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Friday International Webcast
21 August 2015
Tonight’s webcast is featuring an update on the war danger, Obama’s intentionally provocative role, and the underlying trigger of it all: a financial blowout that will make 2008 pale in comparison. Also in tonight’s broadcast, Jason Ross, author of the latest Basement blog post, "Bertrand Russell, in 1895, Pre-Ordains that the Quantum and Relativity Will Never Be Discovered" will discuss some of the fundamental flaws in science and economy that are to blame for the crisis we are in today. TRANSCRIPT MATTHEW OGDEN: TRANSCRIPT MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening; it’s August 21, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I’m happy to be here in the studio, hosting your weekly broadcast from larouchepac.com of our international Friday night webcast. I’m joined in the studio tonight by three of my colleagues: Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review; and Jason Ross and Benjamin Deniston, both from the LaRouche PAC Scientific team. And the four of us all had the opportunity to have quite an extensive and thorough-going discussion of the current world situation earlier today with both Lyndon LaRouche and Helga LaRouche. And I think from that discussion, that it’s apparent that the truth still stands — that the world and world civilization currently finds itself at one minute to midnight; both in terms of the global financial crash, and in terms of the threat of global war. Increasing numbers of people are beginning to echo the warning of this reality, which Mr. LaRouche, of course, has been warning about for quite some time. I think this is evidenced very clearly from the following headline from the Daily Telegraph, which read as follows: "Doomsday Clock for Global Market Crash Strikes One Minute to Midnight as Central Banks Lose Control". However, Mr. LaRouche continues to be in the forefront of the leadership which is, when it comes to the question of what must be done to reverse this terrible reality; both in terms of the financial crisis and the threat of global war. Now, Mr. LaRouche had some very specific, urgent necessary actions that must be taken, when we spoke with him earlier today. And to elaborate on what these actions are, we will hear from Jeffrey Steinberg. But following Jeff’s answer, we will also have a follow-up presentation which will be a little bit more of an extensive presentation by Jason Ross; who will again address this question of what must be done to reverse the course of the self-destruction of civilization, but from an even deeper, more axiomatic standpoint. A standpoint rooted in rolling back the destruction — both epistemologically and philosophically — that was done to the way that civilization and we think as people; the dark age that was engendered and perpetrated by such characters as Bertrand Russell, among others, around the turn of the century — around the year 1900. So, as I said, we’ll hear from Jeffrey Steinberg first, and then we’ll hear from Ben Deniston and followed by Jason Ross, following what Jeff has to say. But let me get back to the original point: What must be done to reverse immediately the threat of global war and global financial collapse? So, I want to ask Jeff Steinberg to come to the podium to elaborate on some of what Mr. LaRouche’s urgently necessary actions were that he specified when we spoke with him earlier today. So, Jeff — In the case of China, in the last quarter, China’s economic growth rate was over 7%. If the United States were to reach a 2% growth rate, which is not even close, this would be cause for banner headlines, parades up and down Wall Street, and celebration all over the place. China is in the process of building out the New Silk Road; the one belt, one road program. They’re investing in Egypt; they’re investing in the construction of a new canal through Central America in Nicaragua, that’s urgently needed if we’re to ever actually have an expansion of real world trade. China has built 16,000 miles of high-speed rail in the recent years, and there’s over 300 million people who have been uplifted into standards of living that approximate the middle class in the West, just in the last decades. So the idea that somehow or other a crash in China, a collapse in China is the root cause of this problem is absolutely preposterous. And in fact, it feeds some of the very war provocation propaganda that we’re seeing right now. There is a strong causal relationship between the fact that the trans-Atlantic financial system is doomed, and that the day of reckoning may very well have already begun over the last 48 hours. Market numbers don’t have any kind of real connection to the real world, except insofar as they indicate a level of panic setting in in Wall Street, in the City of London, and other financial capitals in the trans-Atlantic region. And indeed, panic has in fact set in. No sooner had the Greek Parliament, the German Bundestag, and the European financial ministers ratified the new EU86 billion bail-out for Greece, than it was universally panned; and none other than Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, said, "This deal is a failure before it even starts. The starting point has to be a massive write-off of Greek debt. In fact, all of it is illegitimate." She called for a 30-year total moratorium on all principal and interest payments, as well as new debt that will have to issued going forward. And yet, this is exactly the opposite of what Schäuble and other financial officials are willing to accept. The Greek government was brought down this week; Tsipras announced that he will be stepping down and calling snap elections that will be taking place in a matter of weeks. So, you’ve got political chaos on top