The Academy Awards is interesting this year. I never watch them, but I do follow the movies that receive nominations in the most important categories. I also haven't been to a move theater in years, and in fact, for reasons I'll explain, I doubt movie theaters will exist ten years from now, other than specialized ones like Imax. But I've seen a tremendous number of movies in my life, and was, in college, sort of a movie buff, being one of the few students enrolled in the two classes offered on the history of film. Now it's a whole major, and in some schools, a department. I've viewed all the old silent films, many of them intolerable bores, and more than my share of Soviet propaganda films. The people in class with me were pretty amused at the glorious Soviet Union's modern farming methods, with rag tag farmers driving Ford tractors, although today, I'm sure the reaction would be, Gee, we stole Ford from the Russians. Not a single scene of any of the 200,000 Studebakers that, by 1944, were motorizing the Red army onto the streets of Europe, though (most people will probably have to Google Studebaker to discover it's hallmark was being the first car that looked the same whether it was coming or going, and come to think of it, the last).
During the 20s and 30s, movies were meant to entertain (thus the contrasting of the Soviet propaganda films in film class). In the 40s, during wartime, films were designed to be both entertaining and patriotic, although there were some attempts at propaganda. After the war, films went back to entertainment until television started to drain the coffers of the studios. Up until this point, the Academy Awards were association affairs honoring actual contributions to the industry. Starting with the fifties, it was turned into a promotion medium to push big budget films that hadn't made their nut. This lasted until the first real blockbuster, Jaws, then Star Wars, then E.T. and all the rest after, led to movies budgeted above a hundred million, then two hundred million (Titanic), the Henry Potter series and incredible earner, The Lord of the Rings series. During this period, the mixture of awards was fairly random because the Oscar nominating committees were slowly being salted with people who viewed the film as a form of propaganda, and they wanted films that best propagandized an appropriate message to get the publicity of the award.
This year marked an astonishing realization, although it hasn't yet sunk into the filmmakers, that while one film costing $100 million dollars could return a billion, it could also return $10 million, while the chance of one film made for $10 making $100 million were greater than the chance of losing $90 million on the $100 film. Financially speaking, the odds of making more are better to spend less. Leave it to a net pioneer, the creator of EBay, to step up and realize what was happening. He reasoned that niche markets would support propaganda films, at least to the point of making a profit on the DVD sales. He started a company, approached idealistic actors who agreed to work at reduced rates or for nothing, got cheap screenwriters and started turning out films with low production values targeted to specific political markets, and started making money out of the gate. It wasn't long before famous actors such as George Clooney followed suit, and with the Nominating Committees now stocked with people who favored propaganda films, the Academy Awards returned to promoting films, but only those films that were directed at appropriate political niches. This year's nominated best picture movies combined didn't gross what the single largest grosser did, but they all made a profit.
The one thing that is common to all the films over the years, including the Soviet propaganda films, is that they are fantasy, made-up fictions with no basis in reality. Enter a stunning article in Business 2.0, which is owned by Time-Warner, on how Time-Warner, along with all the other giant content distribution companies, might be able to survive the next ten years. He said their current survival tactic, to buy up their own stock, and this surprised me, some of them are laying out up to 20 billion dollars to do so, is suicide. He pointed out that distribution is becoming cheaper and cheaper with the creation of the Internet, digital movies, social media, cell phones, the list is endless, and that eventually distribution, read movies houses, will be worthless. He pointed out that the vast amount of content creation has driven consumers to pursue their own interests, read niche markets. His advice was, get rid of the distribution part of the business now while it's still worth something, and diversify content creation into niche markets.
I found this to be a stunning revelation because it will basically lead to a fracturing of a society with common interests. I see nothing wrong with this as long as society pursues a live and let live philosophy, but I also see incredible ignorance evolving. Why? Because empirical science is a niche society and it has produced nothing but ignorance. Last week's column pointed out how meteorology was accepted into the empirical ranks. Its acceptance didn't increase knowledge, it simply increased ignorance because it had to conform to the dictates of empirical dogma, and those dictates were diametrically opposed to meteorology. Empirical science is a vast undertaking of disparate groups of people examining smaller and smaller bits of reality, and in the process, accepting the received wisdom from all other fields without question.
