"And now for something completely different".....
I won't tease you. This post is about something that I think has very little chance of being real, at least in the terms which have been applied to it. It's about the alleged "pyramid energy" and its claims to do all manner of unexpected things. But before I "reveal all" as to my "brilliant" insights on this, here's why I'm posting.
Along with my assaults on the extra FATE magazine piles [etc] which must "go" prior to the ultimate move to the new house, another casualty has been the slide collection. This thing once upon a time [when the technology of the age was oriented to such antiquities] was pretty extensive and impressive. Lots of good talks and "prof's lectures" embedded there. But that's all passe, so to the trash it goes.
In the doing so, I looked at every slide to see if any had unique or near unique information on them [surprisingly some did.] [95% were booted, and some saved just because they were "pretty" or dramatic.] Of the unique ones were several pictures of a plant growth "pyramid energy" test.
The photography isn't stellar here, folks, but it's good enough to get the gist of this.
Once upon a time, far back in the Ancient 1970s, I was teaching a course called "Science and Parascience" --- a dammed good course regardless of what the chemists and physicists thought about it. The course required a student to demonstrate that they understood the scientific method, could dump their biases, and think about a controversial topic like a scientist. Normally students HATE things like scientific methodology, but because this was heavily chocolate-coated with subjects that many students would nearly kill to get a chance to study, it was wildly popular. AND, wonders of wonders, almost all of the students over the 15 years of the course's existence, behaved and gave it honest tries.
One of my best [I had MANY SUPER students in this class] decided to take on "pyramid power" as her topic. Kathy [I'm not telling you her last name as I'm sure she's leading a happy successful life with no need for "strange" internet followers] was a very bright, and very cute and energetic co-ed who insisted that I allow her to do some project which was more than a literature survey --- in other words she wanted something to experiment upon and gain her own data. ... Prof's Dream.
I had purchased two identical planting boxes with a metal [copper] open-work pyramid which fit into the grooves so it was stable above one of them. You see the rig above. Kathy did as I expected --- somewhat obsessively measuring out soil, water, growth medium, and seeds. She was a gem --- sure she wanted to get a "positive" result, but she knew that if she didn't give the experiment an honest base, she'd have wasted her time and learnt nothing. By the way, although you will see the planter boxes always in the same orientation in these pictures, Kathy regularly [on a timed agenda] moved the boxes into one another's position to equate as best she could the different sunlight [if any] or the different heat quantity [if any] relative to the two positions. She took pictures when the boxes were in similar positions just to make the visual comparison easy [ Like I say... a gem.]
Whereas the first two pictures above were at "day zero"/planting, and day 5/ 1st sprouting [these were bean plants], things began to get lively at day 7. Though you can't see it too well, Kathy noticed, she thought, a small increase in robustness in the pyramid plants already.
The pictures above are day thirteen. Kathy was pretty sure that somehow the experiment was "working". The plants in the pyramid box --- some of them anyway --- were noticeably taller.
Day sixteen. Weirdly, the pyramid-ed plants seemed to be striving to fill a more pyramidally-shaped space.
Day nineteen. Kathy at the end of the experiment checked the thought that comes up at this time: were the non-pyramid-ed plants just "lazier" and not standing up as straight for some reason. She weighed their relative masses and the pyramid-ed plants had significantly more "bulk".
Day twenty-four: last day before the culling and the measuring [stalks and roots were also longer.] My Good Girl had run a proper scientific test [as much as a dorm room would allow] and was all smiles. She also was never a fool, and knew that she would need to do this many times [repeatability of results] and under better "lab" conditions [control of variables], but all-in-all this was a success.
BUT HOW COULD IT BE?
I mean, really.... I ran a few growth experiments myself with these planter boxes and got [if I remember correctly {40 years ago, folks}] two no results and one positive. But still... what was going on? No "energy" has ever been reliably measured inside the open-work space, just as you'd expect.
I'm flummoxed, I'll admit. My "theory" is that neither Kathy nor myself [on my one "success"] were witnessing the result of some mysterious but unmeasurable power. Nor do I think that she was just lucky [and certainly not hoaxing]. I think that Kathy "did it herself".
There was a study done by the reverend Franklin Loehr which got published as The Power of Prayer on Plants which looks quite like Kathy's results when Loehr prayed for one batch of plants but not another. Normally one would take this with tablespoons of salt, but Loehr blew the science boys at NOVA away when he demonstrated the same effect for them with corn plants in a locked terrarium planter with their cameras as witnesses.
Still, what was going on? I refuse to buy into a hypothesis that God cares about relative rates of corn growth. But I DO think that we human beings can influence [sometimes] the external world by our intentions. And here we return full circle to the last post about JB Rhine and Psi and Bob Jahn's final proof that we all demonstrate at least low levels of psychokinesis.