of a process of accelerating financial disintegration on both sides of the Atlantic. Again, the fraud is overwhelming. The Obama administration talks about unemployment in the United States being down to 5.3%. But the only reason for that is that 93 million working age Americans — and these do not count people in universities, in the military, in hospitals, in jail — working age, eligible people, who could be holding legitimate jobs in the economy, are no longer counted in the labour force because they’ve given up even trying to find jobs. 93 million people. So, the real unemployment figures are well up into the double digits; probably passing 20%. This is beyond depression level. So, the idea that somehow or other the United States has reached even a modicum of stability is a complete fraud. Now, the big danger is that because this system, this British, Wall Street system is on its way crashing down; there is a drive for war provocation. When your entire system is going into a state of increased bankruptcy, reaching as the Telegraph said, one minute to midnight on the doomsday clock for the financial system; then those are precisely the circumstances where desperate oligarchical forces go to war. So, you’ve got the war danger targeting Russia and China, which is also reaching a danger point at the same time that we’re seeing the meltdown of this entire financial system centred in the trans-Atlantic region. You have credible reports coming out of Europe that the Right Sector — literally the Nazi networks that are predominant in the national guard and some government circles in Ukraine — are planning a major provocation into the eastern Ukraine. Where the real target is not the eastern Ukrainians, the real target is to draw Putin into a war; to basically blame Putin for taking the initial step towards war, so that in reality, Obama — who’s the one who intends to start a war against Russia — will have the minimal pretext for launching a war that will very rapidly become a world war. And could, in fact, very quickly become a war of thermonuclear annihilation of mankind. Now, there have been many warnings issued by senior American, Russian, and European military officials; who have warned that the situation is one in which the danger of the outbreak of nuclear war is greater than it has been not just at any point since the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, but since the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact, in the discussion earlier today with Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche, the point was made very clearly. The situation is far more dangerous today than it was during those 13 days of October in 1962, when we went through the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the reason it’s more dangerous now, is not just because the arsenals of overkill nuclear weapons are greater; it’s not even because you’ve got tripwire deployments of hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe pointed directly at Russia. The real reason why the danger of war is greater now than it was at the time of the Kennedy/Khrushchov resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is that John Kennedy is not President, but Barack Obama is. And whereas John Kennedy had an intensive dialogue underway with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchov going into the Cuban Missile Crisis, this was a private correspondence. All told, right before Kennedy’s assassination, there had been a total of 118-120 private secret communiques back and forth between Kennedy and Khrushchov. There had been dozens of them that had already occurred by October of 1962; and the major theme that they discussed in these back and forth letters, is that between the leaders of the United States and Russia, they held the awesome responsibility of avoiding annihilation of mankind; because the United States and the Soviet Union already at that time possessed overkill arsenals of thermonuclear weapons. So, Kennedy and Khrushchov were very frank about this; they wrote about it in private correspondences that were simply a matter of presenting their true, deep thoughts about the urgent necessity for the two of them to reach an understanding, a meeting of minds, that no matter what the disagreements, no matter what the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union; these two men agreed that they would do everything in their power to avert a nuclear war. And when circumstances came very close to that in October of 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchov rose to the occasion, and managed to come up with a solution that averted a war of annihilation. Can anybody out there legitimately say that they have an ounce of confidence that President Barack Obama is either willing or capable of showing the leadership that was shown by John Kennedy at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis? I think the answer is a resounding "No." So, we’re faced with a danger that brings up, once again very directly, the question of President Obama. Anyone who even remotely would contemplate taking actions that could rapidly lead to the launching of thermonuclear war, in the position of being President of the United States, is mentally unfit to continue in office. The 25th Amendment, which was ratified in 1967, provided specifically for the means by which the Executive Branch — Cabinet members, White House staff — are obliged to remove a President from office if he is no longer physically or mentally fit to continue to serve. And today the danger of that, the danger of not invoking the 25th Amendment is a danger that puts all of humanity at risk. Now, there are two pathways for removing President Obama — literally tonight, tomorrow morning, Monday at the latest. Number one is invoking the 25th