© CORREA&CORREA, 2001   Another question that is often addressed to us is - Why do we stubbornly insist on mixing philosophy and physics, or philosophy and biology, or simply philosophy and science? Our inclination is to answer with another question: Is it simply 'wishful thinking' on our part to claim that there would be some form of bridge to be made between them, or - even worse - that there must be some continuity between them; that, at the end of the day, the concept and the functive belong to the same order of knowledge and not to different ones? Here, we may have to exorcise somewhat the specter of Deleuze - who so wanted to keep science as a project distinct from that of philosophy. It is not as though we are unaware of an equally stubborn reticence on the part of certain of our fellow human beings and some readers of Aetherometry towards entertaining this passion of ours. But to these questions, we must in turn answer that the only Biophysics that matters to us is the Biophysics that addresses our sense perceptions and organ sensations; which provides tools that are extensions of our own organs and allows us, in a sense, to come to the realization that we are just a miraculous interlinking of processes of 'partial objects', that we are phenomena at their interfaces, giving us new possibilities to act upon Matter in our Space and Time, and thus to expand the intelligence of Life. In other words, what is the sense of any of this knowledge of the replication of the work of Reich or the discovery he made of the ORAC anomalies? What is the sense of reopening the book? This is also like asking - what is the sense of going back to the foundations of Physics, to the most basic of basic questions in science? If we contemplate the advances in scientific knowledge in the past two centuries, we realize the exponential pace and the intensity and breadth of the undertaking in all disciplines - in physics, chemistry, genetics, molecular biology, neurobiology. In physics, veritable revolutions in thought were brought about by constant developments in thermodynamics - from the steam engine to the Nernst effect - and in our knowledge of electricity and electromagnetism. We know today about all types of monopolar massbound charges, about their behaviour in vacuum and in a variety of materials, about their distribution within atomic constructs - such that we can detect them with complex techniques like NMR, control their currents in conductors and superconductors, form electron and molecular plasmas and beams in gases and vacuum, shuttle electrons and holes in semiconductors. This knowledge made possible the entire process of technological revolutions in the past century, from wireless telegraphy through the cathode ray screen to the transistor and the microcomputer, the creation of entirely new infrastructures - power grids, electric trains and homes, telecommunications, surveillance, conditioning and control techniques, etc. With the military pressures of the XXth century, we learned much about the photoelectric effect and the electromagnetic spectrum - radio, radar, microwave, infra-red, optical light, ultraviolet, and then ionizing radiation, X-rays, gamma rays and molecular cosmic rays - and we became confronted politically, scientifically and emotionally, as a global society, with the strong and weak nuclear forces behind thermonuclear reactions. In chemistry, we have today a complete periodic table of atomic elements and their radionuclides, an immense expanding knowledge of organic and inorganic compounds that has ushered in a permanent materials and explosives revolution, an understanding of covalent bonds and free-radical reactions, experimental topological maps of phase changes, etc - and these scientific developments led to other breakthroughs in altogether distinct disciplines, such as biology, medicine and forensic science. In the last half-century alone, the veritable explosion in the expansion of the Life Sciences is palpable: we went from Mendelian genetics to the molecular identification of entire genomes, by cracking the biological codes of nucleic acids and amino acids, and by grasping the morphological arrangement of molecules that permits enzymatic action by noncovalent bonding; and then moved on to molecular biology, to the understanding of subcellular structures, their biochemical and electron-microscopic identification, and the complete elucidation of the biochemical steps involved in just about all types of biological metabolism pertaining to an ever increasing variety of living systems. Our eyes have only just begun to open to the world of nature around us and within us. And at the same time, the social machines devised by us to control our emotions, values and thought, have come to rely increasingly upon this technological power of science to create new techniques of containment as well as entirely new mechanisms of power. Their current process of melding into what Foucault once called a global BioPower, defines a shift where the emphasis ceases to be the enforcement of the old right 'to compel to die and allow to live', and becomes, instead, a global right of power mechanisms to compel to live, or rather survive; and, above all, a banishment of death as a natural event - much as joy has been banished from any sexuality. Yet, despite this infernal machine of technological and scientific advancement, the gaps in our knowledge of nature are immense. Most are like gaping black holes that have been glossed over, and one cannot by any means imagine that political and emotional reasons are entirely foreign to this