USAF Studies Teleportation 678
ArchAngel21x writes "Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation.
But scientists aren't so thrilled. The Air Force Research Lab's August 'Teleportation Physics Report', posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending."
random slashdot quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Dan Tedrick
Insulting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, this is an insult to Star Trek fans everywhere. The Star Trek vision, if anything, was about using science and technology to enhance people's lives. It was and is in no way about this pseudo-scientific nonsense. (BTW, "pseudo" in this context means "false, but masquerading as", NOT, "kinda" or "quasi".)
If anything, Star Trek fans would (and should) be appalled by this.
End of rant.
My 2 cents... (Score:3, Interesting)
What proof do I have? Just look at Sam Cassel.
Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I am not suggesting some kind of bizarre conspiracy, just some 'front project' to cover up something that may involve new laser assault/defense systems, sonic weaponry, or new methods of fighter control mechanisms or something that might be really cool, really plausible or equally 'cool' yet disturbingly vile that they would rather not explain to the American public or Congress.
So, seeing that most of the nation, albiet only by a small fraction in the larger scheme of things, would fall for such crap, they decided to trot out that story. One, to be able to push it past such science-blind people as the majority of this nation and secondly to thumb their noses at the rest of us that would know and understand such a thing is bollox, yet are unfortunately unable to do anything significant about it...
Re:For the love of..... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the statement you lambasted,
"This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts"
is quite true, if a bit sensationalistic. I'm not certain, as you said, it shows "no understanding of science". It's a reasonable paraphrase of some of the assertions in Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is the backbone (along with Popper's ideas and some french folks' theories) of modern conceptions of science and how science changes.
Sometime somewhere someone really made a big mistake, and thus this research program was born. However crap it may be, though, it does show awareness of modern approaches to scientific change.
RD
Quantum Physics and the Quantum Mind (Score:4, Interesting)
Quantum theory (at least mathematically) does allow for teleportation, and so capabilities such as "remote viewing" and so forth *might* be there. But who knows.
Re:For the love of..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
On a related note, I was once working on a very serious project where I named all of the client systems after food - chicken, pizza, and taco, and named the server Megadoomer after an Invader Zim episode. I just about died trying not to fall over laughing when my coworkers would turn red with embarassment when discussing the network during meetings because they thought the names were terribly silly. But it was government work, so nobody cared enough to make me change anything.
Re:For the love of..... (Score:3, Interesting)
It really came down to the company being a lot better at selling itself to these agencies than actually doing worthwhile research.
Re:For the love of..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military. However, with rather complicated topics like this, they should be hiring people with appropriate qualifications, and relying on a review of the research by qualified scientists before they do anything else with it. I assume they would do that before pouring millions a year into some of this stuff.
The point where I start becoming wary is the point where he starts saying things like this:
The debate among scientists and scientific philosophers is highly charged at times, and becomes acrimonious to the point where reputable skeptical scientists cease being impartial by refusing to examine the experimental data or theories, and they prefer to bypass rational discourse by engaging in ad hominem attacks and irrational "armchair" arguments.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions. If you can only bend a spoon with your mind when its your spoon and your on national TV, then I don't think you're really bending the spoon with your mind. Incredible claims require incredibly strong evidence to back them up. If this guy can repeat any of the results that the Chinese studies he mentions were able to produce (he says they were repeatable, but fail to say by whom - if they just said they were repeatable, that fails to rule out the most likely explanation of simple scientific fraud), then by all means, fund away.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff. And he thinks they should wait-and-see while D-Brane theory matures, but run full steam ahead with psychokinetic research.
He also seems to recommend that some of the most outrageous and least likely to pay off topics should be pursued the most vigorously, like "biological quantum teleportation", based on a single, unpublished paper in the arxiv.org online repository (i.e. a non-peer reviewed scientific publication with no credibility to speak of). Additionally, he recommends funding FTL communication based on entanglement, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the concept of group vs. phase velocity. Without at least an inkling of which direction to go, funding a million bucks a year of FTL communications research based on the irrelevant mechanism behind entanglement is useless.
