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Nobel Prize Winner Says DNA Performs Quantum Teleportation
HJED writes "TechWorld is reporting that the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008, Luc Montagnier, is claiming that DNA can send 'electromagnetic imprints' of itself into distant cells and fluids which can then be used by enzymes to create copies of the original DNA. This would be equivalent to quantum teleportation. You can read the original paper here [PDF]."
I am no geneticist, biophysicist, or organic chemist, but...this sounds wacky, even by Nobel laureate (who tend to go for the fringe ideas after they win) standards.
God sent his seed into Mary via Quantum Teleportation! That's how Jesus came to be! But don't give in to Quantum Temptation...or you'll end up in Hell!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Winning a Nobel Prize does not give you a lifetime immunity from saying anything idiotic. It doesn't even prevent you from putting idiotic things into the arxiv. One might think there were a negative correlation between being smart enough to win a prize and stupid enough to say something idiotic in public, but the data suggests otherwise. Winning the Nobel seems to give some of these guys the confidence they need to make complete asses of themselves.
I am a particle physicist, and needless to say, the theory proposed in this paper is laughably stupid. The authors have no understanding of quantum field theory, and their observations are a sad combination of wishful thinking and poor experimental design.
From the freaking paper: "Some bacterial and viral DNA sequences have been found to induce low frequency electromagnetic waves in high aqueous dilutions. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency. We discuss this phenomenon in the framework of quantum field theory."
/rantover
In other words, scientists observed something that makes them say "hmm... that's strange," which leads them to say "hmm... I wonder what could be causing this?" These researchers tried to explain the phenomenon using the best tools that they thought that had: quantum mechanics. (classical EM theory is pretty useless for fields this weak) The linked article is behind a wall, but the title seems to start with "Scorn over claim of teleported DNA"
Again from the paper: "In this paper we have described the experiments showing a new property of DNA and the induction of electromagnetic waves in water dilutions. We have briefly depicted the theoretical scheme which can explain qualitatively the features observed in these experiments." Crazy observed phenomenon explained by theories that aren't fully accurate? No way!
The current scientific media seems to increasingly favor sensationalist titles that enable their readers to go "hah, those stupid eggheads, I know better than them that X/Y/Z is impossible! I are smarts!" and this seems to be no different. There is not, has not, and likely will not, be any claims that DNA teleports. However, there has been, is, and likely will be, evidence that DNA interacts with factors beyond easy and simple comprehension. These interactions seem to resemble "phase-locking regime[s]" observed in "two superconducting samples or in the arrays of Josephson junctions," which is pretty far from quack science.
Signatures are the new names.
Quite honestly, I don't possess the science background to really critique the paper and have to rely on the man's credentials to find this believable.
I do have the background. It is unbelievable. Even IgNobel Prize winners are laughing at this.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
they figure out a way to connect my WiFi to my DNA so I can use my body to connect to the internet and stop paying these ridiculous 3G prices.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
"Honest! My DNA teleported into her. I never touched her. I swear it."
I am anarch of all I survey.
My background is strictly biology, so a lot of the physics stuff goes over my head, but I can decipher the sciencey jargon well enough to read the paper. Anyway, here's what they saw:
bacterial DNA in tube 1 -> water tube surrounded by 7hz field -> tube 2 containing PCR ingredients minus template -> recovery of bacterial DNA sequence from tube 2
The explanation, as you may have guessed, is super complicated. It involves the hypothetical creation of so-called water nanostructures (water memory anyone?), but apparently the ~7hz field is important and recapitulated in the math somehow that's opaque to me.
So that's the paper for dummies, so to speak. If anyone can elaborate or correct in simple terms I'd be happy to read it; this is cool stuff.
If this is true, then medical quacks and new age groups are going to have a field day using this as the justification for everything mystical and magical. I bet they will make a lotaf money by quoting this Nobel Laureate.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
The paper is in Arxiv, and has not been peer-reviewed. They refer to Craig Venter as "G. Vinter." I won't hold my breath until these results are replicated by third parties.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
And you think that spamming this 3 or 4 times on slashdot is going to help? GTFO.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I just read the original article, and it is not claiming quantum teleportation.
