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USAF Studies Teleportation
ArchAngel21x writes "Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation.
But scientists aren't so thrilled. The Air Force Research Lab's August 'Teleportation Physics Report', posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending."
classically, the random slashdot quote at the bottom of this article was "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
Dan Tedrick
Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation [...]
Please, this is an insult to Star Trek fans everywhere. The Star Trek vision, if anything, was about using science and technology to enhance people's lives. It was and is in no way about this pseudo-scientific nonsense. (BTW, "pseudo" in this context means "false, but masquerading as", NOT, "kinda" or "quasi".)
If anything, Star Trek fans would (and should) be appalled by this.
End of rant.
No, I am not suggesting some kind of bizarre conspiracy, just some 'front project' to cover up something that may involve new laser assault/defense systems, sonic weaponry, or new methods of fighter control mechanisms or something that might be really cool, really plausible or equally 'cool' yet disturbingly vile that they would rather not explain to the American public or Congress.
So, seeing that most of the nation, albiet only by a small fraction in the larger scheme of things, would fall for such crap, they decided to trot out that story. One, to be able to push it past such science-blind people as the majority of this nation and secondly to thumb their noses at the rest of us that would know and understand such a thing is bollox, yet are unfortunately unable to do anything significant about it...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I agree with you that it's a terrible, terrible waste of money and Bad Science.
However, the statement you lambasted,
"This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts"
is quite true, if a bit sensationalistic. I'm not certain, as you said, it shows "no understanding of science". It's a reasonable paraphrase of some of the assertions in Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is the backbone (along with Popper's ideas and some french folks' theories) of modern conceptions of science and how science changes.
Sometime somewhere someone really made a big mistake, and thus this research program was born. However crap it may be, though, it does show awareness of modern approaches to scientific change.
RD
I think some of the justification behind this research may be based on the fact that some researchers are starting to believe the brain is a quantum device. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
Quantum theory (at least mathematically) does allow for teleportation, and so capabilities such as "remote viewing" and so forth *might* be there. But who knows.
My criticism has more to do with the style of writing which borrows commonly used "catch words" that seem to be popular with marketing folks these days. Specifically I was referring to his use of "paradigm shifts" twice within two serial sentences. I am surprised we did not see the invocation of "world class" among other gems of marketspeak which I am loathe to include in this post.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
You've obviously never worked for the US Government as a contractor or employee. The government loves to request huge piles of documentation about all sorts of crazy things from contractors, who regularly just copy & paste from old documents, swap some names around, and replace the logos on the first page with logos of the relevant contractors and agencies. The thing is, much of this paperwork is huge, and these agencies have piles of the stuff printed and bound, on CD, on DVD, and on various government intranets -- so much of it that, in fact, nobody ever looks over it. So when silly nerds working on documentation get bored, they tend to stick some really stupid stuff in there, knowing damned well that nobody notices. It's just like the silly names that go into network protocols and such. Bored geeks looking for cheap thrills try to see what they can get away with.
On a related note, I was once working on a very serious project where I named all of the client systems after food - chicken, pizza, and taco, and named the server Megadoomer after an Invader Zim episode. I just about died trying not to fall over laughing when my coworkers would turn red with embarassment when discussing the network during meetings because they thought the names were terribly silly. But it was government work, so nobody cared enough to make me change anything.
Just to be clear - they funded a study into the general areas and applications of teleportation by a private individual/small company. Some of the conclusions seem a bit wacky, however, there is no evidence in this documentation that the recommendations are accepted or that this guy's conclusions are accepted.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military. However, with rather complicated topics like this, they should be hiring people with appropriate qualifications, and relying on a review of the research by qualified scientists before they do anything else with it. I assume they would do that before pouring millions a year into some of this stuff.
