This article has first been published as an appendix to Dr R.N. Boyd's recent paper titled "BACK TO REALITY" which can be found here. Since the paper on Consciousness Studies addresses an important point that has stunted progress in physics for a long time, I am giving it its own space here, where it is easier to locate than just as a mere appendix to another article.

The subject of the paper is whether consciousness is purely brain-based or whether there is another, more effective way to view consciousness that explains phenomena better but is being ruthlessly suppressed by current "scientific consensus".

Quantum Consciousness - Image found here

Toward an Empirical Reality in Consciousness Studies

by
Dr. Adrian Klein, MDD, Israel.

The hereby presented few considerations are inspired by, and strongly supporting Dr. R.N.Boyd's vibrant appeal for restoring common sense into Scientific exploration and interpretation concerning experimental and experiential observations in empirical range, as an urgent request launched at the beginning of the 21st Century ("Empirical Science - Back to Reality!")

In his pilot paper, Dr. Boyd questions the very value of the complex argumentation scaffold currently serving dogmatic authorities in the Sciences, which axiomatically defend misleading conjectures and their totally counterintuitive consequences. Dr. Boyd casts an annihilating spot of light on the shaky physical fundaments identified as sets of underlying fictitious constructs which are ceaselessly multiplying in all the fields accessible (and "acceptable" !) for scientific investigation today.

We strongly believe that Consciousness Studies, as one of the most recent fields opened to scientific exploration, would enormously benefit if its current misleading methodology, based on the rotten premises of the aforementioned scaffold of fantasies, would be brought into alignment with empirically supported observations hitherto ignored, denied or intenionally misinterpreted, based on a rigid and biased exclusion of the empirical hard facts. What really and most urgently is required instead, is the exclusion of the various inadequate principles themselves, as held "valid" by current "scientific" methodology, which corrupt principles are continously contradicted by observations.

Big Bang 'afterglow' or thermal anisotropy of the universe?

Robert Neil Boyd questions that 'received wisdom' in a recent article. He argues that observation is far superior to theory. Whenever an observed fact contradicts a theory, the latter has to give way. We need to re-think and find a better explanation that fits all of the observations.

Boyd also challenges Einstein's Relativity. He says it fails the test of Popper's Criteria for Reliability in the Sciences.

His conclusion: We need to return to reality, even in physics, and even at the expense of tearing down a holy of holies like Einstein's Relativity.

Empirical Science: Back to Reality!

Science is based on the principle of Cause and Effect. We observe an effect. (Something happens, or some event is observed.) What caused it? Then, on finding out, we want to know, "What caused that?", going from cause to cause, looking for the actual origination of things. This succession of asking the same question, at every point in the sequence, is a process which is apparently without end. (Though there may be some end-points reached eventually, in some regards.)

"What caused it?" is the primary and most fundamental question in science. What causes that observable event to happen? In fact, this question is primary to existence and to life experience. We are always asking questions in our lives, such as: Where did that come from? Why did that happen? What started it? Who started it? Why did they do that? What was the origination of that (event)?

These are all varieties of the same question: What caused it, actually? Because we know that until we find out what is the cause of some experience, the origination of it, we may be experiencing the same painful experience over and over again, until we learn to avoid the results of that cause, or cease performing that particular action. Or we may be missing the same pleasant experience, time after time, until we learn how to get it to happen again.

Cause and effect. This principle is used and applied by all Life and all forms of Consciousness, continuously. Knowing the cause of a thing or event is fundamental to existence. Nothing can live without applying this principle of cause and effect, at every opportunity. So learning about cause and effect is a natural condition, and is crucial to all Life. So, doing "science" (in terms of cause and effect) is a natural behavior.

The proverbial tale of Newton and the apple that bonked him on the head (it never happened, really) leading to Newton's discovery of the Law of Gravitational Attraction, is an example of how exploring and examining our experiences in order to find what is the origin of the given observable event, results in reliable understandings about how Reality actually works.

Given a known cause, we can observe that a known effect is always resulting from that same cause...

Read the rest of the article here

Under the title A Heuristic Approach to the Particle Physics Implicit in Theosophical “Occult Chemistry”, William Patrick Bourne links the work of theosophist investigators Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater to the mess that today is known as particle physics.

As you may know, Besant and Leadbeater investigated the world of particles with a particular approach, using the mind's inner eye to bring into focus the infinitely small.

ANU - the basic particle as described by Besant and Leadbeater

They had little to go by at the time, to compare their findings with the results of investigations by physicists who work with instrumentation, but their results were painstakingly recorded and they are available in a classic work: Occult Chemistry.

