Songs of the flowers

I remember a family friend when I was a child who talked to her plants.

Mostly she gave them ultimatums.  There was a particularly recalcitrant chrysanthemum, I recall, that didn't want to flower, and our friend told it that it had one more year to show up to the game, or it'd find itself on the compost pile.

The chrysanthemum flowered like crazy that year.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now I don't think that our friend really believed that her talking to the plants made any difference; it was more of a running joke.  But there are definitely people who believe that plants are conscious.  A lot of them still believe the completely discredited claims of Cleve Backster, who back in 1966 said he hooked up a polygraph machine to a house plant and then threatened to burn it with a lighter.  The needle, Backster said, jiggled crazily.

Supposedly the plant also knew when Backster was on an airplane that was experiencing a rough landing.  Given that this is the same guy who had threatened to torch it, maybe it was excited at the prospect of getting rid of him.

Be that as it may, Backster has become something of a hero to the woo-woo world.  His experiment was written up in the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, and he went on to try to show that not only were plants telepathic, so were bacteria and sperm.  None of these "experiments" were ever replicated under controlled conditions, and virtually all scientists consider Backster's claims to be unsubstantiated nonsense.

But that hasn't stopped people from wanting it to be true, and just a couple of days ago I ran into some people who are making an extraordinary claim.  Before, we could talk to plants, and all we could do is assume they heard us.  But these folks have invented a device...

... that lets the plants talk back.

Apparently, the device, which costs £499 (not including shipping), hooks up some kind of electrical sensor to plants' leaves, and then converts the minute signals registered thereon to music.  You might be thinking: well, that's cool, but that doesn't mean they think these are deliberate communications, do they?

The answer is yes, they do:

Do you talk to your plants?  Would you like to hear them respond?  Nature has many incredible ways of communicating, and with the Music of the Plants U1 device, there is finally an avenue of expression for the plant world.  A Music of the Plants device in your home or garden will awaken a deeper sense of awareness and connection to the natural world.  Crafted by hand, the U1 is the result of over forty years of fascinating research at Damanhur.  The music created is organic and relaxing, allowing listeners to be at one with nature and to appreciate the impact that our interactions and intentions have on the plant world.  Discover this a unique and profound connection for yourself.

So naturally, I had to find out more about Damanhur, which I discovered is a commune north of Turin, Italy that calls itself the "Laboratory of the Future."  A lot of what they talk about -- peaceful and sustainable living, supporting each other in achieving goals, living harmoniously -- sounds pretty awesome, honestly.  But of course, they couldn't just leave it at that.  When I went to their page about their plant "research," I found the following:

Researching and exploring aspects of human potentiality results in the amplification of individual sensitivity.  As such, it's easy to intuit that plants, just like humans, animals, and other life forms, have their own intelligence and sensitivity...  As early as 1976, Damanhurian researchers had created equipment capable of capturing electromagnetic changes on the surface of leaves and roots and transforming them into sounds.  The trees learn to control their electrical responses, as if they are aware of the music they are creating.

There was a recording of some of the music from red and white roses on their website, so I decided to give it a listen.   And my considered opinion is: if that's all the plants have to say, it's no wonder most humans don't pay much attention.  It sounds like a piece that was rejected from Music From the Hearts of Space on the basis of not being peppy enough.

Maybe it's just because they picked roses, I dunno.  My dad grew beautiful show-quality tea roses, but only by pampering them continuously, so maybe they're too hoity-toity to say anything with substance.  It'd be interesting to see what the results would be if they listened to, say, crabgrass.

In any case, I don't think that the "music of the plants" is going to take either the music world or the scientific world by storm.  If you convert random electrical signals to music, you'll get random music, which is pretty much what they've done here.  Ascribing meaning to it only is possible if you apply to it the meaning you'd already decided it had, which makes the whole exercise one big study in confirmation bias.

Even so, I think I might have a talk with the lime tree in my greenhouse.  It keeps getting infested with scale insects, then spreading them to my other plants.  Maybe it'll try harder to stay healthy if I threaten it.  Might sing another tune, you think?