It is claiming that electromagnetic resonances are set up around polymers in water solution, and if the water contains the right building blocks (monomers), then the resonances can reconstruct copies of the original polymers. This apparently occurs even if there are physical barriers separating the polymers from the monomer solution.
The article relies on quantum mechanics only to the extent that certain quantum mechanical models of water molecule behavior (coherence domains) are used, since "classical" models that rely on energy levels are not sufficient. There is no claim of teleportation that I could see.
When I first read this story I misread the first line and though the scientist had won the Nobel Prize for this research. Later I realized I recognized his name. Luc Montagnier, FWIW, won the Prize in 2008 for being the first to isolate HIV (at a time when its exact role in AIDS was unknown). He's since remained pretty prominent in HIV/AIDS research.
This other research, however, seems a lot more fringe-y and questionable, and now that I know the Nobel Committee has not endorsed it I will view it with a serious dose of skepticism until his findings can be repeated.
Breakfast served all day!
If you want to make sense of the Unified Field and you want to know who John Hagelin is
...then you need to read more James Randi and less new age crackpottery.
Seriously - this is a guy who claims that if enough people in a city do TM meditation, crime rates will fall and a Vedic Defense Shield will prevent them from war.
John Hagelin appeals to people who think What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret were science documentaries.
Advice: on VPS providers
After reading this article, one word comes to mind. I think it sums up all 10 pages, and especially the slashdot summery quite well.
BULLSHIT.
To put it simply, this is BS, on all levels. The summary is just wrong, teleportation doesn't even appear in the article on arXiv. But then the arXiv article is ridiculous. It's a thinly veiled attempt to play with homeopathy: "high dilutions", "mechanical agitation between each dilution", and low frequency EM taking the place of "concussing", "water nanostructures" formed on the DNA which can be used to recreate the DNA sequence? And the paper is totally amateur hour. In summary: It's BS.
Seriously - this is a guy who claims that if enough people in a city do TM meditation, crime rates will fall
This could easily be true. The criminals are too busy meditating to be able to commit the crimes...
That's an interesting claim. Most of the DNA molecules would somehow have to be in sync to get audio-frequency waveforms out. How's that supposed to happen?
I can't speak for the physics, but the experimental setup seems bogus. See Fig. 1. They have a coil with a test tube inside it. The coil is connected to an audio amplifier and then to the audio input on a laptop, where some frequency analysis takes place. They claim that a solution of DNA in water emits signals which can be read by that setup.
A setup like that is enormously sensitive to any electric or magnetic fields in the vicinity, mechanical vibration, and even mechanical motion of conductive objects, like fan blades. Like most low-level RF experiments, something like that has to be conducted in a electrically and mechanically quiet area. (RF engineers use either RF-shielded rooms or wooden boxes/sheds in open fields.)
The history of "polywater" is relevant here. There, it was for a while thought that water could somehow polymerize and change properties. It turned out to be a contamination problem. Here, the authors talk about previously unknown "nanostructures" in water.
John Hagelin appeals to people who think What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret were science documentaries.
Hey now. Scoff all you like, but The Secret helped me manifest a twelve inch pianist.
Depends on if the criminals are doing TM meditation too, I guess. Hard to stick up a liquor store and meditate at the same.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Okay. I'll try. So, like, a really, really long time ago, the life force we call Chi permeated the universe. The Green Chi generated a great upwelling of life across the cosmos. Electromagnetic Panspermia Theory anyone?
A beowulf cluster of water sprites, performing genetic algorithm computation using genetic material.
-kgj
IgNobels are given to real science, it just also happens to be silly, wacky, or fun science.
[silence] ...-quantum!
Dilbert:
Ashok: aaaaaaaa! [jumps out of window]
Pointy haired boss: I like it!