ignorance. Incessant noise itself, as pure overflow of information and a measure of the inflation in disinformation, is part and parcel of this glossing over or of this perpetuation of ignorance. Debord once wrote: "disinformation now spreads in a world where there is no room for any verification". If we leave General Relativity aside - since it has contributed no further mastery of gravitation other than in theory - our scientific understanding of gravity has remained essentially that which the Great Newton taught us. We know nothing about gravitons or the real gravitational waves. To this day, instead of having discovered the fine structure of the electron or of any other element of Matter, we have placed 'monumental' blocks on the road of our inquiry - these imaginary tripartite quark structures that have deranged entirely the consistency of any inquiry into their dimensionality, quantification, quantization, and even definition. Our understanding of inertial mass is marred by our functional incomprehension of the apparent phenomenon of addition of electromagnetic mass - and this error has widespread consequences, permeating our knowledge of electrodynamics which ignores open circuit interactions and the impact of the differences in mass of various charge carriers, and limiting our understanding of radiant energy, which we constantly reduce to electromagnetic or ion fields. We admit only the existence of electromagnetic energy, treating gravitational fields as merely a question of static geometry. But then, official science has no idea whatsoever of how Light arises from the Dark and returns to it, no idea of the processes whereby those blackbody photons are produced or how they are produced. Despite the breakthroughs in exciton theory, the fundamental behavior of dielectrics or insulators continues to escape us. Even though the official US legal opinion reversed the unforgivably unfair decision of having once granted Marconi's patent for radio over Tesla's, we remain completely ignorant of ambipolar electric radiation - that its effects of penetration of diverse materials at various rates are massfree and electric, that this is the very physical nature of the energy released by solar radiation - in fact, we are ignorant of its existence, let alone of its fine structure and interactions or conversions! This, not to mention that the official outlook of science upon biological processes and systems remains entirely mechanistic and imbued with genetic determinism. Inevitably, the scientific margins become indistinctly populated by insightful discoveries that are glossed over or repressed, and by a plethora of ignorant and mystical ad hoc reinterpretations that further distort the repressed. There are anomalies strewn everywhere in the field of dominant or official science. If these anomalies were to congeal as integral parts of the functions of a unitarian theory of Physics, then the distortions would be pushed back, whether of a mechanistic, mystic or probabilistic bent. Here and there, where these physical and biological anomalies manifest themselves and official science has to actually deal with them or address them - be it because they are part of a medical or a military or other challenge - the reductions that result are ridiculous and absurd, the somersaults of understanding entirely gymnastical. Dominant science has behaved as if there were ample time for foolishness - and legitimized it always as a function of operational and technological criteria. And philosophy, after having gone wild with the new metaphysics, with the fake Taos of Physics and other best-selling orientalisms, has now fallen silent. So, why is it that Physics is so unable to stick a knife into this unknown world of the Aether? Why does it so obviously lack the tools to dissect and synthesize the Aether's microfunctional world? We think it is ultimately for the same reason that philosophers of science have taken one of two paths: they have either become great apologists of modern, probabilistic stochastic Physics and have made the eulogy of uncertainty while celebrating the incapacity of science to give an accurate account of the microscopic and submicroscopic world, or they have taken the position that if one seeks knowledge of life, of the world and of the self (not of one's self, but the self) - knowledge of those interlinkings of the partial drives that one's self constantly consists of - then it is certainly not in science that one can find answers. They turn instead to the world of dreams, the world of analysis, the world of logic, the world of mathematics; some form of rationality - that carries its own irrational, of course, no matter how well hidden. This creates the attitude amongst philosophers that only two roads for consciousness remain open. Either their philosophical questions regarding life and society and power and everyday life are to be resolved by belief in some faith which is, in one way or another, religious, or then they are not religious but exalt instead in celebrating the demise of both religion and science - finding in this or that philosophy, this or that method of separate thought, the ultimate answer. But both these responses on the part of philosophers only deepen the chasm between Science and Philosophy, between Bio-Physics and its very object - Nature, and so also between Philosophy and its own object - Knowledge, actual and effective Knowledge (and not knowledge for the sake of knowledge). The question of life and death has been badly posed - probably ever since thought has confronted itself with it. Social life was once founded upon