From Atlantis to the Roswell Incident, via Wikipedia

 

There's a game where players compete to get from one specified Wikipedia article to another in the minimum number of jumps, just by clicking on internal wiki-links within an article. I thought I'd try a fortean variation on this, navigating my way from the Atlantis article to the Roswell Incident. But instead of going for the shortest route, I've tried to make it more interesting by, wherever possible, including items from the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this blog. Here's the route I came up with:

STEP 0: Atlantis. A long-time favourite topic of mine, this scores 12 in my tag cloud (meaning this is its 12th appearance on this blog). My most recent brush with it was a video I made last year based on an old comic story by Steve Ditko. Historically, the oldest surviving references to Atlantis appear in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, who consequently is one of the very first wiki-links in Wikipedia's Atlantis article.

STEP 1: Plato. Wikipedia's article on him mentions his prominent appearance in Raphael's painting The School of Athens, with an onward link to its article on that subject.

STEP 2: The School of Athens. This is one of my all-time favourite "fine art" paintings - a fanciful depiction of a host of famous philosophers of various time periods all congregated together in a classical architectural setting. I've seen the original in the Vatican, and written a blog post about the fortean credentials of some of the people featured in it. An interesting bit of trivia mentioned early in the Wikipedia article is that Raphael's depiction of Plato (top left in the montage at the start of this post) is modelled on Leonardo da Vinci - whose article Wikipedia then links to.

STEP 3: Leonardo da Vinci. The second "hit" for my tag cloud, Leonardo scores 8 in it (which is either a measure of his fortean relevance, or my interest in him, or both). I've seen the originals of several of his paintings, including the most famous, the Mona Lisa, and the most interesting, The Last Supper. Both of them are linked from his Wikipedia article,  but there are no prizes for guessing which one we're going to click on.

STEP 4: The Last Supper (Leonardo). This, of course, is prominently featured in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which scores 11 in my tag cloud. And since Wikipedia's article on The Last Supper links to the one on The Da Vinci Code, that's where we're going next.

STEP 5: The Da Vinci Code. Of the many interesting links in this wiki-article, the one I'm going to pick out is another item from my tag cloud (with a score of 9), the Knights Templar.

STEP 6: Knights Templar. More than anything else, I associate this mediaeval organization with the legend of the Ark of the Covenant, but surprisingly their Wikipedia article doesn't mention it. So we'll have to take a roundabout route via something it does link to, the Temple of Solomon.

STEP 7: Solomon's Temple. OK, now there's a link to the Ark of the Covenant, so without further ado let's click on that.

STEP 8: Ark of the Covenant. This is another favourite fortean topic of mine, with 5 hits in my tag cloud. To most people, however, it just means one thing - Steven Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark - which Wikipedia conveniently links to.

STEP 9: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Astute readers will probably see where we're going now (if they haven't worked it out already)! This, of course, was the film that introduced everyone's favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones - and the Wikipedia article helpfully links to all his subsequent appearances, including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

STEP 10: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. By far the most fortean instalment in the series, I love this film - and it neatly provides the last (wiki-) link in the chain, straight to our target destination: the Roswell Incident.

STEP 11: Roswell Incident. With a count of 5 in my tag cloud, this is the ultimate "modern myth", which I thought was a fitting final destination after starting out from the "ancient myth" of Atlantis. Hope you enjoyed the tour!

I already said that AGES ago

There’s nothing more frustrating than saying something clever, being completely ignored, and then years later someone else says exactly the same thing. That’s always happening to me. A case in point was the above article on the BBC website last week. It’s about how E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” from 1909 seems to foreshadow the world of social media, with its depiction of a dystopian future where people interact with each other via technology rather than face-to-face. But I made exactly the same point as long ago as 24 January 2011, in what was only the third post on this blog.

The post was called Wikipedia Prophecy, and in the last five years and four months it has amassed a grand total of 48 page views. In it, I said that Forster’s story “can be read today as an amusing satire on the World Wide Web, and on social networking sites such as Facebook in particular” – which is essentially what the BBC article says. However, as the title of my post indicates, I made another connection they missed – with Wikipedia’s strict (and to my mind frighteningly fascist) policy of “No Original Research”, which is also a central tenet of the future world envisaged by Forster.