Because IgNobel isn't about bad science, just odd ranging to silly science. (I imagine the parent knows this, just pointing it out for those that don't know)
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Beam me up, Scotty!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Hey now. Scoff all you like, but The Secret helped me manifest a twelve inch pianist.
I believe that is spelled penis, and I doubt it.
But if you stop and think about it, the 12" pianist claim does seem a lot more believable, doesn't it?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
...how I got her best friend pregnant.
...as if a million bat-scat crazy homeopaths and refused to be silenced.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Looks like I've got some new ammo for those paternity test results. Those little quantum-tunneling buggers! Nothing in space-time could have held them back!
A lot of people laughed at Tesla too. Only took 100 years to prove the man right, for the most part.
No, it only took a few years to prove him right on the things he was right about. They're still working on the things he was wrong about.
Except the point is that if enough people meditate regularly -- the original idea was 20 minutes, twice a day -- then you can live an otherwise normal life, but it'll lower crime.
I grew up in Fairfield, IA. I was somewhat disappointed when I checked out the skepdic entry on TM only to find that the strongest debunk was James Randi calling up the Fairfield Police Department and asking whether the influx of meditators had reduced crime. Nope, crime rates had increased if anything, but were pretty typical either way.
It's a good argument, but I'm kind of disappointed. I'm going to have to deconstruct it sometime. It seems to get either respected or ignored, never seriously challenged other than people saying, "You think people can fly?" and laughing hysterically. It's not really a threat, so I can see why other absurdities would be a bigger target, but it also means the meditators themselves never have to really think hard about why they believe what they do.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A lot of people laughed at Tesla too. Only took 100 years to prove the man right, for the most part.
So... basically you're saying that anyone who gets laughed at because of their theories must be right, because Tesla got laughed at and he ended up being right?
I think you'll get laughed at if you try to present that correlation as being meaningful. But, on the bright side - they laughed at Tesla, so you must be right!
#DeleteChrome
So... erm... Let's see the evidence. Having skimmed the paper, I just don't see it claiming what Hagelin claims.
I was a meditator for years. I grew up in it. I'm better off without it now, but I'd still very much like to be proven wrong, if only because it'd be really cool to know how humans can levitate, if, in fact, they can.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field.
I thought the point of publishing was that we could replicate your experiments? Is it normal to withhold information like this?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan
arXiv is NOT peer-reviewed, and anyone can put anything up there. (Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it lacks the intrinsic rigor of a peer-reviewed journal.) It's the Wikipedia of science papers.
While arXiv is filled with some neat (and some not-so-neat) ideas for science fiction writers, I'd be reluctant (to put it mildly) to give credence to anything that sounds weird that resides there. Seriously, I know some cool stuff appears there, but we've been through this before. When is /.'s staff going to stop citing arXiv papers as being somehow more plausible than the Dean drive?
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
For some reason, people like being kinda stupid and magicy with science. I remember that one movie, the "what the bleep.." atrocity. It feels like that. Or like any time someone magics up cold fusion with a stick of metal and another stick of metal.
Noone can know who's right and who's wrong without doing the work to check it. That's just how it is; simple.
Emotions! In your brain!
Quite honestly, I don't possess the science background to really critique the paper and have to rely on the man's credentials to find this believable.
Welcome to the state that 98% of humanity is always in regarding anything beyond highschool science. Remember that magicians are only respected when they produce fantastic results or are feared. Otherwise, wizards are reviled, pitied, and laughed at.
Tesla was a Loony-Tune. After 100 years his wacky ideas are till considered wacky. Broadcast power anyone?
Krugman's economic views are coherent, not terribly deep, and potentially wrong, yet he does a more credible job of putting his ideas forward than the people who hate his ideas most (of putting their own ideas forward).
In this context, "potentially wrong" is a merit point, as distinct from ideological views, which are never wrong.
I see no reason to lump Krugman in with a flagrant quack. One of his least deep observations is that "fiscal restraint" in government does a lot more to serve the mid to long term interests of the financial elite than it does to help out a family having trouble paying their mortgage during a recession caused by excesses of the aforementioned elite. Or maybe this is so obvious it can only be seen with bifocals.