a continuum with life, but our evolutionist and neo-evolutionist biologists tell us that this life, this biological life, was and is merely survival of the fittest. So the lie is pushed back, back beyond the origins of culture, and well into the supposed nature of biological systems. We say this, because life has its own differentiating characteristics, its sexuality and eroticism - physical, biological and even political. Life cannot be confused with its image as Survival, nor with its effective and practical reduction to Survival. Rather, we should follow in the steps of the SI and Pierre Clastres and hold firm the fact that this reduction is a political one. It is in one and the same breath that civilized peoples refuse to regard savage societies as societies of non-accumulatable wealth, as societies organized without State, and that they view the present-day value of 'earning a living' in a continuum with the image of savages struggling to survive under conditions of biological and technological hardship. From the moment social life was reduced to Survival, the continuity of its connection to biological life, to the libidinal economy of desire, suffered a disconnection, an irreversible discontinuity promptly remedied by the intermediacy of new powers. The dialectical essence of the State lies in this intercession, in this intermediacy. But this break also had wide and far-reaching consequences: Life could not simply be reduced to Survival, without thereby leaving Death, too, out of balance. It is a complicated matter, all the more so as the libidinal and political economy of 'primitives' or 'savages' also coded the power of death, and had its own processes of discharging it so that it generated no death latency as we now know it. Read Shabono by Florinda Donner, or the entire work of Clastres, or still Artaud's voyage into the Tarahumara land - everywhere it is clear that 'savage' social structures, whether or not in a state of deterritorialization because of their karai or shamans, contained all the elements of a war-machine. Simply, they had not - nor do they necessarily - agglutinated into a permanent assemblage we can recognize as 'nomadic'. But it is not the change from 'savage' to 'nomadic' that should concern us here. Indeed, what brings about The Great Power of Death and places Death squarely in focus (as a royal prerogative), is not this conversion, but the intermediacy we spoke of above - which, for all we may understand of it, took hundreds of thousands of years to accomplish: to turn animism into mysticism, to turn the names of the ancestors into names of quasi-gods, to operate this extraordinary conversion that extracted a despot with his bureaucracy, a priesthood, from the locus of the shaman, a religion and a church from the decoding and recoding of savage cultures, and appended a State apparatus to the system of kinship to restructure the latter as a function of a despotic body. After each devastation of a capitalist margin, we see the process restarting all over again, but masked today because it is no longer separable, as a religious phenomenon of State-building, from the military mechanism of war - civil and foreign - that was not always there. Yes, with Moses and the flight from Egypt, both elements are there - the religious and the military machines - but then this is a late event in the geological process that developed all these vectors to their present historical stage. More to the point, someone like Mahatma Gandhi , for instance, stands as an example of the dissociation of the two tendencies, where the new State is plainly seen as a matter of religious conversion, including a new political practice, the non-resistance of satyagraha. It is a blinding error to confuse the separate roots of the powers of the State. Today, in the era of global or international capitalism, these mutations have migrated further, much further in - well into the tissue of the social. And this is precisely why most human beings do not understand anything about what is happening to them: they have no perspective upon this inward migration, they have no desire to break the silence, they are inundated by noise, and so they do not even realize the breakdown or implosion of this social that inevitably follows any such inward migration. All happens as if hegelianism were wrong but yet bent nonetheless on proving itself right by fashioning the world according to its dialectical play. The intercession we described above, the beginning of History for Hegel himself, also consisted of an inevitable break in the metabolism of Life and Death. With the creation of the State, it was an entire quantum of freedom that was removed from the world of Life - well before States made warfare their business. The break that reduced Life to Survival also delayed and prolonged Death into a seething latency - all the way from resentment to vengeance, vengeance against Life itself. The march of civilization, with its varied jackboots, made sure that this vengeance became distilled, like a subtle spirit, into an air of cynicism and humanism. But this air is stale, and its promises offer nothing different - they better depict an imaginary life in advertising and a host of virtual realities, than permit any Life to desire anywhere. The metabolism of Life and Death is not just broken but also reversed, inverted. To paraphrase M. Khayati in "The Captive Words", 'what is freedom of expression without freedom of action', without the freedom to act as one speaks or thinks? Survival has in fact been refined to the point of complete anomy and pointlessness. Lives become