Mind over matter

The difficulty with a lot of claims of psychic phenomena (besides the unfortunate lack of hard evidence) is that they kind of fall apart when you say, "show me the mechanism."  Even the practitioners can't tell you how the whole thing is alleged to work.  It's very seldom you get anyone willing to go out on a limb and tell you, specifically, how paranormal experiences happen; most of them say something like "some folks can do it, others can't, it's mysterious," and leave it at that.

So the link sent to me last week by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia is a bit of an anomaly.  In it, we are given  a set of step-by-step instructions for learning...

... telekinesis.

Yes, telekinesis, the skill made famous in the historical documentary Carrie wherein a high school girl got revenge on the classmates who had bullied her by basically flinging heavy objects at them with her mind and then locking them inside a burning gymnasium.  Hating bullies as I do, I certainly understand her doing this, although it's probably a good thing this ability isn't widespread.  Given how fractious the current political situation is, if everyone suddenly learned how to move things with their minds, the United States as viewed from space would probably look like a huge, whirling, debris-strewn hurricane of objects being thrown about every time something about the former president appears in the news.

But if you'd like to be able to do this, you can learn how at the aptly-named site HowToTelekinesis.com.  But to save your having to paw through the site, I'll hit the highlights here.  You can try 'em out and afterwards report back if you had any success in, say, levitating your cat.

Polish spiritualist medium Stanisława Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors that totally was not connected to a piece of thread tied to her fingers  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Step one, apparently, is that you have to believe that there is no external reality, because otherwise "your logical mind will be fighting your telekinesis endeavors every step of the way."  I know this would be a problem for me.  The author of the website suggests that you can accomplish this by studying some quantum physics, because quantum physics tells us the following:

Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is light and energy vibrating at a fixed frequency.  This energy is being projected from within, both individually and collectively.  Our energy projection is reflected back and interpreted and perceived as “real” via the mind through our five senses. That is the condensed version of reality.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn't say any such thing, as anyone who has taken a college physics class knows.  Quantum physics describes the behavior of small, discrete packets of energy ("quanta") which ordinarily only have discernible effects in the realm of the submicroscopic.  It is also, in essence, a mathematical model, and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with an "energy projection (being) reflected back and interpreted and perceived as real by the mind."

But apparently if you're inclined to learn telekinesis, you can interpret the findings of physics any way that's convenient for you.

Oh, and we're told that it also helps to watch the woo-woo documentary extraordinaire What the Bleep Do We Know?, which was produced by J. Z. Knight, the Washington-based loon who claims to channel a 35,000 year old guy from Atlantis named "Ramtha."  The author waxes rhapsodic about how scientifically accurate this film is, despite the fact that damn near everything in the film is inaccurate at best and an outright lie at worst.

Step two is understanding your "telekinesis toolkit," which includes "empathy, mindset, and energy."  They explain it this way:

Imagine feelings being the words spoken on your phone, and empathy is the signal or wire connecting you.  Your mindset is the phone itself and energy is the electricity used to run it.  You have to have a phone, signal and power to communicate.  A lame phone, weak signal or low battery will make doing telekinesis nearly impossible.

I daresay it will.

Step three is finding a good mentor.  Since these mentors aren't free, let's just say that I had a sudden "Aha" moment when I got to this point.  The website tells us that the best mentors are at the Avatar Energy Mastery Institute, where we can learn the following:

You will learn all about energy, chakras, clairvoyance, out of body travel, mind and soul expansion, healing, higher-self, time travel, lucid dreaming and pretty much everything else a seeker could hope for.  I also know that Ormus from www.SacredSupplements.com really enhances psychic abilities and speeds the learning process.

When I saw "Ormus," something in the back of my brain went off.  I knew I'd seen this before.  At first I thought it was the name of the evil blob of black goo that killed Tasha Yar in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation and wondered why anyone would take supplements made from that guy, but turns out his name was Armus, not Ormus.

But it still sounded somehow familiar, so I did a little research, and sure enough, a while back I did a post on Ormus, which is an acronym standing for "Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements."  And yes, I know that spells "ORME" and not "ORMUS," but since we're kind of disconnected from reality here anyhow, we'll let that slide.  Evidently the believers in Ormus think that taking this stuff can do everything up to and including (I am not making this up) changing your inertial mass, and I don't mean that you got heavier because you just swallowed something.  They claim that taking Ormus makes your inertial mass smaller, which would be surprising for any supplement not made of antimatter.

And taking antimatter supplements has its own fairly alarming set of health risks, the worst of which is exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

So anyway.  The step-by-step instructions turned out to be kind of a bust, frankly.  I'm thinking that if you do all of this stuff, telekinesis is still going to be pretty much out of the question, which is a shame, because it could be kind of fun, as well as making moving heavy furniture a lot easier.  But feel free to give it all a try.  Let me know, though, if you're planning on lobbing any heavy furniture my way.  The hate mail I get on a daily basis is bad enough.

