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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."
Initially I thought this may have some relevance to encryption as there is a phenomenon of quantum teleportation that appears to have some scientific validity and would have significance in military and strategic planning and communication. However, when I actually started reading the article, at first I could not stop laughing until I reached this part:
.pdf :An experimental program similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program should be funded at $900,000 - 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration.
From the linked
What!!!!!???? I am thunderstruck that this recommendation could be made. 1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon. By the way, the CIA's program was ill conceived and full of it back then too amounting to a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
Other conclusions in the document are: "We will need a physics theory of consciousness and psychotronics, along with more experimental data, in order to test the hypothesis in Section 5.1.1 and discover the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter." What can I say? The status of basic science education among those who make funding decisions within certain areas of government are pitiful.
Even worse is this statement: "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! " which has got to be the work of someone with a marketing background and absolutely no self respect in the scientific community. A document like this would be laughed out of the NIH or any other respectable scientific funding agency, but the scary thing is funding like this has always been able to go forward under the guise of military funding in crisis situations where fear abounds. Combine that with no understanding of science and this is what you get. If any of my students came up with something like this, I think I would cry.
Hey, if the Air Force wants out of the box thinkers, I can come up with all sorts of biomemetic and bioencryption stuff for 1.5 Million that would be based in scientific fact with reliable peer review science behind it.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
In a country in which a substantially larger portion of the population believes in the Virgin Birth than in evolution through natural selection, and which has just this week demonstrated that majority, why should anyone be surprised?
While highly implausible, the whole idea of science is to discover things that one wouldn't expect. If soundly gathered evidence suggests psychic powers or teleportation is real, then we should investigate it. If the facts fit, then no matter how much someone might not desire to accept an explanation (whether it be for or against any phenomena), it is most likely the truth.
classically, the random slashdot quote at the bottom of this article was "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
Dan Tedrick
With the current, rather theocratic US administration, I'm surprised they don't try training field medics in faith healing...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If someone gave me money to study "psychic teleportation", I'd be like "Thank you, Allah!" and immediately begin researching liquor and hookers.
"Guys, you're not gonna believe this! Last night, I as at this strip club, I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was face down in the gutter a few blocks away!"
[o]_O
Stephen King wrote a nice short story about teleportation called The Jaunt. I'm not much of a King fan, but the story is very good. In The Jaunt people can teleport between different locations, but they have to be put to sleep first, otherwise something very bad happens. Most of the story is from the perspective of a father telling his family, all of whom are about to go "Jaunting", about the history of how it was invented and its side effects. Very interesting read.
Just pay me a few million, and I'll do whatever research into fantasy physics that they want. I'll even throw in a few Powerpoint presentations for good measure.
If the choice is between spending billions on reserching quackery in the military, or spending the same money on bringing US education up to decent levels, I think the education would be money better spent. We might even end up with politicians who know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland.
But if they're determined to throw money away on absurdity, then the least they can do is throw some of it in my direction. I think I could find better uses for it than anyone the USAF could hire from the Psychic Hotline.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
This is just the cover story. The money is really being funneled into the Stargate program.
Maj. Ed Dames' astral body may come kick you in the nuts.
The Air Force did NOT pay to study this. They commissioned a study and one of the recommendations was this, and they have already stated it will not be funded. Hurray for illiteracy!
Has to be a joke. Read the PDF. The name of the sub-contractor is "Warp Drive" and the end of the document contains discussions of "negative energy" and all kinds of totally bogus junk that looks like it was culled from a Star Trek script.
Seriously, this is some fan-boy trying to rile up the millitary conspiracy theorists (and apparently doing quite well).
Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
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 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.
I'm quite frankly tired of the hypocrisy I see on ./. On the one hand you accuse the christian right of being bigoted or closed minded while in the same breath demonstrate how close minded and bigoted you are.
Want to see who you are complaining about? Look in the mirror.
Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery, not a religion like some of you make it out to be.
Is aids research a waste of money because no cure has been found yet? Are all studies that reach a dead end a waste of money or do they provide us with valuable insight?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
8 million that MIGHT have a radical payoff is a bargain.
Psychic Research is probably about the only way they're ever going to find Bin Laden anyway.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
In the report, author Eric Davis says psychic teleportation, moving yourself from location to location through mind powers, is "quite real and can be controlled."
Yeah. It's called 'walking.' Or am I looking at it totally wrong?