So yes, this guy is a quack, but it looks like nobody is taking the recommendations seriously. Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)? Perhaps, but lots of small research projects happen and end up going nowhere, and like they say, it's sometimes worth pursuing a bit of cursory research in even unlikely areas to see if anything interesting gets turned up. In this case, it didn't pay off (and I doubt this guy will be doing any more studies for the Air Force).
sounds like the Soviet Union (Score:4, Interesting)
you can find a lot by yahoo searching for Scalar Weapons which is a system suposedly developed in the 60s and 50s which the USSR can use to control the weather, and used to shoot down the Challenger space shuttle.
remote viewing in the CIA is something that's on the Discovery channel on cable all the time -- also shows about crop circles, UFOS, and "psychic profilers" solving murder mysteries
similar quackery was investigated by the Nazi scientists who were deeply into the occult and other "black arts" including the flat earth society and the hollow earthers (how do you reconcile those two groups? flat and hollow??)
In fact, a squad of Nazi troops took a super large cannon/gun out to an island in the middle of the ocean and tried shooting STRAIGHT UP trying to shoot across the "hollow earth" center to rain shells down on London. It didn't work.
Biological counterargument to psychic phenomena (Score:4, Interesting)
It is unlikely that humanity is unique in have some never-before evolved power. The more scientists study animals, the more they find that humans are not qualitatively different from other creatures, only quantitatively different. Other creatures can count, create tools, have emotions, participate in social structures, practice deception, be aware of what others might think or do, etc. We exhibit these properties to a greater degree than do animals, but we are not unique. (In fact if humans did have psychic power, they would have little need for social systems, tools, etc. because psychic power would let them snare prey/beings with lesser powers.)
Finally, we find no "physical" basis for psychic power. The four forces of gravity, eletromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force do not provide a basis for psychic power. It is unlikely that some magic biologically created material could manifest and manipulate some unknown fifth force without either biologists, chemists, or physicists becoming aware of it..
Re:For the love of..... (Score:3, Interesting)
But this is an advocation for 8 Million dollars of taxpayer funded money. A lot of good science can be done with 8 Million dollars.
don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military.
Is it worth 8 Million dollars? Do you know how much education could be done for 8 Million dollars? Do you know how much science could be done for 8 Million dollars? Hell, do you know how much 8 million dollars would be if compounded with interest over 20 years? That would certainly help pay down our deficit and make US science more competitive.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions.
If it is not testable, then by definition it is not science. This is why real science is peer reviewed and documented. If your peers cannot duplicate your results or have access to your data, then there very well may be some suspect work going on.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff.
What is disturbing is that this person is confabulating real science with bogus ideas. I call shenanigans! Seriously though, this is how lots of crackpots justify their products and ideas by making them sound plausible through the lens of real science. To the untrained, this could appear plausible. But like shark cartilage and crystal healing (placebo effects aside) much of this stuff is complete bunk.
Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)?
I'll field that question.........The answer is yes
This is why people "volunteer" on campaigns (Score:1, Interesting)
Now he's starting a software company which will make "national security" software and use connections to get the gov't to pay for it.
It's a risk-- if Kerry won he would have wasted that time. But he's expecting at least a $100G buyout now.
Ahh, the complex world of money we live in....
Re:With the current administration... (Score:1, Interesting)
He formulates his opinions of foreign leaders by "looking into their souls" (as with Putin, whose soul apparently looked good)
He removes fictional barriers preventing religious groups from using state money, creating policies which allow religious groups to use state money for religious purposes (see Catholic Community Services, which has had no problems keeping the books for their religious and non-religious activities separate, without incident, for years before Bush notified us all of this problem crippling charitable organizations)
He promotes policies which appeal to a religious sense of righteousness, but are often actually counterproductive when independently assessed (abstinence education has worked, but never in the US; D.A.R.E. increases a child's likelihood of experimenting with drugs--please note that D.A.R.E. predates Bush, but it's a faith-based program in the sense that with all the evidence around, you must have deep faith in it to keep supporting it)
When confronted with a religious fanatic who claims that Islam has declared war on the U.S. (even though the Islamic world did not support this zealot), he takes the "religious war" seriously and commences attacking unrelated nations with Islamic populations (even though their governments are nonreligious and have a longstanding antagonism with said fanatic)
When asked about activist judges, answers with a completely unfathomable answer about the Dred Scott case. Why? Although slavery WAS codified into the Constitution and therefore it would actually have to be an "activist judge" who ruled in favor of Dred Scott--Bush knew that the Dred Scott case has special meaning to anti-abortion religious groups, who regularly use it as an example case. Actual meaning of the Dred Scott comment: "Although abortion, like slavery at the time of Dred Scott, is legal, I will change either judges or the Constitution until it is not legal." It was a bold religious pronouncement, and only the faithful could decipher it. Heathens thought he was just being stupid again.
