Space donuts

A friend of mine asked me yesterday if I'd ever heard of a "flux thruster atom pulser."  I said, "You mean, like in Back to the Future?"

He said, "No, that's a flux capacitor."  And he gave me a link to a site called Rodin Aerodynamics.

"You may want to wear a helmet while reading it," he said.  "It'll protect your skull when you faceplant."

Indeed, the site did not disappoint, and I was put on notice in the first paragraph:

Within, you will be taken on a spiraling tour through the toroidal roller coaster of our deterministic universe.  Dark Matter, the vibratory essence of all that exists, is no longer on its elusive hide and seek trip -- it has been found!  With the introduction of Vortex-Based Mathematics you will be able to see how energy is expressing itself mathematically.  This math has no anomalies and shows the dimensional shape and function of the universe as being a toroid or donut-shaped black hole.  This is the template for the universe and it is all within our base ten decimal system...  You have entered a place where Numbers Are Real And Alive and not merely symbols for other things.

So, we live in a giant space donut composed of dark matter, and 125.7 is a living entity.  Wheeee!  We are certainly off to a good start, aren't we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons RokerHRO, Torus vectors oblique, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The originator of the idea is allegedly a fellow named Marko Rodin, although I could find no independent corroboration of this -- as far as I could tell, Rodin seems not to exist except on this site and others that reference it.

The mysterious Rodin, however, has had quite a life:

At the age of fifteen Marko Rodin projected his mind as far as he could across the universe and asked the question, "What is the secret behind intelligence?"  Due to his gift of intense focus or because it was time for him to know the answer, his stomach muscles turned to iron and as he was literally lifted forward he answered out loud, "I understand."  What he had gleaned from his query was that all intelligence comes from a person's name.  This led him to understand that not only do our personal names and the language they are spoken in highly affect our personalities but that the most important names are the names of God.

I wish I'd known when I was fifteen that all I had to do to get rock-hard abs was ask a vague philosophical question.

Anyhow, what intelligence did Rodin glean from his trip, and the contemplation of his name?  Well, here are a few gems of wisdom he brought back:

• a propulsion system that can bring you "anywhere in the universe."
• there is an "aetheric template" in DNA that guides evolution.
• the "repeating number series that solves pi and proves that it is a whole number."
• the fact that "zero does not exist on the number line."
• infinity has an "epicenter."

These represent just the ones I could read without my brain exploding, because a lot of Rodin's "ideas" are completely incomprehensible.  A couple of these will suffice:

• the world boundary seams consist of nested vortices.
• the torus skin models harmonic cascadence [sic].

A lot of his pronouncements sound like that -- a bunch of fancy-sounding words strung together that basically don't mean anything.

He goes on to mess about with number patterns, but brings in the Yin/Yang, the Mathematical Fingerprint of God, and Aetheric Flux Monopole Emanations.  What are those, you might ask?  You might be sorry you did:

Aetheron Flux Monopole Emanations, or Aetherons, are linear Emanations of quasi-mass/energy, traveling in a straight line from the center of mass outwards.  They radiate in phased-array from the Aeth Coalescence (the central essence of God).  The Aetheron Flux Monopole Emanations Rarefy the Diamond Tiles.  This rarefication [sic] is spread over the Torus Skin, creating Doubling Circuits and Nested Vortices.

Aetherons cannot be seen or felt by the average human being.  Yet, Aetherons are responsible for life as we know it.  Aetherons are Life Force of the universe, and are responsible for all form and movement.  Aetherons are the source of all magnetic fields and create instantly reacting, high inductance, dual magnetic field flows.  Aetherons generate Synchronized Electricity.  They are irresistible and can penetrate anything.

The Aetheron Flux Monopole Emanations comprise the positive, transparent Z axis of the Abha Torus.  This is not the traditional Z-Axis of the traditional, Euclidean geometry.  The transparent Z-Axis of the Abha Torus is actually a point source from which linear Emanations pour in all spherical directions from the center, as demonstrated by the Dandelion Puff Principle.

Oh!  Right!  The "Dandelion Puff Principle."  I'd forgotten all about that, from my college physics classes.

Now, you might think that this is just some guy blathering on about how he will Revolutionize Physics despite the fact of having no scientific background whatsoever, and admittedly people like that are a dime a dozen.  But now Marko Rodin has been championed by noted wackmobile Jeff Rense.

Never heard of Rense? He is a conspiracy theorist par excellence, whose overall looniness quotient ranks him right up there with Richard C. Hoagland and Alex Jones.  But Rense compounds his bizarre view of the world with anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, which moves his ideas from the realm of the laughable to the completely odious.  He brags that his is the most "format and content-plagiarized site on the net," despite the fact that his most of his material seems to be outright lunacy.  (And even if you don't want to read any of his posts, you should at least go to his site to look at his profile photograph, in which he sports a mustache and a mane of flowing hair that in my eyes makes him look a little like an aging 70s porn star.)

