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Soviet Union Spent $1 Billion On "Psychotronic" Arms Race With the US
KentuckyFC writes "During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union battled on many fronts to demonstrate their superior technical and scientific achievements. While the race to put a human in space and then on the Moon is famous, a much less well-known battlefront was the unconventional science of parapsychology, or psychotronics as the Soviets called it. Now a new review of unconventional research in the Soviet Union reveals the scale of this work for the first time and the cost: as much as $1 billion. The Soviets had programs studying how "human energy" could influence other objects and how this energy could be generated independently of humans using a device called 'cerpan'. The Soviets also had a mind control program similar to the CIA's infamous MKULTRA project. Interestingly, the Soviets included non-local physics in this work, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect in which an electromagnetic field can influence a particle confined to region where the field strength is zero. And they built a number of devices that exploited the effect, although research in this area appears to have ended in 2003."
When man stare at goat man have heart attack.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Poppycock - computers were already a major thing - in UK even bakeries had started installing them in 1951. You Americans need to learn the computing history all over again.
I guess this goes to show you don't need religion to believe in nutty pseudoscience.
We cannot permit an imaginary weapons gap!
waste of money - kill all politicians and gut public-sector pigs
These same people also keep talking about all these "benefits" that space technology brings to a society, but when I point out that Russia beat America most of the time no one seems eager to move there. That is also very funny to me.
WWII was the biggest impetus for technology in the 20th century, THEN we went into space.
The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:
That sounds like legitimate physics research. Research into the principle of locality is unlikely to produce a mind-controlled teleportation beam, but it has yielded a better understanding of quantum mechanics.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That commercial you watched last night where the screen changed so often your eyes couldn't focus on it, the deep voice talking with music playing at the same beats per minute as the desired heart rate the advertiser wants, displayed on a screen at 30hz, usually starting off with either a motherly women or a crowd of people looking at you.
MKUltra started that research. Want to learn mind control, go get a masters in motion video or advertising; what they teach is textbook psychological warfare with a domestic application.
Funny thing; once you know it's going on, it doesn't work anymore.
It wasn't really a race at all. The USSR didn't make a massive effort to get there first; they were more interested in space stations. It was hard for their head of space exploration to get funding for moon missions, so they couldn't just brute force the problem like America did.
It's like the missile gap race - pretty much all in America's mind.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I always wonder why articles like this are posted on slashdot. I mean, it's simply not reasonable to convey this ideology on a tech-savvy website just to have everyone point out that it's silly pseudoscience.
The general population of this type of website is going to bash anyone that agrees that spending a billion dollars on pseudoscience is "worth it", regardless of what the government has concluded. I seriously doubt that they started off like, "Ok guys, we're going to try this silly stuff out. Let's start with.... a billion dollars, and go from there." Then later once they have spent the money, "Ok guys, that was a waste of money. Let's all pack up and try to forget how silly we all were." Surely spending that kind of money on such a project had some merit, or it wouldn't have cost so much. Now, whether or not they proved that telepathy or anything like that exists is debatable. Perhaps they did find some interesting facts about the realms beyond the physical, but couldn't "make use" of it in any way that they were originally shooting for. Perhaps a lot of that research soon moved to another focus other than war strategies.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
This should set the tinfoil hat brigade off screeching like demented howler monkeys.
.... early research on Quantum Physics.... before it was labeled such.
Actually most of the interest was in ICBMs. The rest was propaganda. Then satellites became useful but even for that a Moon rocket was just too big.
There were "stories" of similar programs run by the CIA back then (and perhaps they are still doing it right now, as we speak), and I saw a documentary back in the 1980's of a soviet man who could sort of "imprint" what he thinks onto a film/negative.
Someone showed the guy a picture (a building) and then he hold a camera and then focus his "energy" into it, and then they took out the negative to develop and the picture that came out was blurry but still you could make out a "shape" of that building.
I am a science nerd, but still things like that really fascinate me to no end.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Well... while we may redicule the notion, perhaps... some of the things they did marginally worked? (e.g. is it 100% bullshit or 99.999% bullshit?, and what exactly could that 0.001% be?)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Assassin in stealth
Assailant from Hell
Impervious to damage
Computer on board
Engaged in war
Non-stop combatant
Maybe not a mutant, maybe a man
Part bionic
And organic
Not a cyborg
Call him Psychotron
Burning inside
Godspeed in glide
Battle plan running
A killing machine
Just downright mean
And forever gunning
Maybe not a mutant, maybe a man
Target to destroy
Arms in employ
Full assault fire threat
Sensors indicate
You will terminate
Life systems disconnect
Psychotron
One to indicate whether the dollar amount is inflation adjusted or not. I Imagine a $ with an arrow hat on the | So it's an up arrow and an S. That will work for talking about historical figures in current day.
