“Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
In 1843 Sir Richard Owen came up with the term “dinosaur” to describe the fossilized remains that were being discovered and studied. Of course, before this point they were considered “dragon bones” or bones from giants because only truly massive beasts could have created bones so big. But we all know it was your momma.
Every once in a while, I like to take a large turn to the weird on Wisdom Monday – primarily because it’s fun. I think that following those that study the paranormal is similar to watching The Ultimate Warrior® take on Hulk Hogan™ for the WWF© title. It’s harmless, amusing, and if you watch it close enough, you just might stumble upon some truth. Ohhh, yeah!
I think that science describes what’s true – and as such, is the very enemy of post-modernist thought – “nothing is certain, nothing is true.” And I am certain that there are many things we don’t yet understand, and many places where the basic fundamental understanding of nature and reality eludes us. This is different than post-modernism. There is Truth. We just need to understand it. And we really don’t.
Like radioactive decay.
Radioactive decay is where an essentially unstable atomic nucleus decides that it’s done with being unstable and dumps a proton like a psycho ex-girlfriend. Or it splits into two nuclei like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck not being in the same movie together. This decay is important, because it likely is the source of heat for the core of the earth that keeps our magnetic dynamo going that keeps the planet habitable. Matt and Ben must be in separate movies so that we can all live.
But the rate of radioactive decay should be constant, right? I mean, if I jumped up and down on a trampoline with a lot of plutonium the plutonium wouldn’t decay any faster. I’d be fried like a pizza roll from the radiation from the plutonium, but the rate at which the plutonium decayed wouldn’t change.
The radioactive decay should be constant.
But it isn’t. It appears to be (in some experiments) a variable. It varies with the time of the day, and the season of the year. Not by a lot, but by about 4% in one experiment. Here’s a graph of the experiment by Sturrock, P.A.; Steinitz, G.; Fischbach, E.; Javorsek, D.; Jenkins, J.H. (2012):
Pretty colors, right? But it also is pretty plain that something is going on here that impacts the radioactive decay of Radon 222 seems to be changed . . . by how close we are to the Sun. Maybe.
This bothers physicists. A lot.
I also recall reading a paper by a Dr. Dean Radin some time ago (LINK – to a .pdf). He performed an experiment with 31 different subjects where they viewed a total of 1060 images. He measured their physiological responses during the testing. They’d see a blank slide. Then, five seconds after they pressed the mouse button, they’d see a slide. Kittens. A mountain. A hot naked person. A seaside. A dismembered body.
What???
Yeah. Some of the pictures were set up to produce an emotional response, but most, not.
About four seconds before the emotional picture, the subject displayed a physiological response. But for those boring pictures? No response.
Read that again.
About four seconds before something emotional happened, the subject knew something emotional was going to happen. Which is not how reality has been defined to us – we’re not supposed to know that something bad is going to happen. But this experiment said . . . we do.
And then there was Project Stargate, started at Stanford Research Institute and eventually folded into an Army project. The movie The Men Who Stare at Goats is a fictionalized version of what went on during the Army project, and it’s not a bad movie.
Yeah. This was a government funded (to the tune of $20,000,000) project in what’s called Remote Viewing. What’s Remote Viewing? It’s fairly simple – a target was assigned to a “viewer” who was asked to describe it. In one trial, the US government was looking for a downed Soviet Tu-22 bomber in Africa – it was converted to a surveillance plane and had all of the latest Soviet goodies (I assume that they had diesel-powered calculators weighing in at only 350 kilograms). The report says the remote view assigned to find it wrote down a latitude and a longitude. And the plane was there.
The government reportedly got information they could take action on for years, in some cases entirely verified by satellite photos and other James Bond-type stuff. In my own personal admission – at one point I got online and did a remote viewing test. I concentrated very hard, wrote down a sketch and my observations, and the following photo was nearly spot on.
Coincidence? Sure.
Science? No way. I couldn’t replicate it. But it happened. And these coincidences have happened to me throughout my life.
We’ve talked before (LINK) about the biggest advantage humanity has – the ability to see into the future. We do it regularly. I can predict that during the month of December, it’s probably not going to be an awesome time to catch a bunch of sun in Fairbanks. I can predict that if I plant grass seed, fertilize it, and water it, at some point I’m going to need a mower. Through our thought processes we can see the future.
But would it have been to our advantage to know four seconds before a saber-toothed tiger attacked? Would it have been subject to natural selection? Would the people who couldn’t see slightly into the future die at a slightly higher rate? Sure.
How could that even work?
There is precedence in quantum mechanics for particles to become entangled that doesn’t even involve alcohol and a frat party – Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” wherein the state of one entangled particle changed the state of the other particle even though they were far apart. Something about information seems to tie distant particles together – even though there’s no way that they could be tied together, just like Hulk Hogan® and The Ultimate Warrior©.
Is there a coincidence that Hulk Hogan® teamed up with The Ultimate Warrior™ right when the Global Warming© thing began?
And the whole “spooky action at a distance” is difficult to believe, but it is generally accepted, and based on actual scientific observation, but we have problems with thinking that we might in some way be tied into events slightly into the future, or thousands of miles away.
Science can tell us a lot. But we have to wait until Summer Slam ’18 for the results . . .