Unfortunately, the rhetorical temperature in Washington permits a dancing gorilla to wander around the basketball court without the general public cluing in. Krugman speaks against this, which makes him dumb by association.
This is pretty nonsensical. At 7 Hz the wavelength for sound in water would be hundreds of meters and light would be many order of magnitude more. How would such an em field be involved in forming nanometer resolution structures in water?
This is yet another case of wild extrapolation from measurements that are at or beyond the limits of the tools being used.
To point out that Luc Montagnie is a Nobel Prize winner is just setting up for an argument from authority. I am reminded of Linus Pauling and his Vitamin C mega-dosing.
Errrm. You're joking right? How is that teleportation? It actually goes beyond "quantum teleportation" and hits the definition of the classic sci fi molecular teleporter that takes matter on one end sends information about it as a signal and reconstructs the object molecule by molecule from other atoms at the other end.
I would have more faith in this experiment if the genetic testing of the "receiving tubes" was done by a person other than the one who ran the experiments on them. Maybe he found what he was looking for because he expected it to be found.
This Hagelin fellow is intruiging.
He used to work on pretty sophisticated and legitimate science where he did some valuable research and now he working for the Maharishi trying to link things like meditation with actual physics.
What has caused such a dramatic change?
Seems that after he joined the Maharishi movement, he still did some things that were actually scientific and his approach to politics is still a lot more scientific than the ruling political parties in the US.
I'd just like to know how he can combine these two polar opposites in his mind.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I don't meditate and I don't believe in any of the supernatural benefits is has other than it simply being a way of relaxing a bit.
But in what way are you better off without meditating? Did it harm you in any way or cause problems?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Well, people can levitate. To understand how, a separation of mysticism, mythology, and technology must be maintained.
You can watch a magician (mysticism) make a human float, and he/she will have the audience believing exactly what they saw.
You can hear and read about how a religious figure (mythology) floated.
And then you can be taught (technology) hundreds of ways to make a person levitate. theatrical flying harnesses, forced air, glass floor/ceiling and perspective. How about not just a person, but an entire train full of people? Even something as simple (and expensive, and stupid) as hanging from a rope under a helicopter (ala Robert Downey Jr in Air America).
Illusionists by a variety of names have been making people believe in impossible things. All it takes is an audience to believe the mysticism or mythology, before asking to understand the technology. Too many people are willing to believe the "miracle" answer, without understanding the technological answer.
If I read your comment right, you've grown beyond the mysticism answers. If we can only drag a few billion other people past the threshold, humanity would be in good shape.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm better off with, conservatively, 40 minutes of extra time per day.
And that's just the meditation itself -- it's not just that I've stopped meditating. I've left the Movement. This means I no longer have, as a goal in life, meditating to achieve enlightenment so as to break the cycle of reincarnation and become one with the universe. It means I no longer believe in Vedic astrology, or levitation, or any of the dozens of other crazy things I used to believe.
It also means I speak my mind, instead of always being careful to "speak the sweet truth."
And I'm certainly better off with the $5k or so I didn't spend getting the Sidhi program.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
there are no flies in the vicinity when you try it
They laughted at Columbus, and with good reason. The fool have wrong calculations all around, and only plain luck saved him.
What are you talking about? Tesla pretty much single-handedly invented the AC power generation and distribution system, and went to work for Westinghouse, where his ideas turned into reality. There wasn't much time between the point where Edison was electrocuting elephants to prove the "dangers" of AC and the point where AC power became commonplace; it was well within Tesla's lifetime.
No no, you got it all wrong. Criminals will do crime still. However, other people will be too busy meditating to report the crime. The same goes for war, people will be too busy meditating to fight for freedom, so they will just be dominated. No fighting, no war.
Hey now. Scoff all you like, but The Secret helped me manifest a twelve inch pianist. I got a cat who wouldn't pay for a round of drinks...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
you've both got it wrong, it's a plan to introduce thought police.
