My frustration derives from this persistent accusation from a small but ironically vocal minority that there is some sort of coordinated thought police around here. I am not a part of any thought police and I resent the accusation. I can understand how there is the appearance of coordinated effort to bring discussions back around to proof and evidence, but that is just a natural outgrowth of similar ways of thinking. Stop with the paranoid ideation that the board is being run so as to steer thought toward mainstream views. It's absurd on the face of it. The late CW had grown positively obsessed with this idea that she was being attacked and marginalized for having the temerity to think differently. With what? Questions? Requests for proof and evidence? C'mon. And now the following she had gathered and seduced still harbors these suspicions and it's corrosive, divisive, and not good for anyone.
No one is preventing you from using your intuition and conjecturing and thinking out loud about anything at all with the exception of the very narrowly described proscriptions in the board's posting rules.
Come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine! No one's stopping you. Do you really care so much about the far away laughter?
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
I think there are more options than Hoax or Creativity Suppressed - although I am sure there are many examples of both of them. The dangers of coming up with something simple but perceived as game-altering by people in a position of power is not a current phenomenon...
The "Unbreakable Glass" of Ancient Rome
In the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37 AD) a Roman glassmaker demonstrated a remarkable new glass at the imperial court. Unlike ordinary glass, it did not break: it must have seemed almost supernatural. The event was recorded by contemporary writers Pliny and Petronius. They called his glass vitrum flexile (flexible glass). The craftsman displayed a beautiful transparent vase to the emperor and then dashed it to the ground. According to the story, it dented but did not break. Tiberius asked if the glassmaker had told the secret of unbreakable glass to anyone else. When the answer was in the negative, the emperor had the unknown genius put to death and his workshop destroyed fearing that the new material would reduce the value of his imperial gold and silver
As speculation, I think that it is very likely that the US and / or UK Governments already have access to limitless energy, but not from sources within the domain of either conventional science or solo maverick inventors. This is the area of the 'Breakaway Civilisation' as referred to by Richard Dolan and Catherine Austin Fitts.
If you say 'what is the evidence for a breakaway civilisation?', try this
One other thing though is asking for evidence - for example, in reading the review that slim posted, the writer seemed to be agreeing 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'. That is not science, it's politics, although lots of skeptics would like one to believe it is.
What constitutes proof and what is evidence in this context? A working prototype? - what about commercial confidentiality? Published in a mainstream academic journal? You gotta be fucking kidding me. Seriously.
On the other hand, having someone who actually spends the time to go and see these machines and talk to their inventors deserves real credit.
Searcher08 » Thu Aug 01, 2013 6:57 pm wrote:One other thing though is asking for evidence - for example, in reading the review that slim posted, the writer seemed to be agreeing 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'. That is not science, it's politics, although lots of skeptics would like one to believe it is.
Ordinary proof will do for me.
What constitutes proof and what is evidence in this context? A working prototype?
Yes. That would be the gold standard. A demonstration of a working machine which contradicted the law of conservation of energy. That would be ordinary proof.
- what about commercial confidentiality?
A plausible reason why alternative, paradigm shifting technologies might not be known. If that's what you mean, sure.
Published in a mainstream academic journal? You gotta be fucking kidding me. Seriously.
Why is that? Is their nothing ground breaking ever published in a 'mainstream academic journal'? I mean I understand that wildly divergent from the accepted norm ideas are not exectly encouraged in academe when it comes to challenging such basic and widely accepted foundations of science like the law of conservation of energy. But should all information from all mainstream academic sources be summarily dismissed if one is looking for paradigm busting research?
On the other hand, having someone who actually spends the time to go and see these machines and talk to their inventors deserves real credit.
Agreed. Even more so if they approach such inventors with both an open mind and also a skeptics mind. One can be both you know.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Look man. This thread is an illustrative microcosm of the seemingly never ending clash between the members that believe there is some concerted effort afoot to censor and suppress free thinkers and the members that simply want to be rigorous about their search for truth.
Is that what you got out of the origins of education video? OK, anyway FYI I prefer to engage with folk that think differently than me for the pragmatic reason that it is those folk that are more likely to help me to develop my thinking. This is difficult in this medium where things tend to get taken personally and people confuse high level thinking with an assumption that they are right.
No one (here) is trying to suppress free thought.
Certainly not consciously, we here, such as it is, are at the vanguard of the will to evolve human consciousness. None the less, we are creatures of our conditioning, and unconscious drivers may play a greater role in our shaping of words and ideas than do our conscious formulations as to what needs to be done so as to provide for the ‘greatest good’.
I try to make a case that because our conceptual modeling derives from and gives support to a vertical authority distribution system, that there is then a strong impulse to ‘suppress free thought’. We have been born and bred in a culture whose highest value is coercion. Of course it’s uncomfortable to feel accused of being coercive, but get over yourself; this is about the total system.