Image found on skybooksusa.com

Much has changed since the early part of the last century and physics has come up with a veritable particle zoo, but there are many inconsistencies and agreement on what is real and what are merely temporary products of the destruction of particles is still a far way off. So it is interesting to go back and see what was found before we started to build atom smashers to investigate subatomic particles and their components.

Bourne is an independent researcher who has published scientific papers in Chronology and Catastrophism Review, Leading Edge, and The Theoscientist. He is a generalist with particular interest in cosmology and particle physics. His synthesis of the occult knowledge of theosophical investigation with modern particle physics makes good sense.

The scale of particles postulated by Bourne brings us from the immaterial and ethereal all the way to visible, tangible matter. It would certainly constitute a worthwhile direction for further investigation ... to falsify or confirm, as the case may be.

Here is a PDF of Bourne's article as published in Infinite Energy.

A Heuristic Approach to the Particle Physics Implicit in Theosophical “Occult Chemistry”

David's pendulum hydro pump concept is simple and can be built by everyone. It is based on the idea of Milkovich, who says that a suitably heavy pendulum can produce more power than is necessary to expend in order to keep it swinging. The basic idea is described in PESWiki:

Milkovic Two-Stage Mechanical Oscillator

Here is what David says about his invention:

"I [have] just come up with the pendulum hydro pump.

Similar to Milkovic´s device it may be an over unity machine.

I tried with a rudimentary setup in springs, with a rigid rod firmly tied to the bearing. The swing of the pendulum was steady. Looked like the force on the springs where the same on both legs. I did not find any vibrations on the pendulum and the amplitude behaved like the schematic showed on the website.

The pendulum keeps swinging, with the pivot making a parabola. It looks like, if we extend an imaginary line from the rod up, it will have an imaginary fixed pivot.

I am setting up everything for a prototype. Let´s see how it goes.

I am inviting everybody to build small prototypes because we will have different perspectives and improve it.

I am not filing a patent, and wish that a lot of water pumps being installed in Africa, the most needed good in this continent.

In the meantime, Don Hotson has written part III of the article, and like the previous ones, it was published in Infinite Energy magazine.

To give you an idea of what the argument is, here's the introduction to part III of Don Hotson's article:

Introduction

The preceding two-part article published in Infinite Energy 44 and 45 (see web links to both documents in Bill Zebuhr's Introduction) was entirely predicated on the proposition that a true physics must be based on simplicity and causality. If Dirac's equation means what it says--that it describes everything that waves or every possible particle--it arguably provides the first basis, simplicity: the universe must be built of the four kinds of electron which are the roots of the equation.

We have shown at least plausible ways this might happen, ways that solve the glaring problems with conventional physics. Moreover, we have shown direct contact, causal solutions to the problems of the "electromagnetic field" and gravitation, in which we have shown that both represent physical, non-local structures, responses the Big BEC (Bose-Einstein condensate) must make to balance imbalances and maintain its own integrity.

There are a number of developments, unmentioned in Parts 1 and 2, which greatly strengthen the case presented there. First, the Nobelist Dr. Norman Ramsey convinced his colleagues that negative absolute temperatures made thermodynamic sense.1 Since it is the quantity of positive energy in a substance that gives it its positive energy temperature scale, it should be a perfectly obvious corollary that negative energy must be a prerequisite for negative absolute temperatures.

This complements our symmetry arguments, and the fact that both the energy equation and Dirac's equation have negative as well as positive roots.

Dr. Benni Reznik of Tel Aviv University has demonstrated that the "vacuum" as a whole violates Bell's inequalities, and so acts like a BEC. (Bell's inequalities, and the now voluminous proofs thereof, show that two particles or photons, created in the same event, remain "entangled" with each other, sharing the same wave function, no matter how far apart they may move. Thus an action on one instantaneously causes a complimentary change in the other.)

Dr. Reznik demonstrates that two unentangled probes, inserted into the "vacuum" at random distances, rapidly become phase-entangled. This is behavior one would expect from a BEC, not a "vacuum," and can hardly be understood except in terms of a universal BEC. Since the Dirac papers insist that the "vacuum" is a universal BEC, this represents an immense verification of its thesis.

This is only one of a number of demonstrations, recent and ancient, that entanglement and superluminal effects are real and fundamental factors. For instance, it has been known since Laplace that gravitation must act much faster than light, or the earth/sun system would form a "couple" and the earth would spiral off into space. That gravitation acts almost instantaneously has been shown by studies of contact binary stars, which show that it must act many orders of magnitude faster than light. Astronomer Dr. Tom Van Flandern has shown that General Relativity, though it gives lip service to the "light speed limit," simply goes on to assume instantaneous "changes in the curvature of space" in its equations, and so is non-local.

