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The 11/20/01 issue of EOS (p. 566) quotes you as saying the role of science, ... "has never been more clearly in the national interest. I assume you agree it is in the national interest to investigate possible misuse of NSF funds via its grant 9413208 to Los Alamos for the operation of the LANL eprint archive. In particular, since the NSF and LANL, which is one of the University of California's three national laboratories, are all EEOC employers, it follows that their staffs' professional activities should be conducted without prejudice or discrimination toward fellow American scientists, without regard to the latter's race or religious persuasion — or to the unpopularity of their conclusions, or to how much a scientist's results may challenge existing theories. Thus, I assume you, and others in leadership positions in these organizations, would also agree it is in the national interest to investigate evidence showing the archive's staff have violated their own operating protocol in suppressing the release of scientific results that challenge or overturn existing theories.
Attorney John Threadgill's fax to you and others on 7/27/01 described how my attempt to post ten (of twelve) articles on time archive on 2/28/01 was thwarted by the archive's staff, and again on 3/5/01, the latter event being accompanied by my password being removed. I hoped Attorney Threadgill's documentation of the archive's discriminatory action in doing this would result in its restoration. However, on 8/27/01, LANL's designated Attorney, Christine Chandler, responded this would not occur, saying there was no discrimination. Subsequently Congressman Roscoe Bartlett of the 6th District, Maryland, who is Chairman of the Energy Subcommittee of the Science Committee in the U. S. House of Representatives, visited Los Alamos and spoke personally with Ms. Chandler in my behalf. Again I expected my password would be restored. However months have passed without any action from LANL. I now assume the status quo will continue unless I go to Court — which would pit me, a lone researcher, against the federal bureaucracy — or unless you now choose to intervene in my behalf. Now listed are the reasons why I think your intervention is justified.
• Consider first archive's web site (http://www.lanl.gov/misc/disclaimer.html), which contains its,
Disclaimer of Endorsement: The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or the University of California, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes."
The above is a two-edged sword. On one hand it absolves LANL itself and the University of California, the NSF and the U. S. Government, from any involvement with, or responsibility for, the conclusions stated in any articles that are posted on the archive. But neither are there any restrictions as to how often a researcher can post on the archive, nor any constraints on the number of articles he can post at any given time. Thus there is no way the archive staff could legitimately refuse to post my papers based on their content — assuming of course they were truly scientifically-based articles — nor any legitimate basis on which they should act to prevent my posting several papers at once, if I deemed this was the most effective way to communicate my results. On the other band, the archive staff can violate the provisions of this Disclaimer anytime they choose to do so. And this the did both in preventing the release of my ten articles on 2/28/01, and the subsequent removal of my password. On 6/18/01 LANL's Christine Chandler claimed, in a letter written to Attorney Threadgill, that,
"The archive has had a long-standing requirement that complete works be posted as one submission. Multiple pieces are not permitted principally because the archive requires self-contained, comprehensive research articles."
Here we should remember that Ms. Chandler is writing as an Attorney who is representing LANL's best legal interests. As such she is obligated to follow the written law, for it is the written law, not private evasions of it, not substitutes for it, that must be used to answer my charge that LANL's archive staff have unjustly discriminated against me both in removing my password and in their refusal to restore it. But clearly Ms. Chandler has not followed the law — which in this case are the provisions of the LANL archives own Disclaimer of Endorsement. Instead she has allowed herself to he induced to throw an apparent legal umbrella over the archive staff's claim that the "archive has had a long-standing requirement that complete works be posted as one submission," and "Multiple pieces are not permitted principally because the archive requires self-contained, comprehensive research articles." Such claims are spurious. They are nothing more than artifacts resulting from the archive staff's private meetings with each other. This is why Ms. Chandler makes no attempt to reference any of the LANL archive's written regulations to justify such claims. Moreover, not only are they nowhere to be found in the Disclaimer of Endorsement, they also directly contradict and violate the essence of its provisions.
• Another instance wherein Ms. Chandler again allowed the archive staff to effectively act in this manner is evident in a closely related statement made in her 6/18/01 letter to Attorney Threadgill — namely:
"... Mr. Gentry ... must obtain an organizational affiliation such as an accredited university or recognized research organization that will sponsor the work by accepting affiliation with the submission. ... The requirement of a legitimate organizational affiliation is a minimal check on scientific quality."