Is Loehr's work not like "faith healing"? He thought of it that way... a "laying on of hands" on the corn plants, without touching them? Was Kathy so joyfully hoping that the pyramid covered bean sprouts would grow tall, that, bless her, they actually did? If I ever had a student upbeat and full-of-life enough to transfer something into her experiment it would have been her.
As far as the pyramids having "magic" in their shapes, who knows --- the Big Ones certainly do. But... I don't think that their power is too mysterious --- just awesome.
.... or maybe ...
No... I'm outta here.....
I'd like to hear more about your students' research projects and what they found.
ReplyDeleteThe other outstanding projects that I had were all literature reviews and intellectual analyses, not original experimentation. One exception was that one student thought that she got good data for Transcendental Meditation-like consciousness states on a "finger-temperature measuring monitor" [as she should have according to a lot of literature], but my guess is that any "relaxation-with-intention" meditation method using Biofeedback would have worked.
DeleteAs to the literature review intellectual works, I had many top quality efforts on almost all of the potential subjects, but the "kids" in those cases rarely found anything that I didn't already know. Once in a while I got a real life story from them [usually the reason why they picked their subject in the first place] which was extremely interesting. Someone had had a fire-creating poltergeist, another knew a Catholic priest who served at an exorcism, are two interesting ones which stick in my memory.
I myself would wonder about differential (but not consciously noted) watering....
ReplyDeleteBut of course, the greatest reasons this sort of thing was "debunked" are a) "pyramid power" was supposed to be a "mystical energy", something totally paranormal, and 2) thus it was supposed to be entirely outside of the scientific paradeigm. But if the various effects claimed for it (e.g. self-sharpening of razor blades) had been investigated by totally automatic equipment, and had been proved-out....today, we might have the Volnikov-Gordon-Nussbaum Solid Surface Configuration Distant Quantum Effect applied to diesel engines or something. And it would be used as a proof of Scientific Materialism.
FJReid
There was no "differential watering"... Kathy never touched the plants unless she had measured everything first.
ReplyDeleteNone of the other "pyramid power" gross physical claims tested out in any literature that I know of. The razor blade thing was "supported" by laughable comments like "I shaved many more times with that blade." It's only the enhanced plant growth thing that's {fairly} easily controllable and subsequently grossly assessable [by weighing and measuring]. That's why Kathy and I did that. She'd have done other testing if she could have without being Argonne National Laboratory.
I notice that outside the window there is a white surfaced deck (paint, concrete, snow?). It could be that there was a reflection off the deck into pyramid top. Notice how the plants of the pyramid box are more straight while the other box lean toward the light.
DeleteIt's snow.
DeleteIt's also basically irrelevant as Kathy measured the weights and lengths of these plants and the ones in the "pyramidal" box were much heavier and longer. The idea that the non-pyramidal box plants were leaning towards the snow [for some reason] also is not sensible as they can not "see" the snow if they lie flatter. Reflection into the pyramid top is really stretching for some effect. The facing inside side of the pyramid is a triangle about an inch on a side and mainly shaded. The "extra" photons that you seem to be trying to find are going to be a pale stream. But if that works for you, go with it.
b"h
ReplyDeleteThe fifth pyramid picture reveals an interesting set of conditions which might have played into the extra growth. It looks like the sun is shining directly throught the window and its rays would have heated the copper metal throughout the day, and that would cause the four sided copper cone to radiate a bit of IR (heat) in a downward direction onto the plants. It might be just a slight temperature difference, but over a few weeks during winter, perhaps enough to account for the difference. Presumably an additional pyramid made of sticks and balsa, or cardboard, might have provided a control.
Best
Seems a small difference to me [heat from something as small as that --- it was Kathy's room general heat which was the dominant heat source, overwhelmingly] but who am I to say? She couldn't be held to Science lab conditions and certainly didn't have an "equipment budget". I do not remember whether she changed the pyramid positions more than once a day. If she did that would moderate this [tiny] effect. If she did not, then maybe noting which were the more sunny days and seeing if they were unbalanced for the placements would also be a small control. She had to open her curtains during the day since she didn't have things like "grow-lights".
DeleteThe thing about this is: this was a good student with some real enthusiasm for learning something. She did not go and join a cult because of her experiments. The second thing is that she found a positive result regardless of the ultimate explanation. The third thing is that we don't know what that explanation is. Because I think that I've seen enough evidence for micro-pk effects due to intention, I think that this is as good a hypothesis for her results as the extra-radiation [if any] theory. Because I've seen essentially no other results supporting the "power" of the pyramid shape, that one is one of my last hypotheses in this case.
b"h
DeleteI should have said that I think intention and micro-pk effects are likely and that your student's intention may well have been the main or only source for the difference. Just wanted to point out a possible alternative factor.
