Three New Things

Posted by jns on July 14, 2006

Three items in this week’s issue of “What’s New”, by Bob Park,^* amused me enough to share. That I found these amusing may tell you more about me than anything.^#

1. ABC PRIMETIME: WAKE UP ABC, IT’S THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY!
Here’s the scene: Adam Dreamhealer is a normal 19 year-old, who wears an earring, has a tattoo, pumps iron, and all that stuff. A regular guy, except he has this gift. It came from a 4-foot tall blackbird he encountered on a strange island. The bird downloaded all the world’s knowledge into Adam’s head. Now Adam goes into trances in dark rooms to manipulate quantum holograms with his hands. (Tom Cruise in Minority Report?) It enables Adam to cure cancers that haven’t been verified by biopsy. How does it work? “Quantum mechanics.” An over-the-hill physicist said scientists “groan” at that explanation. He said more but it was cut. Dr. Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 fame came on and agreed with Adam that it must be quantum mechanics. It was Mitchell who carried out ESP experiments from space, and now worries about all of these UFO visits. He is the author of Quantum Holography: A Basis for the Interface Between Mind and Matter. Why am I telling you this? Because I was the “over-the-hill physicist” who allowed himself to be used. I will perform any penance WN readers feel is appropriate. I really should have known better: http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN05/wn021105.html.

2. DOUBLE BLIND: WHAT THE MEDIA JUST CAN’T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND.
Feynman once described science as “what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves.” The most important discovery in medicine is the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled test, by means of which we learn what works and what doesn’t. When I was first contacted by ABC about Adam Dreamhealer, a producer asked how I would respond to Adam’s claims? “I would ask for the test results,” I replied. But of course, there are no test results. That’s the point. And it’s the only point ABC needed to make.

4. SOUL SEARCHING: ZYGOTES, PEOPLE, AND THE TWIN PARADOXES.
Several readers commented on last week’s science v. religion story that, if a zygote is assigned a soul, identical twins would have to share a soul. One reader noted that in the very rare case of chimerism, which involves the fusion of two paternal twin zygotes, one person would have two souls. Identical twins, however, as we all know, are not identical. Many connections in the brain, mostly dealing with language, are still not completed at birth. In the sense that our “essence” is our “soul,” the soul keeps changing throughout life.

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^* Archive at http://www.bobpark.org. Bob: when are you going to start the “What’s New Blog”?

^# It should go without saying that physicists often have an inscrutible sense of humor, particularly when it comes to physics jokes; that is to say, there are things that physicists find knee-slappingly funny that makes no sense to others.