Amendment. If there’s a consensus within the Cabinet, the Vice President takes the action; and on the basis of that action the President is removed immediately. And the Vice President steps in as the Acting President of the United States. The other option, which we’ve discussed frequently on this broadcast over the last weeks, is for Hillary Clinton to ’fess up. All Hillary Clinton has to do at this point, is simply come forward and say, "The President lied, and I was intimidated into going along with his lies." This has to do with Benghazi, with the events of September 11, 2012, when the President ordered Hillary Clinton to issue a fraudulent public statement to the American people, claiming that the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya was a spontaneous action stemming from a video that was circulating, criticizing the Prophet Mohammed. U.S. intelligence, the State Department, the embassy in Tripoli, everyone knew in real time that this was a premeditated attack on the anniversary of 9/11, carried out by al-Qaeda. There was a DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency] report that was issued days after the attack, that laid out in great detail exactly how it happened. And yet, the Obama administration continued to either actively engage in, or turn a blind eye, to the fact that weapons were being shipped into Syria to Syrian rebels that were part of the same al-Qaeda and worse apparatus that had just carried out the murder of an American ambassador and three other American diplomats. So, Hillary Clinton can step forward; and she can simply tell the truth: "The President ordered me to lie. I was intimidated; I made a terrible mistake. I went along with the lies," and that’s it. People understand that these are the kinds of methods that President Obama uses; and they will understand very clearly the danger represented by allowing him to continue operating as President for one day longer. Now, the fact of the matter is, that over the past week, a number of things have come to light publicly that further should remove any incentive for Secretary Clinton to continue to protect Obama. There have been news reports, and we’ve checked them out and there’s significant credibility to them, that the floating of a Joe Biden Presidential candidacy is coming directly from the inner circle of President Obama; from Valerie Jarrett, from Michelle Obama. And that this is specifically aimed at stopping Hillary Clinton from getting into the Presidency; from getting the Democratic nomination and going forward from there. The role of the Justice Department, the leaks that have come out about her emails and all of these things; they’re coming in some cases from Republicans, but in other cases they’re coming directly from the Obama White House and from team Obama — the inner circle. So, Hillary Clinton has no reason whatsoever to continue to give any kind of cover or protection to President Obama, when his removal from office represents the only means of guaranteeing that we don’t plunge into thermonuclear war because of the intention of the President of the United States, to carry out this provocation against Russia, and secondarily against China. When you have no cards left to play, when your system is bankrupt and converging on doomsday financially, what do you do? You bluster, you bluff, and you take risks that put the lives of billions of people at risk. Now, the fact of the matter is — and this was the point of emphasis by Mr. LaRouche earlier today — there are very clear and straightforward solutions that have proven precedent. If you want to avert the kind of catastrophic blowout that we are on the verge of, then simply reinstate Glass-Steagall. Bankrupt Wall Street in an orderly fashion. Take Wall Street and London out of their misery. Cancel the quadrillions of dollars in gambling debts piled on top of gambling debts. Create a complete and total separation from legitimate commercial banking, which is insured by the FDIC, where depositors’ money is guaranteed, and take all of this gambling activity and let them just swim in it, let them drown. Wall Street, those gambling debts, London, it’s all gone, there’s nothing left, it’s unpayable and therefore there is a clear and readily available and well-established solution. Go back to Glass-Steagall. Get rid of President Obama, remove him from office by either the 25th Amendment invoked immediately, or Hillary Clinton robbing him of the last vestiges of any credibility whatsoever, by simply stepping forward and telling the truth. By removing Obama from office, we’ve removed the capability for launching thermonuclear war. The City of London, Wall Street, may be desperate, oligarchs may be desperate to start it, but with Obama gone, and with that apparatus losing their finger on the nuclear trigger, the threat is over. And then go to Glass-Steagall and begin the process of rebuilding. OGDEN: Great, thank you very much. So I think from what Jeff just went through, we covered what Mr. LaRouche specified earlier today as, the necessarily urgent immediate actions that must be taken to reverse the current collision course which civilization now finds itself on, this one-minute-to-midnight doomsday situation, both in terms of the financial crash and the threat of war. But I think what Mr. LaRouche has been emphasizing over the last several weeks with his discussions, about the importance of a Classical education for our citizenry, what’s happening in New York City with the spreading of Classical music, and changing the way that people think, and deepening the way that people think, and allowing people to self-consciously reflect, on what it is that has brought us to the point where we find ourselves now. There’s a deeper element that has to be addressed, and Jason Ross will address