The mandate that I "... must obtain affiliation such as an accredited university or recognized research organization..." implies Ms. Chandler is stating a factual provision of the archive's operating protocol. But a search of the archive's web site reveals that, as of 12/28/01, there are no requirements about scientists having to acquire these qualifications. Indeed, if Ms. Chandler had confined her remarks to the archive staff's exact practice she would have saved herself the embarrassment of stating claims that are again outside the law. Truth sometimes lies close to error and this is one of them.
What the archive occasionally does is to transmit the following email to prospective authors having either public access providers, or research employers that are not big name employers:
"Ordinarily we require an appropriate institutional affiliation, so if you are trying to register from a public access provider, please use instead (for example) your university account. If you are trying to register from an e-mail account with a research employer that officially sponsors your work, then please send a message to www-admin@arXiv.org with brief information on that employer (including a pointer to that employer's web pages)." If you have no suitable institutional affiliation, then please find someone with such an affiliation to sponsor your activities.
The above shows the archive staff do provide for granting a password to authors who have genuine scientific qualifications, irrespective of their affiliations. As to be shortly discussed, their investigation proved I had the necessary qualifications, and the LANL archive staff duly provided me with an authorized password two years prior to my attempted posting of ten of my twelve papers on 2/28/01. Obviously, then, this proves that, in the eyes of the LANL archive staff, my employer, The Orion Foundation, did qualify as "an appropriate institutional affiliation" for two years before they deleted my password. This factual evidence exposes the spurious nature of Ms. Chandler's claim that I must now acquire another "organizational affiliation" before my password can he restored. Further, in stating this as a requirement she has unwittingly exposed a tremendous bias with respect to what type of research is funded by the government.
Specifically, the reason I am with a small research organization with very minimal financial resources, one that does not have NSF or other government funding, is because my discoveries challenge the basic premises of both the evolution of the cosmos and the evolution of the earth. And to most scientists this is just not to be tolerated, and peer reviews of grants for such research are always negative. For instance, decades ago, after I had discovered evidence for earth's rapid creation — evidence which contradicts the evolutionary origin and history of the earth, and which was repeatedly published in Science and Nature, to name just two of the journals where I published my results — the request for continuation of my immodest NSF grant was denied by evolutionary geologists who opposed my work, and who were determined to cut off further NSF funding for my research. And they succeeded.
Thus I find it somewhat hypocritical that the archive staff would now attempt to impose an "organizational affiliation" barrier to my posting articles on the archive when, in fact, I would long ago have continued to enjoy the same type of prestigious laboratory affiliation and government funding as they have enjoyed for many decades, if they had not formed a tightly closed community to prevent funds from going to challengers such as myself.
• The above focuses attention on the underlying reason why the archive staff removed my password, and why they continue to oppose its restoration.
More specifically, it is here that Ms. Chandler's apparent legal umbrella begins to fold under its own weight. In her 6/18/01 letter to Attorney Threadgill she states:
"The archive is also concerned about situations where an author may dominate the daily new listings and e-mail announcements.
Here the truth finally comes out. It stands out prominently when noticing the blatant contradictions that exist in this pronouncement. For example, Ms. Chandler makes it appear that in posting my papers I would be using the archive in a way that was not intended, or in a way that other scientists would disavow. The fact is, just the opposite is true. In particular, astrophysicists who have new and exciting discoveries to report from their use of the Hubble Spase Telescope, or other high-tech astronomical instruments, routinely take advantage of the archive's rapid transmission capabilities to alert the worldwide astrophysical community of their results, while knowing full well that the media is daily scrutinizing the archive's new listings for scoops. Thus media interviews frequently follow such postings, and the researchers who reported the discoveries are often immediately limelighted in the dally press and in the breaking-news sections of widely-read scientific journals. And they are also handsomely rewarded by their peers recommending they receive even more government funding.
