Through a glass, darkly

I was chatting with my younger son a couple of days ago.  He's a professional scientific glassblower, so anything having to do with the properties, chemistry, or uses of glass is going to interest him automatically.  And this was how he ran into the name of Walter John Kilner.

My son asked me if I'd ever heard of him, which I hadn't, and he suggested I look into him as a possible topic for Skeptophilia.  What I found out was pretty interesting -- straddling that gap between "fascinating" and "crazy."

Kilner, who lived from 1847 to 1920, studied medicine, physics, and engineering at Cambridge University, eventually earning a master's degree as well as a doctorate in medicine.  He had a private medical practice as well as being a "medical electrician" -- then a brand-new field -- at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

So the man was certainly not lacking in brains.  But he veered off into an area that is fringe-y at best, and to this day we don't know if what he was seeing was real.

The basic idea is familiar to us today as the "aura," but what most people mean by that -- some sort of spiritual halo around humans (and supposedly, all living things) that conveniently can't be measured by any known technique -- is several shades more woo-woo than what Kilner meant.  He seems to have latched onto the idea of there being a kind of electromagnetic radiation given off by the human body that was outside the range of human vision, and which could potentially be used as a diagnostic tool if a device was developed that allowed us to see it.

In fact, there is invisible radiation coming from our bodies; it's infrared light, which is light that has a longer wavelength than red light.  (Nota bene: it took me some pondering to get past the misunderstanding that infrared and thermal radiation aren't the same thing.  Thermal radiation can be in any region of the spectrum -- think of the red light given off by a hot stove burner.  The wavelength of thermal radiation is dependent upon the temperature of the source.  Infrared, which can be emitted thermally, is defined by having wavelengths longer than that of visible light, regardless of how it's generated.)

More germane to Kilner and his goggles, although the human eye can't detect it, mosquitoes' eyes can (one of the ways they find us in the dark), and it can be sensed by the "loreal pits" of pit vipers that they use for finding prey at night, not to mention the infrared goggles used by the military, which convert long-wavelength infrared light to shorter wavelengths that we can see.  

So there was at least some scientific basis for what he proposed, and remember that this would have been in the late nineteenth century, when the properties of electromagnetic radiation were still largely mysterious.  What Kilner proposed was that since light is altered when it passes through filters of any kind, there might be a filter that could take the electromagnetic radiation from the aura and convert it to visible light.

His approach was to take thin layers of alcohol-soluble dyes, most derived from coal tar, sandwiched between two sheets of clear glass.  He claimed he found one that worked -- a blue dye he called dicyanin -- but according to Kilner, it was difficult to produce, so he started fishing around for a substitute.

Along the way, he convinced a lot of people that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see the human aura, and generated a huge amount of enthusiasm.  People suggested other blue dyes -- cobalt-based ones, and other coal tar derivatives like pinacyanol -- but the results he obtained were equivocal at best.  Nobody was able to produce dicyanin again, or even figure out what its chemical composition was, which certainly made any skeptics raise an eyebrow.  But to the end of his life, Kilner swore that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see clearly an aura around his volunteers' naked bodies, despite an analysis by the British Medical Journal stating bluntly, "Dr. Kilner has failed to convince us that his 'aura' is more real than Macbeth's visionary dagger."

So what, if anything, did Kilner see?  The easiest answer is: we don't know.

The whole thing reminds me of Kirlian photography -- those familiar (and striking) photographs that result from placing a photographic plate on top of a high voltage source, then adding a flat object of some kind.  This produces a coronal discharge, a purely physical effect caused by the voltage creating temporary ionization of the air molecules.  Pretty much anything works; I've seen Kirlian photographs of coins.  But this doesn't stop the woo-woos from claiming that Kirlian photographs are capturing the aura, and giving it all sorts of spiritual and/or esoteric overtones.

Kirlian photograph of a dusty miller leaf [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In the case of Kilner, though, the effect was never successfully replicated.  This hasn't stopped people from making "Kilner goggles" that you can still buy online, if you've got no better use for your money.  But as far as Kilner himself, he seems to have been entirely sincere -- i.e., not a charlatan or outright liar.  He pretty clearly believed he'd seen something that deserved an explanation.  Whether it was some kind of optical effect produced by his mysterious dicyanin, or a faint blur in the image that he then gave more significance than it deserved, we honestly don't know.  (This is reminiscent of the "canals of Mars," first described by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, which were clearly an artifact of poor telescope quality -- when the optical equipment improved, the Martian canals mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.)