So, anyway, that's today's Breakfast of Wingnuttery.  We live on a donut made of dark matter and numbers, and the whole thing is caused by invisible particles emanating from the Essence of God.  Oh, yeah, and despite what your math teacher told you, pi is a whole number, something I remember trying to convince my seventh grade math teacher of, many years ago.  "Can't we just call it '3' and be done with it?", I recall saying.  If only I'd known how many years ahead of my time I was, I could have dropped out of school and beat Rodin to the punch, and invented my own "flux thruster atom pulser" so I could "go anywhere in the universe."  Think of how impressed the aliens would have been, especially given my rock-hard abs.

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

One of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience is the origin of consciousness.  We are aware of a "self," but where does that awareness come from, and what does it mean?  Does it arise out of purely biological processes -- or is it an indication of the presence of a "soul" or "spirit," with all of its implications about the potential for an afterlife and the independence of the mind and body?

Neuroscientist Anil Seth has taken a crack at this question of long standing in his new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, in which he brings a rigorous scientific approach to how we perceive the world around us, how we reconcile our internal and external worlds, and how we understand this mysterious "sense of self."  It's a fascinating look at how our brains make us who we are.

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

Spirals and ice ages

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia recently sent me a link that spells out why we're headed to another ice age, which precipitated my vanishing down the rabbit hole for almost two hours.

The gist of the first website I looked at is that we're headed for an ice age despite everything we're currently doing to send us into the climate change hothouse, because the current model of the Solar System is "not only boring, but incorrect."  This follows the well-known scientific law that if you're bored by a theory, that's evidence that it's wrong.

This startling revelation came from a post on the r/Conspiracy subreddit that could be used as an advertisement about why it's critical to take high school physics.  It starts with a video on YouTube called "The Helical Model: Our Solar System is a Vortex," wherein we find out that because the Sun is traveling in a (more-or-less) circular path around the center of the galaxy, the planets aren't traveling in circles, they travel instead in a "vortex."  "The Sun is like a comet," the video tells us, "dragging planets in its wake."

Because apparently comets do that.  Who knew?

"Rotational motion" and "vortex motion" are, we are told, "completely different things."  Then we're shown all sorts of pretty pictures of spiral stuff like ammonite shells and fern fiddleheads.

But so far, what we've been shown is hardly startling, if you know any physics at all.  Of course the motion of the planets looks different if you're viewing it from a different perspective.  Physicists call this a reference frame, and they know all about them -- the idea of reference frames is what gave Einstein the idea for the Theories of Relativity.  So it's not some kind of earthshattering idea to point out that if you're traveling with the Sun, the planets move in ellipses, and if you're not -- if you're at a fixed point above the center of the Milky Way, watching the stars zoom around in circles -- the planets will travel in a spiral-ish fashion.  The motion isn't different; what has changed is your reference frame.

But that's only the beginning.  We're then shown two drawings of "energy fields," one around a human and one around... um, something.  I'm not sure what.  The first one is marked "copyrighted," so out of respect for intellectual property rights (although this may be stretching the definition of the word "intellectual"), I'll just post a link to it.  The second, though, I'll reproduce here:

The original poster on r/Conspiracy called these "Taurus fields."  And I sat there for some time, wondering, "Why Taurus?  Why not Scorpio or Aquarius, or, for that matter, Camelopardalis?"  And then it came to me: he means "torus."  As in, a donut-shaped thing.  Although I do think that "Taurus" is correct in one sense, in that this seems to me to be a lot of bull.

In any case, this sets us up for the punch line, which I present here in toto:

...we are just on the outside of the Iron Age (the shaded in cone), and entering the Bronze Age.  Being we are still in the cone, this is causing us to travel in a spiral, but the spiral is widening.  This is causing us to gain speed, like a sling. 

This gain in speed is causing our sun to produce longer solar flares.  This will cause our planet to rise in temperature, causing our polar caps to melt.  This, of course, will cause major flooding.  We've yet to see the worst, and the worst will last about a month to a month and a half.  This will flood most of the world. 

And the sun progresses to increase, the planets will pull away (think of gravity like a bungee cord), and this will then cause global cooling, which will introduce us into a new ice age. 

The ice age will take about 300 years to fully manifest, but it will last between 12,000 - 16,000 years. 

This explains all the black projects costing trillions of dollars.  This explains all the underground bunkers being built.  This explains all the camps, all the militarization of police, all the crack down on rights.  This explains why people that seem to have all the money they need seem to need more money.

