This article appeared in the June 4, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. See also Jeffrey Steinberg's introductory article, "The Cox Report Is a Gore, Inc. Pack of Lies"

A Scientifically Illiterate Hoax

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The following statement was issued by Democratic Presidential pre-candidate LaRouche on May 28, 1999.

The Cox Committee's report itself contains sufficient crucial evidence to reveal its claims of alleged scientific espionage by China to be intrinsically fraudulent. He who wishes to wear adult-sized Dr. Dentons to Vice-President Al Gore's costume parties would find it prudent to make sure he has not lost his buttons, as Norm Dicks' Cox Committee appears, in retrospect, to have done.

Given the great increase in scientific illiteracy of not only the Cox Committee, but younger generations of the U.S. population, it is important that the nature of the technical evidence proving the Committee's fraud be explained.

Concerning the report as issued, three most essential facts are to be emphasized.

1. The "computer codes" hoax.
   
   Scientist Harold Agnew put his finger on the crucial proof of the Committee's fraud. The Committee's own claim of reliance on "computer codes" proves two things. Not only does that claim prove, in and of itself, that the authors of the report were incompetent in the field addressed, but by failing to secure competent scientific guidance, showed themselves to have acted willfully, in reckless disregard for truth.

2. Although some Republican legislators have climbed onto this fraudulent report, the fraud was perpetrated by the Al Gore faction within the national Democratic Party organization, notably Gore crony Norm Dicks.

3. The actual instigator of this fraudulent report is Her Majesty's Blair government. Committee chairman Cox, like Dicks' crony Al Gore, has frequently acted in his official capacity as a de facto agent of influence of a foreign power, the British government, in various matters. The Vice-President himself, an unabashedly fanatical admirer of the disgusting Blair, is also a dedicated "China-basher," despite his pretense of being a supporter of President Clinton's policies.

The technical issue

Go back to the case of a fatal accident during a space shuttle launch. According to the report on the investigation, the chief suspect in the accident was a mistaken substitution of a new, untested design of an O-ring. The danger of precisely such a risk in U.S. shuttle flights of that period, was warned against by a leading senior German space expert, who was among my collaborators in a related project at that time. If the prestigious report on the accident is not in error, the cause for the fatal shuttle accident was a cost-cutting measure taken for the usual, misguided accounting and budgetary reasons: cutting out "unnecessary" proof-of-principle experimental testing of previously untried combinations of technical principles. The fraud of the Cox report is a reflection of the kind of scientific illiteracy shown by those political authorities whose actions were indicated as responsible for contributing to the deaths of those astronauts. However, those misguided NASA authorities of the 1980s were marvels of scientific genius, when compared with the illiterate hoaxsters behind the fraudulent Cox report.

The root of this kind of scientific illiteracy is to be traced, proximately, to the ill-deserved influence of two hoaxsters trained by the notorious Bertrand Russell, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. The fraud is the same which caused the virtual bankrupting of the ill-fated Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) organization which erupted during August and September of last year. John von Neumann's influence was expressed in the Black-Scholes doctrine used by the bankers sucked into the LTCM scam. Think of the number of Wall Street and other loonies and goonies who believe in the von Neumann myth of economics as a zero-sum game. The mind-set which caused so many of the world's leading banking executives to be duped into the Morton-Scholes LTCM scam, is the mind-set expressed by the authors of the fraudulent Cox Committee report.

Compare this with another recent case, the highly embarrassing case of formerly prestigious Daimler-Benz in the scandal of the original design for the Mercedes A-Klasse "flopmobile." In this and an ever-growing number of cases, the growing rash of actually or potentially fatal design failures by previously most honorable and prestigious organizations, is a direct result of the same kind of scientific illiteracy shown by the Cox Committee's fraud. In the business community, the generally used name for this sort of scientific incompetence is "benchmarking": the use of computer codes and computer nerds, rather than science and engineering, as the basis for design of a growing range of virtually untested new products.

I shall give only a summary explanation of the issue of scientific method involved here. I have often addressed this same issue of method in other locations. My associates and I are producing a wide-ranging series of reports on these same principles, as they apply to making the difference between success and failure in the proposed economic reconstruction of southeastern Europe. I summarize two relevant points, as follows.

We need a law

It should be considered fraud to report that a marketed product's design has been "proven" by use of computer methods. Only so-called unique physical experiments, so-called "proof-of-principle" experiments, competently test either a new principle or some new combination of technologies. The work of the top-ranking designers of new kinds of machine-tools and of scientific experimental apparatus, is competent to provide such testing capabilities. These essential competencies are being eradicated from the budgetary allocations of corporations and governmental institutions around the world. The reliance upon computer codes, rather than proof-of-principle experimentation, constitutes folly. To present such folly as alleged proof of a case, is fraud. Hire back competent machine-tool-design and related teams, or expect to be treated as a quack whose fakery may constitute a general menace to public health and safety.

To acquire the scientific secrets previously discovered by one nation, requires only the following steps by any other nation:

1. Be a scientifically trained worker who has gone through years of education, in secondary and advanced education, with heavy reliance on rediscovering universal principles of nature through the methods of pedagogical proof-of-principle experimentation.

2. Recognize a paradox within the body of what one has otherwise believed, up to now, to have been an adequate manifold of proven universal physical principles. Invent the notion of a new physical principle which must be added to the existing repertoire of known universal physical principles. Test that hypothetical newly proposed universal principle by appropriate designs of proof-of-principle experiments. Make application of such a newly proven principle to a variety of media of application, thus producing new technologies.
   
   That is the only way in which one can "steal" other nations' discoveries successfully.

3. Modern physical science was founded by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, beginning his famous De docta ignorantia. The central formal feature of that work was Cusa's reworking of Archimedes' theorems on the quadrature of the circle and of the parabola, to show that Archimedes had erred in failing to recognize that the ratio pi is not an irrational, but a transcendental magnitude. In other words, that action in the universe does not occur in action at a distance along straight-line (linear) pathways, but only along curved pathways of action, such as spherical pathways, or, as a student of Cusa's work, Leonardo da Vinci, showed, according to metrical characteristics of action in physical space-time which coincide, at a minimum, with spherical pathways of action. The entirety of the fundamental progress of physical science, from Cusa's revolutionary revival of the Classical Greek tradition, through and beyond the work on higher manifolds by Gauss and Riemann, is based upon those principles.

As Gauss and Riemann demonstrate, and as Riemann insisted, one can not derive valid knowledge of universal physical principles by deductive (i.e., linear) mathematical methods; one must measure the curvature of physical space-time defined by the interaction of each and all of the universal physical principles which define the manifold, by what Riemann defines as unique experimental methods.

For such reasons, as Harold Agnew warned, no competent scientist would risk the future of his nation on stealing computer codes from some other nation. This is not merely an issue of good taste; the misguided thief would usually find himself the victim of his own scientific incompetence.

The Cox Committee's immorally reckless disregard for elementary considerations of even simply truthfulness is shocking behavior. But, the cronies of Al Gore have never demonstrated even the slightest concern for truth when it comes to matters of science and technology.