A later post I wrote on a similar subject was The End of Books, about Octave Uzanne’s short story of that title from 1895. That post has fared better, with a total of 647 page views (above average for this blog). However, I can’t resist repeating this illustration by Albert Robida, which shows a group of earphone-wearing commuters on a metro train. When you realize that Queen Victoria was still on the throne when the picture was drawn, it really is astonishingly prophetic.

Old Books of the Fortean Kind

Pictured above is a genuine piece of retro-forteana – Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, produced way back in 1977 by John Michell and the founding editor of Fortean Times, Bob Rickard. It’s one of several books I picked up for a pound each from the Bookbarn shop, just off the A37 about half-way between Shepton Mallet and Bristol. Until a few years ago, this was the best bookshop in Somerset – literally a giant warehouse packed with second-hand treasures. Unfortunately the main warehouse was closed to the public after they catalogued all their decent stock and put it online. But visitors can still browse through the leftovers – the books that were too uncommercial to be worth cataloguing – in a smaller warehouse next door. Everything is a pound – which sounds cheap, although I somehow managed to spend a total of £18 on my visit last week!

You can get a pretty good idea of the contents of the Phenomena book from the words on the cover. It’s a pretty standard compendium of all the usual fortean topics – frog and fish falls, spontaneous human combustion, cattle mutilations, levitation, teleportation, cities in the sky, entombed toads, werewolves and so forth. The last two items on the list are rather more cryptic – “Arkeology” is shorthand for the archaeology of Noah’s Ark, while “Accidents to Iconoclasts” refers to mishaps that befall people who dare to interfere with ancient sites. The “Mummy’s Curse” is the best known example of this, but another case described in the book occurred less than five miles from the place where I bought it.

Everyone has heard of Avebury and Stonehenge, but far fewer people know of England’s third largest megalithic site, consisting of three prehistoric stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset. The reason for the site’s relative obscurity may be that, in spite of its sprawling size, it’s not really that impressive to the eye – the individual stones are quite small, and the overall plan of the circles is difficult to make out. But perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be. According to Michell and Rickard, the first person to attempt a detailed survey of the site was the architect John Wood in 1740. The locals told him that merely counting the stones was a bad idea: “Several have attempted to do so, and proceeded until they were either struck dead upon the spot, or with such illness as soon were carried off”. Ignoring such superstitions, Wood continued with his task “and as a great storm accidentally arose just after, and blew down part of a great tree near the body of the work, the people were then thoroughly satisfied that I had disturbed the guardian spirits of the metamorphosised stones.”

Here is one of my own pictures of Stanton Drew:

Another of the books I bought for a pound was a 1978 paperback called Explorations of the Marvellous, containing the text of a series of lectures given by various scientists and science fiction writers. Featured among the latter is John Brunner, who I’ve written about on at least one previous occasion. Brunner lived in Somerset for many years prior to his untimely death in 1995, and I suspect that some of his personal library may have found its way to the Bookbarn. On a previous visit there (about ten years ago, before they went onto the internet) I bought a hardback anthology that was neither edited by John Brunner nor had a story by him in it – yet it has his signature inside. So maybe it was his own copy of the book (it was a collection of science fiction erotica, if you must know).

By a further coincidence, Brunner’s lecture is all about forteana. More specifically, it’s about how shockingly sloppy some well-known fortean writers are when it comes to research and fact-checking. One of the most amusing examples he cites relates to a book I’ve never actually read, although it’s a classic of the genre – The Morning of the Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier. Apparently they make the claim that one Professor Ralph Milne Farley “has drawn attention to the fact that some biologists think that old age is due to the accumulation of heavy water in the organism. The alchemists’ elixir of life might then be a substance that eliminates selectively heavy water.”  Brunner recognised this idea as coming not from a serious scientific treatise but from a science fiction novel he’d devoured when he was 12 or 13! The book in question was called The Immortals, and it was indeed by Ralph Milne Farley... but the latter was neither a professor nor a scientist. In these days of Wikipedia, it’s easy to do the fact-checking that Pauwels and Bergier failed to do:

Roger Sherman Hoar (April 8, 1887 – October 10, 1963) was a state senator and assistant Attorney General, state of Massachusetts. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of “Ralph Milne Farley”.

