More Review selections

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Wakeup-Call
Posts: 271
Joined: Wed Jul 16, 2008 5:20 am
Location: Washington

More Review selections

Unread post by Wakeup-Call »

Interesting info about Captain Cook and the ships...

According to João Magueijo, reader in theoretical physics at Imperial College, the film deliberately misquotes science.

The American Chemical Society's review criticizes the film as a "pseudoscientific docudrama", saying "Among the more outlandish assertions are that people can travel backward in time, and that matter is actually thought."

The film's central theme -- that quantum mechanics suggests that a conscious observer can affect physical reality -- has also been refuted by Bernie Hobbs, a science writer with ABC Science Online. Hobbs explains, "The observer effect of quantum physics isn't about people or reality. It comes from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and it's about the limitations of trying to measure the position and momentum of subatomic particles... this only applies to sub-atomic particles - a rock doesn't need you to bump into it to exist. It's there. The sub-atomic particles that make up the atoms that make up the rock are there too."

Hobbs also discusses Hagelin's experiment with Transcendental Meditation and the Washington DC rate of violent crime, saying that "the number of murders actually went up."

Hobbs also disputed the film's use of the ten percent myth.

David Albert, a physicist who appears in the film, has accused the filmmakers of selectively editing his interview to make it appear that he endorses the film's thesis that quantum mechanics are linked with consciousness. He says he is "profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness."

In the film, during a discussion of the influence of experience on perception, Candice Pert notes a story, which she says she believes is true, of Native Americans being unable to see Columbus's ships because they were outside their experience. According to an article in Fortean Times by David Hambling, the origins of this story likely involved the voyages of Captain James Cook, not Columbus, and an account related by historian Robert Hughes which said Cook's ships were "...complex and unfamiliar as to defy the natives' understanding". Hambling says it is likely that both the Hughes account and the story told by Pert were exaggerations of the records left by Captain Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks. Historians believe the Native Americans likely saw the ships but ignored them as posing no immediate danger.
Vanilla
Posts: 586
Joined: Mon Apr 11, 2011 10:51 pm
Location: Rome, Italy

Re: More Review selections

Unread post by Vanilla »

Like the spoof of how when the men walked on the moon and saw the earth, they had never seen this before, so they couldn't see the Earth! haa
joe sz
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Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2008 2:43 am
Location: Birdsboro, PA
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Re: More Review selections

Unread post by joe sz »

if some wild kid threw a rock at the back of JZ's head while she's channeling Ramtha and struck her, her perception of quantum fields could not change the bloody bruise left behind, even if the kid hid from her view behind the Yelm property wall.

There is a bigger picture here addresed in Prophets Facing Backwards by Meera Nanda(2004).
http://www.amazon.com/Prophets-Facing-B ... +backwards

a good review on amazon by By S. Plowright (Sydney, NSW Australia):
The author is not claiming or trying to be a philosopher, a historian, or a physicist. However, she brings to our attention an important and disturbing consequence of the Western fad for pseudoscience and irrationalism.

Nanda's training in her own science is quite sufficient for her to understand the scientific method, and to recognise snake-oil when she sees it. Cultural relativism, and the other idiocies spawned by Kuhn's magical "paradigms", have left the door open for politically motivated cults to justify dangerous, divisive, and oppressive ideologies.

Is tradition a defense for female genital mutilation? If you missed the point of Nanda's book, you will not be able to see that human rights are universal. Can cultural tradition justify the oppression of minorities? These are the real questions to be asked.

The last thing this World needs is intellectuals philosophising justifications for the patently absurd. Nandas book is a breath of fresh air, and it can only be hoped that others like it will put the wheels of reason back on the cart of civilisation.

This a great read, one I have read and annotated twice...it shows that RSE/JZ is just like Hindu fundamentalist-fascists trying to distort and hijack science to support Hindu scripture as "scientific". R J Lifton calls this "sacred science" in totalist communist cultures---no one can question the "science" because a "god" or "dictator" with godlike power claims it is true.
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