Challenging outside the box thinking with the tools of mainstream science and logic is not an attempt to silence creativity or more fanciful voices. Neither is it necessarily an endorsement of mainstream science and logic as the only avenue to the truth. Ok?
Challenge, fine, but please consider that facts are context dependent and that original thought may not have much correspondence with existing understanding of our categories.
I could also do well not have to deal with generalized derision and group assignment markers.
Dr. Evil wrote…
There's plenty of "exotic" energy research going on that's not being suppressed. It's just that they're still in the research stage, figuring out how to make it viable and cost effective.
I know a banker fellow that hires grad students to do ‘zero-point’ work in his basement. The guy has insane amounts of money and I can only imagine or dream about the equipment he has. (Nobody’s supposed to know, Shhhh)
But I know the guy and his efforts to stuff a square peg in a round hole can only make me laugh. I would not trust him to walk my dog.
So the while research may not be suppressed, to me at any rate, creativity is most certainly suppressed.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
There's plenty of "exotic" energy research going on that's not being suppressed. It's just that they're still in the research stage, figuring out how to make it viable and cost effective.
I know a banker fellow that hires grad students to do ‘zero-point’ work in his basement. The guy has insane amounts of money and I can only imagine or dream about the equipment he has. (Nobody’s supposed to know, Shhhh)
But I know the guy and his efforts to stuff a square peg in a round hole can only make me laugh. I would not trust him to walk my dog.
So the while research may not be suppressed, to me at any rate, creativity is most certainly suppressed.
This reminds me of the industry expended in cancer research, along with other recollections of accounts of research into "free energy"
Tesla had it all boxed off around a century ago, and JP Morgan response is there on the record for all to see.
Published in a mainstream academic journal? You gotta be fucking kidding me. Seriously.
Why is that? Is their nothing ground breaking ever published in a 'mainstream academic journal'? I mean I understand that wildly divergent from the accepted norm ideas are not exectly encouraged in academe when it comes to challenging such basic and widely accepted foundations of science like the law of conservation of energy. But should all information from all mainstream academic sources be summarily dismissed if one is looking for paradigm busting research?
No, I'm certainly not asserting that (Groundbreaking => Not published in academic journal) - there are obviously many counterexamples to that.
***************************************************************************** Rant starts: Far from dismissing mainstream sources, they should be made much more easily available and a completely different model created for the assessment and dissemination of academic research. There has been an academic journal publishing slavery paradigm in place (I'm not talking about novel idea selection here, rather the mainstream publishing system - just the appalling return on time, energy and information invested... ) Seriously, we have the utter abundance of the fucking world wide web yet have an academic publishing system so BAD
5,000 profs join boycott of Elsevier publications in international “academic spring” by Dennis Johnson
An “academic spring” has broken out against scientific journal publisher Elsevier, says a New Scientist report by Jacob Aron. According to the report, “Inspired by a University of Cambridge mathematician, over 5000 academics have agreed to boycott publishers Elsevier, vowing not to peer-review or submit papers for any of its scientific journals.”
Of course, it should be noted that Elsevier is owned by the giant conglomerate Reed Elsevier, which not only owns many publications but runs fairs and conventions such as the London Book Fair and the Book Expo America … and also owns New Scientist.
Nonetheless Aron gives a good synopsis of the situation:
The protest began last month when Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, wrote a blog post objecting to what he called Elsevier’s “very high” prices and its practice of “bundling” journals, which he says prompts university libraries to spend money on titles that they may not want.
Other mathematicians joined the cause, creating the website thecostofknowledge.com to declare they would no longer support Elsevier. Since then academics from other disciplines have joined the protest, and earlier this week 34 mathematicians, including Gowers, published a more formal statement explaining the reasons behind the boycott.
As well as criticising Elsevier’s pricing, the statement also objects to the company’s support of three proposed US laws: the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills and the Research Works Act (RWA), which aims to prevent government-funded researchers from being required to publish in open-access journals.
Mathmatician Nassif Ghoussoub — a member of the Board of Governors at the University of British Columbia — gives a more detailed breakdown of the charges against Elsevier in a post on his Peace of Mind blog:
Journal costs: Though not alone among publishers in price gouging, Elsevier’s prices are ridiculously high …
Bundling, which is a business practice that forces libraries to subscribe to large numbers of journals in order to avoid paying the exorbitant list prices for the ones they need. The real effect of such a practice is that the average price that libraries pay for the journals they actually want, is higher …
Scandalous practices: Elsevier has been involved in various dubious practices regarding the scientific content of its journals. One in particular involved the journal “Chaos, Solitons & Fractals”, which was at some point one of the highest impact factor mathematics journals that Elsevier published. It turned out that the high impact factor was at least partly the result of the journal publishing many papers — by its own editors — full of mutual citations.
