[R. N. Boyd]:

I am a "from the top, down" kind of guy. I go from the big picture to the details, as needed. I want to understand first, the *principles*, then all the rest of it is within my grasp, and it's just a matter of filling in the details. (Of course, as Ark says, that's where the trouble starts.)

[Arkadiusz Jadczyk]:

Indeed. The point is, I think, that we can't really understand principles without being able to command the details. Somehow we all believe that there exist few simple principles. But why should it be so? Wishful thinking. There is a huge mosaic which we need to grasp, not simple at all. Even worse, deliberately obscured by forces that do not pay much attention to our wishful thinking, and if they pay, it may be not in our best interest.

In the final instance it is the results, that count. Whether they come from working from general principles down to details, or from working from details to general principles. Whether they come of remote viewing, intelligence data, channeling or reverse engineering. The end question is: how much do we understand? How much do we control?

[R. N. Boyd]:

Everything you said is true.

Another question is, how much are we *allowed* to understand? How much are we *allowed* to control?

"Business As Usual!" determines some of this, if not a great deal of it, IMO. There have been many cases where results have been suppressed or made unavailable to the scientific community. As a rule, I have found that where there is opposition to a concept, that is precisely where I want to be looking, to get to the truth. A good example of this would be the vast oppressions of consciousness-related phenomena which arose due to military interests in the topic, and the "Business As Usual" interests of the scientific community as a whole. Another example would be the suppression of antigravitational researches in general, as a result of military and commercial interests in the Biefeild-Brown effect. There are probably countless examples of other such suppressions by various "special interest" groups.

I have also found that anomalies of any kind, especially those which are reproducibly observable and not covered or accepted by prevalent scientific views, are very important to investigate. For example, the so-called "subtle energies" of which Einstein was so enamoured, such as "radionics" apparatus, are well worth investigating to make the picture more complete. As Ark said, the picture is vast and complexly interwoven. I have found that things get more complex as I learn more, rather than simpler. Still, there are situations where the complexities collapse into some very simple principles. For example, consider all that preceded the very simple E = mc^2. On the other hand the interdependencies are vast almost beyond measure. If one contemplates all of the combinations and permutations of interdependencies and inter-reliances of the fundamental general areas of physics, for example, E/M as related to relativity, as related to quantum mechanics as related to plasma physics as related to mechanics as related to fluidics, as related to etc., the combinations rapidly become vast! Considering only 13 categories of research, this means that there are 13 factorial (!) combinations of combined physical interdependencies to be investigated. In consideration of this large number (which is actually quite small, compared to the actual number of interdependencies, based on the number of categories, which is larger than the number 13), it is *certain* that a physicist should never be bored, or run out of things to investigate!

I call such combinatorial studies "Wholistic Physics". There are few examples of such in the world. One example that immediately springs to mind is a paper by titled, "Spinors, Minimal Surfaces, Torsion, Helicity, Chirality, Spin, Twistors, Orientation, Continuity, Fractals, Point Particles, Polarization, the Light Cone and the Hopf Map." (R. M. Kiehn) This fascinating paper can be found at: http://www22.pair.com/csdc/car/carfre75.htm I think that this was sparked in part by discussions of the vastness of the interconnectedness of the various areas of physics which went on between Tony Smith, Kiehn, and myself, several years past. I sent them both a simplified diagram of the interconnectednesses of some of the various categories of physics. The diagram I sent them was simply 12 points on a circle with a point at the center of the circle with all the points connected to each other. Each point was labeled with a sample category, and the relatedness became more apparent in this diagrammatic form. I would forward it to the list, but graphics are unfortunately precluded from this list. As a result of this exploration, Kiehn has so far produced two papers, showing part of the tip of the iceberg which is "wholistic physics". (I coined the term, by the way. I also call it "multiply connected physics" on occasion. It is a vast research area in itself.) But, the diagram helped me to make sense of all the relationships which exist in the physics, and pointed me directly to many areas of researches which have never been touched. When I examined the combinations of only those 13 labled points, to see which combinations of topics have actually been investigated, I was startled to discover that only some 2000 topical areas have actually been investigated in any way whatsoever, out of the conservative 13 factorial possibilities. When Tony Smith realized the truth of what I was saying, he was rather overwhelmed by the fact of it, working so hard as he is on a Theory Of Everything. I think he realized then that he would be forced confine his TOE, to some extent, because of the bewildering number of possibilities of interactions, and place his TOE on a firm foundation which could act as a covering theory for the combinatorial physics, without the requirement that he investigate all of the possible combinations.