There is another problem though that is wanting to work backward, either by date or rate. So I would suggest the arrowed $, number and a divisor $14.7m/3.5 this would indicate to divide 14.7 by 3.5 to get the original dollar amount.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I always though that there was serious interest in this on both sides, but the US went...WTF and just kept up the show so the Soviets would go bust spending big bucks in a race to keep up. Looks like it worked.
Find a job you love, and never work a day in your life.
Someone showed the guy a picture (a building) and then he hold a camera and then focus his "energy" into it, and then they took out the negative to develop and the picture that came out was blurry but still you could make out a "shape" of that building.
Paging Mr. Randi, Mr. James Randi you have a phone call on the wooscam line.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
It was a race. It is quite well known that the USSR build several rockets designed for moon launches (hence why they put a rover on the moon), but support dwindled after the U.S. landed humans, and the USSR refocused its efforts on space stations and abandoned their landing craft after the fact.
The difference between the USSR and the US was that NASA acted in public, while the USSR performed all development and launches in secret, so that they could publicize the successes and hide the failures. This strategy allowed them to save face whenever their program was inferior to their competitor.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
yup
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Exactly! Biology and geology are not real sciences either, with all their hereditary nonsense and goofy crystals. Bunch of charlatans and nutters if you ask me.
Are you sure you're not thinking of Ted Serios? I don't think he was a Soviet, in fact WP states he was from Chicago.
I wasn't aware nensha was a thing beyond Ted. Hey, you learn something every day.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you think that's bad, you gotta see this: $8 trillion wasted by the US taxpayer in protecting the flow of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz where more than 50% heads to Asia.
... the wisdom of putting our most paranoid citizens into our intelligence & defense agencies.
That the research has ended? Maybe that's what they've made you believe using a late-model cerpan? Cue Twilight Zone music etc. etc. etc.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
If you run 20 bullshit double blind experiments, 10 of them are going to show positive correlation to the hypothesis, and 1 will show improbably high correlation. Far more still if your testers have any unconscious control over the data.
So, "unconventional science" is how you say "farkin' bullshit" in Russian. Got it.
It would not surprise me if these "studies" were due to CIA influence to trick the Soviets into wasting their money and effort.
Yes, but are we doing it by having people sit and wish really, really, hard? There's wasting money in the normal way, and there's wasting money in amazingly stupid ways, even when you consider the "normal way" includes $600.00 hammers and the like. It takes a truly unique and special brand of stupid to waste money in a way that's ridiculous even by the accepted standards of governments world-wide.
Not Courtney Brown or the Farsight Institute by any chance? Weren't they the ones that got Ti and Bo all hopped up about the aliens riding comet Hale-Bopp coming to beam them up?
Crackpots and their interesting theories are kind of a guilty pleasure of mine.
Like the guys that thought LSD would make a dandy truth serum. I heard they threw great parties^W^W did some interesting research.
Back to the Soviet angle, they also researched the LIDA machine, which was supposedly an electronic sleep inducer.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Because it's been rebuked by research. Conducting that research, however, is what science is all about: test claims to see if they're correct.
Heck, you could do parapsychology research today and, as long as it's properly conducted, it would be science. It's unlike such experiment would do more than confirm what's already known, but that doesn't make it "mumbo jumbo".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It was in that "Indiana Jones" like movie Lucas and Speilberg made a few years back.
No, it really wouldn't. Science only concerns itself with non-supernatural/non-metaphysical claims, and there's a reason for that. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
Happy people make bad consumers.
We do it with the media
Parapsychology theories have been given every chance. They've been tested under proper laboratory conditions according to the scientific method. They've been tested again and again, over and over, given far more chances than any ordinary scientist might expect to be given. The tests were scientific, and the theories failed those tests.
Hanging on to disproven theories is what makes parapsychology a non-science. The -ology suffix is just a desperate attempt to associate with proven laws of nature. Science is right to give crazy ideas a chance, but also right to shun them when they are emphatically shown to be wrong.