The point where I start becoming wary is the point where he starts saying things like this:
The debate among scientists and scientific philosophers is highly charged at times, and becomes acrimonious to the point where reputable skeptical scientists cease being impartial by refusing to examine the experimental data or theories, and they prefer to bypass rational discourse by engaging in ad hominem attacks and irrational "armchair" arguments.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions. If you can only bend a spoon with your mind when its your spoon and your on national TV, then I don't think you're really bending the spoon with your mind. Incredible claims require incredibly strong evidence to back them up. If this guy can repeat any of the results that the Chinese studies he mentions were able to produce (he says they were repeatable, but fail to say by whom - if they just said they were repeatable, that fails to rule out the most likely explanation of simple scientific fraud), then by all means, fund away.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff. And he thinks they should wait-and-see while D-Brane theory matures, but run full steam ahead with psychokinetic research.
He also seems to recommend that some of the most outrageous and least likely to pay off topics should be pursued the most vigorously, like "biological quantum teleportation", based on a single, unpublished paper in the arxiv.org online repository (i.e. a non-peer reviewed scientific publication with no credibility to speak of). Additionally, he recommends funding FTL communication based on entanglement, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the concept of group vs. phase velocity. Without at least an inkling of which direction to go, funding a million bucks a year of FTL communications research based on the irrelevant mechanism behind entanglement is useless.
So yes, this guy is a quack, but it looks like nobody is taking the recommendations seriously. Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)? Perhaps, but lots of small research projects happen and end up going nowhere, and like they say, it's sometimes worth pursuing a bit of cursory research in even unlikely areas to see if anything interesting gets turned up. In this case, it didn't pay off (and I doubt this guy will be doing any more studies for the Air Force).
back during the Cold War, there were a lot of Soviet programs in this sort of thing, and other pseudo-science fields.
you can find a lot by yahoo searching for Scalar Weapons which is a system suposedly developed in the 60s and 50s which the USSR can use to control the weather, and used to shoot down the Challenger space shuttle.
remote viewing in the CIA is something that's on the Discovery channel on cable all the time -- also shows about crop circles, UFOS, and "psychic profilers" solving murder mysteries
similar quackery was investigated by the Nazi scientists who were deeply into the occult and other "black arts" including the flat earth society and the hollow earthers (how do you reconcile those two groups? flat and hollow??)
In fact, a squad of Nazi troops took a super large cannon/gun out to an island in the middle of the ocean and tried shooting STRAIGHT UP trying to shoot across the "hollow earth" center to rain shells down on London. It didn't work.
If telekinesis, ESP, etc. were biologically possible, it would have been evolved by some creatures already. Imagine the incredible advantage a predator would have if it could read the mind of the prey and know that the prey was hiding behind a tree or that the prey was about to jog to the right or left. Or what if a predator (or prey) could telekinetically cause a stick to trip its opponent. Yet, no animal (or plant) seems to have such powers.
It is unlikely that humanity is unique in have some never-before evolved power. The more scientists study animals, the more they find that humans are not qualitatively different from other creatures, only quantitatively different. Other creatures can count, create tools, have emotions, participate in social structures, practice deception, be aware of what others might think or do, etc. We exhibit these properties to a greater degree than do animals, but we are not unique. (In fact if humans did have psychic power, they would have little need for social systems, tools, etc. because psychic power would let them snare prey/beings with lesser powers.)
Finally, we find no "physical" basis for psychic power. The four forces of gravity, eletromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force do not provide a basis for psychic power. It is unlikely that some magic biologically created material could manifest and manipulate some unknown fifth force without either biologists, chemists, or physicists becoming aware of it..
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Actually New Age and modern charsismatic evangelicalism have many of the same roots (basically they're the product of early post-modernism). Things like the veneration of subjective experience over objective facts - 'I can feel sense the spirits of the dead' is very close to 'I can feel the Holy Spirit in this room'. They're treating subjective feelings as objective facts.
Traditional evangelicalism is more like you describe. This was a product of the enlightemnent - everything must be proved/explained - so you'll find those kinds of christian more 'bookish' and generally reject experience as a means to understand anything.
Interesting society is still changing - I've been to churches where dogma is almost anatheama and everything is debated and reasoned out, and it's not uncommon for everyone to have a completely different opinion - my own feeling is that will be mainstream within 20 years (at the moment it's a few hundred 'emerging' churches), as society is
already a long way along that road - you can see it in slashdot between the 'QT might be true, you never know' and the 'this is bollocks' type of people, getting into arguments about how it's wrong to say anything is bollocks just based on solid scientific evidence...