Wowza.  This may be one of the most concentrated samples of bullshit I've ever seen.  We have: a total lack of understanding of basic physics, apocalyptic stuff, "global cooling," government conspiracy theories, and underground bunkers, all in the space of just five short paragraphs.

We are then directed to two websites for further information.  The first is Half Past Human, which seems to be some kind of conspiracy site (although I did see references to "swirlies in the sky" and "spacegoat farts" as I scrolled down the entries, both of which I would prefer not to investigate, rabbit hole notwithstanding).  The second is DJSadhu.com, which is a blog with lots of videos and articles about how everything we know about physics is wrong.  Oh, and chemtrails and Cliven Bundy and music and pyramids.

It's a general rule of thumb that whenever some n00b comes down the pike, without any scientific training whatsoever, and claims to have discovered a Grand Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, (s)he is (1) probably insane, and (2) definitely wrong.  Scientists do make mistakes; as British science historian James Burke put it, in the episode "Worlds Without End" from his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, "The so-called voyage of discovery has, as often as not, made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge."  Science sometimes backtracks, makes missteps, pursues what ultimately turn out to be dead ends.

But scientists do understand the method by which you achieve understanding, and because of that, the overall body of science becomes better refined, and closer to grasping the actual truth, as time goes on.  The bottom line: we may not understand everything, but we have a pretty good idea of how to explain a lot of what we see.  The likelihood of anyone finding anything that completely overturns our understanding of any branch of science is slim indeed.

And that includes vortex motion, Taurus fields and "spacegoat farts."

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

Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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

Don't drink the water

It's been a while since we've had a new bizarre alt-med claim to poke fun at, so I was delighted when a loyal reader sent me a link yesterday to a site for something called "Starfire Water."

What is "Starfire Water," you might be asking?  Let me allow the website to speak for itself:

Starfire Water™ is a proprietary alkaline (pH 8.5) performance water produced using breakthrough 21st-century quantum water technology.  Starfire Water is treated with ultraviolet ozonation, infrared stimulation and electromagnetism for a negative ion charged water, as in nature, allowing deep, cellular intake through aquaporins, the floodgates to hydration.

So we're starting off the right way, with the mention of "quantum."  Everything in alt-med has to be "quantum."  As far as the rest, it appears to me that the writer of the above paragraph came up with this text by opening the glossary of a college chemistry text and pointing at random words, then stringing them together into sentences.

"Ultraviolet ozonation," my ass.

So then we get to find out how "Starfire Water" is made, and that adds a whole new layer of wacky woo-woo pseudoscience to the mix:

Our process utilizes a centrifugal vortex to implode the water and set the water in motion for several hours. This reorganizes the molecular order into a receptive state to receive high frequency vibration. The water is then passed through a chamber where magnetic resonance imprints a series of frequencies in an infinitely modulating sequence. Molecular order and frequency loading mutually reinforce each other to maintain the transformation of the water. 

The result is a liquid with the water formed into small, biocompatible water crystals that resonate at a designed and predictable frequency. The specific frequencies of the crystalline structured water solution are designed to be amplified by the cells of the human body, and transferred through resonant paths to tissues in need of “tuning”.

So, let's see here.  We have:

• a "centrifugal vortex."  Because apparently there's another kind.
• "reorganized molecular order."  Don't want to drink disorganized water, after all.
• "high frequency vibrations."  The higher the frequency the better, apparently.
• "infinitely modulating sequences" imprinted by "magnetic resonance."  I have a bachelor's degree in physics, and I have no idea what the fuck that means.
• "water crystals."  You mean ice?
• "frequencies of crystalline structured water solution amplified by cells and transferred through resonant paths."  Okay, fine, you win.  I give up.

But one more thing bears relating, which is the diagram that shows the highly scientific method they use to make this stuff:

So evidently electrons get sucked down whirlpools, and positive ions get flung out of it, or something.  But at least now we know how the water is "imploded in a centrifugal vortex."

What this product appears to be is mineral water that they spin around for a while and then sell for six dollars a gallon to unsuspecting gullible types.  And there are a good many gullible types, apparently; even their Facebook page has been "liked" 3,960 times, probably because they make a point of telling us that their water is "treated with S.S.R.T. , Sacred Sound Resonance Transmission, making it the world’s finest premium Cell Ready performance 'living' hexagonal water ever produced."

Which you have to admit sounds pretty impressive.

So that's our dip in the deep end of the ordinary-water-filled pool for today.  Spending an hour pawing through the nonsense on this site -- and believe me, what I've written here represents only the barest fraction -- is making me consider giving up on water entirely.

At the moment, I'm thinking of switching to scotch.