replaceable even from the logic of Survival. As labourers, we all become discarded bodies in our lifetime. Here is where the challenge resides - we must again become able to control our powers of Life as much as our powers of Death, instead of being the machine-slaves of a BioPower that controls our Lives and our Deaths, by doling them out as Survival and as slow-burning self-abolitionism. This is what the civilized regime of drives achieves - a complete disconnection of the natural metabolism of the power s of Life and Death from the Living and the Dying in life and society. The real meaning of a BioPower is precisely the achievement of a pure image of Survival - by incessantly infusing Death into Life. These considerations are what underlies the importance of Reich's discovery of OR and DOR energies, which Aetherometry revisits and makes precise: there is no biologically determined death latency; all death latency is determined by socio-economic and political conditions, all neurosis is actual and filled with death. Freud was deeply wrong on this matter. Yet, there is an Aether energy that brings death, a DOR energy that suffocates the living - it is not a biologically determined instinct, but part and parcel of a natural metabolism between Life and Death, between OR and DOR. As we demonstrate elsewhere (in AS2-09, in volume 2 of Experimental Aetherometry), even water and oxygen are born and die with each turn of the allotropic cycle, at a molecular level. What is pathological and creates latency - latency of death and suffocation of the living - is the suppression of this natural metabolism, the attempted human 'corrections', the disconnections that these have entailed, the vengeance against Life and disinterest in living that leads people to become suicidary fanatics and dull beings. It all happens - from a perspective axed on this inevitable metabolism of living and nonliving energies, molecules and systems (all enchained in a single continuum) - as if, despite all the suppressions, repressions, murders, etc, of the systems erected to resent Life, to take vengeance upon it and instill guilt about it, even the systems of power had to yield to some expression of the powers of Life and Death in their structures, no matter how distorted. But the path of Life or Desire towards intelligence, will always remain minor - that is its very nature. If our atmosphere cycles between OR and DOR formations, are we not yet in time to learn how to become sane when confronted with powers that escape us but reside in desire, in our own desire? The answer that, as scientists, we seek is not different from that which was once provided by the sorcerers of northern Mexico: learn to know the two powers of the aether that bring Life and Death, health and disease, into your body - for they alone are the powers that your desire disposes of: "What the new seers discovered is that the balance of the powers in every living being is a very delicate one. (...) If at any given time an individual feels that the tumbling force strikes harder than the circular one, that means that the balance is upset; the tumbling force strikes harder and harder from then on, until it cracks the living being's gap and makes it die." Someone very dear to us once said that. Somewhere, sometime, a unitarian approach to the experimentation with Nature and the theory of Knowledge will break through the present tissue of dominant science, but not without cost - without it being to the detriment of the emotional, psychic and social stability of scientists and scientific structures. There is, amongst Physicists, the absurd, quietist and complacent notion that everything (or very nearly everything) has already been discovered; that there's nothing of substance left to be found, but details of tertiary order in specialized fields of investigation; or the notion that only complete mathematical abstractions of nature can approximate reality, that reality is nonsensical, irrational, and that only probabilistic and stochastic methods can be used to get a hold of it in some manner. Man's surest bet is simply to tag along as best he can. This absurd pedagogic complacency more and more selects for scientists who meekly adopt the order of the 'inevitable', sheer conformists. They think of discovery like market makers: it's all about the gizmo - and the understanding will come later. So will any considerations of any other order, including usage by power mechanisms. Scientists have in general complete disregard for the social, political, sexual and psychic effects of their discoveries, and they evidently appear all the more justified in doing so as these discoveries reduce more and more to minor addenda on a wider design of making control, conditioning and containment even tighter than they already are. More fascistic, more controlling, more policial, more intrusive - and always the insidious push for increased surveillance, 'improved' genetic control, cloning of better species. That's the global objective. So much so, that the flair of scientific discovery is made to migrate underground and to disappear from view altogether. In a sense it has been obliged to disguise itself. This unspoken ideology of social progress and how it equates to psychosocial control, on the part of official and officiating sciences, digs ever deeper the chasm between Science and Philosophy. If we think about Deleuze and Guattari's project - we could say it was almost able to cause an artistic machine to ride a scientific machine and a philosophic machine, with each machine, in turn, riding the others - in its attempt to