Poltergeists and quantum mechanics
Two physicists are publishing what sounds like a bizarre scientific paper that they claim explains poltergeists. The researchers--Pierro Brovetto, formerly of the Institute Fisica Superiore, and his colleague Vera Maxia--hypothesize that female neuronal changes at puberty can cause quantum mechanical disturbances. The paper will be published in the science journal NeuroQuantology. From New Scientist:
Brovetto and Maxia believe that the extra fluctuations triggered by the pubescent brain would substantially enhance the presence of the virtual particles surrounding the person. This could slowly increase the pressure of air around them, moving objects and even sending them hurtling across the room...Link to New Scientist, Link to NeuroQuantology abstract
We contacted Brian Josephson, a Nobel laureate physicist who is on the editorial board of Neuroquantology.
"This looks distinctly flaky to me," Josephson commented.
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Sounds right to me.
I'll believe it (meaning that it's a real scientific paper) when I see something without today's date on it confirming that it is.
Funny how my skepticism shoots up briefly at the beginning of Second Quarter each year.
I think they're going for the Ig Nobel prize.
Happy April Fool's Day!
This is ridiculous.
It's obvious that it isn't increased quantum fluctuations due to increased brain size that increase the pressure in the air around young women during puberty.
It is a combination of increased breast size and the attendant increased presence of members of the complementary sexual orientation that increases the pressure in the air around young women during puberty.
But for reasons beyond me the NeuroQuantology won't publish this perfectly reasonable, classical, objective explanation for the poltergeist phenomenon, even today.
I believe there can be a link... after all... women are only the creators of LIFE!!!! I would love to try an experiment where 100 pubescent girls, while menstruating, are in a sinlge white room with nothing more than just a vase. Here the girls would focus on the vase and try to move it.
Wouldn't that be crazy!?!?!?
Pull the other one: it's got bells on.
The New Scientist article has an April 1 date but the NeuroQuantology paper was submitted in January and revised in March.
it's all about residual energy. WE're all a frequency..
The paper makes no sense. It seems to be hokey grab bag of stuff a few guys learned from their math classes in college then glued together with a bunch or circular reasoning.
BD Josephson is an amazing guy who did some awesome important research once upon a time. These days he devotes himself to to finding proof of the paranormal. I don't think he'd be so flippant about research so in line with his own ... therefore it's got to be a hoax, with a very subtle punchline.
I was in hysterics by the end, at least.
Um, people? An Italian scientist named "Vera Maxia"? Even if you were duped by the premise, you couldn't possibly have wondered after you came to that, could you?
Women are not the only creators of life. There are other species who can change their sex and give birth with no insemination from a member of the opposite sex of their species.
Also, Happy April Fool's Day :)
This may be hoaxy, but it does sound distinctly familiar to what I have read about the theory of a holographic universe. David Bohm, Alan Aspect and others have theorized that this sort of thing would be completely plausible in the Holographic Theory.
#6 I really like your thinking. That would make for an awesome film. Now if I could only think of a way to round up 100 13 year old girls without invoking the Wrath of Hansen.
Bohmian Mechanics has had a bit of a resurgence lately. It's a valid alternative to QM but still a minority opinion.
Bohm's quantum potential is only viable if you believe that mechanics taking place in an real 6*N-dimensional space is plausible, where N is the number of particles. It all sounds very classical until you move beyond one-particle cases, and then the wheels pretty much fall off.
Given that all the theory has going for it is a certain naive classical appeal, this feature tends to take the edge off for most people. Then there's the explicit non-locality, which seems egregious even for those of us who accept there is something inherently non-local about the world.
I originally wrote a longer reply to this article, which I trashed when I realized what day it was. The gist of that reply was that these guys have definitely selected the right place to steal their scientific jargon from, as vacuum/boundary interactions are notoriously tricky. The only thing resembling a "simple" case is the Casimir force between infinite perfectly conducting parallel plates.
In this "simple" case, careful calculation shows that the the force is attractive, which we explain intuitively by saying that because some vacuum modes are excluded from between the plates, the vacuum has lower energy there, and so the plates are drawn together because that's how you minimize the energy in the system. However, for concentric spherical shells the force is repulsive, which contradicts our intuition.
Ergo, it isn't going to be worth anyone's time to debunk this joke. Even well-defined cases are hard, and in my experience trying to debunk ill-defined nonsense always results in the charlatans claiming that you haven't interpreted their pseudo-scientific jargon correctly.
