Posted on 06/12/2005 7:27:56 PM PDT by betty boop
Who wrote that speech for JFK, if he said it at all.. Kennedy of course was a moron.. as was/is his brothers.. Even his "book" was ghost written.. Many quotes from JFK extant, all out the minds of his speech writers.. Did I say JFK was mentally challenged?..
"Crackpotius Wackimax": Quite possibly this characterization has been attached to quite a few thinkers in the course of human history; before it turned out that some of their "crackpot ideas" were actually correct.
Good one.
LOL!! A-G, Perhaps I am actually a "were-wacko"! I do notice a tendency of mine toward over-dramatization as the evening approaches midnight! '-) <chuckle... >
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Tipler is, in the main, right on target (re failings of the peer-review process). The problems with "peer"-reviewing are well-known and much-bemoaned.
My avocational field of research (archaeology/anthropology) is well-noted for the persistence of entrenched dogmatists in throwing up massive defense screens against those who challenge ideas that they, themselves have espoused and published. Egotistic hubris is, indeed, alive and well in academia! (For proof of the foregoing, just try to get the report of an American hemisphere pre-Clovis era archaeological site published!) <LOL>
OTOH, I also mentioned a second failing of "pseudoscientists": failure to produce results that can be reproduced by independent peer researchers. Although Pons & Fleischman come immediately to mind, the classic pseudoscientific "artful dodgers" are the "parapsychologists" -- who dismiss failure to reproduce their findings by blaming the "unbelieving attitude" of their peers...
BB, you asked for an example of pseudoscience from Bearden. How about this:
Dr. Andrija Puharich, for his rigorous scientific studies of psychokinesis, which then inspired other physical scientists such as Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ of SRI to perform such rigorous experiments. These experiments did demonstrate positive results under impeccable laboratory conditions, although the fundamental active mechanism involved has remained elusive and no convincing theoretical model has been forthcoming...
Nor has reproduction of the results of those experiments by "non-believers" been "forthcoming"... If the experiments were "impeccable" and "rigorous", why, then, are they irreproducible?
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The "Bravo Sierra!" referred to the immediately-preceding litany of "terms":
"New terms"? "Psychotronics", "metascience". "overunity", "negentropy", "psychokinesis", "superluminal communications" "forming negative resistors in storage batteries, thus dephasing the battery's internal ion current from the plate-to-external circuit electron current, and producing and demonstrating self-powering, open electrical systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium, using energy extracted from the vacuum"
(BTW, I am aware of the "action at a distance" implications of quantum entanglement -- but "superluminal communications" implies imposition of information on such a system -- which, AFAIK, is far from being demonstrated reproducibly.)
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To be 'charitable', "Retired as O-5 (LtCol)" is considered in the military as euphemistic for "passed over for promotion -- repeatedly"...
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BB, before you quoted him, I ws blissfully unaware of Bearden and his theories. It was the "woo-woo" (there's a pejorative term I learned just today) terminology that set off my "crackpot!" alarms re Bearden. To see if others happened to view him the same way, I Googled, "Bearden pseudoscience" -- and got 550 hits! Here are some of the more "charitable" ones:
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http://www.ka9q.net/crackpots/index.html
"Tom Bearden is one of the best known crackpots in the field of "free energy", the modern incarnation of the age-old futile quest for perpetual motion. Bearden has published an amazing amount of utter nonsense.""He is surrounded by a loyal band of cheering sycophants who go out of their way to threaten and silence their critics. This is rather ironic given their constant complaints that a vast conspiracy has successfully suppressed (and continues to suppress) all information about "free energy" because what it would do to established energy interests."
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Then, I found an entire webpage devoted to Bearden and his ilk. It is well worth reading:
http://www.phact.org/e/z/BeardenReview.htm
Tom Bearden - A Critical Examination of His Claims
As a poster on another forum commented, "Someone has already done the hard work for me". :-)
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Seriously, BB, I do regret my departure from charity in my preceding rant! OTOH, it seems that, WRT Bearden, at least, I have plenty of company.