that as I indicated earlier. There’s a blog post which Jason has just written, which is available on the front page of the LaRouche PAC website, which I’m sure he’ll reference in his presentation, and this is available for you as a supplement to what he’ll present here tonight. Before I introduce Jason, I want to just ask Ben Deniston to come to the podium to give a little bit of a preliminary introduction to what Jason will go through. And I think you will realize that all of the actions which Jeff Steinberg just elaborated on, as the necessary immediate actions that must be taken, are necessarily accompanied by a change in the way of thinking, a deeper axiomatic re-examination, of the way that we as civilization think about ourselves, and that is the only permanent and only persisting change for preventing the situation we find ourselves in currently from recurring and happening again. So let me ask Ben to come to the podium now. DENISTON: Thanks, Matthew. I’m going to just very briefly say a couple of things, and let Jason give us his presentation here. We were speaking about this subject earlier today, and Mr. LaRouche’s emphasis on this deeper issue, and I just want to pick up off of the introduction that Jason has at the beginning of this article, his blog post. Which is to really ask, how we got into this situation. I think just to reference what we’re dealing with right now, and discussing here tonight — we were talking about the threat of thermonuclear extinction, and as Jeff just discussed and took us through, this is not new, we’ve gone through this before. Kennedy faced this. We faced this in the ’80s under Reagan, in the buildup of the threat of war then. You know, this is not a surprise. We’ve known that we’re at the point where mankind can wipe himself out. We can destroy ourselves with the technology we have, and yet despite knowing that, having been put in situations where we’ve had to deal with that, miraculously coming out because of the leadership of a very small handful of individuals, and having gone through that lesson, we’re here again. We’ve come back into this situation again. Why? What is wrong with society? What is wrong with the way our society is functioning, that has allowed this to happen? And I think what Mr. LaRouche has continued to emphasize, and I think what he would want raised is not the mechanical reasons why. Not just who talked to who, who didn’t talk to who, you know, who said what, who did what, who carried out what action, who didn’t carry out the other action — you know, those might be elements, those might be particular individuals or aspects of the situation, but there is also a dynamic underlying that, a dynamic in society. Why did society as a whole let us get into this situation? Why hasn’t society been producing the kind of leaders, the kind of qualified leaders capable of rising to the situation and preventing these types of potential catastrophes from even getting this far to where we are now. So I think, you know, this is an incredibly important aspect of the discussion, of not just crisis-management of the immediate threat of the situation, but taking on these deeper issues. And as we’ve discussed on these webcasts, as Jason has taken the point in attacking and understanding, Mr. LaRouche has put an emphatic emphasis on what happened over a century ago, in the year 1900. What happened in science, what happened in culture, what was the shift in these deeper ideas about what mankind even is on this planet? What is mankind’s role, what is science? What is the relationship of mankind to the universe and what is our mission to carry forward, based on those fundamental conceptions at the root of society? And what happened in terms of where we were going before this shift, and what was the change of direction that occurred in the year 1900? Now, this is obviously a continuing theme that Mr. LaRouche has introduced and developed for the past months now, but Lyn was very happy with a recent article, blog post that Jason just wrote. The LaRouche PAC website has a new blog for the Basement, where you can find regular updates on our scientific program, on our cultural program, on our educational intervention, so we encourage people to go there, and you can find Jason’s article. But I would like to turn it over to him to elaborate this important contribution he just made. JASON ROSS: Thanks, Ben. I hope I can live up to the hype. You know, the — we’ve heard tonight from Jeff, we’ve got a pretty clear idea of what the situation is, and how very, very, very close we are to the opportunity for acts to escalate very rapidly to thermonuclear war launched between the U.S., NATO, and Russia. This is a serious and real threat. Now, many people would rather that threat not exist. They don’t like the conclusions they’d have to draw about what their actions are to be, they might simply find it to be impossible. This is something that people go through. They might say, well, how could it possibly have gotten that bad? Surely somebody must have stepped in along the way; somebody would have. Is it really possible to have a crisis of this sort? And rather than allowing your views of what somebody would do about things to shape your ability to actually assess what the current strategic situation is, take the other approach, and allow the gravity of the strategic time that we’re in right now, to reconsider your view of society, of yourself, of the human species. We didn’t have to get to this point. So, on that front, as has been said, Lyndon LaRouche has been placing a very strong emphasis upon 1900, and even going a little bit before that. So, let’s get into what he’s emphasizing on this. So, 1890: This was the year of Bismarck’s ouster Chancellor, and the beginning of the unravelling of the alliances, the