One of the big differences between scientists and laypeople is that scientists tend to trust calculation and distrust intuition, while for laypeople it's the other way around. That's another reason why scientists dismiss gabble like this paper, and laypeople find it plausible.
Physicists know that progress in science has fundamentally been away from the intuitively obvious and toward the more and more weird and wonderful. Aristotle's physics was more intuitive than Newtons, which was more intuitive than Einstein's, which was more intuitive than Heisenberg's.
So scientists tend to react sceptically to anything that seems intuitively plausible, and until proven otherwise will believe that something that "just makes sense" is probably wrong.
#12: bookninja
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/viewmedia.cfm?id=20541&seq=0
V. Maxia: 1976.
Humans create their reality by collapsing probability wave function. Mind is the misssing variable in M-theory. We're all part of a great big mind-machine. Maybe.
beg to differ; I create my reality by ignoring the other one
@18: Well, would you look at that. Shows how little I know about angry spirits and science..
TOM said
"One of the big differences between scientists and laypeople is that scientists tend to trust calculation and distrust intuition, while for laypeople it's the other way around."
I am a scientist. I looked at their "calculations" and I don't trust them. Their proposed explanation had nothing at all to do Arreneus rate theory or non-equilibrium stat-mech or BZ reactions. They simply laid down what they knew about the above theories and equations and made tenuous connections and equivocations to a bunch of weird ghost story stuff they heard about in Italy.
When I saw article in my RSS feed this morning, it was accompanied by this description: "Two physicists say they can explain poltergeist phenomena and pubescent kids are getting the blame."
I took that to mean that poltergeists were mostly pranks by schoolkids.
Verdict: April fools joke.
It claims to be in Vol 6, issue 2, which is not out yet:
http://www.neuroquantology.com/journal/index.php/nq/issue/current/showToc
My guess is that this is what Dr. Josephson means when he says it looks "flaky".
Forgive me, but the entirety of NeuroQuantology looks flaky to me, starting with Issue 1:
http://www.neuroquantology.com/journal/index.php/nq/issue/view/1
Awesome cover, though.
[*]
You can't trust a publisher's website to list the latest issues. That's not very good evidence of a hoax.
#26:
True that, but it also means that the only source we have for this actually having been reviewed and accepted by Neuroquantology is the authors themselves.
I know I saw some years ago on television a video report of a researcher who elevated the levels of electromagnetic frequencies in a room and objects started levitating and flying around. I can't remember the details of the source of the article though.
C'mon, boingboing, for shame, printing this story so un-critically!
You could've at least mentioned that the idea of trying to explain alleged paranormal phenomena using various pseudo-scientific mis-understandings (deliberate or otherwise) has been attempted hundreds of times before, never has the results been replicated by a neutral party.
Quantum theory sounds really "science-ey", and most of 'the masses' don't understand it, but at the same time, you hear about it all the time in pop culture. So most people don't know the math/physics of quantum 'stuff' to debunk this sort of thing.
Whereas if these quacks, er, I mean, researchers, had suggested that the poltergeists could be explained by "fluxuations of the aether" then they'd be laughed out of the room.
Not many people know what that would mean either, but they'd know it's bunk.
oh a no!(as Chico would say)you notta gonna fool me!
What's sad is that I completely believed that someone was saying this, and even that it might get published in some B.S. "journal."
I've heard crazier things, worse pseudoscience, that people actually expected me to believe.
When it comes to this stuff, my irony meter is broken.
The is some evidense (I can look for it if someone wants it), that the nanotubles which support the neurons and dendrites in the brain show signs of activation befor thoughts can be detected it the larger cells. This somewhat suggests that the stimulous for the thought is preceding the arrival of sensory signals. It's as if these nanostructures might be registering, or creating reality before it "really" happens. That sounds like quantum-crazy to me. And I think Bohm would agree that it makes sense, as his explicate and implicate orders suggest.
"None" is a value of "some" for low values of "some". And see my remarks above about the value of stuff making sense in physics.
Hmmmm. And here I thought the distinct shortage of poltergeists in my experience was due to the fact that there aren't any.
It will be interesting to learn what parts of these scientists experiments are repeatable. Apart from the close scrutiny of adolescent girls.
@#17: "So scientists tend to react sceptically to anything that seems intuitively plausible"
So would you say that they *intuitively* react sceptically to anything that seems intuitive?