Why was I so vehement? To paraphrase one of my earlier comments,
"Neither the Creator nor Science are well-served by having liars and charlatans as supporters."
To extend that logic, IMO, those of us who wish to have rational discussions of Science, etc. would be well-served to avoid bolstering our efforts by citing those same liars and charlatans.
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Thank you, dear betty boop and Alamo-Girl, for all the energy, and (dare I say it?) prayerful thought, you put into these threads!!!
I can't help but wonder if the author of your most thought-provoking post considered this comment by One whose Words are recorded as:
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit."
John 3:6 (KJV)
when choosing the title (and premise) of the article?
You do realize that the Armed Services work on the Peters Principle don't you?.. Promoted until you've reached you're ultimate level of incompetence.. as does any corporation..
LOLOLOL! It hasn't dawned on him ... yet. And you know how I treasure everything you write, dear sister in Christ!
Also, it seems to me there are a number of disciplines which must begin with thought experiments and mathematical models because empirical tests of the theories cannot be made until the technology 'catches up'. Relativity, geometric physics, theoretical and mathematical physics are examples. Some theories - e.g. physical cosmologies - may always be beyond observation and testing.
Even now, the Higgs boson/field is deduced from the Standard Model but has never been made or observed.
I find the quote ironical.
Since 1959, it has been known in quantum mechanics that the EM force fields are not primary agents at all. We know that classical EM theory is completely wrong on this. QM shows that it’s the potentials that are primary, not the force fields. In fact, it can be shown that the E-field and the B-field do not exist as such in vacuum; only the potential for the E-field and the B-field exist in vacuum. Feynman pointed that out, but nearly all of his modern cohorts seem not to have recognized that fact. Indeed, vacuum is just a conglomerate of potentials, nothing more, nothing less [shades of Plato’s Chora here!!!]. And if you look carefully at the definitions of force and E-field, you see immediately that (1) force (nonrelativistic case) consists of mass times acceleration. Therefore a force consists of an accelerated mass. And electric force consists of an accelerated charged mass, normalized for a unit. But it really isn’t treated that way in the EM theory, where it continues to [be] erroneously considered to exist as a force field in the vacuum. At least you’ve got to use the adjectives “virtual” and “observable” to differentiate vacuum things from material things. One can correctly state that a virtual electric force field exists in vacuum, comprised of accelerated virtual masses, but not an observable force field. The observable electric force field requires, and consists of, accelerated charged particles. And the only place observable particles exist are in a physical medium, of a collection of one or more observable particles in space….Then the interviewer asks Bearden if he could give “a more concrete example of the missing half of the energy?” [I’m not sure whether the “missing energy” is the same thing as the “trapped energy.” I’ll assume that for now, for the sake of entertaining B.’s proposal.] And Bearden gives the example of a voltmeter, which he then proceeds to analyze:…the present vector analysis (as applied to electromagnetics) discards the internal, trapped energy of local spacetime [terminology flag!!!]. Now if the internal trapped energy of spacetime varies from place to place, that is called a curved spacetime, relativistically speaking. And when a spacetime is curved, there is communication of energy between the internal, infolded virtual EM energy state [shades of string theory here….] and the external, translating, observable EM energy state. Curved one way, the local spacetime is a sink, with energy pouring into it continually, and disappearing from observation of the external state. Curved the other way, the local spacetime is a source, with energy pouring out of it continually, and appearing in observation in the external state…. What the present vector system of EM does, therefore, is throw out the ability to use the very strong EM force as an agent to curve local spacetime. The very mathematics itself, a priori, assumes and guarantees a locally flat spacetime….
So the present EM theory throws away exactly half of the energetics of the system involved.
