Looking at Geometry & Relationships to understand science

[jabeguy]

Looking at geometry and how the relationships work together is a new way to view science, outside the box...

Nassim Haramein - Crossing the Event Horizon
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4907540922643918266

The Resonance Project (Haramein's website):
www.theresonanceproject.org

[trotsky]

1. It's like science, only *better*!

With neat colors and funky 80s-style SGI graphics! And a charismatic leader! Do I get to wear black clothes and new tennis shoes and await a ride on a comet, too?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. I wonder what Gene Ray has to say about this.

[Warpy]

3. I can relate to this guy on a lot of levels

especially the one where Eulclidean geometry made no sense but the places deep meditation takes people does. I've also heard people who sound very much like him in psych wards. They didn't see things or hear voices, it was more like they just couldn't slow their thoughts down enough for speech. Some of them were producing word salad. A very few made as much sense as this guy does.

Schools gave up on me, too, and left me in the back of the room to read my books. I was quiet, I passed all the tests, they didn't care about anything more.

That crack about Sedona was worth the price of admission.

[caraher]

4. Word salad it is

I started reading his paper, "COLLECTIVE COHERENT OSCILLATION PLASMA MODES IN SURROUNDING MEDIA OF BLACK HOLES AND VACUUM STRUCTURE - QUANTUM PROCESSES WITH CONSIDERATIONS OF SPACETIME TORQUE AND CORIOLIS FORCES" (hey, he's the one who uses all caps, which is weird in itself. I noticed some erroneous statements in stuff on his site about the status of spin in physics (chief howler: the assertion that physics regards electron spin as the result of the electron physically rotating at "the speed of light." In fact, a standard undergraduate quantum mechanics/atomic physics exercise is to prove that this kind of interpretation of electron spin is untenable...) Giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps there's some rigor in his "scientific papers," and this one I picked at random.

On page 2, he randomly assigns a value of 377 ohms as the "resistivity" of the event horizon of a black hole. Resistivity is a standard quantity used in understanding basic electric circuit components and it does not have the same units as resistance (which is measured in ohms; resistivity has units of resistance times length, or ohm-meter in SI units). Later, he explains that he's not asserting that the value is actually 377 ohms... "This value is chosen, for the sake of this picture, analogous to the Earth's fields." He also includes a gratuitous walk-through of the implications of Ohm's Law: "For 377 ohms, an electric field of 377 volts would be needed to drive one ampere of current across a square surface area on the event horizon." The meaning of "a square surface area" is utterly opaque; he's not talking about current density (amperes/m^2) so mention of the shape of some piece of the event horizon is a non sequitur.

The paper is full of verbiage that is utterly gratuitous in writing for an audience of physicists and utterly meaningless to anyone without physics, math or electrical engineering education at the bachelor's degree level. For instance, on page 3 he solemnly informs us that, "We can treat the electromagnetic field in terms of spherical harmonics as an approximation." Run-on sentences abound. Good writing is not required to do good physics, but the impression I get is of someone who has racing thoughts they cannot readily control, even while putting them in written form. I only looked at a small portion of his mathematics. What I could follow was, at best, confusing not for its profundity but for its poor notation. I could get used to underlined quantities being vectors (though that convention is both nonstandard and unexplained), but some equations are nonsensical as written (equation 16, for instance) and others just unclear. I especially enjoyed the one where he uses lower-case "e" for both the base of natural logs and the charge of an electron, followed by the helpful explanation, "where e is the charge of an electron and the exponent is to the base e."

I could go on and on... his discussion of creation and annihilation operators gets the notation backward. He uses a very random and confusing notation in outlining first order perturbation theory. Much of the paper is devoted to reciting unremarkable factoids, apparently to show that he has read a lot of physics books.

[caraher]

5. A few more points...

Publications: None of Haramein's work has been subject to peer review by the scientific community. Haramein's publications are of two kinds. The "peer-reviewed" papers are all published in "Noetic Journal." Those are peer-reviewed only in the sense that people operating outside the global physics community are his peers - and thus those who consider the work worth publishing. His other publications are poster and contributed talk abstracts at American Physical Society meetings. Those would be presentations before actual physicists, but APS has a very democratic system for these. They do review proposed talks and posters, but only to the level of determining which sessions of a given meeting would be most appropriate. All that one can safely conclude from his presentations at APS meetings is that his APS membership check cleared and he submitted an abstract. Publication in the Bulletins of the APS doesn't even mean he actually gave the talk or presented the poster; nobody takes attendance, and it's not unusual for someone not to make the meeting or to miss their talk.

DVDs, etc.: They're asking a rather princely sum for their DVDs - $84.00 for the 4-DVD set. I also see they have a program to recruit people as "emissaries" from the "Galactic Federation." Beyond being able to call yourself an Emissary of the Galactic Federation benefits include the DVDs at a reduced price (NOT free!). I'm sensing pyramid power here, where the "pyramid" I have in mind is not the source of mystical energies but the kind often used before the word "scheme." It's also interesting that they refer to their DVDs as "products." In their conference call they mentioned that it costs $2200 for the training, NOT including travel, meals or lodging - and the travel is to Hawaii! They also allude to "financial benefits" of becoming an Emissary - a commission on DVD sales, a large cut (the lion's share) of admission fees for the emissaries' presentations...

"Graduates of this year long program will be able to develop networks in their respective regions to deliver the Resonance Project Foundation's vision and mission through seminars and workshops." Key words: "develop networks." Sounds a bit like Amway!

I also just looked at his "scientific paper" on spin, which is (mercifully) shorter than the other. It is definitely loaded with rubbish. I do wonder about his co-author, Elizabeth Rauscher, who unlike Haramein does list legitimate physics degrees and publications on her CV. Looking over a list of her publications I think Haramein is pulling equations and jargon from her academic writings and pasting everything together with his own verbiage. Unless Rauscher suffers from dementia I cannot believe she would have let her name on such sloppy writing even if she thinks the theories are sound. Rauscher seems to have veered off into studying psychic phenomena and other non-mainstream topics sometime in the late '70s. I'd like to know what set her in that direction!

[rayofreason]

6. I call Bullshit.

This is a link to pseudoscience. The so-called "peer-reviewed Noetic Journal" is a refuge for crackpots. And one shouldn't make a big deal about links to abstracts presented at APS meetings. The APS rules are that any member in good standing (paid dues) can submit an abstract to an APS meeting and that abstract will be published in the program. They don't even have to show up. Here is a bit more on the founder of the Noetic Institute.

http://www.randi.org/jr/05-31-2000.html

And as has been pointed out already by caraher, the paper is nonsense. I also took a quick look at the paper and recognized this stuff for garbage pseudoscience right away. For example, on page 284 at the bottom it says-

"The collective properties of the plasma become important when it interacts
with an external or self-generated radiation field. This occurs in the case where the electron plasma frequency, wp ,
is of the same order of magnitude, or exceeds, the operating radiation frequency w , i.e. wp>w . The value of wp is
of the order of 10^5 Hz or greater."

This person is ignorant of plasma physics, but knows a few words.