What is science? You think it’s obvious. But it is actually a hotly contested issue right now. The argument about what science is fundamentally underpins the bloodbath that’s happening in the bond markets. It is causing a profound breakdown of public trust. It is also leading to what I call electile disfunction, meaning the inability of electoral systems to produce reliable, scientifically verifiable and trusted results. The equity markets now also hinge on this same question: what is science? Both the bond and equity markets are making massive bets on the ability of science and technology to solve monumental problems. That’s why so much money has gone into AI. Into data centers. Into space. Into medicine. But will science deliver, and deliver in time, for equities to rise in value, or are the markets overinvested in overhype? These questions have all become more acute because of recent revelations. Science and scientists are under the microscope.
Dr. Fauci’s world is now on public display. The people in his world are no doubt horrified to be discovered. They had worked hard to cover their tracks. His aide, David Morens, and others, have now been shown to have deliberately attempted to destroy incriminating emails in an effort to ensure that FOIA requests would fail. Morens has now pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States.
The cumulative story is shocking. Last March, the New York Times conceded “we were badly misled”. Now we have vastly more insight into what actually happened. We now know that the very scientists who said the COVID virus and the spike protein could not possibly have come from a lab were the ones cooking it up in labs in North Carolina and Wuhan, with support and funding and sign-off from Dr. Fauci. The scientists who said the COVID treatments, like Remdesivir, and the COVID vaccines were “safe and effective” already knew they were not (miscarriages, myocarditis). This is now evidenced by a wide range of emails, Fauci’s own diary, communications, whistleblower testimony, and more. They created a highly successful terror campaign to suppress, shadow-ban, or destroy anyone who suggested otherwise. They systematically worked to destroy belief in alternative news narratives and treatments, killing off all competition, it seems, to protect their own cash flows, including undisclosed sources like royalty payments. For me, the most shocking part was the realization that the six-foot distancing and the recommendation to mask up were made up and not based on any science. But why? Some have suggested that this was done to slow or arrest herd immunity as a means of increasing dependency on only the recommended protocols and drugs. Meanwhile, study after study are being retracted now.
So, if we can’t trust the top scientists, can we trust science? Can we believe any of the other scientists? This question is central to the financial markets now.
For example, are the AI data centers really going to deliver on their promises? The whole equity market hangs on this question. Can we believe Secretary Bessent when he says that the debt may have reached $40T, but the US is about to enter a Golden Era in which energy and resource prices will fall dramatically thanks to a new era of record-breaking science? New small modular reactor firms are approaching criticality, but can we anticipate reliable, scaled energy from this source? That question is at the heart of sovereign debt pricing. If it’s a yes, the debt will be gone in short order. If it is a pipe dream, the debt is set to metastasize into a much bigger problem. Yet if you think understanding viruses and vaccines was hard, wait till you try to understand the breakthroughs happening in math and physics right now.
The Administration is releasing paper after paper that imply that science and math are being radically upended by new scientific discoveries.
The National Security Science and Technology Strategy (NSSTS)
National Space Transportation Policy, Science: A New Golden Age
The American Science and Security Platform
New US Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research
The problem is that some of this is true and some of the claims being made on the net might not be. Separating signal from noise is hard even for scientists, let alone non-scientists. Is spacetime dead? Is quantum entanglement over long distances ushering a new era of communications and new threats to encryption, as the Brookhaven Lab in Stoneybrook recently announced? They successfully demonstrated wireless quantum transmission over 13 miles between the Stonybrook University Quantum Watchtower and the Brookhaven National Lab’s Quantum Lighthouse.
That means we will soon be able to bypass the constraints of fiber optics. Frankly, it means the end of dependence on physical wires for communications, which is a near miracle. It means we are either nearing an unhackable quantum Internet of Things, or we just met Q-Day, a day when Quantum creates a world where everything is hackable. Most importantly, it means that computers of all kinds, but especially quantum computers, will be able to solve incredibly complex computational problems. Notice the recent announcement from NIST: “a team at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has managed to successfully transmit particles of light (photons) across 62 kilometers (38.5 miles) of existing network cabling without breaking their entanglement.” So, we have multiple approaches to quantum communications all happening at once.
What was once impossible is now possible. If true, the US will see its economy radically transformed for the better. The telegraph and trains totally changed the scale of the American and world economy. The advances in the government papers above are set to dwarf the events of that era.
This is what Secretary Bessent, President Trump, and Chairman Warsh are betting on. Are they right? Will they be right quickly enough? All depends on the answer to these questions. The markets think they are betting on these personalities. But they are actually betting on their beliefs. Are those beliefs based on inside information on what science is about to demonstrate? My bet is yes. But that means they believe, as I do, that new science is now being revealed. It also means that I share their belief that scaling and adoption will happen quickly. But, many do not believe this. I have had conversations with many skeptics who concede that the new science may well be true, but it still takes decades to get humans to change and adopt new technologies. But, before we can argue about timelines, we have to get back to what is real and what isn’t.