bring about a great conjunction of knowledge. Of course, as their work became known, they too were afraid they were creating some new form of religion. Every thinker who thinks fears this. And, of course too, there are always those who use the act of thinking of others to create new marketing niches, last-ditch apocalyptic churches and cults. But the fact is, Deleuze and Guattari themselves were - in What is Philosophy - particularly keen on separating Philosophy, and the unity and consistency of Philosophy, from anything that has to do with the unity of scientific thought, which they did not deem good, necessary, or even, above all, feasible. The truth is that they were wrong in this. A unification of Physics and Biophysics is, in fact, inevitable from the point of view of both thought and knowledge. But it will not happen either as a mere totalization of what is known, nor as a function of a special status assigned to a particular field of inquiry. Totalizing unifications will come and go like so many Theories of Everything that for brief moments play the role of despotic signifiers. But they cannot ever suffice to connect and integrate the registers of scientific thought. The resonances which such totalitarian unifications impose are at once metaphysical and metaphorical. Their unification always proceeds by metaphor, by analogy, by reduction and decontextualization. The unity of scientific thought that we speak of, could be said to be a unitarian unity, not a totalitarian and totalizing one. Micro-functions that correlate across distinct scientific registers are events that set into motion a different type of resonance - what one should properly call consistency - since it already carries, in its enunciation, the principle common to all its functional and conceptual variations. Seizing these events in their context is as much the work of Philosophy as the work of Science - and each function-event is a building block in that unitarian theory of nature that is capable - or desires to be capable - of melding all the separate registers of science in the functional unity of nature. Along this journey, neither knowledge of History nor, more to the point, Philosophy, can escape the élan of the scientific project - either because society - and History itself - find themselves pinched by political choices of technology that depend entirely upon dominant science and a domination of science by a will for Power throughout all social formations, or because it is in the nature of the concept to find its function, or better, its functive (or 'being of function'), in the principle that both quantitative and qualitative variations are continuous and correlated, even across their singularities, disjunctions, bifurcations. It is indeed of little help to assign to science the exact notions that are solely quantitative in nature, and assign to the event-resonance network only those notions that by being inexact can cut across diverse fields, the scientific, the philosophical and the artistic, as Deleuze and Guattari's project suggested. Science has always searched for the connection between the exact and quantitative, and the qualitative, without thereby having to assume that the qualitative is any less exact. And maybe that is just where, instead of "some specious unity of no particular interest to anyone" - one begins realizing a unity of thought and action that depends upon a perception of concepts as functions of energy. A thought of the difference and the different, as well as the deployment of the spaces of a knowledge that can reach absolute speed, are entirely a matter of energy and its syntheses of physical and biological reality. The great failure of thinkers after May '68, like Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, was their incapacity to envisage the conditions that would disengage a microfunctionalist science dedicated to the open integration of all scientific fields with a theory of knowledge, and to constructing concepts as functions of energy, and functions as concepts of events. Despite Deleuze's protestations that linguistics is not fundamental, despite Guattari's emphasis on a pragmatics of language, there was closure of the theory of thought in an analytics of languages. Events and acts were not seen as part and parcel of any exact science. And although an analysis of languages and sign-machines is critical, and is one of the key démarches of any scientific method, without the experimental and theoretical relations of science, without a biophysics of desire, of thought, of Life, there can be no real breakthrough for thought, nor for action that affirms that thought. We see this plainly today - there is no thought of Negation, no thought of rupture, let alone a thought of Affirmation, a thought of the different and its creation. So if we slide in our discourse from one register to the other, from Science to Philosophy or vice versa, this should, if anything, be seen as the sign of the power of aetherometric thought - that it can cut easily from one level to the next to pick out the effective elements at play in a field - on whatever level they are playing. For everything that happens in reality does not just happen on one register. Registers are superimposed on one another: political, economic, social, sexual, psychological, scientific, technological factors and structures coexist in the same Space and Time, in the same flux of energy and in the same durations of lives or in the same lives. So, in fact, to be able to connect in this way a minor scientific discourse, let's say to a philosophy that did not wish to be