Project Serpo provides a perfect example. Until I got my hands on the copy of the UFO magazine that led to last week's column, I'd never heard of Project Serpo, and here's a magazine with an issue pretty much devoted to the subject. Project Serpo is the Roswell story, as amplified by Philip Corso in The Day After Roswell, in which he describes how the technology from the downed saucer was integrated into American industry, pretty darned interesting stuff but as far as I can tell unverifiable (although if you study the history of the development of the transistor and the laser, you find there is no history, they sprung full blown out of pretty thin air), and adds a cute little wrinkle. There were two saucer crashes, not one (which was no surprise to me) and a survivor, that claim has been around for a while, but this survivor survived and began communicating with us. The first thing he did was tell us how to develop the technology, Corso's claim, with a hole in it. Corso said they were never able to reverse engineer the saucer's means of propulsion, which is not news to me, see column 03-05, so if we got this Eben, as his race was named, telling us all about the technology of the saucer, then why didn't he tell us about the propulsion system, or perhaps, the lack of a propulsion system?
Oh, well, it gets worse. The Eben decides to take a group of Earthlings back to his home planet, which is named Serpo, and which is some 40 light years in whatever direction, and that's what the Serpo project is. I don't have any problem with traveling the 40 light years because the storyteller is using our myths of distance (although when it came to the physics of the Serpian system, he screwed up so badly, he had to cover himself by saying Earth's physics don't apply everywhere in the universe although empirical science claims they do). I have a problem when it comes to what our little Ebean proceeded to do. See, he had to contact Serpo to make sure it was okay, so he takes out his handy transmitter, and wham, contact is made, permission is obtained, mission preparation begins (we take our own food and Carl Sagan is the astronomical representative of the Project Serpo review committee, a claim, despite my low opinion of him, I'd have to defend him against).
Now let's see. The storyteller accepts our astronomically inflated distances (column 15-05), but allows for instant communication. It seems the empirical practice of ignoring the basic measurement of light, that it diminishes inversely with the square of the distance over which it moves, has percolated to the entire electromagnetic emission field. This, combined with the fact that light, and thus the rest of the electromagnetic emission field, moves at a specific speed (that's why it's called a light year, the amount of distance light can travel in a year), sort of classifies Serpo a fantasy affair like the Academy Awards.
Simply put, oscillators, the things that produce radio waves, are feedback electrical circuits whose power loss is brought into stability by increasing its power input. Let's look at a light bulb to see what's happening or even the surface of the sun, see column 04-06, although I'd like to use the light bulb to illustrate empirical ignorance of one of the most basic facts of our existence, electric lights.
Think for a minute. You move into a house. There's no air-conditioning yet, no oven, no microwave, no heater, nothing but lights. Your only contact with the electric company is the electric lights you burn in the house. Do you expect to get an electric bill? Not according to empirical science. According to empirical fantasy, the electricity in the circuit is a moving charge called an electron. As the moving charge passes through the filament of the light bulb, the resistance of the filament to the moving charge causes it to start to glow, but the glow is something other than the moving charge of the electrons. The glow is the light, which is either a particle or a wave, not sure which, and heat, which is the mystical transfer of motion from the light bulb to the skin of your finger if you accidentally touch it, not to mention the producer of a lot of salty, smelly water if you happen to be a performer sweating under the hot lamps required for production display.