And when the pseudo-scientists persist in dressing up their mumbo-jumbo, quackery, and bullshit as respectable ideas as, you can forgive the real scientists for getting a little bit cross.
Parapsychology has a lot of problems from a reproducible experiment POV, but many of them are due to a complete lack of theory as to how a possible mechanism for a given extra-sensory phenomenon might work. Without a working theory, how do you develop an experiment to test it?
Couple of examples to illustrate the difficulties:
I am an ancient experimenter. I have lots of black rocks. One or two of the black rocks attract one another, but the vast majority do not. (the ones that do are lodestones, natural magnets) I publish a paper saying that some black rocks attract one another. Other experimenters get black rocks and cannot reproduce my experiment. Jamius Randius says I'm a fake, and even when I demonstrate black rocks that attract one another, says I am a huckster. An investigating committee bangs my black rocks together, making them lose their magnetism, so even I cannot make them attract anymore. I lose my patron, and rocks that attract one another is branded pseudo-science.
Other experimenters try this out with other black rocks, but so few have successful results that future researchers need to depend on meta-analysis of thousands of experiments to get possibly statistically meaningful results. Statistics is hard, so the research descends into sniping about statistical techniques. (See http://therandomtexan.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-5/ for recent discussions about how p values are too loose across many disciplines.)
Second example closer to home in parapsychology. There are thought experiments proposing that all ESP related phenomena like remote viewing or telepathy may just be specific cases of precognition, since validating experimental results involves knowing the outcome at some point in the future.
Last idea: Since parapsychological phenomena (whether 'real' or not) involve people and effects at a distance, how to ensure the experimenter is not having an effect on the experiment. This is one idea behind the 'sheep/goat' effect in parapsychology (other explanation is that all sheep are cheating and all goats are honest experimenters)
it's a really interesting field that rewards study, just in terms of figuring out how to create good experiments in such a vacuum. Govt. research and specifically application to gathering intelligence has always been saddled with extremely low reproducibility but occasional spectacular successes.
Yes, it really would. At one point just about every major piece of technology and science we have today would have been considered supernatural/metaphysical. Given the abundance of anecdotal evidence of "parapsychological" effects, it is completely reasonable to perform controlled experiments in order to evaluate whether those effects can be reproduced. That is the very nature of science.
It is also completely reasonable and scientific to periodically continue to perform those experiments as our tools and understanding grow, and to continue to ensure that the earlier falsification was justified and correct.
. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
String theory?
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
However we are current pursuing efforts at mind reading and using minds to control devices using a feedback device which measures activity in regions of the brain. 50 years ago, this would have been considered bunk, so there obviously has been some progress.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was given the power to move objects with my mind, and then some agency remotely removed my memory and ability from a bunker deep in the ground. They left me a broken man with only a vague notion of my manufactured past and a vivid imagination, but no ability to write a script that the ScyFy would carry -- when clearly, I can improve upon the "Fire-breathing Snake, but not a Dragon you NOOB!" and "Golem from a Simpson's Plot"
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
What baffles me is that while the existence of an arms race between the USSR and the United States during the cold war is common knowledge a lot of people seem to think the 'race' is now over and that intelligence agencies such as the C.I.A don't continue their infamous work.
We also just chucked money at NASA and said "Make it happen." The Soviets had rocket experts with their own bureaus and their own goals competing for funding and support from the Kremlin. For example, Korolev vs. Chelomei.
I know it might sound a lot but there are indications US military spent that ammout on a a few toilet seats and a hammer
If they won, we wouldn't really know, would we?
The irony is the US succeeded with a socialist approach and the Russians failed with a competitive approach. Too bad neither country learned the real important lesson from this.
Psychotronic energy is just a spectrum of electromagnetism, a frequency at which the nervous system of living organisms operares at.
There is psychotronic frequency in the low Hz range, which is right below AM radio.
In the United States, only the NSA and maybe those with ties to them can operate in this band. And there is a whole weapons system, complete with patents, designed to intercept, interpret, and alter the mind, or psychotronic energy. They call this technology NSA Remote Neural Monitoring and Electronic Brain Link, ala a remote brain computer interface. Another popular term for it is synthetic telepathy.
The US government has been warrantlessly using this technology to spy on Americans, world leaders, and to communicate covertly with one another, and to attack and target people they want to set up and frame. They can, with this system, spy on people under cover of buildings, to see what the targets see, hear, think, feel, dream, and all memory and thought can be monitored. They can also use directed energy to remotely stimulate nerves, beaming sound, video, dreams, sensation, motor control commands, and more directly into the minds of targets.