Another possibility, though, was brought up by my wife; a lot of the dyes and solvents that Kilner used are neurotoxic.  It could be that what he was seeing was a visual disturbance caused by inhaling the fumes from nasty compounds like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, common in the coal tar he was using to prepare his dyes.

The interesting thing is that Kilner completely dismissed the esoteric spin that auras were given during the last decade of his life, primarily by the Theosophists and Spiritualists who were skyrocketing in membership during the first decades of the twentieth century.  Kilner remained to the end a staunch believer in the scientific method, and that anything he'd seen had a purely physical origin that was explainable in terms of the properties of light and electromagnetism.

It's an interesting case.  The fact that in the hundred years since he died, no one's ever been able to replicate his findings, strongly supports the fact that he was simply wrong -- he'd seen something, but it had nothing to do with anything that could be called an aura.  Even so, he's an interesting example of someone who was clearly trying to do things the right way, but his own determination to prove his conjecture blinded him to the obvious conclusion.

Further stressing the truth of Leonardo da Vinci's statement that "We must doubt the certainty of everything that passes through our senses."

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

A moment of Judeo-Christian silence

Let me start out with a reality check: despite what the Religious Right and the pseudo-pundits on Fox News want you to believe, there is no law against students praying in public school.  Nor is it against the rules for any student in any public school in the United States to have, or read, a Bible.  Nor to cite it (or Jesus) as an influence in their lives in personal essays.  No school has stopped students from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the words "under God."  Bible study and Christian fellowship groups are allowed to hold meetings on school property as long as attendance is completely voluntary.

Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong at best, and flat-out lying through their teeth at worst.

What is not legal is mandating prayer in school, or using Christian membership or affirmation as a qualification for... well, anything.  Schools cannot legally force students to follow the precepts of any religion.  The upshot is that public schools are simply not the venue for generating religious adherence, or (for that matter) preventing it.  It is no more teachers' place to alter their students' religious views in either direction than it is for churches to teach their congregations algebra.

As a personal case in point:

• I responded to questions about my own religious beliefs with "that isn't relevant to the discussion" -- even while we were studying fraught topics like evolution.
• I had a Bible on the bookshelf in my classroom.  I was given it by a student many years ago, and saw no reason it shouldn't be there.
• I saw students praying before exams and saying grace before lunch, and no one ever stopped them or had any problem with it.

As a brief aside, there is an explicit conflict in the "under God" part of the Pledge, in my opinion, because if it's recited by students -- which it still is, in public schools across the country -- it pressures non-religious students to affirm something they don't believe it (i.e., to lie).  I find that people who argue against taking out the words "under God" (which, by the bye, were not original to the Pledge but were added in the 1950s) often can't come up with a cogent reason why the words should be recited in a public school where (1) attendance is compulsory, and (2) there are students (and adults) of all different gradations of belief and disbelief.

But of course, that "live and let live" (or, as my mom used to put it, "your rights end where my nose begins") attitude isn't enough for the sanctimonious spokespeople of the Religious Right, who will stop at nothing to inject religion back into public schools.  And not just any religion, of course:

If there was any doubt about this, it should be put to rest by what happened in Florida (of course it was in Florida) last week.  A new law was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that will mandate a sixty-second "moment of silence" that must be observed in all public schools.  The proponents gave some lip service to a broad-minded sentiment behind this -- that students need to have time to engage in meditative self-reflection -- but the real reason was given away by the bill's sponsor, Representative Randy Fine, who tweeted triumphantly, "Just joined Governor DeSantis to sign my fourth bill of the 2021 Legislative Session, allowing prayer back into schools via a moment of silence for all our schoolchildren.  I won't stop fighting against woke radicals who which [sic] to drive out Judeo-Christian values from every aspect of our lives!"

You'd think that anyone with any sense would recognize that saying this explicitly is just asking for the filing of lawsuits to invalidate the new legislation, but DeSantis, who certainly wouldn't be in contention for the "smartest governor in the United States" award, not only didn't contradict Fine but immediately agreed.  "The idea that you can push God out of every institution and be successful," DeSantis said, "I'm sorry, our Founding Fathers did not believe that."