****************************************

Mind over matter

Do you want to learn a new skill?  Something that will make you super popular at parties?

Do I have an opportunity for you.

I found a site that gives a set of step-by-step instructions for learning...

... telekinesis.

Yes, telekinesis, the skill made famous in the historical documentary Carrie wherein a high school girl got revenge on the classmates who had bullied her by basically flinging heavy objects at them with her mind and then locking them inside a burning gymnasium.  Hating bullies as I do, I certainly understand her doing this, although it's probably a good thing this ability isn't widespread.  Given how fractious the current political situation is, if everyone suddenly learned how to move things with their minds, the United States as viewed from space would probably look like a huge, whirling, debris-strewn hurricane of objects being thrown about every time Kevin McCarthy or Nancy Pelosi say anything.

But if you'd like to be able to do this, you can learn how at the aptly named site HowToTelekinesis.com.  But to save your having to paw through the site, I'll hit the highlights here.  You can try 'em out and afterwards report back if you had any success in, say, levitating your cat.

Polish spiritualist medium Stanislawa Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors that totally was not connected to a piece of thread tied to her fingers [Image is in the Public Domain]

Step one, apparently, is that you have to believe that there is no external reality, because otherwise "your logical mind will be fighting your telekinesis endeavors every step of the way."  I know this would be a problem for me, not least because if there's no external reality, you have to wonder what it is exactly we're supposed to be telekinesis-ing.  In any case, the author of the website suggests that you can accomplish this by studying some quantum physics, because quantum physics tells us the following:

Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is light and energy vibrating at a fixed frequency.  This energy is being projected from within, both individually and collectively.  Our energy projection is reflected back and interpreted and perceived as “real” via the mind through our five senses.  That is the condensed version of reality.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn't tell us any such thing, as anyone who has taken a college physics class knows.  Quantum physics describes the behavior of small, discrete packets of energy ("quanta") which ordinarily only have discernible effects in the realm of the submicroscopic.  It is also, in essence, a mathematical model, and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with an "energy projection (being) reflected back and interpreted and perceived as real by the mind."

Whatever the fuck that even means.  But apparently if you're inclined to learn telekinesis, this allows you to interpret the findings of physics any way that's convenient for you.

Oh, and we're told that it also helps to watch the woo-woo documentary extraordinaire What the Bleep Do We Know?, which was produced by J. Z. Knight, the Washington-based loon who claims to channel a 35,000 year old guy from Atlantis named "Ramtha."  The author waxes rhapsodic about how scientifically accurate this film is, despite the fact that damn near everything in the film is inaccurate at best and an outright lie at worst.

Step two is understanding your "telekinesis toolkit," which includes "empathy, mindset, and energy."  They explain it this way:

Imagine feelings being the words spoken on your phone, and empathy is the signal or wire connecting you.  Your mindset is the phone itself and energy is the electricity used to run it.  You have to have a phone, signal and power to communicate.  A lame phone, weak signal or low battery will make doing telekinesis nearly impossible.

I daresay it will.

Step three is finding a good mentor.  Since these mentors aren't free, let's just say that I had a sudden "Aha" moment when I got to this point.  The website tells us that the best mentors are at the Avatar Energy Mastery Institute, where we can learn the following:

You will learn all about energy, chakras, clairvoyance, out of body travel, mind and soul expansion, healing, higher-self, time travel, lucid dreaming and pretty much everything else a seeker could hope for.  I also know that Ormus from www.SacredSupplements.com really enhances psychic abilities and speeds the learning process.

When I saw "Ormus," something in the back of my brain went off.  I knew I'd seen this before.  And sure enough, a few years ago I did a post on Ormus, which is an acronym standing for "Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements."  And yes, I know that spells "ORME" and not "ORMUS," but since we're kind of disconnected from reality here anyhow, we'll let that slide.  Evidently the believers in Ormus think that taking this stuff can do everything up to and including (I am not making this up) changing your inertial mass, and I don't mean that you got heavier because you just swallowed something.  They claim that taking Ormus makes your inertial mass smaller, which would be surprising for any supplement not made of antimatter.

And taking antimatter supplements has its own fairly alarming set of risks, the worst of which is exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

So anyway.  I'm thinking that if you do all of this stuff, telekinesis is still going to be pretty much out of the question, as much fun as it could be.  But feel free to give it all a try.  On the other hand, if you're planning on lobbing any heavy furniture my way, please reconsider.  The hate mail I get on a daily basis is bad enough.