The other fortean book I acquired last week came via eBay. This was The Fickle Finger of Fate, which I mentioned I’d ordered in last week’s post about Satirical Superheroes. The most fortean thing about the book is its author, John A. Keel – who as I said last time went on to write about Mothman, UFOs and Men in Black. But this novel from 1966 is just a lighthearted superhero parody featuring Keel’s own creation, Satyr-Man. It has a couple of mildly fortean elements – one character believes he is under a “Mummy’s Curse” (see above), and there’s a running joke about swamp gas and weather balloons (the most common ways the authorities used to debunk UFO sightings).

A satyr is a mythological half-man, half-beast with an insatiable sexual appetite. Coupled with the “ADULTS ONLY” warning on the cover, you might imagine this is a somewhat dirty book. But 1966 was still a year before America abolished its obscenity laws (see The Man who Helped to Free the World), so the book is heavily censored. For those who are only interested in such things, here is its one and only explicit sex scene:

“C’mere,” she grunted, pulling him to her as she ****** her **** and ****** ******** until he ***** ******* ***** and they **** *****. He lifted his **** ****** to **** ******, rolling across the rumpled bed with his mouth pressed to her ***** ********. Then she ***** his **** ******* and her hands ***** ***** ***.

“Ooooo,” she said.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” he said.

“Ummmmmmm,” she said.

“Hmmmmmmmmm,” he said.

Finally they **** ********** **** *** ******* **** *******. And then he **** ***** ******* *****. She **** *** ************! Outside the window, the surf continued to pound the beach.

Fighting Philosophers

The cover story in the April 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction was called “Fighting Philosopher”. While it’s not a great story, it’s a great title. Philosophers are notorious for spending all their time sitting and thinking, so the idea of them getting involved in any kind of physical activity, let alone fighting, goes against the stereotype.

I was reminded of this story by a recent item on the BBC website: When philosophers attack! – “Two men were waiting for a beer at a store in the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don. Somehow, the subject of the philosopher Immanuel Kant came up. Discussion morphed into argument, argument descended into fisticuffs... One of the combatants pulled out a pistol, and shot the other one several times with rubber bullets before running away. He was later arrested and has been charged with causing serious bodily harm.”

Kant was the archetypal philosopher: deep thinking, meticulously precise and (to most readers) impenetrably obscure. One of his most famous notions is the Categorical Imperative – the idea that human beings have an unconditional duty to behave in a morally correct way. This duty overrides all other considerations, and includes the usual moral injunctions such as “Thou shalt not kill”. And lying is out, too.

A French philosopher named Benjamin Constant wasn’t so sure about the “unconditional” nature of Kant’s imperative. What if a would-be murderer, searching for his victim, asked you where that victim was? If you knew the answer, should you tell the truth, which would indirectly lead to the victim’s death? Kant said yes, you should tell the truth even if it leads to someone else committing a murder – moral actions are an end in themselves, irrespective of the consequences.

Kant’s bizarre assertion was the inspiration for a murder mystery set in an Oxford college – Death at the President’s Lodgingby Michael Innes. It’s also referenced in an equally bizarre essay by Thomas De Quincey entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. Much of the essay is concerned with the unlikely topic of the assassination of philosophers: “It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”

Of course, this is all nonsense – a product of De Quincey’s rather peculiar imagination. He was a contemporary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and had a similar interest in chemically induced states of consciousness (De Quincey’s most famous work is Confessions of an English Opium Eater).

In the real world, philosophers just aren’t the sort of people who get assassinated. Or are they? A few years ago an academic came up with the theory that Descartes was murdered by a Catholic priest who wanted to silence his heretical pronouncements: “French philosopher was killed by arsenic-laced holy communion wafer” (this photograph of the memorial to Descartes in the Palace of Versailles comes from my recent visit to France).