"Students are free to believe what they want" isn't enough for these people; Fine and DeSantis make it clear that the "moment of silence" bill is just a foot in the door for reinserting prayer -- Christian prayer, of course -- back into public school classrooms.  And call me a "woke radical" if you like, but no compulsory prayer of any kind belongs in publicly funded institutions.

And for fuck's sake, it's not like public school teachers have time to do some kind of subversive anti-religious indoctrination.  I was a teacher for 32 years, and never once did I say, "Okay, kids, we've got an extra twenty minutes today, I will now teach you how to blaspheme!"  I had enough on my hands trying to get high schoolers to understand the Krebs Cycle and Mendel's Laws and the reactions of photosynthesis, I definitely didn't have the space in the curriculum to devote to undermining students' dearly-held religious beliefs.

Nor, might I add, did I have the desire to.  I may be a staunch atheist myself, but I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at their understanding of how the universe works in their own time and fashion, and while I may disagree with someone's worldview, it's not my place to criticize it -- or honestly, even to make a judgment about it at all.

Unless that worldview involves compelling others to alter their own beliefs and actions.  It's all very well to say, "I do this because it's required by my religion;" when you start saying "you have to do this because it's required by my religion," you're going to have a fight on your hands.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Under the ancient skies

I find it fascinating how long humans have been curious about the nature of the universe.  Our drive to understand the world and its workings certainly goes back a very long way.  Some of it can be explained purely pragmatically -- a commonly-cited example is the development of accurate sidereal calendars by the ancient Egyptians to get the timing right for the annual Nile floods, critical not only from a safety standpoint but because figuring out a way to manage all that water was essential for agriculture in what was then a rapidly-growing population.  But it goes far beyond that.  It seems like as far back as we have any kind of records at all, we've wanted to know what makes the cosmos tick.

A particularly fascinating example of this came my way via my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, who seems to have an uncanny knack for finding stuff that (1) I will find really interesting, and (2) I haven't heard about before.  Yesterday he sent me a link from the site New Scientist about an archaeological find in Turkey that -- if the researchers' conclusions are borne out, will provide another example of how early we developed our compulsion to understand what was going on up there in the night skies.

The site is called Yazılıkaya, and it was built by the Hittites 3,200 years ago near their capital city of Ḫattuša.  (The nearest modern town is Boğazkale, in central Turkey.)  It has hundreds of images carved into the rock surfaces, and according to this new study, they represent not only solar, lunar, and sidereal calendars, they are a representation of their concept of the structure of the universe.

The shrine at Yazılıkaya

The current study was the product of a tremendous amount of work.  "There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out," said Eberhard Zangger, one of the researchers who investigated the site.  "But we worked on it for seven years...  [The Hittites] had a certain image of how creation happened.  They imagined that the world began in chaos, which became organized into three levels: the underworld, and then the earth on which we walk, and then the sky.  The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was a recurrent renewal of life – for instance, day following night, the dark moon turning into a full moon and winter becoming summer.  The calendar-like carvings reflect this cyclical view of nature."

Of course, back then, there was no particularly accurate way to measure stellar and planetary positions, and anything like a telescope was still two millennia in the future.  But even so, they did pretty damn well with what they had access to, especially given how long ago this was.  The Hittites controlled most of what is now modern Turkey from 1,700 to 1,100 B.C.E., at which point attacks from the Phrygians and Assyrians pretty much smashed the power structure and subsumed the culture.

From our modern knowledge of cosmology, the Big Bang and stellar evolution and astrophysics, their conclusions seem pretty rudimentary.  They, like most of the contemporaneous societies, put the whole thing in the hands of gods and sub-gods and so on, giving the whole thing a religious rather than scientific veneer.  "Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does," said archaeologist Efrosyni Boutsikas, of the University of Kent, who was not involved in the current research.  "It addresses universal concerns and the place of the people in the world."  She added that she's not 100% sold on the conclusions of Zangger and his colleagues, but that the site and others near it are deserving of further study.