***********************************

Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mind over matter

Once a week, my Critical Thinking classes are required to find an example in the media of one of the concepts we've covered -- logical fallacies, biases, arguments (good and bad), pseudoscience, and ethical issues.  Over the course of the semester, my students become pretty good at ferreting out bad thinking, not to mention digging up all sorts of goofy stuff in newspapers, magazines, and online.

And this week, one of my students found a doozy.  It's a set of step-by-step instructions for learning...

... telekinesis.

Yes, telekinesis, the skill made famous in the historical documentary Carrie wherein a high school girl got revenge on the classmates who had bullied her by basically flinging heavy objects at them with her mind and then locking them inside a burning gymnasium.  Hating bullies as I do, I certainly understand her doing this, although it's probably a good thing this ability isn't widespread.  Given how fractious the current political situation is, if everyone suddenly learned how to move things with their minds, the United States as viewed from space would probably look like a huge, whirling, debris-strewn hurricane of objects being thrown about every time something about the President-elect appeared in the news.

But if you'd like to be able to do this, you can learn how at the aptly named site HowToTelekinesis.com.  But to save your having to paw through the site, I'll hit the highlights here.  You can try 'em out and afterwards report back if you had any success in, say, levitating your cat.

Polish spiritualist medium Stanislawa Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors that totally was not connected to a piece of thread tied to her fingers [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Step one, apparently, is that you have to believe that there is no external reality, because otherwise "your logical mind will be fighting your telekinesis endeavors every step of the way."  I know this would be a problem for me.  The author of the website suggests that you can accomplish this by studying some quantum physics, because quantum physics tells us the following:

Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is light and energy vibrating at a fixed frequency.  This energy is being projected from within, both individually and collectively.  Our energy projection is reflected back and interpreted and perceived as “real” via the mind through our five senses.  That is the condensed version of reality.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn't say any such thing, as anyone who has taken a college physics class knows.  Quantum physics describes the behavior of small, discrete packets of energy ("quanta") which ordinarily only have discernible effects in the realm of the submicroscopic.  It is also, in essence, a mathematical model, and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with an "energy projection (being) reflected back and interpreted and perceived as real by the mind."

But anyhow, apparently if you're inclined to learn telekinesis, you can interpret the findings of physics any way that's convenient for you.

Oh, and we're told that it also helps to watch the woo-woo documentary extraordinaire What the Bleep Do We Know?, which was produced by J. Z. Knight, the Washington-based loon who claims to channel a 35,000 year old guy from Atlantis named "Ramtha."  The author waxes rhapsodic about how scientifically accurate this film is, despite the fact that damn near everything in the film is inaccurate at best and an outright lie at worst.

Step two is understanding your "telekinesis toolkit," which includes "empathy, mindset, and energy."  They explain it this way:

Imagine feelings being the words spoken on your phone, and empathy is the signal or wire connecting you.  Your mindset is the phone itself and energy is the electricity used to run it. You have to have a phone, signal and power to communicate.  A lame phone, weak signal or low battery will make doing telekinesis nearly impossible.

I daresay it will.

Step three is finding a good mentor.  Since these mentors aren't free, let's just say that I had a sudden "Aha" moment when I got to this point.  The website tells us that the best mentors are at the Avatar Energy Mastery Institute, where we can learn the following:

You will learn all about energy, chakras, clairvoyance, out of body travel, mind and soul expansion, healing, higher-self, time travel, lucid dreaming and pretty much everything else a seeker could hope for.  I also know that Ormus from www.SacredSupplements.com really enhances psychic abilities and speeds the learning process.

When I saw "Ormus," something in the back of my brain went off.  I knew I'd seen this before.  And sure enough, a year ago I did a post on Ormus, which is an acronym standing for "Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements."  And yes, I know that spells "ORME" and not "ORMUS," but since we're kind of disconnected from reality here anyhow, we'll let that slide.  Evidently the believers in Ormus think that taking this stuff can do everything up to and including (I am not making this up) changing your inertial mass, and I don't mean that you got heavier because you just swallowed something.  They claim that taking Ormus makes your inertial mass smaller, which would be surprising for any supplement not made of antimatter.

And taking antimatter supplements has its own fairly alarming set of risks, the worst of which is exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

So anyway.  I'm thinking that if you do all of this stuff, telekinesis is still going to be pretty much out of the question, as much fun as it could be.  But feel free to give it all a try.  Let me know, though, if you're planning on lobbing any heavy furniture my way.  The hate mail I get on a daily basis is bad enough.

ORMUS to the rescue

Ever heard of ORMUS?

I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link.  And when I got it, my first thought was that ORMUS sounds like the villain from a cut-rate 1960s science fiction movie.