The voltmeter is measuring the energetics of its own internal change; it is not at all measuring anything external. All instruments measure only their own internal change. We infer the external thing that interacted with the instrument to cause the internal change.That’ll sure give us something to think about! But he then goes on to explain thusly:
The needle moved because conduction electrons accelerated away from the [voltmeter’s] interaction area. This current flowed into a coil and produced a force on the needle movement, rotating the needle against a spring. At the same time, another current — a time-reversed, phase-conjugate current — was induced in the atomic nuclei of the atoms in the interaction area. This “inner current” flowed … through the atomic nuclei of the instrument, producing an equal and opposite force. (This is the mechanism that produces Newton’s third law … as suspected by Feynman)…. So the entire body mass of the meter recoiled slightly from an equal and opposite force, which we just loosely refer to — and recognize as — Newton’s reaction force. It’s there, it’s real, but we completely neglect it…. So exactly as much energy was produced in the “reaction force” energetics as was produced in the “external meter needle force” part of the interaction. We only measured and accounted for half the true energy of the interaction, or else you’ve got to discard Newton’s third law.”To “sum up” this section (as B. puts it): “All detection is actually binary, it’s not singular at all. When we detect photons or EM waves, we normally account for only the externalized translation part of the energetics of the interaction. We miss or neglect the internalized translation part, and we miss or neglect precisely as much internal energy as we account for externally. Again, I’m not the first one to point this out by any means…. Precisely as much EM energy went into the inner system as went into the outer system. But we normally only measure and account for the external energy, and ignore the energy in the internal channel.”
So, is Bearden a charlatan? All I really have to go on is this text, for now at least.
Still, I’m pleased by his openness to “scalar-potential” issues — which seem to involve deep questions regarding the geometry (or dimensionality) of the universe. The physical universe today is variously described in terms of classical Newtonian, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics models: IOW, in terms of the world of the very, very large (relativity), the world of the unimaginably small (QM), and the “in-between” reality in which we humans live as we ordinarily perceive it (Newtonian physics). It seems to me there must be something more fundamental that can tie all these truthful takes on reality into one single coherent, logical, dynamic whole — a fundamental, integrating Unity. That is really the problem that interests me.
The five senses ordinarily deal with four dimensions only. Yet these days science seems to be telling us that more than a 4D construct — the one to which we are all habituated — is needed to explain our world. But then again, Judeo-Christian theology and classical Greek metaphysics both have proclaimed this spiritual insight from Day One.
Perhaps such habituation to 4D perception may have operated as a criterion of (successful) natural selection in the past. If so, is such a “model” sufficient to the (environmental and other) challenges the human race faces in our own day?
Anyhoot, I really did enjoy what Bearden had to say, whether he is ultimately to be shown a charlatan or not! However, in no case do I expect to be donning a saffron robe, or taking up the rice bowl, in his name any time soon. I just enjoy hearing what people think. And Bearden strikes me as an unusually interesting thinker.
Must sign off for now. You’re so very sweet, gracious, and kind to my dear sister and me, TXnMA. May God ever bless you!
So what kind of paranormal stuff does Bearden investigate? He must be failing to get enough results to overcome the vigorish at the casinos.
It's easier to move a solid object from one point to the other using UPS than using ESP.
After re-reading the article (after some months), it seems like a typical postmoderndeconstructionist rant against science that is common in places like Bryn Mawr, Smith, or Radcliff. One need only replace the terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinist" with "Linear Western Thinking" or "European Thinker" to get identical results that I saw about 50 years in academia. Needless to say, much of this type of thing has migrated from the History Departments to the Feminist Departments.
Wish I would/could have said that.. but reading Bearden made my head hurt.. Thanks..
Bearden's thoughts bring to mind a difference in worldviews we've often observed. Space is created as the universe expands - and fields occupy all points in space/time.
Thus some (I am one) see the expansion (dynamics) of space/time (geometry) causing energy/matter to exist. Conversely, others (likely Bearden) see the energy/matter causing space to expand (i.e. exist).
It was Einstein's dream to transform the “base wood of matter into the pure marble of geometry.”
But I believe the physical causation is also important. If it is space/time - then Bearden's theory does not hold per se although extra-dimensionality would.
If it is energy/matter then the extra dimension theories would not be very important (as long as the Higgs is found that is)
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