Through his secretaries, begins an unprecedented purge of indecent and sinful material from the public airwaves.
Gets public funding for religious education through educational "choice" programs, designed to draw students away from underfunded public schools where they cannot receive religious training.
Believes that God selected him to run the country. Coincidentally, cannot specify a single mistake he's made while running the country (the only plausible explanations for this are divine infallibility or arrogance--I choose both)
MOD PARENT UP its on topic!! (Score:1, Interesting)
"Joseph said that the MPs had basically gone straight from McDonald's to Abu Ghraib. They knew nothing. And now they were getting scapegoated because they happened to be identifiable in the photographs. They just did what the Military Intelligence people, Joseph's people, told them to do. PsyOps were just a phone call away, Joseph said. And the Military Intelligence people all had PsyOps training anyway. The thing I had to remember about Military Intelligence was that they were the "nerdy-type guys at school. You know. The outcasts. Couple all that with ego, and a poster on the wall saying 'By CG Approval' - Commanding General Approval - and suddenly you have guys who think they govern the world. That's what one of them said to me. 'We govern the world.' ""
and more importantly
"He told me how in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create super soldiers - soldiers with super powers. One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.
Level two, he said, was intuition - making correct decisions. "Somebody runs up to you and says, 'There's a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?' And you go" - Glenn snapped his fingers - "We go right!"
"What was the level above that?" I asked.
"Invisibility," said Glenn. "After a while we adapted it to just finding a way of not being seen."
"What was the level above invisibility?" I asked.
"Uh," said Glenn. He paused for a moment. "We had a master sergeant who could stop the heart of a goat
"Where did this happen?" I asked.
"Down in Fort Bragg," he said, "at a place called Goat Lab." "
seriously, its a really good read that has everything to do with "psychic warfare" and outlines some other aspects of military intelligence you might not be familiar with.
the story about the guy trying to walk through the wall is so bizare i cant see how someone could make all that up.
Re:Closed minded psuedo-intellectuals (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, that is not how science works. If scientists accepted and looked for evidence for or against every hypothesis, we would never make any progress. You have to have some way of filtering the small number of ideas that are likely to be fruitful from the much larger pool of ideas that aren't going to get you anywhere. The way we do this is through a paradigm--an overall understanding of "how things work". Ideas that don't fit the current paradigm are rejected. We may of course miss some valid ideas that way, but the vast majority of ideas that are rejected are worthless. The valid ideas we miss will get picked up later, in some future paradigm shift.
Black Projects & Black Holes ... (Score:2, Interesting)
these dubious "projects" should be put up
against a wall and shot. (That is one tax-
payer expense I would be happy to cover.)
But the previous
really, really assinine projects are often
a cover to fund other "black" projects.
The "Iran Hostage/Exchanged For/Military
Spare Parts" quickly morphed into covert
funding for the Contras. Once a big chunk
of money is "off the books", it becomes much
easier to hide from the US Congress and the
taxpayer. In the past, our "government-
within-a-government" has used such methods
to fund the assassination of Latin American
leaders, the overthrow of governments, and
even an invasion or two (Bay of Pigs?).
Considering how money earmarked for the war
against terror in Afghanistan was siphoned
off for the run-up to the war in Iraq, one might
ask exactly where has the huge sum of money
earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq gone?
It sure hasn't gone to where the US Congress
earmarked it. Consider all the internet
"background chatter" from neo-cons regarding
Venezuela, the "oil worker revolt" there, and
the recall election that Chavez won. The over-
throw of a left-of-center regime that has had
the temerity to support Castro's Cuba with
cheap oil sounds like a bonafide Bush/Cheney
operation.
Between the veil of secrecy (post 9-11) and the
USA Patriot Act (I), not much info slips into
the press to cause public blowback. If you
try to begome a "whistleblower" on some of these
shennanigans, you are likely to disappear into
Gitmo Bay (not unlike the "vanished" in
Argentina).
Constitutional amendment proposal (Score:3, Interesting)
If that's not theocratic I don't know what is.
