Was it a blip, or a breakthrough?  Scientists around the globe are revved up with excitement as the world's biggest atom smasher — best known for revealing the Higgs boson four years ago — starts whirring again to churn out data that may confirm cautious hints of an entirely new particle. Such a discovery would all but upend the most basic understanding of physics, experts say. –Washington Post

Here we go again. We are supposed to be excited by the return of the Hadron Collider, a particularly obnoxious form of Big Science.

We've written on this subject a good deal: In the 21st century, only large government projects are to be seen as advancing technology and creating breakthroughs.

Our point of view is that most significant advances are made by individuals not crowds. It's an inverse phenomenon. The more scientists there are, the less originality exists.

It's no coincidence that two "Steves" in a garage refined the defining technology of the past 50 years – the "personal computer."

This sort of argument is not ordinarily made in the modern media. Instead, we are exposed to endless adulatory profiles of corporate breakthroughs and the creative genius clustered around government funded projects.

This Washington Post article, excerpted above, is a good example of the latter. The Hadron Collider is doing the good, patient work of advancing the Theory of Relativity.

But then there is this statement from idiosyncratic electrical engineer, Eric Dollard, who has written a tract entitled The Theory of Anti-Relativity:

Einstein is a false prophet. The Theory of Relativity as the "Holy Scripture" is like a televangelistic sales pitch. Nikola Tesla regarded Relativity as the greatest historical aberration of scientific thought. Relativity is no more than a philosophical standpoint, a virus to infect a "New Age".

Einstein is a kind of Big Science icon. After all, he was instrumental in suggesting what would ultimately become the Manhattan Project that employed thousands to develop the nuclear bomb.

And yet perhaps the Manhattan Project was hyped too. There are significant questions as to whether atomic bombs were even dropped on Japan. We reported on that HERE.

We have plenty of reasons to be skeptical these days. The US government developed the atomic bomb and went to the moon in the span of 30 years with laughably primitive technology. We have trouble recognizing that government.

We're only familiar with the one that couldn't even produce a health care website with much more advanced tools.

Big Science is a kind of trap, producing groupthink. That's one of the reasons we've ended up with the Hadron Collider and its endless attempts to buttress the seemingly misguided ideas of modern, gravitational physics.

Look at the night sky through a telescope and study galactic spirals. Does gravity create spirals?  Thunderbolts.info.com tells us that:

Laboratory experiments, together with advanced simulation capabilities, have shown that electric forces can efficiently organize spiral galaxies, without resorting to the wild card of gravity-only cosmology–the Black Hole.