1. The Need of New Approaches - Kritische Stimmen zur ...

Chapter 9: The Thought Experiment
The representatives of this group will be referred to in what follows as “the accountable”. They have normally
had better chances of receiving an all-round education, they have access to more information and competent
assistance, and they claim in general to have insight and to be able to judge independently. What are the reasons and
motives of the accountable for not responding to the serious information received by them (e.g. the information on
the final nuclear-waste disposal site Asse, or on the spying affair of the Telekom or on the bribery affair at Siemens)
in a businesslike manner?
What a businesslike treatment here means cannot be anything doubtful. If the subject matter is a basic right that
has been breached for decades right up to the present day, no one can claim that he or she, acting in good faith, had
thrown the matter in the wastepaper basket due to its insignificance. Each of the addressees would have to have
gained an impression, whether personally or via employees or through other colleagues, about what the matter dealt
with. And in this case he or she would have to have realized that it dealt with a problem area of some significance.
And exactly this realization as to the possible significance would have meant that a judgement as to the quality of
the documentation would have to be made, everything else being dependent on this. All of the addressees would
react in this way up to this point, because they would also do so in the cases of Asse, Telekom and Siemens.
All further steps depend essentially on personal prejudices and judgement, from preferences, moods and
coincidences. Various alternatives are readily imaginable.
(1) Some will reject without examining, because they know that the genius and the great luminaries are
invariably infallible, except when they correct themselves.
(2) Some will enquire by physicists and will receive the reassurance that the criticism is unfounded.
(3) Some will take a look at the documentation, which will at least give an indication of the possible dimensions
involved, and will say to themselves: if there is anything to this, things could become very uncomfortable - so better
to have nothing to do with it and keep one’s head down.
(4) A few will try to check whether the documentation gives correct descriptions and reports. This is already
quite a bit of work. Some will have doubts, and therefore a good reason for seeing the matter as settled.
(5) The very few who examine the work and see the correctness of the documentation as being confirmed will
discuss, with colleagues, the dangers of presenting it to the public and the consequences for one’s own interests, and
they will jointly decide to undertake nothing whatsoever. The typical national cases of Asse, Telekom and Siemens
show that all of those informed prevented public clarification right up to the bitter end. And it was only after the
bitter end that the matter was clarified as “brutally as possible”. In particular, experience shows that those actually
responsible for control tend to make deals with the criminals for as long as possible.
These are the five most probable responses of the addressees. They will have no interest in contacting the
authors of the letters and publications received.
A further constellation of possibly considerable influence - it would be the sixth - should at least be mentioned.
The demand for scientific freedom (in the name of “unity of the sciences”) for a specialist field of the natural
sciences sent to the accountable of all specialist areas could possibly have fallen into the deep-eaten - and therefore,
of course, publicly always strongly denied - cleft between the natural sciences and the humanities. The one group
regards the other (the scientists) as philistines, and the other regards the one (those of the arts faculties) as
crackpots. Furthermore, a recent decision has meant that the explorers of the verse of Homer must now also seek
third-party donations from sponsors and must develop their product’s marketability. This could perhaps give rise,
on the part of the members of the arts faculties, to a somewhat foolish, malicious glee about how these “philistines”
handle each other, instead of making a commitment to a basic right. Since the critics are clearly playing on the side
of the philistines, they can see where they land. Those committed to the humanities have enough to do fighting for
their own rights. Which “unity of the sciences” might it have to do with?
Such arrogance and misplaced gloating by the members of the humanities over the “philistines” stems, of
course, from the certainty that in its own subjects such a criminally complete expulsion of critics from a specialist
field and the subsequent watertight secrecy as to this state of affairs, over many decades, vis-à-vis the public could
not even be imagined in the humanities. It would be much too boring. The abyss between the two camps cannot be
bridged. For this reason the members of the humanities, in their “Heidelberg Appeal” in the copyright dispute with
GOOGLE, naturally had no supporting signatures from natural scientists (Tagesspiegel, 2.5.09). In these structures,
the critics expelled from theoretical physics cannot awaken any understanding on the other side.
We believe we know roughly what the silence is intended to say to us. Most of our addressees are probably in a
severe state of shock, though they are possibly also possessed by a feeling of superiority vis-à-vis completely
unimaginable criminal intrigues. In fear of the devastating consequences of an uncovering, none of them wants to
make a mistake. They have all decided to behave as though they didn’t even exist. Perhaps some even despise the
critics.
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G. O. Mueller: STR