Classical signs of propaganda and miss-director, will allow an extra page added to the bill to outlaw free-thinking, but covertly due to the legal requirement of meditation.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
More to the point, Tesla's ideas for wireless transmission of energy miss the reality by orders of magnitude. They don't hold up to simple electromagnetic propagation calculations (path loss, for one).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Tesla was quite wrong about certain things. His wireless energy transmission idea is unrealizable, for one. He did not "end up" being right about that.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Just like with Montagnier: being right about A doesn't necessarily make you right about B. Tesla got AC transmission right, Motnagnier discovered HIV allrighty, but they are both wrong about other unrelated things. Get over it. Science is not about how many times you were right or wrong beforehand. Every discovery must stand up to scrutiny in its own right. That's how it works.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That's correct, the article is a disaster. Poor Max Planck. Most people don't listen to what he said.
Slashdot fooled again!
I'd just like to know how he can combine these two polar opposites in his mind.
I'd just like to know how you know they're polar opposites without scientific study.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As much as we want to believe that the magician has actually caused someone to float, we know he hasn't. That person is still following every last law of physics. The magician is inherently deceptive. The idea of meditating to cause levitation, then, either is also deceptive, or has nothing to do with magicians.
I would never be late again!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You're spot on. Any guru starting to focus on levitation, is fooling both themselves and others. It has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality.
A real guru will make you realize yourself, without resorting to tricks or deceit. There's nothing advanced or hard about it.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Was he able to prove it without a doubt?
I can say that the world is flat, until I am proven wrong, I can say what ever I want, if I dare not prove myself.
Teleportation is a long shot, more like networking, you use one cell to carry a message to the next until it reaches its intended cell target.
So if an "armchair quarterback" isn't really a quarterback, does that mean your armchair layman is *really* a scientist, just pretending to be a layman from the comfort of his armchair?
"Well, I'm no layman, but even I can tell. . ."
IgNobels are given to real science, it just also happens to be silly, wacky, or fun science.
2001: Astrophysics - Presented to Jack Van Impe and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements for the location of Hell.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
you've grown beyond the mysticism answers.
Or maybe he was just too selfish, impatient and materialistic to stick with the programme.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"You were right to take the bicycle, the clothes probably wouldn't have fit you".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's a play on an old joke, which I will probably mangle because it's been a long time since I heard or relayed it.
A guy is drinking in a bar, and in front of him sits a tiny piano and a tiny man playing it. The bartender says "wow, where did you get him from?"
The guy replies, well, I found a bottle on the beach, and a genie came out and granted me a wish for freeing him. Unfortunately, he was hard of hearing and misunderstood me."
"What did you wish for?"
"A twelve inch penis."
Free Martian Whores!
it wouldn't be effective though. "...they also laughed at Daniel McGinnis" who the hell is that?? (look him up if you're curious.) the point is, there are millions of crackpots who were wrong about stuff, but we don't particularly remember them.
i could live a little longer in this prison
How do you figure? Wireless power transmission has been proven to work - Intel recently experiments demonstrating such. Some scientists are only now starting to experiment with power transmission over long distances using the ionosphere.
Website Hosting
my mind is vibrating at 7Hz
Isn't that the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull ?
no inference intended about parent AC, but hey, make what you want with it
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When I see a real guru fly in a way unexplainable by technology, magic carpet or otherwise, I'll agree with you. There are plenty of people who have dedicated their lives to such pursuits. Most of them say that they aren't worthy, therefore were not able to accomplish it, or they'll tell you that it happened.
I've been around quite a bit, and I have yet to see anyone floating without a technological method to accomplish it. And no, saying "it doesn't work because you don't believe" doesn't hold water. I am open minded. I would love the opportunity to observe all the factors related to such an action. Just like a stage magician, any such performance is well controlled, if not a completely fabricated tale.