Getting back to the subject of “fighting philosophers”, these are even less common in the real world than assassinated philosophers. The only example I could find was a biggie, though. Plato was arguably the greatest of all the ancient Greek philosophers, and one of the most influential thinkers in history. But according to his biographers he started out as a wrestler, and some say that “Plato” (meaning broad-shouldered) was his wrestling nickname. Wikipedia, with its usual po-faced sincerity, includes Plato under Category: Ancient Greek wrestlers.

Plato was an exception, and most philosophers are pacifistic by nature. The archetypal example is Archimedes, who was stabbed to death by a Roman soldier because he was too engrossed in a diagram to recognize the threat that was looming over him. The situation is even mentioned in the blurb to the Astounding Science Fiction “Fighting Philosopher” story: “Archimedes was the philosopher who wouldn’t bother to fight the Roman soldier and had his philosophical work terminated permanently”.

Wikipedia, in its effort to make sure the world knows everything it ought to, has a helpful article on Deaths of philosophers. Unaccountably, however, it misses out what must be the coolest philosopher-death of all (or the grossest, depending on your point of view). Arius was an early Christian theologian who spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity. When he died in 336 AD, he was at least 80 years old. An eyewitness account of his death suggests it was a truly spectacular event: “As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.”

I’m not convinced that, under the natural course of events, it’s really possible to defecate one’s own liver. But the opponents of Arius’s theology didn’t believe his death was natural – they promptly declared it a miracle!

Wikipedia's Hive Mind

Since I started writing this blog, I've been doing a lot more internet research than I used to. And, almost inevitably, I've been using Wikipedia a lot more than I used to -- if only because it features so prominently in Google search results. For most mainstream subjects Wikipedia provides a reliable and objective source of information, but lurking under the surface there is something sinister. Wikipedia, by far the largest collaborative undertaking the world has ever seen, has developed a distinctive personality of its own... and it's not a pleasant personality. It comes across not so much in the visible content of the encyclopedia, but in what is omitted (or more accurately, deleted) from it, and the stridently authoritarian justifications to be found on the "Discussion" pages.

I've talked before about Wikipedia versus Forteana and the Shakespeare Authorship Question, but these are not isolated occurrences. The deletionists have targeted other heterodox ideas ranging from conspiracy theories to complementary medicine and climate change scepticism. If the material being deleted was simply the raving of an irrational crackpot, the situation would be understandable. But as often as not the deleted material was soberly written, well-balanced and carefully documented. The Wikipedia "hive mind" is systematically wiping out views it doesn't agree with... even if those views come from a Nobel Prize winner. The plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén is a case in point. Despite winning the Nobel Prize in 1970, his views on the subject of magnetic reconnection differed drastically from those of the scientific mainstream. In March this year, Michael Suede tried to insert a short, carefully researched section on Alfvén's views towards the end of the Wikipedia article on the subject. It was promptly tagged with a warning that "An editor has expressed a concern that this section lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, controversies or matters relative to the article subject as a whole". Shortly after, the whole section was deleted and Suede was banned from making further changes to Wikipedia.

So where does the Wikipedian Hive Mind come from? How can a collaboration between a potentially vast number of individuals result in such a clear-cut personality, with clear-cut interests, beliefs, opinions and prejudices? To answer these questions, we need to look at just what Wikipedia is, and how it functions.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". In practice, of course, "anyone" means "anyone with a computer and access to the internet". And there are a few other selection effects which may be less obvious. Wikipedia is written using an HTML-like mark-up language, which while it's relatively straightforward may deter the less technically inclined. Wikipedia doesn't pay, so people who are motivated by financial gain are unlikely to contribute... while those who have full-time jobs, and families to look after, may simply not have time to become involved. And no-one looking for personal fame is going to waste their time on Wikipedia: the use of anonymizing handles guarantees zero recognition in the world at large.