In another example, Elsevier seems to have published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures.
Ghoussoub also observes that, with so many signatories, the petition started by Prof. Gowers has, it seems, had an impact on Reed Elsevier’s stock … but at least one investment analyst has said in a report on the stock that it “fully expects the price to rebound once this boycott fails like all the previous ones.”
A paidContent report by Robert Andrews, on the other hand, notes not all market analysts are so sanguine about the company’s recovery. He quotes Claudio Aspesi of Bernstein Research European saying, “We think that investors should ask management of Reed Elsevier how a PR incident of this kind could happen, why crisis management has been so tentative and what other steps management intends to take the handle the protest.”
Meanwhile, Ghoussoub, at Peace of Mind, points to a post at Shtetl Optimized, the blog of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Scott Aaronson, who gives some nature of the long-festering anger behind the boycott:
From now on, if I’m evaluating (say) a faculty or tenure candidate, and I see lots of Elsevier publications, I’m going to wonder about the reasons: “is this person simply unaware of the widely-discussed issues with Elsevier? is the person a timid conformist who feels that his or her papers need a ‘gold star of approval,’ even from a journal whose publisher is known to be mercilessly ransacking universities? if this person can’t even accept whatever minuscule or perceived career risk comes with open(er)-access publishing, why would the person take huge risks in the intellectual realm?” And I’m sure I won’t be the only one thinking this …
And they haven’t even started talking about using Twitter to rally people yet ….
Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House. **************************************************************************
One chap set up vixra, as a response to arxiv which itself was a response to the above predatory practices.
That is one factor - for all we know there already IS mainstream groundbreaking work sitting around ignored because some struggling university librarian cant afford the journal fees.
Other factors The difficulty of publishing cross-discipline approaches - for example if I am a solo researcher who finds that rhythmically striking a circular arrangement of andesite slabs induces levitation in the center of the circle, where am I going to go with that? Well, I could set up a new journal called the Journal of Rock Levitation, but where will that fit into the existing publishing eco-system? Alternatively, I could try and publish in the existing Papers on Andesite Rocks but they may quite properly say "Very interesting, old chap, sadly there isnt very much about , well, andesite rocks in it. Yes you thumped them a lot but that's not really enough..."
How novelty is treated in academia is a very tricky problem. In some ways being ahead of the curve by several years and being able to bring this to the attention of colleagues (ie say they are wrong AND going in the wrong direction) will result in rapid ejection from colleagueship. Combine that with the response that would emerge if said discovery was actually made by a... woman - and one has a perfect storm of journals 'not thinking it is in tune with the times', 'why cant you get a sponsor in a more accepted area', being taken off conference invitations and all sorts of not so subtle blacklisting shit. The analgue of this type of interaction is business-as-usual for these folks...
There are many people who spend their whole lives working in mainstream science outside the academic system (not by their choice), who are qualified with PhD's from excellent universities, and who live in destitute poverty - banished outside Castle Academia, labeled as 'pseudo-scientists' or 'fringe scientists' often by people who appear just too fucking unimaginative to understand them, whose work is ignored for years, until everyone else slowly catches up.. Try to create a Wikipedia article about it and it will vanish faster than a Guinness in a St Patrick's Day pub in Dublin.
The ones who dare to question the scientific method itself (like Sheldrake) or who post truly paradigm challenging results, like Jacques Bienveniste, well they have the fundamentalist skeptic version of 'Fair Game' used against them.
Searcher08 » Thu Aug 01, 2013 11:57 pm wrote:One other thing though is asking for evidence - for example, in reading the review that slim posted, the writer seemed to be agreeing 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'. That is not science, it's politics, although lots of skeptics would like one to believe it is.
Agreed, but one can always play the politics:
However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would “turn the laws of physics upside down,” and added, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”, I replied. “Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?”
Sounder wrote:I will also add that original thinking is most always counter-intuitive.
We're on the same page Sounder - but I'm interested to know how you define 'counter-intuitive'. Hope you'll forgive me if I seem a little over-indulgent.
Here's wiki's definition: Counterintuitive means contrary to what seems intuitively right or correct. A counterintuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition or gut feelings.
Substituting 'counter-intuitive' in your sentence with it's dictionary definition 'a proposition that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition or gut feelings' gives us the following:
"I will also add that original thinking is most always a proposition that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition or gut feelings."
I think I disagree with this. I.e. that original thinking is not most always about rational, material world 'workings', but in many cases some kind of 'insight' or 'realisation' linked to intuition.