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
Some would say that there really is not such thing is chaos in the universe. But rather, the notion of chaos is nothing more then order beyond comprehension. That said, maybe consciousness has some form of predictable order to it and thus we really don't have free will. If this is the case, the being psychic is nothing more then a higher level of thought for the sub-conscious process more of the chaos around us.
;)
Just a thought
Life is not for the lazy.
It's a good thing you're humble, because you're wrong.
Total determinism was an ancient dream of science that proved wrong. Einstein was the last of the "titans" to believe in it. The quantum physics guys demolished that dream.
At the quantum level, everything is a probability. It's just that things play out in such a way that, at a macro level, the Universe appears to be deterministic. But that's just an emergent property of a probabilistical foundation.
But i agree with you that psychic phenomena should not be rejected outright, based on present day's scientific dogma.
Well, the section on wormholes is 90% kosher. He even goes so far as to calculate the amount of exotic matter needed to create such a wormhole, and seems to have read most of Visser's (excellent) book on the physics of them.
It might have helped had the authors of this report read the rest of Visser, however. Such as the calculations showing that exotic matter is intrinsically quantum-mechanically unstable, to the extent that such a wormhole will collapse within a time strictly less than the time it takes for a light signal to get through said wormhole.
Which is good, because teleportation by wormhole lets information travel faster than light and is therefore equivalent to building a time machine.
I really hope that we don't have our government funding research into time machines. Because then this is going to start sounding like a very bad movie plot.
Actually, as I understand it, spiders have fast nerve signaling - fast enough that their reactions are faster than your perception, so they look prescient.
;) I see most of my movies on the airplane. But I do find that reality is often much stranger than fiction, that scientists discover stuff that is more outrageous that anything Hollywood can dream up.
Very good point, many creatures do have "super-human" senses. The spider nerves are a great quantitative tweak on neuronal engineering - bigger diameter axons carry signals faster and the small size of spiders means the latencies are extremely low.
Other creatures have abilities that seem near-psychic but are not when you study the creature further. Cockroaches have sensitive hairs on their tails that pick up the air pressure wave that precedes any subsonic moving object. Because the pressure wave travels at about 700 miles per hour (the speed of sound), the cockroach feels the swatter approaching long before it reaches the roach. As a double advantage the hairs are wired directly to the legs so the roach flees the instant something starts moving its way without "thinking."
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Electric fish use an active electric field to map their surroundings in muddy water. Dolphins and bats use ultrasound. Mantis shrimp see 6 color bands and 4 polarizations. Pit vipers see far IR. Etc. All of these amazing examples rely on well know physics to let the animal sense what a human cannot.
Geez, don't you ever get out to the movies?
Unfortunately no!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It looks like Warp Drive Metrics has succeeded in teleporting $25,000 into their bank account from the taxpayers wallets; we shall see if future expirements are as successful.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I don't get it, if they manage to discover how teleportation works, they will lose their jobs, as G. W. B. wont need airplanes anymore to bomb whoever he wants...
(And I say this as an Electrical Engineer). Established, respected experts in a field are among the most reluctant to consider radically new ideas. Major shifts in science have occurred when some young oddball found a new way to look at an old problem, or an outsider to the field found a new link that was never considered before. Consider the significant (albeit slow) revolution in medicine that is increasingly acknowledging the mind/body connection. Placebo treatments that actually have physiological healing effects; patients that exert conscious control over the failing processes in their bodies.
Now I'm not saying that necessarily this teleportation stuff has any merit. I just want to point out that if you're quick to say "what crap" then you might have fallen into the trap that leads minds to stagnate; that is, to believe that existing human knowledge is complete.
If there's one thing we can bet on, it's that human knowledge is far from complete and we are far from understanding the true nature of things. We are naive creatures with limited understandings of things. Perhaps the military is more willing to gamble funding in new directions, because unlike academics their main goal isn't to protect their researching asses for the rest of their lives. Their goal is to develop new tools that the enemy doesn't have.
Eighty-three percent of American adults believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus Christ
I resent the fact that you imply my beliefs are backwards and illogical. I think it makes perfect sense to believe that Jesus Christ was a virgin when he was born.
STOP MOCKING ME!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
As a successful businessman who has handled many ticklish employee issues, let me explain how you should actually deal with this.
First, you fire them using the normal politically correct "here are your final paychecks, and the Human Resources department's collective foot in your collective asses" procedure.
But you inform them that if they can teleport back in, they can have their jobs back.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Why do Americans always assume the rest of the world goes by their standards?
The human visual system, as we Europeans all know very well, runs on 50 Hz here. But this is more than well compensated for by our higher count of rods and staffs.