A recent study by the United Nations University in Maastricht analyzed the demographics of Wikipedia contributors. Most contributors are male: 87 per cent compared to just 13 per cent female. The average age of contributors is 26 years. Amongst Wikipedians as a whole, roughly a quarter are under 18 years of age, half are under 22, and three-quarters are under 30. Two-thirds of those surveyed were unmarried, and only 14 per cent had any children.

These statistics paint a clear picture of Wikipedians as young males with no family responsibilities. This explains some of the well-known characteristics of Wikipedia, such as its bias towards left-wing politics and its bias towards contemporary popular culture... but does it explain the bias against non-mainstream ideas and opinions?

An article a few year ago on the Times Higher Education website suggested that "what matters on Wikipedia is not your sources but the support of the community... the Wikipedia community that is, within which there is much talk about consensus, civility and reliable sources. Yet on closer examination, Wikipedians seem an unappealing bunch -- computer fanatics, generally male, usually teenagers. They see the world only from a youthful cab driver's perspective. If anyone disagrees with the Wikipedian consensus, their edits are reverted and they can be banned indefinitely."

What has happened is a classic example of positive and negative feedback loops. Individuals whose interests and world-views match those of the Wikipedian Hive Mind find their edits retained, and their opinions applauded on Discussion pages. So they contribute more and more -- that's positive feedback. Dissenters are subjected to negative feedback: their contributions are constantly altered or deleted, and they find themselves on the receiving end of sarcastic, often viciously ad-hominem, attacks on the Discussion pages. So they go away, and switch to doing something more rewarding somewhere else. As a result, Wikipedia conforms to the "one per cent rule": half of all edits are done by less than one per cent of users, and over two-thirds of articles have been written by less than two per cent of users.

Over the years, Wikipedia's collective personality has become more and more one-dimensional, reflecting the personality of the majority of its successful contributors. You might be forgiven for imagining that, with its emphasis on factuality and neutrality, this personality of Wikipedia's would be calm and rational and supremely objective. But not a bit of it. As Nicholson Baker wrote in the Guardian a few years ago: "There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people's work... They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away". He quotes one of the victims of deletionism as saying "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sandcastles", while another victim "likened the organized deleters to book burners".

Wikipedia's editors make a big thing about a "neutral point of view", but really no-one over a certain age demands or expects everything they read to be written in a perfectly neutral way. Grown-ups just want the basic information, from whatever point of view, so they can form their own opinions. Instead, with Wikipedia's practice of deleting all material that is deemed to be "not notable", we've ended up with something much more insidious than a biased point-of-view... an encyclopedia that is biased by what is included and what is excluded.

Wikipedia dimly recognizes that the inclusion/exclusion problem exists... or at least, it did at one time. There used to be a Help page providing specific guidance on how to avoid what it called "Information Suppression". However, the page has not been updated since 9 January 2007, and it's now prefixed with a statement that "This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear."  In other words, the information has been suppressed!

The Wikipedia Authorship Question

Who writes Wikipedia? Wikipedians would instantly answer "everyone"... but while this may be true in principle, in practice there is a strong self-selection effect. The status of Wikipedia as the world's foremost "intellectual authority" seems to attract people who can best be described as "intellectual authoritarians". In Wikipedia versus Forteana I pointed out that articles on Fortean subjects have a depressing tendency to get deleted, but it's not just Forteans that suffer from this... it's anyone who finds themselves in an intellectual minority.

Earlier this month, IEEE Spectrum published an interesting article entitled Wikipedia's Shakespeare Problem, which posed the question "Does Wikipedia provide a viewpoint that's overly mainstream, giving short shrift to controversial, minority, or heretical ideas?" The article focused on the Shakespeare Authorship Question -- the issue of whether the plays normally attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by someone else. This is a minority view, but one that has been around for a long time. When I was a student, my college had a small but thriving "Baconian Society", which championed Sir Francis Bacon (left) as the author of the plays. As far as I could tell, the theory was due almost entirely to the fact that Bacon had studied at the college whereas Shakespeare hadn't! The basement of the college library had a couple of shelves packed with dusty Victorian volumes on the subject.