The system we live in dislikes intuition.
I was reading up about animals recently and marvelling at how a certain wasp (I forget it's name now) just instinctively knows how to build it's nest for it babies. It digs a shaft in the soil and builds a funnel at the top which it coats with a substance that it's main parasitical enemy cannot crawl across (it's too slippery) but it's also too slippery for the wasp itself to crawl across so the chambers have to be built in a specific, convoluted fashion. It buries its eggs in the first lowest chamber, then constructs several chambers seperated by a thin membrane, each filled with food for it's growing babies, up to the top of the funnel. It then boobytraps the first chamber against other predators, then demolishes the funnel and buries the whole lot.
It does all this without guidance from it's own species. It just simply does it.
Animals are gifted with the incredible and unexplained ability to 'just do stuff' without communication or 'thought'. Yes, I know that genetics and chemical reactions are the current buzzthoughts for all actions taken by everything, everywhere, but it makes me wonder if the human animal has ben endowed with incredible gifts, but because of the way we have developed, they lay dormant, forgotten or underutilized. I suspect that intuition may be one of these gifts which has lost ground to the wonderful, life-enriching era of modern Western technology and all it's attendant miracles that make us all so happy. I also think intuition might be on the verge of a comeback in the face of where manipulated societal logic, reason and intellectualism has led us.
I wrote a thing that I'm not quite happy with and will be gone a few days, so hopefully some time to reflect will fix a few issues.
Till then, this will serve as a (lazy) replacement.
I just opened Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, to do a ‘reading’ and came upon this;
How is the ‘irrationality’ of the transition period overcome? It is overcome in the usual way, i.e. by the determined production of nonsense until the material produced is rich enough to permit the rebels to reveal, and everyone else to recognize, new universal principles. (Such revealing need not consist in writing the principles down in the form of clear and precise statements.) Madness turns into sanity provided it is sufficiently rich and sufficiently regular to function as a new world view. And when that happens we have a new problem: how can the old view be compared to the new view?
He goes on talking about A-facts and B-facts not being able to be put side by side.
Looking Beyond Space and Time to Cope With Quantum Theory ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2012) — Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behaviour of the Universe. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 142217.htm
Ironically, that first link features video footage of ... John Hutchison!
Also - the headline: "Hoaxes or Creativity Suppressed" is missing "or Didn't Pan Out". It doesn't have to be black and white.
There's plenty of "exotic" energy research going on that's not being suppressed. It's just that they're still in the research stage, figuring out how to make it viable and cost effective.
Here's an overview of current fusion research for instance:
As for the magical catch-all "Zero Point energy" or "Vacuum energy" (same thing), yes, it's real, but there are still no useful applications. But there's (again) plenty of research going on that's not being suppressed, and with some potential future applications. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
All one can do is to try to build a robust engine I suppose.
It's great to hear from you again Hammer.
It may be possible that the following is agreeable to me simply because it largely conforms to my existing pretences. Still, it seems like another indicator that the source of innovation comes more often from outside institutional educational systems, rather than from the inside, (that in its turn is responsible for incremental improvements.)
At first I was not impressed by this book sales blurb, but then I listened to the following video and Paul attained a higher level of credibility, to my mind at any rate.
Paul talks about suppression at the 46:00 minute mark.
If you are pressed for time there is interesting stuff at the 4:00 minute mark and also at about 26:00 minute mark.
Paul Babcock has twenty-nine years of experience in industrial electronic applications, as a technician, training specialist, service manager, project manager and applications and design engineer. Paul has worked with public entities and private organizations in fields ranging from avionics, power generation, telephony and alternative energy. He has broad experience designing and implementing custom communication and electronics systems in both the public and private sectors, and in developing large-scale communications solutions for the oil and gas industry. Paul is recognized for his expertise in alternative energy systems and power generation for companies and individuals, especially in remote locations.
Conference Series, Part 1 & 2 BEDINI-LINDEMANN 2012 & 2013 Science and Technology Conference
From: Paul Babcock Date: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 RE: Magnetic Energy Secrets™
Dear Friend, Let me cut right to the chase! Harnessing magnetism as a source of energy is not difficult, but you do have to know a few things. I'll begin by explaining a bit about what you find in Magnetic Energy Secrets, PART 1.
MAGNETIC ENERGY SECRETS, Part 1 The first thing you have to know is this: there is no direct relationship between the strength of a magnetic field and the quantity of electricity used to produce it. When I tell this to engineers, physicists, and other experts in the field, it really drives them nuts!
Too bad for them, it's a FACT! I've been arguing with these acedemic types for years, and I have never lost an argument yet. But I am sick of winning arguments. I just want to get on with the work of harnessing magnetism for energy, and show YOU how to do it too!
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