Thus Ms. Chandler's appraisal of my attempts to post something extraordinary makes it crystal clear that the archive staff were determined not to let me have the same opportunity granted to other researchers and authors. Why the big difference? It is mow quite plaln that the archive staff — initially just one of them — became quite agitated about the main title of my articles — Flaws in the Big Bang Point To GENESIS, A New Millennium Model Of the Cosmos. It was, and still is, a most evocative title, and would undoubtedly have caught the attention of the media, if my ten papers had been successfully posted on 2/28/01.
• Thus we seek additional answers to the fundamental issue of whether the archive staff followed their own operating protocol in denying the release of my articles on that date, or instead violated that protocol in doing so.
In particular we turn attention to LANL's web site (http://www.lanl.gov/misc/disclaimer.html)and its,
Policy Statement: The Los Alamos National Laboratory strongly supports academic freedom and a researcher's right to publish; therefore, the Laboratory as an institution does not endorse the viewpoint of a publication or guarantee its technical correctness.
It is most significant, I believe, that neither in her 6/18/01 letter, nor in her later 8/27/01 letter to Attorney Threadgill, does Ms. Chandler refer to the archive's Policy Statement on academic freedom and the right of researchers to publish on the archive. To me there is an obvious reason why she evades mention of this fundamental right. Taking the above at face value there is absolutely no reason why archive staff should have removed my password, nor any justifiable reason why they should continue to oppose restoring it to me because, as can be clearly seen, they claim to strongly support academic freedom and a researcher's right to publish, which in this context obviously means the right to publish on the archive.
Indeed, proof that the provisions of this Policy Statement do apply to me comes from the fact that I most certainly do qualify as a researcher because: (i) of twenty publications in refereed scientific journals, (ii) 13 year-long Guest Scientist tenure in the Chemistry Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, (iii) decades-long memberships in the AAAS, NYAS, AGU, APS and Sigma Xi. (iv) many-year listings in Who's Who in America and Who's Who In Science and Engineering, (v) posting of papers on astrophysics, general relativity amid cosmology on the LANL archive in 1998, and very shortly (vi) the submission of a contributed paper abstract titled, Flaws in the Big Bang Point To GENESIS, A New Millennium Model of the Cosmos, which I plan to present at the American Physical Society's April 20-23, 2002 meeting in Alburquerque. (Perhaps members of the Los Alamos archive staff will be there to hear what I have to say about their suppression and censorship of my articles.)
Indeed, the fact that my three earlier papers on cosmology and general relativity were accepted for posting on the LANL archive in 1998, and have remained there, proves unequivocally that the LANL archive staff recognise that I fulfill their criteria as a researcher, and thus am qualified to post my results in keeping with their presumed commitment of strong support of academic freedom. Further confirmation they had classified me as a bona fide researcher prior to renmoval of my papers comes first from the fact that in early 1999 the archive provided me with an authorized password, xzq3rr, in conjunction with an earlier .com email address, and secondly from their transfer of that same password to my rvgentry@orionfdn.org email address in February 2001. I requested this change so as to clearly identify my forthcoming listings on the archive with my research employer, The Orion Foundation, by whom I have been employed since 1997. In fact my 1997 article in Modern Physics Letters A (MPLA 12, 2929 (1997)), and the three papers I posted on the LANL archive in 1998, all carry The Orion Foundation affiliation.)
Summary
• Ms. Chandler's 6/18/01 letter to Attorney Threadgill closes with the following:
1. You [Attorney Threadgill] have also requested that Mr. Gentry's password be re-activated. The archive will do so upon satisfaction of the two noted requirements and upon receipt of assurances from Mr. Gentry that he will in the future comply with its posting requirements.
Contrary to the implications of the above statements, the contents of this fax have provided factual evidence showing that I did comply with the archive's posting requirements as stated on the LANL web site, in posting my articles on 2/28/01. Moreover I intend to continue to comply with those stated posting requirements in future postings. And on that basis my password should be immediately re-activated. What I do not intend to do is bow the knee to the archive staff's unjust demands, which are in violation of their own operating protocol. What is most surprising to me is that Ms. Chrandler, being a lawyer, would allow herself to be induced to state the above an as apparent fact, when in actuality it is nothing more than what the archive personnel have invented to prevent restoration of my password.