The fact that Shakespeare's plays probably weren't written by Sir Francis Bacon (or by the Earl of Oxford, as discussed in the IEEE article) is neither here nor there. All that matters is the fact that the idea exists, and people have devoted their careers to it and written books about it. An idea shouldn't be suppressed simply because it's untrue... a fact that even Wikipedians seem to grasp, since they're perfectly happy to have an article on Klingons (complete with derivation of the word from the Klingon language)!

Actually, the thing that Wikipedians hold most sacred isn't "Truth" but, quite bizarrely, "Notability". In one of the deletion discussions I looked at, an article (on some Fortean topic or other -- I can't remember which) had been proposed for deletion by a Wikipedia administrator on the grounds that its only purpose was to push a particular POV (Point of View). When one of the contributors objected that the article was well-balanced, with no obvious bias to any particular POV, the administrator replied to the effect that "you're pushing the Fortean POV that unusual subjects are notable simply because they're unusual". So that's what we've been doing wrong all these years!

Returning to the Wikipedia Authorship Question: Who writes Wikipedia? This is a difficult question to answer due to the prevalent use among Wikipedians of anonymizing "handles" instead of real names. It's also hard to tell on the basis of internal evidence. For example, the Wikipedia article on "Earth" appears to have been written by someone familiar with the planet Earth, but not necessarily native to it. Similarly, the article on "Human" appears to be written by (and for) organisms that may or may not be members of that particular species. Wikipedians are not afraid to take "neutral POV" to the most ludicrous extremes.

Wikipedia does provide a few demographic statistics... which are, frankly, quite horrifying. No less than 87 percent of contributors are male, while only 13 percent are female. That's shocking in itself. On top of that, 26 percent of contributors are undergraduate students, while "about a quarter" are under 18 years old. In other words, just over half of the people who are telling the world what to think, on every subject under the Sun, are too young to have done any kind of real job!

Mach's Principle

Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916) is best known for inventing the Mach Number, which measures the speed of an object relative to the speed of sound. But he invented a few other things, of which the most notorious in scientific circles is Mach's Principle. Most physics professors get red in the face with apoplexy as soon as it's mentioned. Mach's Principle takes the most sacred mantra of classical physics, Newton's Second Law of Motion, and ascribes it to the collective effect of all the matter in the universe. To a scientist, this sounds like mystical mumbo-jumbo, or holistic New Age nonsense.

There was a time, a few years ago, when the Wikipedia entry on Mach's Principle had a box branding it as "Pseudoscientific" (reproduced at left... sadly for the point I'm trying to make, the box is no longer there). But what's so dangerous about "the principle that the inertia of a body arises from its relation to the totality of all other bodies in the universe"? And just what is "inertia" anyway?

The official line on inertia is that it's a fundamental property of matter that tends to oppose the effect of any externally applied force, such as gravity, to a degree that is proportional to the mass of the object (as quantified by Newton's Second Law of Motion). In the presence of rotation, inertia causes an object to experience centrifugal and Coriolis forces... which orthodox scientists insist are merely "fictitious" forces, not real forces at all. One of the commonest descriptions of Mach's Principle takes the form of a thought-experiment involving centrifugal force. If you stand outside on a clear night with your arms hanging loosely by your sides, the stars above will appear motionless. If you start to spin around, the stars will start to rotate above your head, and your arms will start to lift up. You might think the rotating stars are exerting an "anti-gravity" force on your arms. As I'll show in a moment, there's good reason to believe that this is perfectly and literally correct... although most mainstream scientists would jump in front of a freight train before they'd admit it.

Gravity is a force of attraction that exists between any two masses. The equation describing this force is identical to the equation for the electrostatic force between two electric charges (except that, if both charges have the same sign, the electrostatic force is repulsive rather than attractive). But in the electrical case, if one of the charges is moving relative to the other, there is another force as well. This is the electromagnetic force, which (without going into details) is an inevitable consequence of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. But Relativity doesn't just affect electric charges -- exactly the same thing should be true of gravity as well. And it is... except that between everyday objects, the "gravimagnetic" force is much too small to detect.