This information is closely tied to the NSA Whistleblower Russell Tice revelations from 2006, where he claims to have targeted journalists, lawyers, senators, judges, generals, admirals, and more with warrantless surveillance at Signals Intelligence. He did this with space (high tech) capability and other methods (low tech, wiretaps, telephone/internet monitoring). He believes there is no system or signal not being monitored, and they are illegally gathering the content of communications, not just metadata.
Link to article, complete with videos of Russell Tice discussing this on Abby Martin, and MSNBC, and patents: http://www.oregonstatehospital.net/d/russelltice-nsarnmebl.html
More articles on psychotronic weapons: http://www.oregonstatehospital.net/d/story.html#links
My website, http://www.obamasweapon.com/ covers my story on how I was warrantlessly spied on, set up, and targeted with this technology during a major US Department of Justice investigation that started in 2006.
My story in this PDF on how I was tortured and set up: http://www.oregonstatehospital.net/d/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Reporter_on_Torture_complaint_9-9-2013-p1.pdf
Repeat on part of the article:
Is the NSA Conducting Electronic Warfare On Americans?
Jonas Holmes May 19, 2006 CHRONICLE ARTICLE
Russ Tice, former NSA intelligence officer and current Whistleblower, was to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. Apparently the testimony, Mr. Tice wanted to give, makes General Hayden’s phone surveillance program look like very small potatoes. Mr. Tice’s testimony is expected to reveal further illegal activity overseen by General Michael Hayden which even loyal and patriotic NSA employees view as unlawful. I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. IT’S PRETTY HARD TO BELIEVE, Tice said. I hope that they’ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn’t exist right now. According to Mr. Tice, what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg. What in the world could Russ Tice be talking about! To figure it out let us take a look at Russ Tice’s work at the NSA.
According to the Washington Times and numerous other sources, Mr. Tice worked on special access programs related to electronic intelligence gathering while working for the NSA and DIA, where he took part in space systems communications, non-communications signals, electronic warfare, satellite con
In other word, the Soviet union went with a market based approach and so got an early victory followed by a bunch of in-fighting while the U.S. went with central planning and so got the last laugh but then got mired in a bureaucratic tar pit.
The world is a funny place.
I think an important aspect in the US is that the politicians told NASA to go for it and then stepped aside (at least until after the first couple moon shots), while the politicians were micromanaging all the way through the Soviet program.
"Actually most of the interest was in ICBMs."
Sorry, no. Separate tasks, separate methods. You can look up all the basics of the history easily with a few searches.
Early on there was a divergence in engineering. The commonalities were more in ablatives, control circuitry (later ICs and chips, then CPUs., guidance, and even in these, the needs diverged enough that so did those techs after a while.
While the U.S. Mercury and Gemini programs used re-built man-rated (and the IRBM, Redstone, for sub-orbital) ICBMs (Atlas and the several Titan and Titan II configurations) - because that's all we had with the necessary boost - missile development went to solid fuel (more stable for storage, very little prep for launch beyond enabling some squibs and verifying target co-ords); all the later man-rated boosters were liquid-fueled - lots of prep time, but they could be defueled and re-spotted, aborted, throttled and, later on, restarted. That decision, IIRC, was made by Ike very early on.
Further the throw weights and flight profiles were quite different, requiring substantially different designs. The space race was what it was, and it wasn't anything to do with warhead delivery. (I'm not counting FOBS; that was mutually outlawed about as swiftly as the basic capability was demonstrated. Nor do I count the armed Soviet recon stations - even they admitted it was not one of their better ideas, however nifty they were.)
WWII was the biggest impetus for technology in the 20th century, THEN we went into space./quote>
And most of "space" was ICBMs: the launch vehicles people don't talk about in case they wake up. But Atlas launched Mercury, and the Minuteman guidance computer predated the Apollo computer. It was a happy accident that hardware not designed to kill millions could also be put on top of the same rockets, but everything after 'destroy Moscow' - including TV and weather satellites - was a spinoff.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Infighting is intrinsic to the market approach.
I don't know either of those people. They probably predate me, and I have no connection to the targeted individual movement other than my advocacy for them and using some of the resources they have made available about this problem.
There are actually billions of evoked potentials in the brain and body, one for each neuron. It is theorized that the bandwidth might be about 32 to 64 bits per monitored neuron, per half second up to 4 seconds. It just depends on how fast the neuron turns on and off, and what data must be stored about it's signal and the range.
There's a guy who calculated it out to monitoring 10,000 neurons per person, and it would only take 1 gigabit per second to monitor 10,000 people that way. This is using a slightly different formula, as explained in the Physics of Synthetic Telepathy, Can a Satellite Read Your Thoughts artices on my website. I believe it actually uses 32 to 64 times that calculation, though.
When the signals of each neuron are pieced back together, whether from brain or organ nerves, video and audio and other information can be inferred.
Weather satellites are not a "spin off" from "destroy Moscow", accurate weather forecasts are very important to military planners. The fact that it's useful to the public is a secondary consideration. TV and phone satellites are paid for by corporations not governments.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A market approach would have individuals producing their product, and seeing which one the market accepted. The Soviets largely went on which bureau chief had the most political pull in the Politburo.
Here's a list of some satellites that might be involved or used to target people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_Launches
NROL-39 was just launched by the National Reconnaissance Office, and has been making rounds in the media because of the controversy of domestic surveillance right now, and their logo which is on the side of the satellite, featuring an octopus straddling planet earth and the text "nothing is beyond our reach". I'd like to add, there is no joke about that message and it is quite literal, as they can even physically tap and tamper with your brain and genitals remotely with these things. No joke.
Ancient Greeks had already calculated the Earth's radius. In medieval Europe, educated people knew the Earth was round.
Columbus did *not* face resistance because people thought the Earth was flat. He faced resistance because people correctly pointed that the Earth was about 40000km in circunference and that his ships could not reach Asia by traveling West. Columbus based his expedition on faulty calculations.
Columbus was lucky that America was in the way.
Sounds like american telecoms and aerospace to me.
So it seems that consciousness and attention can have effects in the physical world
Of course it can, what do you think is controlling my arms as I scratch my arse? It has other names, spirit, soul, mind, etc. There's a reason scientists and philosophers alike call consciousness "The hard problem", it all boils down to the fact that you can never fully understand yourself. You are not separate from the rest of the universe, you and the universe are one (or as Sagan put it) "We are the part of the universe that observes itself", and by extension that implies we can never fully understand the universe. I don't know about anyone else but like Feynman "I'm ok with that, I'm not afraid of not knowing, I find it more interesting".
Having said that the world is full of scammers who use very clever magic tricks to separate the gullible from their wallets. The "clever" part is that they know enough about the human mind to be able to distract it from what's really happening. Of course there are others who truly believe they have special powers but they always turn out to be mistaken when put to the test.
To summarise: Wake me up when James Randi pays out on his million dollar challenge.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How do you know the researchers who fail to find psi evidence don't have unconscious control over the data?
From http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_semiconductor_revolution_m:
What was the market for space launches? It was purely government funded. The market approach is far too short-sighted for such a disruptive endeavor as developing spacecraft.
So let me get this straight. Experimenting to try to gather evidence to support and explain phenomena reportedly observed by people throughout history is mumbo jumbo whereas stating that research in a particular subject is unjustified because we know everything, the subject seems ridiculous and we can assert that it can't be empirically measured is science? Okay. I suppose you believe in immutable "scientific facts" too? I guess I used to believe in the tooth fairy.....
I don't therefore I'm not.
String theory?
Here's why string theory is different from crackpot hokum such as parapsychology:
One should keep an open mind, but not gaping. Life is short, and we have to be critical. If we spent all our time re-testing already discredited theories we would have wasted our lives.
Have you ever even looked at a list of Soviet space probes or launches? They only named and numbered successful launches, and the unsuccessful ones were typically not known to the public until years or decades later. Any modern list of their launches is a mess of internal launch numbers and successful named ones, or in a few cases ones that get numbered retrospectively when they became public.
If you are a good scientist, then you will easily prove the specific claim "some black rocks attract one another". You will repeat the experiment, thereby showing that particular rocks consistently attract one another in controlled conditions. You will lend those rocks to other experimenters to test, proving beyond all doubt that certain rocks behave as you say. Then you will get on the cover of Prehistoric Nature magazine, and be given funding to find out why certain black rocks are special. Other researchers will scour the earth searching for more special black rocks, and reference your paper every time they succeed or fail. Eventually you will become a respected become professor in the department of black rocks.
Parapsychology fails because it cannot meet the requirements of the scientific method. Until it can offer a prediction which (a) differs from existing knowledge, and (b) can be tested in a reproducible experiment it is, by definition, not science. Science being the only method we have for establishing whether a claim is trustworthy, ologies which can't meet the requirements of science must be labelled untrustworthy.
The first space race was about satellites, and the US lost; the reason for the moon was partly because it was a sufficiently big project to make up for having lost the first round. The real technical driver on both sides was ICBMs, but a lot of ego got dragged along as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I never said, nor do I believe, that we know everything. Most of the claims I hear that the phenomenon can't be empirically measured comes more from believers in the para-sciences when one of their beliefs is put into doubt from a scientific investigation.
When you're saying something is "supernatural" you're saying it's beyond nature and beyond our understanding. But if that's the case then there's nothing really we can test, is there? And when you can find some claim you can test empirically then you're saying that it is both physical and can be understood as a natural phenomenon. And if it doesn't pan out the way you want, you have to learn to respect the results.
This para-scientific crap has been tested and re-tested for a long long time, and we still see nothing more than can be explained by wishful thinking and the usual statistical blips you'd always see from a set of data.
The real world is way too cool to abandon what is for we hope to be. Time to stop wasting our time with this pointless shit.
Happy people make bad consumers.
The Russian moon rocket effort was half hearted. They were more interested in the ability to lift heavy military hardware into orbit, and it just so happened that they could do moon missions with it as well.
The design was more generic and scalable. The Saturn IV was designed to do one thing only. The Russians didn't have an equivalent of the Gemini or Apollo programmes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Parapsychology proponents put forward their claims as reality.
Not all proponents...but just enough to give them most of them a bad name. Such people are "useful idiots". They give parapsychology a bad name with people who desperately want to believe such things are B.S. (a case of confirmation bias). This allows the real practitioners to do what they do, without drawing undue attention to themselves. An ideal state of affairs for them, really. And your skepticism lets them get away with it.
"Science" can't study parapsychology, because science believes that reality is something that's outside of us, and can be objectively observed and measured. Instead, the scientists are simply observing and measuring the aspects of subjective reality that we all agree upon. There's some value in that — no doubt, science has been a good thing for our species, and has produced all sorts of advancements — but it's not going to lead to the ultimate truths. Those exist within us. Science needs to realize that the right question to ask is "who is asking the question", and then it might get somewhere with parapsychology.
I have some hope that quantum physics will be the conduit for leading science out of its "objective reality" bias, but it's still too early to tell.
In the meantime, keep in mind that science has a terrible track record of claiming that something is impossible.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
That reminds me of a South Park episode...25% of the population is retarded, and needs to believe in an all-powerful government.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Conducting that research, however, is what science is all about: test claims to see if they're correct.
No. They spent a billion dollars on it. They were clutching at shadows after the lights were turned on.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -- Albert Einstein
Well, in all seriousness, 90% of the population is retarded, and all of society is being controlled and manipulated into being mindless consumerists who are incapable to defend themselves from the other 10%, ie those in power. Even slashdot'ers are in the 90% who apparently think serious shit like this is just a big joke...
Yes, it really would. "I can read your mind" or "I can move objects with my mind" or "I can predict which side the coin lands" are testable claims, and are thus in the realm of science.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Quantum Theory sure did appear to be wacky at the time by many, but since it was always based on testable predictions for which to understand nature it was at no point considered metaphysical or supernatural.
Maybe the closest things in science right now to metaphysics are the multiple interpretations if quantum mechanics. These are more frameworks to try and visualize how it works behind the scenes for lack of anything better. But I think most physicists take the "shut up and calculate" perspective instead of considering such things too much.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Every Institute (business/politics/religion/globalization/capitalism) is masquerading itself into Ponzi/Pyramid scams.
Casteism
First of all a simple question with a difficult answer is the psychic real? Some parts look real, some look very unlikely, and some look just about impossible.
One of the first problems is in separating truth from the rubbish and noise, no subject in the world is more subject to bunk and charlatans.
However there are several ways of really testing the psychic and from what I've seen it passes most of them. Its just that the real thing looks so different from the fake that its hard to recognize. It is such a small and subtle interaction that it is very hard to observe or isolate or study outside the person.
There is another little problem, nothing that science can do is more hated by religion than the study of the psychic. A lot of old military scientific research into the psychic is suppressed because it is deeply anti-religious. If you understand the psychic then you can quantify God and reduce it to factors and equations and answers. Do this and the answer comes back that there is/was probably a 'God', but A its existence ends / ended at the beginning of the universe, B it is literally the energy of the Big Bang, C in our terms it is mindless, D it is utterly ruthless -very like evolution, E it looks nothing like the Christian or any other human God.
This 'God' is a force that seeks increasing order (in physics terms), physically it is a quantum 'energy field' with an FTL causality. It jumps backwards and forwards in time creating an evolutionary cycle that eventually creates our universe. The real problem for religious people comes when this is applied to the real world - ie do almost anything which depends on an FTL causality- and you are effectively playing with the creation and use of God as a machine.
Study and dissect FTL models of physics and it becomes clear that certain parts of the psychic are described pretty precisely. It is clear that (if it exists) the 'psychic' is very delicate and is very easily disrupted, and behaves exactly like a quantum state. (A quantum state and an FTL causality are basically identical.) This means that it is virtually impossible to properly scientifically observe psychic phenomena because it is virtually impossible to completely isolate observers from an experiment.
Ironically we all almost certainly observe psychic phenomena every day because they are deeply embedded in many aspects of brain operation, and for instance play a pretty dominant role in human psychology or in 'real time' operations like sight or speech or movement. The place where these psychic phenomena (or 'quantum element') would play the most important role is in brain development - and this is already close to being fully provable. A basic experiment requires a way of disrupting the quantum field during gestation which should disrupt an animals development. (designing a way of doing this isn't so simple though - a vacuum or faraday cage can disrupt a direct field but)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Hey, what do you think of this?
http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
Most of what I read there seems proper science.
I saved this a bit early and the editing is a real mess, sorry... : (
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
R-7, the Soyuz rocket, was developed as an ICBM. It put Gagarin and Leonov in space. Its successors still launch satellites today and service the ISS. It is true that in time liquid fuel rockets were perceived as unusable for military purposes because of the needs to refuel or store them for a long time. But when R-7 was developed the other nuclear bomb delivery mechanism was a strategic bomber. The time to prep, launch and strike was even larger than that of R-7. So it was revolutionary at the time.
The Soviet Union had issues at first in miniaturizing their warheads so they needed to go for much larger rockets. This caused the decision to push for large hypergolic liquid rockets like R-36 or Proton. Proton BTW was used to launch segments of the ISS and is another rocket still in service today. With time the warheads were miniaturized plus, as Korolev has said himself in the past, hypergolics were replaced by solids in the Soviet Union. A major boost to that happening, besides the launch times, was the Nedelin disaster. The circumstances surrounding the Soviet and US rocket programs are fairly different. All programs both for ICBMs and space launch were controlled by Usinov and the military and he often preferred dual use technologies at that time.
Indeed. Correct. Understood. Thanks for the history; I'd known bits and pieces, but nothing like the fine picture you describe. Hypergolics are just plain strange - neat, but strange; finding stuff that you can use the word "stable" about in the same acreage was a big challenge. Solids are handy for military - only thing extra needed is an abort package. I was saddened when I learned about Nedelin; I was also amazed that so many had parked themselves so close to the pad.
Even after all these years, with the military, civilian, commercial uses, thinking on some of the things involved in the doing - no matter how straightforward the engineering - gives me pause and wonderment. I remember watching the live TV of the Vanguard launch attempts. Ouch.
If you've not heard of it, and if you want, track down the pdf "Ignition" - it's a history of fuels research in the U.S. covering the critical twenty years by a fellow who was right in the thick of it. It's fascinating reading even if one hasn't the chemistry to follow all of it. The guy writes well and has a sense of humor like a fine dry martini.
Dunno, man, sitting atop great gobs of propellant that's _supposed_ to burn at a controlled rate but has the potential for going boom - the folks that do that.... I fergit who it was, one of the Seven, while waiting through yet another hold, said something about how all the gee-whiz machinery he was sitting atop had been built by the lowest bidder. Capcom had kittens.
... but materialism is seductive to certain people, so the religion lives on.
I heard a saying just yesterday: 'it's easier to fool people, than to convince them that they've been fooled'. This was supposedly said by Mark Twain...
Rupert Sheldrake has a nice Tedx talk - good enough to get banned from Ted's youtube channel by the materialists who run Ted.