I'll leave it up to you to prove me wrong. And no, online videos don't cut it. I've watched Superman withstand being shot, blown up, vehicles being thrown at him, and turning back time by countering the rotation of the Earth. I've watched Bruce Willis blow up an asteroid. I've seen the dead walk, the vampires fly, werewolves morph. I've seen countless alien invasions devastate the Earth. I've even seen the stones of Stonehenge move and control the annihilation of the earth (BTW, don't bother watch "Stonehenge Armageddon"). On more simplistic methods, I've seen "proof" of "ghosts" through tricks of the camera (many YouTube videos) and less convincing methods (the numerous Ghost Hunter shows, which are purely theatrical presentations with no special effects).
Any and every "impossible" feat has a rational explanation. Well, unless you give in to the idea that you must have faith. Faith works well for con men and cults. It has no place in rational society.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I do meditate (not daily), but I don't believe in any of the supernatural benefits either. I was prescribed yoga lessons by a physician for spinal arthritis about thirty five years ago, and it was the only prescription I ever got that was better than over the counter analgesics. But it isn't magic. Yoga is about relaxing, stretching, breathing. Nothing supernatural about its effects on arthritis.
As to levitating and that other nonsense, I can't figure out how people can possibly believe any of it. Although I can see how yoga or non-yoga meditation might be beneficial for some mental illnesses, and perhaps even some physical ailments. Yoga does in fact work on arthritis, although simple meditation doesn't.
Free Martian Whores!
no, he spelled it correctly, It was a reference to a very old, and very funny joke.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Magic is not mystisim, it's technology, math and science presented in unique and hopefully entertaining ways.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
haha, except some people actually believe they are performing things outside natural laws, seen when they are repeatedly told otherwise.
Penn Jillette as talked about it several times.
This is why I am on the magician should always admit it's a trick, and never hold the pretense beyond the stage.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
someone who doesn't really understand electronics.
NO a very good paper at all, and he doesn't have any good controls for the equipment.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's a horrible punchline. at no point should anywhere in that joke should penis be mentioned, it's implied.
Short version*--
A man walks into a bar. On the bar the is a foot tall man playing a tine piano.
The man asks the bartender: "Where did you get him?"
The bartender says: "I found a broken magic lamp."
"Broken? what do you mean?"
"Do you really think I wished for a 12 inch pianist?"
*The long version builds a lot me suspence and misdirection.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry to nitpick, but Tesla really wasn't a scientist, he was an engineer. He didn't come up with the science behind AC power; in fact, AC power itself was proposed by other people before him. What Tesla did was use Maxwell's Equations and design equipment using those which worked. So, as an engineer, he proved the theory correct with his inventions (or more accurately, created evidence to support the theory).
What exactly did people laugh at him about, which wasn't correct? The only think I can think of offhand is the "Death Ray".
None of this has anything to do with what TM claims, which is that anyone sufficiently enlightened can close their eyes and meditate, and through that act alone, levitate.
They're not claiming they can fool you into thinking the person levitated -- and after all, believing something doesn't make it so.
They're not claiming people once floated, mythologically, because they were so enlightened. Or they are claiming that, but I'm not disputing that these myths exist. I'm disputing that the events they describe actually happened.
But the claim they're making is that the only technology you need to levitate is to be sufficiently enlightened, and then you can fly unaided.
In reality, what they do is close their eyes, sit cross-legged (lotus position, actually), and hop around on their asses, claiming this is the first stage of three stages, where stage 2 will be actual levitation, and stage 3 will be Superman.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Or too skeptical, inquisitive, and logical.
Here's the problem: I wanted to believe what The Movement was telling me. But when it came right down to it, there were absurdities in their metaphysics and very few real answers when I actually had a real question.
For example, if Yogic Flying is actually flight of any sort other than hopping around on your ass, why not measure it? Why not, say, put pressure plates under a yogic flier and do some calculations to see if there's any component to it other than them exerting a muscular force on the ground in order to hop?
