The Cult of the Expert is Killing Science

Introduction

Science has always been a social activity and in social activities, group-think prevails. Granting agencies may say they want originality, but the truth is that genuine newness has never been easily accepted in science. When James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879) published his seminal paper in the nineteenth century (Maxwell, 1865), the physicists of the time failed to understand his mathematics, the mathematicians of the time failed to understand his physical explanations, and Maxwell's now classical theory of electromagnetism was widely ignored for more than twenty years. Later, Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) gentle suggestion that "According to the assumption to be contemplated here, when a light ray is spreading from a point, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing spaces, but consists of a finite number of energy quanta that are localized in points in space, move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as a whole" (Einstein, 1905) was roundly rejected: as late as 1922, Niels Bohr's (1885-1962) Nobel Prize lecture contained the bald statement "The hypothesis of light-quanta is not able to throw light on the nature of radiation."

Eventually, of course, the dual wave/particle nature of light came to be accepted by all. But the point is that because of the human proclivity for group-think, there have always been factions in science. Physicists are raised to think of physics as the queen of sciences and biologists as merely stamp collectors. Epidemiologists convince themselves and hence politicians that theirs is the only biological discipline worth bothering about when it comes to deciding whether or not something is harmful to humans — conveniently ignoring the fact that the data on which they do their statistics come from unplanned, uncontrolled, unmonitored, unconsented and therefore on all counts utterly unethical experimentation on those humans.

Even within any given field of science, junior practitioners in the modern era quickly learn which journals are likely to be sympathetic to papers emerging from their chosen paradigm and which are not. Of course, "peer" reviewers are still anonymous to the authors whose work they review, and there is little doubt that secrecy facilitates misdeeds, wherever it is found. But even journal editors who sincerely believe themselves to be fair and open-minded usually belong to one or another scientific faction themselves and thus know which reviewers can be relied upon to recommend publication of papers that support their own preconceptions and block papers that don't. It's 'human nature', we tell ourselves, as if that were an excuse.

And worse, 'human nature' also dictates that there has always been outright misconduct in science. This used to be limited to the occasional desperate grad student or postdoc, secretly fudging data in order to impose on the randomness of reality the coherent stories necessary for publication of the scientific papers so essential for survival in the "publish or perish" world of the academy. But sadly, that restriction no longer applies.

A new culture of deliberate corruption has appeared in science. The present essay argues that the Cult of the Expert is a manifestation of this culture — and therefore that the public is absolutely right to distrust many if not most of the individuals presented to them by the mainstream media as scientific "experts".

ICNIRP (International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection)

A prime example of this creeping culture of corruption is ICNIRP, a small, private scientific club based in Germany. ICNIRP is important because its members have infiltrated all of the regulatory agencies in the Anglophone world that set allowable levels of RF (aka radiofrequency radiation, aka microwave) pollution in the global environment. This includes RF emitted by cell phones, cell towers, mobile landline phones, 'smart' electricity meters, watches and TVs, WiFi and Bluetooth networks and devices (including WiFi internet connections, wireless keyboards, printers and mice), 'collision mitigation' vehicular radar — and now, just to make RF completely inescapable, a proliferation of RF emitting satellites.

The only way to become a member of ICNIRP is to be invited by existing members — there is no independent oversight. And the only people who have ever been so invited are members of a very small scientific faction who believe (or at least say they believe) that tissue heating is the only mechanism by which radiofrequency radiation can have any effect on biological organisms.

The practical result is that ICNIRP supports limits on environmental RF that protect the public only from tissue burns. The fact that there is now a huge scientific literature (reviewed e.g. by Miller et al., 2019) clearly showing that irradiation by RF at power densities thousands of times lower than those deemed safe under this "thermal-only" assumption causes various kinds of cancer, arthritis, diabetes, reproductive disorders, neurological disorders, immune system disorders and cardiac problems apparently bothers ICNIRP's camp followers not at all. Legally, the organisation's website protects them with the bland indemnification "We do not assume any responsibility for any damage, including direct or indirect loss suffered by users or third parties in connection with the use of our website and/or the information it contains, including for the use or the interpretation of any technical data, recommendations, or specifications available on our website." Hence members of and scientific advisors to ICNIRP apparently feel perfectly safe in making repeated statements, both in reports to governments and in the mainstream media, to the effect that "there is no evidence that cell phone and WiFi radiation causes biological harm."

But this is (let's not mince words) a lie. And they know it. So why do these people behave like this? Well, because the telecommunications industry and/or the military and/or their national governments pay them to, in various overt and covert ways (Slesin, 2020; Hardell and Carlberg, 2020).

Thus, at least in this area of science, the term "expert" has come to mean "person who looks good on TV and is willing to say with a straight face whatever his or her pay-masters want the public to believe." In plain language, the cult of the expert has become a front or vehicle for blatant corruption.

And if it happens in this area of science, why should anyone believe anything some officially anointed "expert" says about any other area of science, either? Well frankly, they shouldn't.

Over the last two years, this caveat has become quite fantastically important in relation to the announcement by the WHO of a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)" and the consequent mandating by governments all over the world of injections of an experimental gene therapy renamed a "vaccine". This situation will be discussed in more detail in upcoming articles.

Conclusions

To an academic who has devoted their life to advancing genuine knowledge of the world by the practice of genuine science, this whole situation is very sad. Science is one of the crowning glories of humanity — the best way we have yet invented of understanding the world. Its death from unchecked corruption would pitch us back to the dark ages.

But on another level — to the increasing number of innocent citizens who have either (1) become physically sensitized to RF radiation or (2) suffered entirely predictable 'adverse events following innoculation' with the novel and inadequately tested "vaccines" that have lately been forced on them under false pretenses — the cult of the expert is quite literally life-threatening. This blatant corruption of science must stop.

Copyright Notice: Authors hold copyright with no restrictions. Based on its copyright Journal of NeuroPhilosophy (JNphi) produces the final paper in JNphi's layout. This version is given to the public under the Creative Commons license (CC BY). For this reason authors may also publish the final paper in any repository or on any website with a complete citation of the paper.