diplomatic work that he had done, the economic work that he had done, the stability that he had created, such that a couple of decades later, the British had been able to manipulate the situation in such a way that the stage was set for the launching of World War I. Which history books might tell you was due to the assassination of an Archduke. Clearly, if the assassination of one Archduke is able to unleash a world war, there was some set-up involved. So, Bismarck’s ouster in 1890 put things in the direction to make that possible In 1990 itself—and I’m going to focus on a certain scientific aspect of this. There have been a number of articles in EIR, and discussion on the LaRouche PAC website, that cover some of the political, and some of the cultural musical aspects of this, and links to some of those can be found in my blog post, which is itself in the video description of this video that you’re seeing on YouTube. So, 1990. David Hilbert, a mathematician from Germany, gave a speech in Paris at the International Congress of Mathematicians. In this speech he laid out what he thought were the biggest problems for mathematicians to take up. What were the things that, if they were solved, would really move thought forward? What were the thorniest issues? What were the most interesting concepts to delve more into? For our purposes here, the most important of these questions posed by Hilbert were two: the axiomatization of mathematics, and the axiomatization of physics. Now, I know axiomatization is not an everyday sort of word, so to understand the importance of what Hilbert was proposing, let’s talk for a minute about what axioms are, and what logic is. Because what Hilbert was proposing at this conference—and we’ll see this had far greater importance than just some mathematicians getting together—what Hilbert was proposing was to reshape science such that it would be based on derivations from the past, instead of discoveries about the future. What Hilbert was doing was to say that knowledge fundamentally comes from recombining what we’ve already got, and that truly new concepts aren’t part of thinking. That’s a really dumb thing to say, clearly. But let’s get into what he did, and you can almost reject it right from the beginning, but... So, logic is the idea of working with how reasoning unfolds. Ideally, logic would give ways that people could start from certain concepts, and derive satisfactory conclusions from them, where, if the initial thoughts were true, so would be the conclusions. Here’s a few examples of logic. You might, if all cats like to chase mice, and my pet is a cat, then my pet likes to chase mice. The relevance of this to someone like Einstein making a breakthrough discovery, should be obvious. Just kidding. You might say, if it is raining, I will use my umbrella. It is raining, therefore I will use my umbrella. Those are the kinds of astonishing breakthroughs that logic allows us to make. Here’s another one. This might be a surprise. Some men are chefs. Some chefs are left-handed. Does that mean that some mean are left-handed? No, it doesn’t. Now clearly some men are left-handed, but following the rules of logic, you couldn’t conclude it from the fact that some men are chefs, and then some chefs are left-handed. Maybe only women chefs are left-handed. So, the validity of logic isn’t in whether the statements are true about the world. It’s about how did you arrive at them from other statements. The question, of course, comes up: where did the original statements come from? Where are the axioms going to come from? So the axioms—those are the basic concepts from which everything else follows. So, what Hilbert was proposing was, is it possible to turn mathematics into logic, where, if we set out some very basic thoughts, axioms, everything about mathematics could be derived from them. Could we do that in physics, he wondered? Maybe in the branch of mechanics. We could write down all the axioms about how mechanical, the basics of mechanics, and then conclude everything about mechanical things. That would be nice, and maybe possible. It wouldn’t be nice; it would be maybe possible, if there was nothing new ever to be discovered in mechanics. So, you see the kind of thinking that’s here. It’s cutting off anything new ever happening, and saying, from now on, we’re going to build on what we’ve got. And that’s thinking, that’s what rigour is—rigor mortis. So, that’s the setting. Where does this come from? A very big example of this is Aristotle, who wrote a lot about thinking. Much of it was about logic, and that important aspect, where do the axioms come from, he wasn’t really big on that. There’s also Euclid. Euclid, who wrote a treatise on geometry, started from a few basic assumptions, some basic concepts, and from them he derived a number of geometrical, a whole bunch of geometrical demonstrations. Things like, how to cut a circle into five pieces, or how to cut an angle in half, or how to make a hexagon—things like that. So, again: we’re got this major question. Where do the basic concepts come from? And how do you know they’re true? Those basic thoughts, you can’t say they’re true because you derived, because you got to them logically, because they didn’t come from anywhere else. They’re new thoughts. Logic is not creative. Logic is not science. Logic is how a cash register works. That can occur logically. A scientist, a composer, an artist, forget it. It’s not logical. Einstein was a discoverer. His discoveries were not logical. So, let’s delve into 1900, and a particularly evil man named Bertrand Russell, by first setting the stage with the work of a really great thinker, Bernard Riemann. This is one of LaRouche’s favorites; he was a real inspiration to his own thinking in economics. And I want to talk about a particular