| Jumping
Lightyears is a difficult book to classify or describe.
That makes it impossible to sell it to the major publishers,
who require every author to tell how their book resembles
one on the NY Times Bestseller List! Do they think any
great book would resemble anything on that list? No,
greatness is a function of originality.
This book more resembles Euclid's
Elements, Galileo's Dialogues, Newton's Principia, Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations, or Darwin's Origins of Species,
in being quite unlike any pre-existing book, and in
founding new sciences. If utopian analysis, psychical
research, or empirical metaphysics ever become accepted
sciences, it will be due in no small measure to this
book
Jumping Lightyears makes one expect
physics, astronomy and space technology, and there are
a few chapters on those subjects, near the beginning,
which only come to the standard conclusion, that physics
does not permit interstellar travel. So those chapters
are mere prologue, which one may skip.
The real gist of the book begins when
Dr.H delves into Forbidden or brand new sciences which
he has just invented. The Science of Civilization is
wholly his invention, though based on the work of the
philosophers Hobbes and Locke, 300 years ago. Empirical
metaphysics is based on C.G. Jung, Arnold Toynbee, and
William James. Quite a bit of the book is devoted to
attacking the professional skeptics, on the grounds
that they violate scientific method, or do not know
what it is. He tells us about the real classics, the
real scientific work in UFOlogy and Psychical Research,
while freely granting that one must winnow a lot of
straw to find these kernels of wheat. The important
works are scientific monographs, not popular or well
known books.
We are at a turning point in Western
science, where it either hardens into a religion of
reduction, with the professional skeptics as the high
priests and grand inquisitors, or we open up science
to other parts of the spectrum of experience. The physical
sciences are exciting as adventures of ideas, but as
religions, they stink, and will ultimately be rejected
if the books are closed, and the Standard Model becomes
the Bible for all Academics (which is very nearly true
now).
This book is a work of philosophy,
if Western Philosophy is the founding of sciences, which
has happened on rare occasions in the past 2000 years.
In other respects, it does not resemble any academic
philosophy book, since only the failures are included
in the syllabus, i.e., those philosophers who failed
to solve their problems and found a new science.
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