Bloody Serious Game of Mathematics at KTH 2

The turmoil at KTH about my mathematics text BodyandSoul Mathematical Simulation Technology BS (can be downloaded and inspected from my home page), raises important questions concerning academic freedom and who decides what is scientific truth.

The Program Administration PA of Engineering Physics at KTH decided some time during the summer to use BS in a course in Numerical Methods in the 2nd Quarter, with BS available for inspection and the message that I as the author was open to suggestions for improvements of the text.

In the middle of the course PA announces that BS has been "stopped" from being used in the course. What can be used according to PA is only a certain small excerpt, corresponding to tearing out some pages out of a whole book.

And there it is when now the course enters into its two final weeks. The course material

BS is "stopped" from being used, but the course continues using BS. A contradiction which must be resolved in one way or the other.

Why then has BS been "stopped"? I have no idea, since the PA has refused any form of contact with me as the author of the "stopped" course material. I have only heard a rumor that PA claims that BS propagates "conspiration theories" and therefore must be "stopped".

To me this seems like a pretty serious allegation, but it is only a rumor and as I said this is all

that has reached me from KTH.

So now back to the question about who decides the scientific truth at KTH as a university in a democratic state. Is it the scientist or the bureaucrat? Of course, it should be the scientist you say, because the scientist knows about the science and the bureaucrat about the bureaucracy, right? Now in the present case I am the scientist and PA is the bureaucrat, but at KTH it is the bureaucrat who decides the scientific truth, by deciding that my scientific theory is a "conspiration theory". Is this not a violation of the basic principle of science that scientific truths are to be decided by scientists?

But then you say: If two scientists have different scientific truths, which is quite common by the way, who is then to decide the true truth? Well, there is a procedure for that at a university:

1. Open debate where different arguments are presented and evaluated.
2. No debate: Scientists with different truths simply agree to ignore each other and branch into new separate departments.

In the present case, none of these alternatives is in operation, which signifies an illness affecting our universities by weakening the role of the scientist and strengthening the role the bureaucrat or manager, a system imported from business and politics.

Climate science is here an example of how far this maladie has progressed: The Organization of IPCC is based on the following principles:

• IPCC reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.
• By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content.

In short: IPCC as a political UN organization erected by governments, assesses science which is endorsed by governments into scientific truth. But this a corruption of the basic principle of science, of open debate between scientists. In the Soviet Union the government decided the scientific truth, but this is not the idea in democracies.

The outcome of a soccer game is decided by the soccer players, not politicians in the audience

or businessmen owning the teams. Unless the match is fixed, but that is corruption.