I'm certainly not qualified to judge the quality of the research nor the legitimacy of the team's conclusions, but I am fascinated with how long we've been trying to figure out how everything works.  As Boutsikas said, religion is a common first-order approximation, and although in many cases it became solidified into a compulsory belief system that then became a hindrance to scientific advancement, it does represent our drive to reach beyond our day-to-day concerns and glimpse the mechanisms controlling not only the movements of things here on Earth, but of those unreachably distant points of light we see gliding through the night skies.  Awe-inspiring, isn't it, to think that our ancestors 3,200 years ago were looking at those ancient skies, and trying to make sense of it all -- just as we're still doing today.

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Finding the "cauld grue"

I had a recommendation from a reader to devote one day a week to my other passion besides science and critical thinking -- fiction.  I thought it was an interesting idea, so we'll give a try to Fiction Fridays.  I'm planning some book reviews, excerpts, essays, and so on -- let me know if you like it!

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

Most of my books are about the supernatural, and some of them are intended to be downright terrifying.  Along the way I've been influenced by many superlative writers of scary fiction, so I thought I'd start Fiction Friday with a few recommendations for some of my favorite Tales of the Supernatural.  I'll be curious to see what my readers think -- and to hear what your favorites are.  Always looking for new stories to read...

I have fairly definite opinions about reading material (okay, to be truthful, I have fairly definite opinions about most things, as long-time readers of Skeptophilia know all too well).   To me, a good horror story is one that is evocative, in which there is a subtle touch – the imagination, I find, is far more powerful than the written word in creating frightening imagery.  As Stephen King pointed out in his wonderful analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, it's often as scary to leave the door closed and let the readers spend the rest of their lives speculating about what was behind it than it is to actually open the door and reveal the monster (and take the chance they'll say, "Is that all it was?").

This is why gruesome stories really don't do much for me.  A story about a murderer with a chainsaw might disgust me, it might incite me to check to see if my doors are securely locked, but it doesn't give me that thrill of fear up the backbone that is what I'm looking for in a good spooky story, what the Scots call "the cauld grue."  Sheer human perversity doesn't fill the bill; there has to be some sort of supernatural element, to me, for a story to really cross the line into the terrifying.  Reading about homicidal maniacs simply is neither very appealing nor very scary (however scary actually meeting one would be).

All this is rather funny, because I don't actually believe in the supernatural, and I obviously do believe in the existence of homicidal maniacs.  The fact that something that doesn't exist can scare me far worse than something dangerous that does exist is probably just evidence that I'm not as highly evolved in the logic department as I often claim to be.

In any case, if you're curious, here are my top ten choices for the scariest stories of all time.  Let's hear what you think -- if you agree, disagree, or if you were prompted to find and read any of these.  Could make for an interesting discussion!

These are in no particular order, and there are no spoilers -- just a brief idea of what the plot is.

"What Was It?" by FitzJames O'Brien.  A house is haunted by a real, corporeal creature that also happens to be invisible.  And insane.

"The Dunwich Horror" by H. P. Lovecraft.  This is one of the most eerily atmospheric stories I've ever read, about an old man obsessed with recovering ancient lost magical lore, who should have left well enough alone.  Set in the wooded hills of northern Massachusetts, it is serious nightmare fuel, and one of Lovecraft's best.

"The Mirror" by Haruki Murakami, from his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.  If I had to vote for the single best-crafted short story I've ever read, this would be a strong contender.   A group of friends gets together for an evening of drinking and chatting, and someone notices that the host's apartment has no mirrors, and asks why.  Reluctantly, he explains.  You'll see why he was reluctant...

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The Shining by Stephen King.  Combines haunting with the familiar horror fiction trope of "we're all stuck here and can't get away," in absolutely masterful fashion.  Skip the movie and read the book.  You'll never look at a bathtub, or an old-fashioned elevator, or a long hotel hallway the same way again.

"Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad" by M. R. James.  A regrettably little-known story which is one of the flat-out scariest things I've ever read.  A British tourist finds an antique whistle half-buried in the sand on the beach, and blows it.  He shouldn't have.

"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs.  Embodies the old saying "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it," and is the classic example of -- literally, in this case -- not opening the door.

"Afterward" by Edith Wharton.  If this story doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you're made of stone.  A story about... a retroactive haunting?

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.  Not a supernatural thriller, as per my original description (so sue me).  But still a classic of horror fiction.