Best
William, I much appreciate your postings --- keep doing it. As always, my "job" here is to respond to the ideas in any postings not the person offering the ideas, and give what little that I can to the whole readership. "Alternative factors" in all this stuff [when reasonable as your post is] are welcome unless there is some personal angle somebody is projecting [which you don't]. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone took their own concepts with a grain of salt, and we all could explore on together with a smile? Thankfully there are many such folks who you and I could happily walk the forest paths together with who read this blog. {and sadly there are a few who I'd be happy to give the slip to around the next tree.}
DeleteHi Professor, A book came out in 2005 by John Burke and co-author Kaj Halberg, "Seed of Knowledge Stone of Plenty." The book shows they found the ancient megaliths, mounds and pyramids they studied amplified naturally occurring magnetic fields which can enhance crop yields according to their theory. Burke has a university background in physics at SUNY Stony Brook, and agricultural science. Halberg is a naturalist and nature photographer. Burke founded Pro Seed Technologies, Inc. It's an interesting read with details on many sites you can visit where you can check for yourself and a description of equipment you can buy to check for the fields. They did one experiment putting 40 seeds in a chamber and 40 outside a hundred feet away. The seeds that were in the chamber for 75 minutes produced three times the corn in weight compared to the seed not in the chamber. They tried this on other seeds and saw a recordable difference as well even with seeds just put on top of a pyramid. It's worth checking out.
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DeleteInteresting comment. The trouble that I have with these "dramatic, concrete, and physically-proven" things is that these claims are so Earth-shaking and apparently simple to support that I should be able to "wait five minutes" for the corroborating results of six more labs --- but they never happen. Why not? If some random science professor [in his youth] and one of his finer students were interested in testing such things, surely across this whole country/world there must be many more. Even the claims of Cold Fusion [WAY more difficult to test] were taken on by at least a half-dozen labs immediately after the Pons and Fleischman claims.
When typical strong anomalistic claims are tested, the results [no matter how simple the experiment seems to be to set-up and control] come in mixed at best. Why? Is it not that this is NOT just a physics experiment but in fact an experiment with a seriously important human component? The Skeptics crow "yes!, They cheated!!" [usually with no grounds whatsoever]. But the sympathetic among us wonder if the experimenters themselves honestly added their "minds" to the tests. The famous Sheep vs Goats effect seen in psi testing was essentially proven by the mutually-designed tests of "can we sense when we're being looked at?" The sympathetic researcher [with the skeptic looking over her shoulder] got statistically significant results, while the skeptic [with the sympath looking over his shoulder ] got statistically null results. The skeptic, by the way, acknowledged that the two experimental runs were done identically with the exception of which researcher was running the tests.
I know who Burke is. He was part of the BLT team which claimed strong evidence for "alien" forces in crop circle formation. That is one further reason that I feel it necessary to wait until others verify the claim.
My first thought was that the pyramid was reflecting more light onto the plants than the boxes without the pyramid, and I wondered if the experiment would show positive results if the pyramid was made of cardboard or paper. But after reading the comments here and other people's ideas, I think it the results are likely due to chance. I don't think the experiment tracks a large enough sample to yield any information, but it is interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think psi effects exist but they are small and subtle. Charles Tart thinks that they can also be learned over repeated trials. It would be cool to test this idea on plants.
Love following your blog. Good clean fun.
Somehow it reminds me of a friend of mine who used to say that some of the best experts in the medical field had to be people who understood hormones because they had to analyse all organs.
ReplyDelete.
When I saw both groups of plants I wondered about his words. So maybe one idea is that the growth factors or substances that promote development happened to be under different conditions during one of the steps at the experiment, but the hardest thing would be to point the connection between cause and effect (supposing we could find out the cause).
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Because of that, according to my life experience we live in a very weird reality that tends to give unexpected complexity to lab conditions , therefore I would prefer to approach very carefully because first I would want to test the organic mass from the big plants to check if they are really coming from its natural origin instead of an unknown growth factor.
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After this I would want to ask if there was any data on that particular species in order to identify or exclude any "green mass stimulant" that could be concentrated around the plant (like a gas or particle cloud) protected from air flow by the frame of the pyramid. Or maybe the opposite, anything that could inhibit the performance.
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It also raises questions concerning UFOs and aliens. If hormones are a way to stimulate long range response targeted at populations then alien projects would pay off only with many generations during a very long time scale. It would be like pregnant women suffering from a weak immunological system so that nature can get variety by compromising part of the health of an individual. A hypothethical alien civilization would work very slowly if they had long life spans.
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Alaôr
Where are you professor. Hope all is well.
ReplyDeleteExtremely busy and distracted at the same time. New house is roofed, and some boxed resources are going over there as I type. Will try to enter some posts shortly.
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