It's NOT a joke (Score:2, Interesting)
The first part of the article deals with all the legitimate ways to move particles from point A to point B without going through the intervening space. These methods (while very, VERY far off in the future) are scientifically plausible even if they sound like they were lifted from a bad Star Trek script. The second part, of course, is full of the worst kind of pseudo-science, like telekenisis and psychic abilities. But, really, the first half of the proposal is only a waste of money because the technology involved is too far off to be useful in any reasonably timeframe.
For example, negative energy is a real phenomenon in quantum physics. It is most commonly discussed in the context of the Casimir effect. Here's an article [ohiou.edu] that discusses the Casimir effect. Basically, the negative energy arises because empty space itself has a certain amount of vacuum energy, and the Casimir effect reduces these fluctuations inside two metal plates (which have to be spaced absurdly closely together and manufactured to extremely exact precision for the effect to be measureable). Because we generally say that empty space has zero energy and the space between the plates has less energy than that, the Casimir effect is regarded as a source of "negative energy". This could actually be useful (one day in the far FAR future) for opening up space-time wormholes. And, no, I'm not joking either.
Also, while "warp drive" may be an overused Trek term, it's also a (semi) legitimate topic of discussion in physics. In 1994, Dr. Miguel Alcubierre found a solution [washington.edu] to General Relativity that seemed to allow for faster than light travel while obeying special and general relativity. What followed was a lively debate on the plausibility of the "Alcubierre Warp Drive". One of the most recent objections [lanl.gov] argued that Alcubierre's warp drive would never be able to cross lightspeed but might allow for non-Newtonion sublight travel.
Re:Why is this a surprise? (Score:5, Interesting)
Traditional evangelicalism is more like you describe. This was a product of the enlightemnent - everything must be proved/explained - so you'll find those kinds of christian more 'bookish' and generally reject experience as a means to understand anything.
Interesting society is still changing - I've been to churches where dogma is almost anatheama and everything is debated and reasoned out, and it's not uncommon for everyone to have a completely different opinion - my own feeling is that will be mainstream within 20 years (at the moment it's a few hundred 'emerging' churches), as society is
already a long way along that road - you can see it in slashdot between the 'QT might be true, you never know' and the 'this is bollocks' type of people, getting into arguments about how it's wrong to say anything is bollocks just based on solid scientific evidence...
Re:Scientists have one major flaw (Score:1, Interesting)
There are *plenty* of things that are worth researching and have a microgram of plausibility. When we've exhausted all those, by all means, let's go back and re-confirm the nonexistence of perpetual motion machines, etc.
Recommend: The Conscious Universe, Dean Radin (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, the above book covers a lot of studies headed up real scientists, and there is a lot of interesting data out there; the effects they find are not huge, but they are statistically signifigant and worthy of investigation.
If someone has an odd idea, fine - ask them for a repeatable experiment anyone can do to replicate said hypothesis. That's what science is about, and that's why we don't automatically assume the world is flat and we are the center of the universe anymore.
Re:With the current administration... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is not fair until religious organizations pay taxes. Presently, they're parasites, a condition created and continuously enabled by pathological government favoritism.
Re:Scientists have one major flaw (Score:1, Interesting)
Off-topic but tangentially related. (And I get a kick out of telling people that Queen owns several pieces of jewellery that are made of aluminium... when they were made, bauxite was difficult to mine, and thus it was a precious metal)
Okay - no point... just funny how things change.
The market isn't truly free, but is mostly free... (Score:3, Interesting)
A company or industry that's doing well can try to extract concessions from politicians (DMCA, antitrust wrist-slaps, telcom regulation, etc) and a company that's not doing well can generate political pressure to save jobs. And the former annoys me greatly, as I can tell it annoys you [slashdot.org].
But I find it hard to dismiss the sense that there is a "mostly free" market out there, having watched closely billion-dollar companies fall (SGI), and from a distance seen others just get lost (Kodak) or shift their core activity to avoid a lingering death (IBM). The market may not be truly free, but it is a harsh mistress.
I can't find a full list of companies kicked off the Dow Jones (just 1999 [cavalierdaily.com], 2004 [hollandsentinel.com], 1895 [djindexes.com]), but big companies even with their vast political influence cannot succeed when the market says "no thanks" to paying the hoped-for-nicely-profitable amount for their products.
--LP