"August Heat" by William Fryer Harvey.  What if you happened upon a stranger, a maker of marble monuments, and he was making a headstone -- with your name, and today's date, on it?

"Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe.  One of the earliest stories of possession.

So, those are my top ten.  Agree?  Disagree?  Any additional that you would recommend?  What stories have chilled your blood, that would be appropriate to sit in front of the fire with, late at night, when no one is awake in the house but you?

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Double vision

After ten years of writing this blog six times a week, you'd think I'd be inured.  You'd think I'd long ago have stopped running into weird ideas that I hadn't heard of.  You'd think it'd be impossible to surprise me any more.

You'd be wrong.

You've heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  Well, just yesterday, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the homepage of the Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society, which takes it one step further:

Many prominent individuals are actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced.  That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection.  Clones can mate and reproduce clone children.  A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children. 

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion.  They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others. 

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill.  Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior. 

The eye is the window of the soul. In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within.  As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source.  Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment.  The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light.  They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that the last paragraph could be describing me before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning, the whole thing seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little shaky in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point.  (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.)  The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950’s.  This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor.  Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells.  To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change.  Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell."  The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed.  They developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment.  By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all. Not only do we have fake people walking around, some of them are actually robots. Jimmy Carter, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics.  Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff.  For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President.  On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter.  By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Brad Pitt and Jimmy Carter synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or something, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyoncé (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me choke-snort coffee all over my computer, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's rather tenuous grasp on reality?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone.  We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff.  Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry.  Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof.  Also the different color of his skin.  Its [sic] a very fine difference of the color.  Also the distance between body and head is now different.  Also his psychology while talking.  We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this.  We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then. They did lots of "stuff" and found out that (amongst other things) David Icke's head has moved farther away from his body.  Plus, they say they're being objective, so pretty much q.e.d., as far as I can see.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less blank and hollow-eyed, and hopefully fool more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Personality in music

A few weeks ago I was in my office working, and while writing on my computer I was listening to the London Symphony Orchestra (under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle) performing Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

It's a profound, beautiful, disturbing work.  But it's not everyone's cup of tea.  My wife came in to ask me a question while it was playing, and  as she walked into my office she said, "What the hell are you listening to?"  [Nota bene: she said it with a smile on her face; it was curiosity, not criticism.  We've known for years that we have very, very different tastes in music, and each of us finds it more interesting than off-putting when the other is listening to, and enjoying, some oddball piece.]

But to say that Stravinsky is not on my wife's "favorite composer list" is a bit of an understatement.  To her, it sounded a bit like a random note generator, and definitely didn't have the thrilling impact it has on me.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've been curious for years about where tastes in music come from.  My own playlist is wildly eclectic; when I put my iTunes on shuffle, I can end up with musical whiplash, going from Bach directly to Nine Inch Nails.  But why (for example) does my taste differ so completely from my wife's, when in so many other ways we're similar?  I know my own preferences are for music with strong rhythms, unexpected or odd harmonies, and an emotional edginess.  ("Music with teeth," I call it.)  That's true regardless of genre. 

But why?  What is it about my personality that makes my heart pound when I listen to Shostakovich, but leaves me yawning when I listen to Mozart?

Turns out there was a study done about this very question five years ago, led by the same person who led the research I described in yesterday's post, about the psychological effects of making music in groups -- David Greenberg, then of the University of Cambridge, now at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.  I found out about it because a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post, and sent me an email saying, "You think that's cool, take a look at what else this guy has done," along with a link to a paper in the journal Social, Psychological, and Personality Science entitled, "The Song is You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality."  The paper so directly addresses the question I've wondered about for ages that I'm kind of stunned I'd never run across it before.

What Greenberg et al. did was look at three musical attributes in pieces from various genres:

1. Arousal -- intense, forceful, abrasive, thrilling vs. gentle, calming, mellow
2. Valence -- fun, lively, enthusiastic, joyful, happy vs. depressing, sad
3. Depth -- intelligent, sophisticated, inspiring, complex, poetic, thoughtful vs. light, entertaining, simple, "party" or "dance" music

These broke down into 38 different descriptors, and the first thing the researchers did was to have judges evaluate 102 different pieces of music from various genres with respect to each descriptor.

