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Bearden flame war at GNN
Posted on Monday, April 07, 2003 @ 01:20:17 UTC by vlad
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SMHoke writes: FYI: A rather nasty little "flame war" has erupted on the guerrillanews.com forum regarding Dr. Bearden, his research, and the MEG.
So, if anyone cares to jump into the fray, feel free. Here's a link to the BB thread:
URL: guerrillanews.com
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Average Score: 2.2
Votes: 10
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Re: Bearden flame war at GNN (Score: 1)
by bender772 on Monday, April 07, 2003 @ 19:22:31 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.suppressedscience.net | While I hope very much that the MEG turns out to be legit, and while I am by no means defending the ignorant tirades of pseudoskeptics like James Randi, I must admit that Bearden IS giving them more than enough ammunitition.
For years now, we've heard the Bearden claim that "Maxwell-Heaviside" EM theory is incomplete, and that the original Maxwell equations are far richer than the ones we find in the physics text books, which were, so the story goes, curtailed by Heaviside, by chopping off the real component of those quaternion-valued quantities and making the three imaginary ones into a vector. That missing scalar quantity is supposed to represent a kind of vacuum stress, through which such (currently not recognized by mainstream physics) phenomena as "pressure waves of the vacuum", i.e. longitudinal EM waves, are possible. It's supposedly all in there, in Maxwell's original papers.
I honestly think that's a fascinating idea. There's only one problem- I can find very little evidence for these claims. Years ago, when I "discovered" Bearden, I went to my university library and got the volume with historical Maxwell papers that, according to Bearden, contains those uncurtailed equations. But I could not understand what I found. I have an undergraduate degree in physics, and I know what is generally considered the Maxwell equations, but those papers use antiquated terminology and notation.
But Bearden talks about these "20 quaternion-like and vector equations in some 20 unknowns" as if this was all perfectly clear. If it is so clear, why can't he give those equations, in modern terminology, on his website, and make a clear statement that can be confirmed or refuted by experiment, like "I claim that the following set of equations describes electromagnetism".
But you will not find such a positive statement anywhere. All you will find is the constantly repeated negative statement that "Maxwell-Heaviside" EM describes only a subset of EM phenomena.
I bought Bearden's book, "Energy from the Vacuum" in the hopes that it would finally reveal those true Maxwell equations to me, and develop Bearden's ideas systematically, from first principles.
The book turned out to be a disappointment on both counts. Whenever Bearden can't explain something in detail (and detail is everything in physics), he just reproduces the same rhetoric we know from his website.
It doesn't look any better with respect to Bearden's other big claims. Why is time equal to energy? How does a charge "transduce incoming time-like longitudinal EM energy flow into 3-space real energy flow for negative charge, or vice versa in the case of positive charge"? What are the equations? When he says these things in the correspondence on his website, you are lead to think that he has a rigorous theory to justify them. But he doesn't. The rhetoric is all there is.
That is not to say that those ideas are not stimulating or exciting. Some of them have the ring of truth to them. But if there are no equations to describe them, equations that can be confirmed or refuted by experiment, then they are just science-fiction, not science.
I think it is well possible that Bearden is a genius who has a deep, intuitive understanding of the nature of physical reality that allows him to glimpse truths that are beyond current mainstream physics. But in the absence of a proper mathematical theory of his ideas, the only possible justification for them could come from experiment. But things look bleak in that area too.
If Bearden published complete instructions for building an MEG with standard parts, tens of thousands of qualified engineers would already have built one, shown it to physicists and the media, and we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Alas, this information remains proprietary. All requests for release are rebuffed with the argument that one can't seriously expect someone to freely give away their life's work, the result of decades of painstaking thinking and experimentation.
Sorry, I think that's complete BS. We're not talking about a conventional invention here. We're talking about a paradigm-shattering device whose inventor would instantly become the greatest scientific mind in human history. Media appearances alone would make him a wealthy man . His books would fly off the shelves, he would win the Nobel price for physics, and universities would be lining up to give him honorary chairs.
In addition, Bearden has a history of sensational claims that didn't pan out. Remember the Fogal Semiconductor? A miracle invention that can work as a faster-than-light communications device, room-temperature superconductor and volumetric scanner (for example, to directly observe the insides of people as well as planets). Where is it? It was supposed to revolutionize human technolgy years ago, and we're still waiting for it. In a response dated
November 11, 2002, Bearden writes:
It also appears that Fogal will get his semiconductors into production and usage very soon now, driven by recently emerged serious requirements and urgent needs. With his prototype technology, subspace communication and superluminal communication can become standard technology. One can also take a photo, and realize that the entire past history of the EM in the light emitted from the target or reflected from it, that was captured by the film or digital receiver, is still there, even if heavy noise was added along the way to the camera by many (even 10) orders of magnitude, and is obscuring everything. Fogal can go right in there and get to the original signal, when no noise was present. He can pull out the signal itself and remove all the noise. At a major university in Europe, he demonstrated this technique and the scientists tested it meticulously. He has also demonstrated it in the U.S. With his chips, room temperature superconductivity is straightforward and simple. So is superluminal and even instantaneous "signal tunneling", even at a great distance. With a little more effort, so is "seeing right into the depths of great assemblages of matter". Eventually, one will be able to simply focus down inside the sun, e.g., and directly sense, record, and analyze what is going on at the deeper levels. Or inside the earth. Or the moon. Etc. Eventually the REAL way to do earthquake warning will be to do direct observation and scanning inside the earth, including measurements at a distance.
Bearden has only one excuse why we still don't have working Fogal semiconductors , and that's suppression. Which may very well be true - but it won't convince a skeptic.
So let's be realistic people. As much as we want Bearden to succeed, he's not giving us much material to defend him againt the pseudoskeptics and professional naysayers. |
- Randi by chipotle_pickle on Monday, April 07, 2003 @ 19:53:45 UTC
- Re: Randi by bender772 on Monday, April 07, 2003 @ 21:07:33 UTC
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Upper bound of SMHoke's lit search skill found (Score: 1)
by chipotle_pickle on Saturday, April 12, 2003 @ 21:14:19 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://freehydrogen.blogspot.com | He missed A.L. Trovon de Carvalho and W.A. Rodrigues Jr, published in "Random Operators and Stochastic Equations" (ROSE), Volume 9, No. 2, pp. 161--206, 2001. It's available as a pdf.
The "skeptics" are very good at proclaiming this all to be a hoax, but they have yet to publish a single peer-reviewed paper contradicting Bearden et al.'s claims. I'm guessing that may have something to do with the fact that the most vocal "skeptics" (notably the self-proclaimed "Amazing" Randi and Graham P. Collins) are not even scientists in the first place.
If the "skeptics" want me to start listening, they need to get busy publishing peer-reviewed literature. They have some serious catching up to do.
Very Sincerely,
Michael Hoke
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