Or if people can actually fly like Superman, where are all the people flying like Superman? I haven't seen one. You'd think if Maharishi's goal was to make the whole world enlightened, a trivial way to get a giant head-start would be to start flying. How many people would've tried TM if he actually did fly? (Never mind the trivial grab of James Randi's million dollar prize.) I mean, he only needs one percent of the population meditating, supposedly -- that's, what, 70 million people? Surely a single act of flying could convince 70 million people to start meditating.
Or let's try the square root of one percent doing the Sidhis. That's under ten thousand people. Fly in front of the President, the Joint Chiefs, even a few high-level officers, and you'll easily get that many soldiers ordered to do it.
Yet so far, I see nothing about the Movement which isn't equally well explained -- better, in fact -- as an interesting and mostly harmless cult which is only really still alive because of a few very wealthy contributors (David Lynch, etc). About the only thing that separates this from Scientology is the "mostly harmless" part.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, that's what I was trying to describe.
The simplest definition of mysticism is "belief in the mystery", or a leap of faith to believe what is shown, rather than wanting to learn the truth.
Magic is mysticism for the audience. They see someone hover, a girl cut in half, or disappear from a sealed box, to the audience it was a mystery. To you or I, we try to get a glimpse of how the illusion was created. Depending on the skill and method of the artist, we may never get a hint of how it was done.
If we were allowed to know the technology behind it, many people would be disappointed to know that the magic was just technology. Others, like you and I, would appreciate how they did it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
While I enjoy the magazine, it's commonly "out there". It's like the Popular Mechanics of science magazines - lots of cool stuff that probably won't ever happen/exist.
I'm gettin' with Natalie Portman right now.
He didn't prove anything. He couldn't do undergrad physics right.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Here the scale is uber-important. His approach is not wrong by orders of magnitude, it's worse, it's got an off-by-one on the exponent. Intel's "experiments" and such are doing stuff on the order of hundreds of watts at most, over distances of inches.
You have to demonstrate transmission of terawatts for thousands of kilometers for this to be feasible. And your losses need to be pretty much where they are with copper distribution we have now.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Half the references are to papers coauthored by E del Giudice, himself a coauthor of the paper. Here is one of his works: http://www.isi.it/progetti/workshop-complexity09/pres_DelGiudice.pdf, looks very much like the work of a crackpot. An he often is a coauthor of M Fleischmann of cold fusion fame. Also I do have some training in QED, but what those guys are writing looks like junk to me, and particular it looks much different to typical QED computations. Heaps of fancy words without meaning in between. How they got Montagnier to coauthor the paper escapes me.
WTF are you talking about? You don't need longitudinal waves to build motors and generators. You seem to be going on about some of the later stuff Tesla did that bore no fruit; I'm talking about his work with AC power generation and transmission, such as his invention of the AC generator in 1891. The theory behind this invention is Maxwell's Equations, and his invention showed the theory is correct (or very close). His invention is now the basis of all AC power generation.
Sure, Tesla went off onto some tangents. Any good inventor does; that's how they push the envelope. But his early work with AC power absolutely did build support for the scientific theories backing them (namely Maxwell's theories). In fact, his inventions show that he deeply understand the underlying mathematics well, something which his rival Edison (a mathematical idiot) did not. Just take a look at Maxwell's Equations: most people don't even know what the symbols mean, much less understand the higher math depicted there.
Also, as for not "doing undergrad physics right", Maxwell only published his equations in the 1860s, and then they were grouped together and rewritten in a different notation by Heaviside in the 1880s, in the same decade that Tesla first envisioned his AC generator (he published and patented it in the 1890s). At the time, all this stuff was cutting-edge (and don't forget, they didn't have the internet back then for instant communications).
This stuff may be undergrad-level now, but I don't think it was back then. I think he can be forgiven for exploring some other tangents that didn't pan out. Even now, there's conjecture about magnetic monopoles, and there's a hypothetical form of the Maxwell's Equations which account for that, even though no one's built any support for that theory.
