diet of short posts and videos on X, TikTok, etc., make it hard to sustain a thought, or to develop and work with complex concepts. And “information” has itself become a dominant concept, displacing ideas. On the difference between these, let’s hear from Lyndon LaRouche, in his 1992 “On the Subject of Metaphor”:
“During the twenty-five-odd year reign of today’s “New Age” cult, an ominous crippling of the U.S. individual’s cognitive functions has been abuilding. This loss of mental capacity is presently affecting a growing majority among the under-fifty generations. Much of this damage is attributable directly to the multi-faceted influence of a modernist dogma which usually parades under such various names as ‘systems analysis,’ ‘linguistics,’ and information theory.'
“Today, for example, rarely are pupils guided to reproduce, within their own minds, the Socratic experience of re-living the original discovery of crucial principles of scientific knowledge. Lacking the benefits of such once-traditional forms of secondary school learning in the subject matter of rigorous formal and synthetic geometries, for example, today’s student would virtually never be able to attain an intelligible comprehension of even the bare fundamentals of physical science. Thus, today’s modernist classrooms have been turned away from what is too often reviled as ‘authoritarian’ teaching of conceptions; more and more, the modernist’s ‘democratic’ classroom and sterile textbook merely ‘provide information.'
“Similarly, a generation has passed since the time it was still fashionable to assess a pupil’s progress in terms of that student’s ability to apply prior learning to the effect of discovering, promptly, appropriate constructions of relevant solutions to unfamiliar problems. More and more, schools employ the ‘more efficient’ practice, of degrading education to the rehearsing of pupils for passing computer-scorable forms of multiple-choice questionnaires.
“These, and other enumerable applications of the pathological information theory doctrine, have brought upon us much of that widespread collapse of the individual victim’s attention span which has occurred lately, accompanied by a correlated loss of the potential for those qualities of rationality which are associated with achievement in science and technology. That loss of scientific rationality is linked functionally to a parallel loss of personal capacity for comprehension and enjoyment of such once-respected fine arts as great music or the classical tragedies of Aeschylus, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Schiller.
“Such observations pose the question: What makes an ostensibly innocent technical doctrine, such as information theory, so wickedly pathological in its social effects? The most efficient tack for exposing the answer to that question, is a more rigorous, Socratic definition of the fine arts term, metaphor. We signify ‘metaphor’ as William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity—for one—has identified it, as a phenomenon customarily associated with classical forms of poetry and drama. However, by ‘more rigorous,’ we should also show metaphor as the crucial feature of those thought-processes bearing upon the geometrical fundamentals of physical science.
“That sets the task before us. So, without more foreword, to work.”
So, doing that work. Starting in one week, the LaRouche Organization will be hosting a series of classes and discussions on key figures and discoveries in what Lyndon LaRouche identified as a “narrow path” of profound geniuses throughout history. The guiding concept of the series will be on the nature of change as primary, of how to understand cause itself. We will be reading and discussing primary sources from the Greek thinker Plato, a student of Socrates, through his Socratic dialogues; Nicholas of Cusa; Johannes Kepler, the first modern scientist, who brought astronomy into the realm of physics; Pierre de Fermat, who revolutionized the concept of intention in scientific inquiry, and about whom you can read more in a book available outside; the brilliant polymath Gottfried Leibniz, whose infinitesimal calculus gave us a language for discussing cause directly; Carl Gauss; and Bernhard Riemann, whose work on the complex domain, the shape of space, and higher transcendentals challenged the formality that had become hegemonic in mathematics in their day, by making discovery itself the fundamental matter of the universe.
Then we’ll compare and mostly contrast what we’ve learned about how these great discoveries have been made, with the way AI functions. What is going on inside ChapGPT while it is thinking about your question? And how is this similar or different from good old-fashioned organic natural intelligence?
I do hope that you’ll all join these weekly classes, starting next Sunday at 5 p.m. Berlin time, 11 a.m. New York time. The sessions will also be recorded and made available to you. There are also discussion periods on Wednesdays at 1 a.m. Berlin time, 7 p.m. New York time. Learn more and sign up at larouche.info/science.
In conclusion, my goal with this series of discussions on Lyndon LaRouche’s narrow path of scientific discovery, is to bring to life the process of hypothesizing the higher hypothesis; of developing insights into the quality of thought, that method of approach that successfully has developed and will develop new, higher hypotheses to resolve the contradictions of the older viewpoint. In this sense, by addressing directly this hypothesis of the higher hypothesis, creativity can be taught! Thank you.