work that Riemann did in 1854. He was having an examination to be allowed to teach at the University, and the topic of his speech, and then paper, was chosen by Carl Gauss. The topic was: On the Hypotheses that Underlie Geometry. Riemann’s talking about those hypotheses that are at the foundation of geometry. What does Riemann say? He says, from the time of Euclid, up to the geometers of today, no one’s ever shed any light on some very basic questions. What’s the nature of space that geometry takes place in? And what’s the nature of those constructions that can be done in space. These are really taken as given, and no inspection is made of whether they’re true, whether they’re contradictory, whether they could be right. So, by constructions in space, Riemann means things like what you probably did in school, where you had a compass you could draw circles with, and a ruler, or at straight edge. And using these two tools, you could do some of those things I mentioned before: you could cut an angle in half; you could divide a circle into six pieces; you could, given a line and another point, draw a second line through that point, parallel to the first. Those are the kinds of constructions in space that Riemann is pointing out, have not really been investigated thoroughly. And in fact, they’re not true. Here’s a couple of simple examples: According to Euclid, the sum of the angles in a triangle is two right angles, or 180 degrees. And these examples you can find in the video on Riemann’s work that are in the blog post. But if you made a very large triangle on a sphere—say you went from the North pole to the Equator, 90 degrees along the Equator, and then back up to the North Pole, you just made a triangle with three right angles. The sum of its angles is 270, not the 180 Euclid said all triangles were. You might say, well, that triangle’s curved. Well, how do you say what a straight line is? If you lived on a sphere, you walked along it—when we walk along the Earth, we don’t notice it being curved. But if you made that walk, and drew that triangle I just described, you would certainly think you were going in a straight line along each of those three sides. So, straightness-that’s another concept. How do you know that you’re making a straight line. What does that really mean? How do you know that your ruler was straight? Is there another ruler you measure it against? Where did you get that one? So, some of these basic concepts haven’t adequately been worked through. So, what Riemann did, is, he said, there’s three ways that space could be, if it’s continuous. He said, just like there’s a lot of different two-dimensional surfaces, just like a piece of paper is a surface, an infinite plane is a surface, a sphere is a surface, a milk-jug, the outside of it, that’s a surface. Just like there’s a lot of surfaces, with different shapes and different curvatures, and where the triangles may or may not have 180 degrees, where it may or may not be possible to make two parallel lines that go to infinity without meeting... For example, you can’t do that on the Earth. If you’re standing 5 feet away from a friend, who’s, let’s say, to the East, and you both walk straight North, you’re going to meet at the North Pole. It might have seemed parallel in the neighbourhood, but you can’t have parallel lines on a sphere. So, these are the three possibilities that Riemann gives. He says, maybe space is flat, in which case, yeah, triangles would have 180 degrees, you can always draw parallel lines. Two: Maybe space has a constant measure of curvature. Maybe space itself is curved sort of like a sphere is a curved surface. If we went far enough, we’d eventually come back; that triangles, if you add up their angles, they’d be more than 180, depending on how big the triangle was, and no part of space could be distinguished from another. No part of the sphere stands out compared to another, as you move along it. It’s uniform in that way. Or, Riemann gave a third possibility. Maybe space is curved in such a way that it’s different in different places, and what would be the basis for what it is in different places? What would be the basis of that curvature? This is where Riemann ends his lecture. He says, well, we’re not going to figure it out here in the mathematics department. We’ve got to pack up our bags and briefcases, and go over to the physics department, if we want to get answers to these questions. And Riemann used this technique. He was a physicist, he was a scientist. So, here Riemann has really exploded the Euclid myth, both on the specifics of Euclid and flatness being wrong, but much more importantly, in saying that discovery takes place in a way that doesn’t come from deriving from the past, but that we have to discover physical principles, what Riemann calls the binding forces that underlie the interactions that make up spatial relations; that we’ve got to discover those physical principles, and that’s the foundation then of geometry. That’s the foundation of space. It’s not making measurements, and curve-fitting them. What’ s the principle that makes things happen? So, this is what Riemann did. Profound, powerful paper. Very much worth reading. In the video, which is in the blog post, in the video description to this, you’ll also find in that, description of the link to the actual Riemann paper you can read. So, let’s take a look at Bertrand Russell, that evil, wicked, horrible scoundrel; that man of peace, supposedly, who promoted nuclear war with the Soviet Union, when the U.S. had the bomb and the Soviets didn’t. That man who was so concerned about the spread of "negro people," and that race becoming more prolific than the white—these are the kinds of concerns he had. The man who wishes for a Black Death every generation, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about