After generating composite scores for each attribute, the 102 pieces were thrown out to a total of 9,454 participants.  Each participant gave each piece a rating, and also took a psychological/personality assessment.

Then the researchers started looking for correlations.

The results are downright fascinating, and I refer you to the paper itself for the full lowdown.  But here are a few of the connections they found:

Agreeableness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal and valence in music and positively associated with depth...  [P]reference for arousal was positively associated with modesty but negatively associated with trust, morality, altruism, cooperation, and sympathy.  Valence was negatively associated with modesty.  Preference for depth was positively associated with cooperation but negatively associated with modesty...  Conscientiousness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal in music and negatively associated with depth...  [In fact] arousal was negatively associated with all the conscientiousness facets [in personality] except for self-discipline.  Valence was positively associated with self-efficacy and cautiousness, and depth was positively associated with all of the conscientiousness facets except for self-discipline.

What this study would say about my own personality, given my love for The Rite of Spring, has been left as an exercise for the reader.

I was also fascinated by their look at what personality correlates exist in people who have diverse tastes in music as compared to those who have strong genre preferences.  Apparently, we people who listen as often to metal as to classical score high in measures of openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and low in neuroticism.  So... yay?  I've always thought of myself as being something of a neurotic introvert, so I have to admit this one came as a bit of a surprise, although by my own assessment I'm pretty open, agreeable, and conscientious.  I guess on balance, this one works as well.  And despite coming from totally different genres, mood-wise there's a lot of commonality between Stravinsky and The Hu, an amazing Mongolian metal band whose song "Wolf Totem" is one of my favorite tunes to listen to while running:

So maybe the genre isn't as important as the emotional content.

In any case, I thought the whole thing was fascinating, and the entire paper is well worth reading.  Music affects a great many of us on a completely visceral level, and it's unsurprising that just about every culture in the world makes music in some form or another.  The fact that what music we respond to is a reflection of who we are is perhaps unsurprising, but it's kind of cool that we can find out a little about ourselves by looking at our playlists. 

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

A beautiful noise

For ten years, I was part of a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence.  The name, if you're curious, comes from an English children's rhyme:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence beside a crooked stile.
He had a crooked cat and it caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Finding a "crooked sixpence" (a bent silver coin) was considered lucky, and we thought that was a good moniker for our group.

Playing for contradances and English country dances was brilliant fun, and I attribute my getting over the awful stage fright I suffered from when I was younger to being a part of this wonderful trio.

Crooked Sixpence at our last gig -- January 2019 [left to right: Kathy Selby, me, John Wobus]

Sadly, we disbanded when our fiddler, Kathy, moved back to Ireland.  Of course, shortly thereafter the pandemic hit and all the public performances were cancelled, pretty much for the rest of the year, so I doubt we'd have done much playing anyhow.

Since our breakup, all my music has been alone in my house -- I haven't had any jam sessions with friends for a year and a half.  While I do love playing, whether by myself or with others, there is something about making music together that is qualitatively different than playing solo.

This was the subject of a fascinating study at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Chicago that came out in the journal American Psychologist last week.  The team, led by David Greenberg, looked at five measures of five key functions in the brain: empathy, the levels of three hormones (dopamine, oxytocin, and cortisol), and language structures, before and after having an experience of playing music in a group.

What they found wouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has made music with others.  Levels of empathy, as measured by psychological assessment, went up.  Dopamine and oxytocin levels, both connected with reward, pleasure, and pair bonding, both went up as well.  Cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, went down.  The neurological systems involved in language -- both listening and producing -- both spiked in activity, especially when the playing or singing was done in harmony, not in unison.

"Music connects us to our humanity," Greenberg said, in a press release from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  "Through social neuroscience, we can discover that our sense of social connection isn't just subjective, but that it is rooted in important brain mechanisms.  Especially in a time when there is so much social division around the world, we need to find new ways to to bridge cultures in conflict.  Music is one of those ways.  We hope our research will lead to more grass-roots programs like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which bring people from differing cultures together through music."

Which brings home once again how much I miss making music with friends.  We've all felt pretty isolated during the last year and a half, and now that we're slowly and hesitantly coming out of isolation, maybe it's time to start making a beautiful noise together again.

The world as a whole sure could use something positive.  And, I suspect, so could most of us as individuals... and small groups of friends together.

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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