nihilistic or merely limited to deconstruction - as the philosophical discourses of Nietzsche or Deleuze, for example, aspired to - obliges one to effectively confront the political, the economic, the sexual, ethical, etc, issues associated with scientific research, just as there are scientific aspects associated with those other factors themselves when they are expressed, let us say, on a level that is even with the social structures they have been assigned to. It is precisely in this sense that there is a science that serves the State because it is a subject of the politics of that State, including its military politics. Likewise, there are political factors and consequences and micropowers associated with a unitarian science that employs microfunctionalism indistinctly as a philosophical, analytical or scientific and synthetic tool. The deeper reason why one inevitably has to straddle both discourses - philosophical and scientific - comes from the fact that the basic steps that lead to Aetherometry imply at once some closeness to, and some distance from, both Philosophy and Science. It is not possible for us to raise the argument of the energetic nature of Space and Time without learning from Nietzsche's notion that Space and Time themselves need to be explained as a "play of force", "the game that the aeon plays with itself." This was his own language employed at the advent of the concept of energy. And likewise, it is not possible for us to argue with Einstein without first reading the criticisms that Bergson and Deleuze addressed to him. It is not possible to relate Space and Time as distinct multiplicities, at once quantitative and qualitative, without taking account of Deleuze's criticisms; but also, likewise, without taking an immense distance from Deleuze's position, or analyzing it in order to demonstrate the errors and mistakes that prevent us from a new theory of manifolds. So, effectively, Aetherometry only carries the load it needs to carry - because Aetherometry is not Deleuze's theory, it is not neo-Deleuzeanism, any more than it is a Reichian theory, or a neo-Reichian theory or an 'orgonomic school of thinking', any more than it is a Nietzschean current, any more than it makes the apology of anyone else. Aetherometry is about science. And science uses names with respect to effects that are actual or 'material'. And if Science today has ceased doing this, it is because its real creativity and discovery are virtually dead. Aetherometry is, in a sense, the continuation of the scientific project now virtually abandoned by a science that is subordinate to mass-marketing of technologies and the policies of mass-control. Those who think the continuum we have built between philosophy and science is nothing more than 'wishful thinking' should ponder this. What is 'non-wishful' in thinking? The notion that Time should be spatialized because we only 'know' one type of quantitative multiplicities, that which belongs to Space? Is this a better way to think? To allow scientists to continue therefore in that error, and allow those who are better philosophers to continue to think that quantitation and numbers are thereby useless or uncertain by nature? The entirety of Aetherometry shows simply and clearly that nature thinks in numbers. Why is this? The numbers are real. An electron has a definite mass energy. OR energy has definite energy and frequency boundaries, as well as defined physical effects. Scientists have waged war on each other to ascertain whether the speed of light varies - and yet simple rotation, as shown by the Sagnac Experiment, can make it vary. Still, it is the most constant of measurements. Why? If people believe that the profound understanding provided by Aetherometry is 'wishful thinking' then they should most certainly stay with the bankrupt science of Relativity - but to choose to do so means that the doors of the cosmos, its intelligibility and perceptibility, will be forever barred - not just to human awareness, but to any intelligence, any reasoning and any reasoned sense on this planet. Of course, as thinkers, we see otherwise. In our view, it is impossible to be a thinker unless you are, in fact, capable of reading the senses of events, the senses of the forces that dominate them. Science has ceased doing this, but there was a time when Science and Philosophy both arose as grafts from the same trunk, concerned with the same 'play of forces'. All that mattered then was finding the sense of the forces and the constellation of forces in any given event, by following the trail of energy. Understanding one's perception was all that mattered if one was to act intelligently. Therefore the tasks of Science and Philosophy really are not so very different, even if they have pursued them with different means - up until now. Now, however, it is within our grasp - the means to pursue this project in a most novel way - straddling all these layers at once, for there is continuity and total contiguity between them. Their planes of composition are different, but they share the same consistency. It is only Capital's need for a division of labour that has artificially separated knowledge into knowledge of abstract signs that are not numbers and knowledge of numbers as a divorced science. We think that thinkers who have accepted this distinction with little questioning and much elaboration will one day no longer be amongst us, if we at last begin to move towards intelligence. If, on the other hand, we move further towards stupidity and a greater barbarism and decomposition of thought, they will inevitably multiply - ad nauseam.