overpopulation. This charming man, Bertrand Russell, in 1895, he wrote a paper to get his fellowship at Cambridge, and listen to the title: "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry." That’s basically the same as Riemann’s paper. And yeah, Russell talks about Riemann, and then he demonstrates that he’s either a liar, or an idiot. Could be both. So, I’m going to read a quote from Russell’s paper here: Russell says, "Riemann has failed to observe what I have endeavoured to prove in the next chapter; that, unless space had a strictly constant measure of curvature, then geometry would become impossible. Also, the absence of constant measure of curvature involves absolute position, which is an absurdity. Hence, Riemann is led to the conclusion that all geometrical axioms are empirical" — meaning come from experience; from science and not from math, — "and Riemann believes that they may not hold in the infinitesimal, where observation is impossible." That’s what Russell says. Then he quotes Riemann. Riemann had written: "Now the empirical conceptions on which spatial measurements are based, namely the conceptions of the rigid body and the light ray, appear to lose their validity in the infinitesimal. It is therefore quite conceivable that the relations of spatial magnitudes in the infinitesimal do not correspond to the presumptions of geometry, and this would, in fact, have to be assumed, as soon as it would enable us to explain the phenomena more simply." Then Russell comments. Russell says: "From this conclusion, I must entirely dissent. In very large spaces, there might be a departure from Euclid, for they depend upon the axiom of parallels, which is not contained in the axiom of free mobility. But in the infinitesimal, departures from Euclid could only be due to the absence of free mobility, which, as I hope my third chapter will show, is once for all, impossible." Let me translate that a bit. This is from Section 65 of Russell’s paper. He’s saying two things, before and after that Riemann quote in the middle. First, if space is curved, it must be a constant measure of curvature; otherwise, parts of space would be different, and then we could have absolute position. What Russell’s basing that complaint on is, the short version of it, is that Isaac Newton, for example, believed that space was absolute. That space and time were outside of everything that took place in space and time. And one of his friends used this to prove God’s infinite power by saying that, when God got around to creating everything, he could have put the Heavens and the Earth anywhere he felt like in this big shoebox called space. And since he picked one place rather than another, that shows that God gets to make some decisions just because he feels like it. Gottfried Leibniz had said that that actually proves that space doesn’t exist. If God had to make a decision without a good reason for it, putting Earth here and the Heavens and everything here, as opposed to over here, then he would have had to do something without reason, and, since God is infinitely wise, in addition to being infinitely powerful, the initial assumption that there is a space must have been wrong. So, in the sense of a shoebox that’s fixed, in which things take place, and in which things could be in absolute motion, or absolute rest, yes, absolute position is an absurdity. But, when Russell complains about it here, he’s again either an idiot or a liar. Because what Riemann is saying is that different parts of space could have different characteristics. That doesn’t make space absolute. What it means is that there are absolute real differences brought about by the power of physical principles. The second complaint from Russell was that he said that things couldn’t be anything but Euclidean in the very small, that it would be impossible. I’m not going to get into free mobility, but he goes through why it’s not possible in the very small, to have anything except for flatness, and geometry shouldn’t change when you get down there. But think about the two things that Riemann had cited as possibly breaking down in their character in the very small: the conception of the rigid body, and the light ray. This is amazing prescience actually, as we’ll see in what comes. How does the atomic, the idea of atoms, how does that change the idea of the rigid body? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Okay, so there’s Russell. 1895 he’s showing, he’s beaten up on Riemann, he’s on the up and up. 1900, this conference in Paris in August, where Hilbert says, let’s throw away creativity, we don’t need that any more, we can all become machines, and all of mathematics can be done by step-by-step logic. That same year, 1900, Planck, Max Planck, in Germany is working out how it is that hot bodies change what color they glow at based on their temperature. People were working on this because they were working on light-bulbs. They had a real industrial purpose. As wire gets hotter, or anything gets hotter, it glows red, orange, yellow, white. And if you have an incandescent light bulb, and you dim it, it doesn’t just get darker, it also turns yellowy, orange; it’s very dim. Like in a toaster—it’s red. So, in working on this problem, Planck made a new physical hypothesis, an illogical physical hypothesis. He said that light interacted with matter in a way that was quantized; that specific amounts of light/matter interaction would occur, and you couldn’t have an in-between amount. It was an amount of one, or two, or three, or four, quantized. In 1905, Albert Einstein had his miraculous year, as they call it, where he wrote a whole slew of papers: on Brownian motion, which gave some ability to estimate the sizes of atoms; on special relativity—more on that in a moment; and on