This is critical because the old guard in the science world has turf to protect. They are not going to just let newcomers destroy their life’s work. After all, new discoveries render many long scientific careers null and void. The peer review system is not just about vetting for good science. It is also about keeping unconventional, groundbreaking science at bay. It has also been about choosing who gets the credit for discoveries too. So, the new government papers force us to reconsider the question: What is science? The question has two broad answers: science is a body of knowledge or a way of asking questions. The trouble between them has arisen from two profound developments.
First, many have appropriated the word science, wrapping themselves in a white medical jacket that serves as a cloak of unassailable, superior knowledge in order to prevent anyone from questioning their views. This strategy is meant to protect their cash flows and power. On the other side, we have real science: the business of making new discoveries and solving problems using the scientific method, a process that is being turbocharged by AI in conjunction with supercomputing. Dogma and discovery are duking it out. Right now, discovery is busting dogma. But the friction of this fight between dogma and discovery is now destabilizing financial markets and the body politic.
We see this same problem at play in the realm of elections. On the one hand, we see growing evidence that election fraud has occurred through multiple cleverly devised pathways. The Smartmatic and Dominion voting machines were corruptible, meaning they had backdoors that connected them to the internet. This opens the possibility that there has been interference in the tabulation process. Every day we get further revelations about fraudulent voter rolls. Foreign interference with the US election process remains a very hot topic in politics. Everyone had been focused on the idea that Russia colluded to ruin Senator Clinton’s Presidential run in favor of Donald Trump. Now the tables have turned, and it is increasingly clear that much of this story was carefully fabricated in order to ensure that Trump would not be elected. Today we are seeing evidence of highly sophisticated efforts by foreign entities to influence American election outcomes. Neville Roy Singham is under scrutiny for allegedly funneling some $3b into more than 2000 anti-American or Marxist propaganda efforts in the US. His alleged links to Apax Partners, fraudulent voter schemes, and the role he has played in allegedly funding anti-ICE protests are now under scrutiny.
For example, there are revelations about fake American driver’s licenses being shipped into the US en masse. There are also investigations into the use of TikTok as the source of fake voters on public voter rolls. The voter fraud issue is progressing at the state level: Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and other states. Michigan voting records have revealed that all the military ballots had the same birthday: 1/1/1900. That’s a known software placeholder that is used when a birthday is unknown or incorrect. The courts have dismissed these cases based on sworn affidavits from the Michigan Director of Elections. But, this does not mean these voters are truly traceable to a living and legitimately registered voter. This is why President Trump now has the Census Bureau analyzing 2020 voter records. It should be perfectly easy for science to prove the existence of voter fraud one way or another. Yet, this is the single most contested story in American politics today. It’s a battle between the “of course the system is scientifically sound” crowd and the “no, it isn’t crowd. It’s a matter of “Who Counts” as the FT put it.
One science teacher looked into the campaign contributions made by an 88-year-old Michigan woman named Elizabeth Waffle who lived in a trailer. She made “Fourteen thousand six hundred ninety-six donations. Divided by one thousand eight hundred twenty-six days. Eight point zero five per day. That is a pattern that never sleeps, never takes a holiday, never misses a Tuesday, and never varies enough to trip a reporting threshold. Every single amount kept small. Small on purpose. Small enough that it never triggers itemized federal reporting requirements.” That’s not a human; it’s an algo. Science.
So, we are back to the central issue in politics. Can we trust the science? The scientists? In the Trump team’s view, “science” has been expropriated and abused by a community of people who were not doing any real science but were willing to say anything to create and protect their own cash flows. The opposition says that the scientists must be trusted and anyone who does their own research is dangerous. Only those who are credentialed and confirmed by appropriate authorities are to be trusted. This is thus the central issue that underpins that battle over social media and the profound divide between X and Bluesky. It divides voters into those who think we already have free and fair elections in the US and those who think we don’t.
But, amongst the many people on social media and even within the government, how many can truly comprehend what is happening in science today? How many can truly track or comprehend the events that are unfolding in physics and math today? Few. Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross co-authored Solve Everything with Peter Diamandis, Chairman of the XPrize and moonshot expert. They write, “as Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolves at an accelerating rate and grand challenges in medicine, energy, and industry are systematically solved.”
Secretary Bessent, Kevin Warsh, and President Trump are betting that these breakthrough solutions will not only happen, but that they will happen quickly. They are drafting in all means of encouraging this. First, there was the announcement of The Genesis Mission, an effort to open up all the data in the national labs to AI and to private-sector scientists who bring a more open-minded approach to scientific discovery. In other words, The Genesis Mission is a war on the gatekeepers of science. Now more are being drafted in with the announcement of a streamlined application process for small businesses.
We can think of the situation as a war. A war between an old establishment with power and secrets and cash flows it wants to keep, and a new anti-establishment that wants to disrupt the power establishment, to reveal secrets, and to secure cash flows. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that Trump, Bessent, and Warsh are attempting to wrest control of science and cash flows from the old guard.
Wars need to be financed. The previous teams at Treasury and the Fed raised a more than a wartime budget to bail out the Old Guard when the Great Financial Crisis happened. The two sides worked in tandem to solve that crisis. The same is
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.