Further, it has been known for decades that electromagnetism acts faster than light, according to a whole series of experimental results starting with the Sherwin-Rawcliffe experiment and continuing with those of the Graneaus and Pappas. These experiments all show that changes in the electromagnetic field must propagate much faster than light, apparently instantaneously, so that a moving charge has no "left-behind potential hill." Thus changes in electromagnetic potential must propagate apparently instantaneously over any distance.

A BEC has been shown by laboratory experiments to be all one thing, so that an action on one end of a BEC causes an instantaneous reaction at the other end. Therefore a universal BEC is the only plausible explanation for these burgeoning superluminal effects.

But we require a further, in-depth look at causality... (continue reading here)

Illustration from Wired - Aegir Hallmundur; Benjamin Franklin: Corbis

"The banks and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1.3 trillion in debit card transactions every year. Until recently, vendors had little choice but to participate in this system, even though — like a medieval toll road — it is long and bumpy and full of intermediaries eager to take their cut. Take the common swipe. When a retailer initiates a transaction, the store’s point-of-sale system provider — the company that leases out the industrial-gray card reader to the merchant for a monthly fee — registers the sale price and passes the information on to the store’s bank. The bank records its fee and passes on the purchase information to the credit card company. The credit card company then takes its share, authorizes all the previous fees, and sends the information to the buyer’s bank, which routes the remaining balance back to the store. All in all, it takes between 24 and 72 hours for the vendor to get any money, and along the way up to 3.5 percent of the sale has been siphoned away."

Paypal, which at the time of its founding was intended to introduce an alternative to money, has become a web interface with the world's banking system and the credit card companies, simplifying transactions, but still using the same currencies that are in our wallets and in our bank accounts today.

Third party applications that interface with Paypal like Twitpay, simplify that interface even more, allowing you to send money to someone's Paypal account by a simple tweet.

Jack Dorsey's Square is another one of the payment alternatives discussed in Wired. It is a physical plug-in to smart phones that allows users to accept credit card payments without having to have a merchant account.

Obopay, which runs on Nokia phones, is a mobile payment system that allows transfers from one mobile phone user to another. It interfaces with Mastercard, a few banks and some major mobile phone providers. Zong is another phone based mobile money transfer application, aiming to take a bite out of the credit card business, while GetGiving specializes in micro payments or small donations to charities.

Those systems, as described in the Wired article, all interface with banks and "real" money. They merely seek to find a way around the immobility and clunkiness of the service provided by banks and credit card companies.

For anyone advocating changes to the current monetary system, local currencies or an internet-based alternative to bank-issued money, the article may be a bit of a disappointment, because it is all about how to move money more efficiently and more cheaply than banks and credit card companies, rather than reforming the money system itself.

- - -

Plichta also studied law, and in the 1980s he studied and researched logics, numbers theory and mathematics. As a result, he published several books outlining a new theory on prime numbers in German. In this article however, I will only discuss his proposal to use silanes as a highly energetic fuel.

Silicon is more abundant than carbon. It oxidizes or combines with oxygen into silicon dioxide, which forms crystals present in rocks like quartz, basalt and granite. Silicon dioxide is especially prevalent in sand which fills deserts and sea shores. We process silicon dioxide into glass and purify the silicon for use in electronics. Both of those processes require much external energy input.

Before the 1970s, silanes were considered unsuitable for use as fuels, because they instantaneously self-combust at room temperature. Not satisfied to leave it at that however, Plichta went to work and succeeded in producing longer-chained silanes that appeared as clear, oily liquids and were stable at room temperature. He argues that these higher (long-chain) silanes could be used as an abundant fuel as an alternative to both hydrocarbons and pure hydrogen.

Unlike hydrocarbons, silanes use both the nitrogen and the oxygen in air for combustion. While the hydrogen component of silanes reacts with oxygen, the silicon oxidizes in a highly energetic reaction with nitrogen. So the burning of silanes produces much higher temperatures and frees more energy than the burning of hydrocarbon fuels. The silane reaction leaves no toxic residues.

Much of the information in this article comes from a recent description of Plichta's discoveries and his proposed silane fuel cycle written by Norbert Knobloch and published in the German magazine raum&zeit.

If you read German, you can see the original article in pdf format here.

Dr. Plichta's website, also in German, has much additional information.