the photo-electric effect, which is when light strikes a material and electricity comes out. Einstein had showed that it wasn’t just light interacting with matter that was quantized, as Planck had shown was the case. Einstein showed, hey, all light is actually in pieces; we call them photons today. That light couldn’t only be a wave. Because you can have the amplitude of a wave get bigger and smaller, continuously, but Einstein showed that light intensity came in pieces, that light was in photons. Like Riemann had said: in the infinitesimal, the light ray appears to lose its validity, and it’s quite conceivable that things don’t correspond to the presumptions of geometry in that very small. Indeed they don’t. Not in the quantum world. Einstein’s special theory of relativity showed that space and time were not distinct, they weren’t featureless; that depending upon who’s doing the observing, objects could change their shape. Time could move in a different way. A square moving along this way very rapidly, would look like a rectangle. This goes against the free mobility... Russell said this was impossible in 1895, and here we are, ten years later, two real scientists have just proven that he’s wrong; that space can have a non-constant curvature, and that things are different in the infinitesimal, which Russell said he would prove was impossible. Nature proved it was possible. So, not to be stopped, Russell in 1910 to 1913, churned out a three volume math book, the Principia Mathematica, where he tried to do what Hilbert had proposed. Russell said, I’m going to do it. I’m going to figure out how to get all of mathematics in the form of some basic assumptions and logical derivations from them. That’s what he was working on. Two years after his final book comes out on that, we’re in 1915. Einstein develops his general theory of relativity. Now we’ve got space-time curving in response to bodies in it; this was tested in 1919 in the expeditions to view stars that were near the Sun during the eclipse of that year: Einstein was right. The breakthrough back from 1905, in special relativity, had led Einstein already to conclude that there was an energy in things, equal to their mass times their speed squared, a phenomenal amount of energy. These are breakthroughs, these are shocking things that completely change our view of the world. They’re discoveries; they’re not derivations. They’re creative; they’re not mathematics. They’re physical. They require a mind to hypothesize something new. So, I think that the contrast that you get there, between Russell saying that working on destroying thinking—very explicitly. The same guy who’s promoting nuclear war with the Soviet Union in order to have a world empire, while there was a monopoly on the use of atomic weapons, this same man in his other aspects of life, is working on making illegal creativity, saying we should develop a theory of science in which it can never happen. So, what’s the relevance today? How does this affect things today? You might say, well, yeah, if we’re thinking wrong about science, well, that’s a big problem. Maybe that’s why we haven’t made the kinds of breakthroughs that we should have. Maybe that’s why, in addition to dramatic underfunding, maybe that’s why we don’t have fusion power today. Maybe that’s why we haven’t figured other things out. But the relevance is much broader than that. As part of an overall shift towards denying the human nature of human beings, and towards creating an animal outlook. In science, the mind can be replaced by artificial intelligence. In culture, the ideals of the past were seen to be old hat, had to be replaced by a new culture. The Congress for Cultural Freedom promoted this very dramatically in the aftermath of World War II, to destroy a thinking culture, a human culture. The spread of environmentalism, which was made possible —and not actually cleaning up the environment, but the environmentalist movement dedicated to depopulating the planet, a clearly oligarchical view that is now embraced by people who call themselves progressives. Would a progressive in the 1800s have said, I’m going to help make the world a better place by reducing the number of people in it? By preventing people from developing? No. So, we deserve much better than what’s been given to us, and what we find ourselves facing, culturally, musically. Music today, it’s terrible. Scientifically, it’s math. And we deserve not to be ignorant of this. I think one of the biggest aspects to take is that this isn’t secret knowledge. This isn’t something that people can’t come to know. The great discoveries of the past, these belong to all of us. These are ours. This is our human culture. Do we know what Planck did? Do people generally? Do people know what Einstein did? Did people work through what Kepler did? So, we’ve really been denied a connection to what it is that makes the human species the human species, that creative ability to ennoble ourselves in a beautiful way, and in an increasingly powerful way. That’s the source of economic wealth, and it’s the source of the enduring happiness of knowing that you’re able to make, and understand, the immortal contributions of others, and maybe make one yourself, towards transforming what we are as a human species. OGDEN: Thank you very much, Jason. And I would encourage everybody, as Jason said, to study the blog post, which is linked to in the video description to this video on Youtube. And it’s also available on the new Basement Blog on the LaRouche PAC website. So I want to conclude tonight’s webcast by thanking Jason, in addition to Ben Deniston, and also Jeffrey Steinberg, and encourage you to stay tuned to the LaRouche PAC website, and tune in again next Friday, 8 pm, Eastern Time, same time, same place, for our weekly broadcast. |