Month: November 2018

Atomic Bomb in The Iron Giant

Atomic holocaust video shown in school

0-50 – launching the missile

3:00-3:40 – the Iron Giant saves the day/ explosion

-Leah

Sheldrake’s Pseudo Science and Conceptual Thinking?

For those unsure of you Sheldrake is, he is an author and researcher. He wrote a text called “The Science Delusion” writing insight to a different way of viewing science. While I personally find the read interesting and opening, many science critics label is a :pseudo: science, yet I can agree.

Here is his wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake#The_Science_Delusion_(Science_Set_Free).

While I am very intrigues by his ideas, even more so his apparent backlash in career. He was also in a TEDTalk that had happened to get banned: https://blog.ted.com/the-debate-about-rupert-sheldrakes-talk/. along with a statement of the banning from Sheldrake himself: https://blog.ted.com/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/

I’m curious as to hear the opinions of students regarding pseudo science and the slippery slope of subjectivity in sciences (and how it can relate to making a claim).

Black hole discourse with Bohm and Sheldrake.

Here is a very interesting discourse from 1982 (?) with Sheldrake and David Bohm discussing the theory of the Big Bang and Blackholes (http://perception.inner-growth.org/2017/03/25/morphic-fields-and-the-implicate-order-rupert-sheldrake-david-bohm/). Although this conversation is not unknown, I found this statement to be of interest:

Bohm: There is also the belief, commonly accepted, that at the core of black holes the laws as we know them would also vanish. As you say, scientists haven’t faced up to it because they are still thinking in the old way, in terms of timeless laws. But some physicists realize that. One cosmologist was giving a talk and he said, ‘Well, you know, I used to think everything was a law of nature, and it’s all fixed, but as far as a black hole is concerned, anything can happen. You see, if it suddenly flashed a Coca Cola sign, this would still be a possibility.’ [Laughter]. So, the notion of timeless laws doesn’t seem to hold, because time itself is part of the necessity that developed. The black hole doesn’t involve time and space as we know it; they all vanish. It’s not just matter that vanishes, but any regular order that we know of vanishes, and therefore you could say anything goes, or nothing goes…

Here is another interview here: http://www.fdavidpeat.com/interviews/bohm.htm, which he says similar things, yet goes more into the metaphor of human memory to give context to time.

Not sure if this was to any interest to anyone, but if you are wanting more conceptual ideas to black holes in relativity to time, this would be a fun place to start.

-Jessie McCarty

X-Files Season 8 and the Glowing Skin

In Season 8 episode 12 of the X-Files, Scully and Agent Doggett are asked to come investigate the Boston subway system after a man’s face was found to be half-eaten.

As they both get further into their investigation, Agent Doggett decides to get into the subway tunnels to explore what could possibly be the culprit of the murder. When one of the police gets a chemical burn from the water, Agent Scully and Doggett discover the policeman’s skin to be burning off then turning into a green glow. By the end of the episode, they discover the water to include a sample of a sea creature called medusa which are made out of calcium and are bioluminescent yet the chemical reaction is unknown.

I found it interesting the concept of a chemical making a human’s skin glow green, and made me think of cases where cities had to evacuate due to chemicals and waste spilled into the water. If this glow was possible, what would be the likely culprit of the reaction?

I’ve included some photos from the episode and an episode review (here: https://them0vieblog.com/2015/11/02/the-x-files-medusa-review/) for more context.

 

Thanks!

Jessie McCarty