You misunderstood. I'm talking about his power-tower wireless transmission projects. AC power distribution has been, um, sufficiently demonstrated in practice ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'm not talking about how it was back then. All that nutters today care about is Tesla's wireless transmission. Somehow AC in their wall sockets is not so spectacular anymore :(
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
A couple of points: from my reading, Tesla really did have wireless power transmission working, on a small scale, and allegedly powered the lights in his lab that way. Where he was "off" was that he envisioned wireless power transmission on a worldwide scale, with electricity basically being free.
Second, wireless power transmission is real, it's just a matter of feasibility. Intel has been doing some research in this area in recent years, and showed something at their IDF a couple years ago IIRC. The problem with it, however, was that it required some rather large antennae. But over short distances, it's perfectly possible, and in fact that's how these "charging mats" for wireless devices work. Of course, like anything using mutual inductance, it works a lot better when the distance is really short.
But I can understand how people would be interested in some of his more radical ideas, or other peoples' radical ideas in physics, even if they really don't pan out under scrutiny. After all, Maxwell's (/Heaviside's) Equations, which do pan out, are the fundamental basis of pretty much all of electrical engineering, and all the electrical and electronic technologies we have today, including the computer I'm typing on and the internet I'm connected to. If there were some other related branch of physics that actually worked, whether it was magnetic monopoles, longitudinal waves, or Heim's theories, etc., who knows what new technologies such theories could make possible: force fields, artificial gravity, who knows? The idea is very tempting, so it's understandable why people would get excited about such theories, even though they end up not panning out under rigorous investigation unfortunately. At once time, Gauss's Law, Ampere's Law, etc. were all brand-new and probably in doubt too. Electric current creating a magnetic field? Preposterous! Magnetic fields creating electricity? Impossible! Luckily, the naysayers were wrong about those, but there's also been things the scientists ended up being wrong about, such as phlogiston, phrenology, etc.
Eh, whatever blows your skirt up. Just don't go thinking correlation == causation.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Speaks the voice of experience ?
Did the liquor store have a video camera recording when you tried this ... unusual ... stick up? That would make for an interesting, not to say amusing, video.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Where am I thinking that?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Sounds like a cheap pussy?
That's the thing: it will only ever work on a small scale. The writing is on the wall, precisely as you state. To power a whole city wirelessly, you'll pretty much need an antenna covering the total area of the city. The reason that Intel has to use large antennas is because the math works out that way. For a house powered from 1000 miles away, you'll need an antenna the size of a small skyscraper.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
A few billion people can probably be dragged, but they will be dead eventually. You'll have to keep dragging a few billion people all the time.
Like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or Nithyananda, I'd rather prefer selling snake oil and mysticism.
Get a bunch of labs to try and replicate the experiment. Having an opinion before then is pretty silly. Either the experimenters stumbled onto something (regardless of their armwaving attempts to explain it) or they screwed up the experiment. Until it's been replicated (or failed to be) in multiple reputable labs, there's not much point in saying either "OMG what if it's right?!?!" or "Well OBVIOUSLY it must be wrong."
It's supposed to be frickin' SCIENCE. Just do the damn replicability experiments, publish the data, and only then start speculating wildly.
If you read the original paper in a Terence McKenna voice, it sounds really cool.
Yeah, he made several errors in calculating the distance to Japan. He took the most optimistic estimates of all the distances involved, didn't add any sort of safety buffer to account for the fact he was being optimistic, and then made a couple unit errors to complete the set.
The royal advisers who wanted to stop him didn't do so because they thought the world was flat, they did so because they knew the world was round, and they knew it was roughly 5 times larger than Columbus had calculated.
Columbus wasn't a genius, but he was the single luckiest person in the history of mankind. He stumbled across an entire goddamned continent right when he was about to run out of food.
And after that, even knowing that it was a new continent, he keeps calling it "Indias". That was because if that wasn't asia, then the deal making him Viceroy (Virrey de indias) was invalid. And that was the reason of the continent named after Americo, and not after Columbus (Colón). A sad history for a sad guy, with tons of luck.
or a tight one! ;)
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