But, heaven forbid, the moving charges do not take any part in the light or in the heat produced by the filament. Electrons are electrons and photons are photons, and never the twain shall meet. This state of affairs resulted in the incompetence that results from turning concepts into law. Light was decisively determined to be a wave, and therefore non-existent, simply a disturbance of a medium, at the beginning of the 19th century. Experiments were going on with electricity quite independently of any discussions of light because, with light being nothing, there was no reason to connect it with its source. However, electricity did have a source and when, around the same time, the battery was invented, a permanent source of electricity allowed the discovery of induction some three decades later and the light bulb some four decades after that. Just as the people that were turning the concept of light into a fact that it was just a wave, the people dealing with electricity didn't have a clue what they were dealing with but being good empiricists, they had to talk about it, and talking required naming, and naming produced the electron, the moving charge of electricity, although there were several other concepts that could be turned into word structures.
When it came to Edison inventing the light bulb, he didn't give a fig what light was, all he cared about was how direct current could be used to produce light. He never connected the two, electricity and light, because he was an inventor, he made up real things, rather than an empiricist, who makes up things and then claims they are real. But with the light bulb lighting up the world, empirical science had to come up with an explanation what was going on to maintain its emerging superiority as the arbiter of all knowledge. Since it knew light wasn't something and electricity was, whatever the electricity was couldn't be what light was. Ergo, the electricity used up to produce the light was lost in the resistance of the filament rather than emitted by the filament as light.
But as any electric bill will tell you, the electricity you are buying is being turned into light. Before the light bulb, people lived by kerosene lamps, and before that by candles. The argument that electricity is not being emitted as light doesn't look too good beside the argument that the light emitted by the dwindling kerosene or tallow isn't being emitted by the kerosene or tallow, although empiricists claim that the sum of all the materials left over after burning something solid equals the totality of what was burned, explaining the loss of material as the result of invisible gasses being emitted (or perhaps phantom ghosts, hmmm, maybe Serpians are siphoning it away).
The electricity hits the filament and the electrons build up. More electrons occupy the filament than can exit it at the same time, so they begin exiting in frequencies, the more electrons built up, the hotter the filament, and the higher the frequency. The electrons are emitted in all directions that aren't blocked, see column 21-06, which is an expanding sphere. The expanding sphere, because of solid geometry, diminishes inversely with the square of its distance from the source and eventually expands out of existence. That's why they don't put candles on lighthouses. They put extremely high frequency light sources because they want as much light as they can produce at the source so that it will be seen as far as possible. Astronomers would have us believe they could theoretically construct a telescope on the white cliffs of Dover that could see light from a lighthouse in Newfoundland, because that's what they're claiming, with there more and more expensive telescopes being able to see to the end of the universe, but the fact is, light is something, it diminishes, and it eventually diminishes out of existence. If it doesn't exist, it can't be seen, no matter how strong the telescope (or deluded the astronomer piling his table high with the good things in life).
In short, the surface of the light bulb is oscillating. In the oscillating circuit, the electrical feedback is not designed to produce the high frequencies of light, but rather the lower frequencies that can be modulated to produce radio signals. The feedback builds up the electrons in the circuit to the point where they start to be emitted just as the light in a light bulb is emitted, although to empirical science, the oscillator emitting the electrons producing electromagnetic frequencies is not analogous to a light bulb emitting light. The electrons are emitted in all directions that are not blocked or, in the case of frequency modulated (FM) emissions, even those that are blocked by things like bridges. The emissions, like light, expand in an expanding sphere and as they do so, diminish with the square of the distance over which they expand. As a result, they expand out of existence. Course correction teams that guide space probes use this fact in part to determine the location of the space probes so their course can be corrected.
Thus, our little Eben taking out his transmitter and calling home is a pile of crap simply because, unless home was on the base, the expanding emissions would cease to exist (you can't transmit far with a walkie-talkie, and unless the Serpians had a chain of cellular space points clear back to their home planet, he'd get a no signal sign).
The stupidest stories are based on the simplest of misconceptions. Empirical science is awash in simple misconceptions, so Hollywood, if they ever get out of their propaganda mode, will always have limitless stories based on "fact." The Academy Awards are the outward reflection of a dream world, empirical science is a dream world, and Project Serpo is the result.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com