2. In your letter you [Attorney Threadgill] suggest that the basis for the paper rejection is based on discriminatory motives, but provide no supporting law or facts. Our review of this matter supports no such inference. However, if you believe that you have such information, we would be happy to consider it.
This fax documents that Ms. Chandler needs only to review her own actions and correspondence to find the consideration she seeks. If this situation does go to Court, then she, LANL, and its administrative identity with the University of California — as well as Cornell University, if the archive is transferred there — might well expect that the archive's foregoing claims, as legally documented by her statements, would there be starkly contrasted with the provisions of the archive's Disclaimer of Endorsement and Policy Statement.
• Consider now the rasion de'tre for the LANL archive's actions in blatantly violating academic freedom in preventing release of my articles.
The archive staff's opposition is rooted in the fact that the big bang model has not only come to be a scientific icon to the scientific community, it has also assumed enormous proportions as a cultural icon to the nonscientific public. It's one thing for the big bang to be discussed negatively in sermons by fundamentalist preachers. Big bang followers chuckle in their sleep about this. But my ten papers (actually twelve now) are scientifically based, and they claim to do what no other scientific reports have ever previously done, which is to identify several fatal flaws that I have discovered in its basic postulates. Moreover, to add insult to big bang's injury, these papers document a new model of the cosmos, one that agrees with the Genesis record of creation.
If my discoveries are correct, then we are on the verge of scientific revolution in our understanding of the cosmos. Obviously the only way to determine whether this is true is to determine whether these discoveries can withstand the scrutiny of the scientific community.
Clearly, they must come before the scientific community in the best way for rapid, uncensored, back-and-forth exchanges to take place. This is exactly what the archive has admirably done in all fields of science until 2/28/01. On that date censorship kicked in, and is still in force in blocking the release of my discoveries to the scientific community.
But what is the real underlying element that prevents their release? This is the crucial unanswered question. This fax has shown the reasons stated in Ms. Chandler's letters are at best ill-devised smoke screens. Here is what I think is actually going on behind the scenes.
If the archive staff had perceived that my papers were poorly written and filled with nonsensical arguments, they would gladly have posted them, knowing they would easily be shot down and highly ridiculed for years to come. In that case they would have received plaudits from their peers worldwide for arranging matters so that the big bang model would again have shown its superiority over the best that an acknowledged creation scientist — meaning myself — could muster. But they didn't do this. Instead they did the opposite and stonewalled the papers. But why? To me it is now abundantly evident the problem is fear.
Indeed, the archive staff's actions are consistent with a fear that my discoveries are genuine. They are painfully worried the the whole framework of modern cosmology could soon collapse. But experience has taught me the vast majority of researchers in this field — and the archive staff are an integral part of the enterprise — cannot tolerate even the possibility of such a revolution. It would mean that eminent reputations, careers, academic and professional standings — plus long-time government funding for their research projects on the big bang — would all be called into question, or completely unravel. All the evidence points to this as the real reason why they decided to squelch the papers, and since then to fabricate arguments designed to retroactively provide a semblance of apparent legal justification for their actions. It is just the opposite of the guarantee of academic freedom given in the Policy Statement.
What is not generally known is that the scientific community operates in a self-protecting mode. The actions of the archive staff are a preeminent example of how it treats dissent to its scientific icons, legitimate dissent that it cannot overthrow, refute, or disprove.
One final thought. In the 1970s one U. S. President allowed himself to get involved with a seemingly innocuous cover-up to prevent the release of details he considered would be too embarrassing to come to public attention. It unraveled to become the crime of the century.
I trust the above summation is sufficient for you to intervene in my behalf. Please feel free to contact me if additional information is desired.
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| cc: | Dr. John Browne, Director, LANL; Frank Dickson, Lead Counsel, LANL; Christine Chandler, Attorney, LANL; Dr. Richard Atkinson, President, University of California; Dr. Hunter Ripley Rawlings, III, President, Cornell University; Dr. Peter Lepage, Chairman, Cornell University Physics Dept.; Spencer Abraham, Secretary, Department of Energy; Dr. John Marburger III, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy; U. S. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland) and John Duncan, Jr. (Tennessee) |
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