Wheat from chaff

Yesterday, I looked at the general idea of separating science from pseudoscience, and my conclusion is that any sufficiently educated person can learn to distinguish the two.  The main hallmarks of good science are (1) the characteristic of prediction and falsifiability, and (2) reliance on mechanisms that are consistent with already-verified science.

How, though, do you make the distinction between pseudoscience and valid, "emerging" science?  New ideas in science are frequently ridiculed, especially before the mechanisms governing them are completely elucidated; even such rock-solid (pun intended) models as plate tectonics were considered to be foolishness before the magnetometer data discovered in the late 1950s showed that the ocean floor was spreading.  Some ideas that fly in the face of what is currently known will turn out, on analysis and through experiment, to be verified science.  How do we know that by labeling something as pseudoscience, we're not tarring good ideas and bad with the same brush?

Here are a few things that seem to be general characteristics of pseudoscience.  Note that not all pseudoscientific theories have all of these traits -- but this will at least provide a few general rules-of-thumb for recognizing it when you see it.

1)  The reliance on undefined, or poorly-defined, terms.  I've harped on this one so many times that it doesn't bear much more description than that.  Watch out, especially, for terms that are firmly defined in one realm (e.g. physics), but are being used in a fluffy, non-specific way.  Favorites are frequency, vibration, quantum, energy, field, wavelength, and resonance.

2)  Any idea that claims to contradict a thoroughly researched and experimentally verified model.  If someone starts by saying, "My theories overturn the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics," I pretty much stop listening.  Take a look at the webpage of The Thunderbolts Project, which claims that pretty much everything we know about physics -- gravity, electromagnetism, particle physics, convection, heat flow, quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion -- is wrong.  Instead, the universe is linked by "a web of electrical circuitry connects and unifies all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets and, on our own world, controlling weather and animating biological organisms."  While it is always possible that new data could force a revision of a pre-existing model -- look at what Einstein did to Newtonian mechanics -- the chance of a few "progressive scientists, researchers, and laypeople" trashing all of physics in one blow is unlikely in the extreme.  If you take a look at the video clips put out by these people (such as this one) you find that mostly they are relying on the fact that physicists' models are themselves incomplete.  While no reputable physicist would argue that point -- after all, if their models were complete, they'd all be out of a job, because there'd be nothing left to research -- our ignorance about how some features of the universe work doesn't mean that the framework of science itself is faulty and needs to be replaced.

3)  A theory that blurs the distinction between a model and the reality.  This one can be pretty insidious, because scientists use models (especially mathematical ones) all the time, and frequently explain their ideas using analogies.  On its crudest level, we have people like the Rosicrucians, who think that because much of the universe is describable using mathematics, that the universe is numbers (and those numbers have mystical significance).  A subtler example is the work of Stephen Wolfram, who has modeled systems behavior using a construct called a cellular automaton, but who seems to me to cross the line from stating that cellular automata can model many observable processes (this model has been used in everything from developmental biology to particle physics), to stating that the universe is composed of cellular automata.  While the first statement is no doubt true, the second remains very much to be demonstrated.

4)  Experimental claims that no one else seems to be able to replicate.  Replicability is one of the most important characteristics of good science, which is why any peer-reviewed paper is expected to give thorough detail about the experimental protocol used.  Examples of this abound: three well-known ones are the famous "polywater" debacle, "cold fusion," and Cleve Backster's claim that he'd done an experiment proving that his house plant was aware of his emotional state.

Of course, there are many other good questions to ask that can help separate good science from bad.  Is there a profit motive involved in the claim?  Does the researcher have an ideological bent that is biasing him/her to ignore contrary evidence?  Are the results published in a journal that has adequate peer review?  Is anyone who questions the results viewed as hostile/biased/closed-minded?

Given the number of crazy ideas out there, it's absolutely critical that we learn how to recognize what constitutes a scientifically sound idea, and what characteristics should raise red flags that we're looking at pseudoscience.  Millions of dollars of hard-earned money are wasted every year on homeopathic "remedies," psychic and astrological readings, crystal therapy, chakra and "energy field" realignment, and so on.  The methods of science aren't error-proof, and scientists are fallible humans, just like the rest of us; but if you're looking for the best way to gain a solid understanding of how the universe actually works, science is the only game in town.