But no.  ORMUS stands for "orbitally rearranged monoatomic elements," even though that spells ORME and not ORMUS.  The whole thing was supposedly discovered in 1975 by healer and erstwhile Arizona cotton farmer David Hudson, who claimed that he was drying out some minerals in the sunlight, but they exploded and disappeared completely, thus leading him to the discovery of "an exotic state of matter, where the metals do not form any bonds or crystals but exist as separate single atoms" and disproving the First Law of Thermodynamics simultaneously.  Even though ingesting stuff that explodes violently is generally speaking a bad idea, Hudson said that said exotic matter was good for damn near anything.  According to RationalWiki, here's a "non-exhaustive list" of things that ORMUS can allegedly do:

• Cure all forms of disease, including cancer and AIDS
• Correct errors in the DNA
• Act as a superconductor
• Emit gamma radiation
• Partially levitate in the Earth's magnetic field
• Read a person's mind
• Have a "weigh-ability" different from mass, which probably means an inertial mass different from the gravitational mass
• Be fused into a transparent glass
• Act as a flash powder, causing "explosions of light"
• Make severed cat tails grow back

Notwithstanding that several of them seem mutually exclusive -- such as "correct errors in the DNA" and "emit gamma radiation" -- Hudson and his followers have insisted that the stuff is real.  This is despite the fact that Hudson himself gives every evidence of having failed 8th grade physical science; for example, he repeatedly says that there are 10¹⁸ ergs in one gauss, which is odd because an "erg" is a unit of energy and a "gauss" a unit of magnetic flux density, which are not even close to the same thing.  So this statement is a little like trying to figure out how many minutes there are in a kilogram.

After reading the RationalWiki  article I thought, "Okay, this claim is so obviously wrong that no one could possibly fall for it."  So I did a search for "ORMUS products."

And turns out, I was the one who was wrong.  About people falling for it, at least.  I got 425,000 hits, which made me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.

First, no idiotic alternative medicine claim would be complete without an equally idiotic article in Natural News supporting it.  And this one is a doozy -- it claims that ORMUS is the "Philosopher's Stone," thus vindicating not only David Hudson but the medieval alchemists.  But here are a few of the products I found featuring ORMUS:

• "Monatomic [sic] Gold Platinum Fortified ORMUS Elixir," which "quickly delivers trillions of monatomic particles connecting you to your subtle energy body thereby opening up a person's many acupuncture points and restoring the proper flow to these starved locations, thus bringing the body back into ease and providing the correct energetic template for future cellular regeneration."
• "SunWarrior ORMUS Peppermint Supergreens," which appears to be dried grass flavored with mint, but which was "nurtured... in a fertile, mineral-rich volcanic soil" and thus is "enriched with trace minerals."
• "Crown Chakra ORMUS," which allows you to "Connect with Spiritual Energy to Live by Divine Purpose and Will, Be Tranquil, Complete, Compassionate, Empathetic and Self-aware, [and] Help Illuminate the Path for Others," and thus blends the ORMUS nonsense with chakra nonsense for a nice woo-woo mélange.
• "Mountain Manna," which combines ORMUS with homeopathy for double the fun, and claims that ORMUS has something to do with the manna from the bible.  Oh, and "Their unique energy frequencies tend to bring a holistic balance to the nervous, and cellular systems, as well as the subtle bodies," because a claim of this sort would not be complete without a mention of "frequencies."
• And finally, "Gaia Thera ORMUS Gold," which at a whopping $530 will cure what ails you, and comes with the selling point, "Does nuclear radiation, EMF damage, Chem-trails, tumors, E. coli in your gut, some yet unnamed disease or any other uncontrolled environmental toxins scare the xxxx out of you?... Gaia Thera ORMUS Gold could be the answer... Some call it the Fountain of Youth."

And on and on and on.  Each one is laden with testimonials, meaning that there are people who are actually falling for this nonsense, and spending their good, hard-earned money on it.

Of course, "This product is not intended to treat, diagnose, or cure any human disease."  Because that's not what telling people that ORMUS "could be the answer" to "tumors... and some yet unnamed disease" amounts to.

Yes, I know the caveat emptor principle.  But preying on people who evidently didn't do well in public school science classes just isn't nice.  And when you add the fact that some of the people being ripped off are probably desperately ill, it really pisses me off.

It makes me wish that there was a new arm of the FDA called the "Prove It Department."  When people make claims like this, a couple of guys would show up at their door and say, "Okay, you say that your product contains unique quantum energy frequency wavelengths.  Prove it." And if they can't, they have their business license taken away.

But that's a forlorn hope, I'm afraid.  There's a sucker born every minute, and that means that we'll never see the hucksters like these run out of business.