Some articles by Rowe posted previously:

A History of Dark Matter?

Controlled Transmutation of Elements Under Surprisingly Mild Conditions?

Hydrogen From Space - The Aether 'Comes Alive'

So here is his latest..

Gravity and the Nature of the Chemical Bond? Part I

Introduction

Sepp Hasslberger has included several of my articles on his blog. Most of them propose that knowable space is not a void but rather, a concentrated matrix of protons and electrons (possibly Bose-Einstein condensed hydrogen and/or the ether of classical physics). The easiest to read is, “A History of Dark Matter?” The most difficult to follow is a too long-too weird play, “The Fall and Rise of the House of Cards”.

Both attempt to give simple mechanisms for many observed phenomena, including:

The magnetic and dielectric properties of space required by Maxwell’s wave equations.

The wave and particle natures of light.

The results of Michelson and Morley’s interferometer experiments.

The present article tries to explain gravity based on the same assumption.

The Growing Influence of Social Networks is one of the themes to be discussed in Davos this year. Public input was invited, but the request was somewhat hidden in a brand new Ning group with little more than a hundred members, and it reads as follows:

Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. We want to hear from you:

1. "How are social networks changing society?"

2. "What are the most important implications and risks for society?"

3. "What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?"

Are social media going to change the world?

A big question to be hidden away in a group with very few members. Still, some great comments and suggestions were made. To get the whole conversation, see the posting

The Growing Influence of Social Networks

And indeed, how do social media influence and change society? I tried to answer those questions, and was surprised at my answers. Social media are more important than we might believe. We are having conversations, mostly for fun, and sometimes with the intention of changing things we perceive to be going in the wrong direction. Yet, the implications of what we are doing are profound, indeed world changing....

Loop quantum gravity - artwork by slobo777

And talking about Einstein ... Vergon is one of the few people who clearly point out what are special relativity's logical inconsistencies and how they will de-throne the theory as logically inconsistent. There goes a mainstay of physics.

Vertner Vergon's introduction to his paradigm changing notes:

A PARADIGM SHIFT


GRAVITY, RELATIVITY, ENERGY, QUESTIONS

Three subjects are in the forefront of today's research.

The present paradigm cannot present solutions to them. The four Attachments present solutions and can be considered a paradigm shift.

"Gravity" is actually Quantum Gravity.

By way of analogy, one can read the face of a clock, but that does not tell him how the mechanism works.

Newton mathematically described the face of the clock but he did not have a clue as to HOW it worked. So you could say he mathematically described the laws of gravity, but that is certainly not the whole story.

Einstein refined the mathematical description -- and then ATTEMPTED to describe the workings, the HOW of gravity.

To me, curved space (empty or not) with geodesics is NOT a PHYSICAL description of how gravity works.

By contrast, I have developed a quantum gravity thesis that tells HOW the force of gravity is created, HOW it is transmitted, WHY the quantities are what they are, and shows why the mechanics of gravity creates an ILLUSION of action at a distance and mutual attraction.

If you will read it (QUANTUM GRAVITY) you will see the difference between Einstein's "explanation" and mine. Judge for yourself.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Einstein developed his special relativity in typical mathematical physicist style - and made a grievous error in the interpretation, a typical problem in mathematical physics often leading to bizarre conclusions.

The second attachment clearly and definitively explains this error and defines the result.
(The Errors of Relativity)

* * * * * * * * * *

Gamma ray energy is bad enough, but cosmic ray energy dwarfs it. Tesla, the discoverer of cosmic rays (protons), said they travel faster than the speed of light, but he was not able to say just what that was.

The answer is in the third attachment. (COSMIC RAY PROTON VELOCITY)

* * * * * * * * * * *

The fourth attachment is "questions". They speak for themselves.

(Questions are reproduced below)

* * * * * * * * * * *

A more recent addition is a short paper describing a common mistake made by proponents of a mass less photon.. They (mis)use the energy/momentum 4 vector equation to establish their view. Vergon points out their mistake -- and shows why the photon has mass and is not mass less.

For those of you who want to get deeper into the argument, there are two books written by Vertner Vernon that can be downloaded as PDF files:

ON THE QUANTUM AS A PHYSICAL ENTITY

and

A DIAGNOSIS OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY

I am not sure whether this is a positive development or something negative that should be balanced out, in some way.

Privacy has become a major issue on facebook, but it seems that the important privacy issue that facebook use brings with it, is glossed over in those discussions. By interacting with our peers, we permit the servers of facebook to construct online social profiles for each of us users that go WAY beyond anything we would normally dream to put in public view. Who then has access to that kind of data? It's anybody's guess.