Ordinary gravity (the "gravistatic" force) obeys an inverse-square law, which means that very massive objects that are a long way away (such as distant galaxies) exert a much smaller force on us than less massive objects that are closer to us (such as the Earth). But the gravimagnetic force obeys an inverse-linear law, which has the opposite tendency... in fact the effect only becomes measurable when you include all the matter out to the edge of the universe. And the effect in question, exactly as predicted by Mach's Principle, is Newton's Second Law of Motion! The supposedly fictitious centrifugal and Coriolis forces are nothing other than the gravitational analogues of well-established electromagnetic forces.

The idea that "inertia is to gravity as magnetism is to electrostatics" was, as far as I know, first put on a quantitative basis by Dennis Sciama in the early 1950s... but it was popularized twenty years later by Eric Laithwaite, Britain's most notorious rebel against the scientific establishment!

Wikipedia versus Forteana

No-one can dispute that Wikipedia is a useful source of information in many areas. It's strong on mainstream science, computer programming, cult television, video games and anime. These are the subjects that get a typical Wikipedia editor's pulses racing. In other areas, such as history and the fine arts, they shrug their shoulders and leave it to people who are knowledgeable in these fields. Only Forteans are seriously persecuted... Wikipedia doesn't share their interests, but unlike classical music and Greek philosophy (which they don’t like either) they just won't leave us alone.

Many perfectly good articles have been deleted, while others have been tagged with so many warning messages (as seen on the left) that the visitor is made to feel a fool for showing an interest in the subject. Forteana by its nature deals with phenomena that lie outside mainstream science, and which are often poorly understood and patchily documented. In the majority of cases, there is a significant element of subjectivity both in the evidence and in the proposed explanations of it. Hence the subject matter of Forteana, by its very nature, lacks neutrality, verifiability and factual accuracy. That's precisely why it's of so much interest to Forteans... and why it's so unpalatable to Wikipedians!

What Forteans understand, but the average Wikipedia editor can't be bothered to, is the perfectly clear distinction between a phenomenon and the description of a phenomenon. The latter can be totally neutral, verifiable and factually accurate even if the former is not. This is true in the case of the Wikipedia article on the Dean Drive, from which the above warning notice is taken.

There are a couple of other reasons why Wikipedia has got it in for Forteans. One is its "policy" WP:FRINGE, which discriminates against any idea or theory which is not part of the mainstream curriculum -- even if that idea or theory has significant social or historical significance. Another is its strange concept of "notability", which seems to be based on the principle "we haven't heard of it even if you have". As a result, many subjects that will be household names to Forteans have had their articles deleted from Wikipedia -- Timothy Good, Alan Godfrey, Charles Fort Institute, David Clarke (lecturer) to name but a few (these are links to the relevant deletion logs, since the articles themselves no longer exist!).

Even Jenny Randles, one of Britain's most prolific Fortean authors (and, like most British Forteans, a highly rational writer far from the rabid ET-believing stereotype that Wikipedia imagines us to be) is tagged for "notability"... as is the Owlman, one of Britain's best known cryptozoological phenomena.

The Fortean Times UnConvention has been running for almost two decades, and is the only event of its kind in the world. A few years ago, Wikipedia had the beginnings of a good article on the subject -- the archived version still exists. But now, if you type UnCon into the search box, you are redirected to the article on Fortean Times... because, we're told, UnCon is not notable except in the context of the magazine!

Wikipedia Prophecy (1909)

Although science fiction ostensibly deals with the future, it's extremely rare to come across genuinely prophetic visions in SF. One that comes close, however, is "The Machine Stops" -- a short story by E.M. Forster originally published in 1909. Whatever its original intention, the story can be read today as an amusing satire on the World Wide Web, and on social networking sites such as Facebook in particular. However, my favorite bit is aimed more at Wikipedia with its anally constricting policies of  "No original research", "Neutral Point of View", "Wikipedia is a mainstream encyclopedia" and "Wikipedia is a tertiary source".

"Beware of firsthand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them [you can take 'them' to be Wikipedia admins, if you like]. "Firsthand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element -- direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine -- the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution... Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time" -- his voice rose -- "there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colorless, a generation 'seraphically free from taint of personality', which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine."