Science Woo

There is a quotation that is going around, attributed to physicist Albert Einstein. It goes:

Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.

Einstein never said it. It is a quote by Darryl Anka. About the only statement in this quotation that is accurate is that it’s not philosophy. It certainly isn’t that; nor is it physics. It’s bullshit. As physicist Wolfgang Pauli might have said, “It’s not even wrong.”

Pyramids – What were we thinking?

The pyramids of Egypt – and in particular, the Great Pyramid of Giza – are among the most puzzling and contentious productions of human endeavor. In fact, one argument is whether the pyramids were built by humans or by aliens. The reasoning seems to go: “I don’t know how they could have built the pyramids. Therefore, it must have been aliens.” Such reasoning is wearisome; I’m going with “forgotten technology.”

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Briefly, the Dunning-Kruger (DK) effect is the erroneous self-assessment of skill, knowledge, or other qualities in a field that is not the person’s area of expertise. This can be laymen grappling with an unfamiliar discipline, or experts who have strayed from their own fields into others. The DK effect is partly due to the person not knowing enough to understand the difficulties and complexities of the unfamiliar field.

From xkcd.com

Occasionally I will hear that some issue is “settled science.” Often it’s in the context of a controversial topic such as climate change. The consensus among climate scientists is that climate change is real and man-made. They tend to dismiss skeptics as mistaken or ignorant. Sometimes, someone will say that this is “settled science.”

There is a tribe in Western Africa known as the Dogon people. They have a tradition of having been visited by beings who taught them various skills. The Dogons explain that these beings come from the sky, from a star we know as Sirius. The Dogons explain that this star is actually two stars, one of which cannot be seen. One star circles the other.

In about 2001 or so, reports began to surface about a new kind of thruster for a spacecraft. This thruster was said to produce a slight push in a way that violated the law of Conservation of Momentum. Despite this difficulty, there were experiments which seemed to support the possibility that the thruster worked.

The butterfly effect is the observation that extremely minute changes in the initial state of a deterministic system can produce wildly different results. Before this observation was noted, it was reasonably assumed that a minute change would have only a tiny effect.

The notion of sentient water was developed by Masaru Emoto. He purported to show that when water was treated to varying stimuli, it created noticeably different patterns when it froze into crystals. Water that had been exposed to positive stimuli, such as the word ‘hope’, formed symmetrical, beautiful crystals. Water subjected to negative stimuli such as the expression ‘self-consciousness’, formed misshapen crystals. Emoto’s claim was that water could sense the emotions behind the words, and would respond accordingly.

Quantum Theory is one of our most successful scientific theories. Its predictions have been verified, often to an extreme level of accuracy. It has helped us to develop technologies that we rely on, that have brought us such wonders as the laser and the transistor. Without Quantum Theory, our technology would be painfully limited. Quantum Theory has helped us move forward.

I’m tired of hearing about Nikola Tesla. He wasn’t the noble crusader and misunderstood genius many people try to make him.   I have often been called stupid or ignorant for saying this.  I have often been told to look into Tesla’s history, as though I hadn’t already done that.  Some people just won’t accept the possibility that they haven’t learned the facts.