Again, is that a bad thing, or is it part of a new openness that we consciously choose to engage in?

On the other hand, facebook is the first online service that, along with a few others, allows us to open up and explore a new dimension of networking. I almost feel as if we're constructing a global mind, each one of us being similar to a neuron and learning to interact with other neurons. Where that could lead, is not quite clear as yet.

Some friends of mine have a rather strongly negative reaction when I invite them to join me on facebook and recently, I received an email from a friend and fellow blogger who says he started to use the service but was banned.

He brings up some interesting perspectives from which to see the expanding phenomenon of on-line social interaction. Here is what he said:

You may have heard of a great accumulation of plastic garbage in certain areas of the oceans. It's all stuff we throw away and it keeps accumulating because plastic does not easily degrade. Birds and fish eat it, mistaking the pieces of plastic for food.

Image credit: Ocean Conservancy

"The dangers of these garbage patches are great in both quantity and quality. Marine animals of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, mistake the plastic for food. Some organisms become entangled in the mass and die", says Meg White.

We can of course combat the continued accumulation of that garbage by controlling what we throw away, but that is a slow process, and it does nothing about what's already there and which will continue to float where it is for decades if not centuries to come.

As for the trash that's already there, many throw their hands in the air nihilistically. "There's just too much, and the ocean is just too big," said one expert about the possibility of cleaning up the garbage patches.

No one seems to have a solution for what's already there, other than waiting for it to magically disappear or kind of nebulously suggesting that the stuff should really be collected and brought to land, a truly Herculean task to say the least.

But there is a solution, and it isn't too difficult either:

Our system of bank currency - the money we are using every day - has a fatal design flaw - it violates the BIBO principle. Economic instability is built in to our money right from the start. This leads to the imperative that the economy must keep expanding endlessly. We are unable to achieve sustainable economic activity, to preserve our planet's finite resources, lest we face financial collapse.

This, in short, is the situation as argued by Marc Gauvin and Sergio Dominguez of bibocurrency.org

A formal stability analysis from the standpoint of control systems theory has shown that the mechanism of interest inherent in money creation and in everyday lending practices must lead to monetary instability (inflation) and eventually to the collapse of economic activity. Adding interest to the principal of any loan to be repaid creates an excess debt that, within the confines of the economic system, can never be fully paid off, resulting in an inherently unstable economic situation.

Financial System walkthrough

1. Wealth is generated by ingenuity, human effort and resources made available through past investment of units of currency.

6. Because the total debt created always exceeds the amount of money available to satisfy it, the system produces a minimum residual debt that must be refinanced in subsequent cycles thus compounding it.

"Cap and trade", is the way to reduce emissions to levels that will stop the inevitable warming up of the planet. No more increase in fossil fuel burning except ... if a country can pay for the right to continue emitting carbon dioxide.

Leuren Moret, examining global warming in the context of geological history, comes to a different conclusion. In her interesting and immensely readable examination of Global Climate Change, the whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons lab, and former
Environmental Commissioner in the City of Berkeley, lays out for us the reasons for global changes in temperature in the context of "deep time", the long term geological history of the earth, and some of the behind-the-scenes manipulations that have led to a rather hysterical campaign that sees us concentrate our attention on one of the minor causes for the changes that doubtless are afoot.

Large parts of our economy appear set to go belly-up. The banking system, which should be of service to the productive economy, is itself on the verge of collapse. Speculators who brought those banks to the brink by pushing "creative" investment opportunities are being lavishly rewarded with bail-out funds amounting to huge gifts that are ultimately being financed by the tax payers.

Unless we want to spend the rest of our lives working to pay off those huge government debts being incurred to keep banks afloat, we should try to understand what exactly has been happening - where things went wrong. And we should learn how money and banking can be re-configured to support, rather than ruin, real economic efforts.

This can't be left to corrupt politicians. We can't even rely on the economists. They are part of the problem. Not only did they not warn us of impending disaster, they were the ones who convinced government that loose rules in banking were good for the economy.

The only way out of this mess is to understand for ourselves. Thomas Greco's new work The End of Money and the Future of Civilization is an encouraging book in this respect. Amongst all the confusion, it provides a stable foothold, a starting point for this quest to understand the subjects of economy and money.

Greco reduces the complicated stuff down to the very essentials. After providing an overview of historical developments and an indication of the reasons for our current trouble, the book points to a future where currency may be at the service of actual economic activities, rather than being a source of easy profit for bankers and speculators, those who have been gambling with our savings and our mortgages.