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THE LITTLE BOOK OF UNSCIENTIFIC PROPOSITIONS, THEORIES & THINGS SURENDRA VERMA Contents Introduction 9 Abiogenic petroleum origin: Petroleum paradise 11 Alien abduction: Delusion or real? 13 Alien rain: It’s raining aliens, not cats and dogs 16 Alien ‘rods’: Invisible creatures caught on camera 18 Ancient astronauts: Chariots of the gullible, not the gods 20 Anthropic principle: A scientific attempt to prove the divine 22 Apocalypse: Waiting for a celestial cataclysm 24 Archimedes’ death ray: A burning tale from the past 26 Astrology: The planets of our lives 28 Ball lightning: A glowing, free-floating ball of light 31 Bermuda triangle: The manufactured mystery of a deadly triangle 34 Bible code: Deciphering God’s messages 36 Biological transmutation: Playing arithmetical games with atomic numbers 38 Biorhythms: Without rhyme or reason 41 Bode’s law: A law of science or a remarkable coincidence? 43 Chiropractic: The real value of Palmer’s ‘discovery’ 46 Climate scepticism: Myths can’t change the reality 48 Cold fusion: Nuclear fusion in a glass jar 51 Common sense and science: A complex relationship 53 Conciousness: Explaining the unexplainable? 55 Cosmic collisions: Planets colliding on the edge of science 58 Crop circles: Reaping by humans, aliens or nature? 60 Cryptozoology: Searching for snarks 63 Crystal healing: It’s all in the mind 65 Delphic oracle: Inhaling vapours and prophesying 67 Dinosaurs: What really killed our lovable leapin’ lizards? 69 Dowsing: Does it work? 71 The Drake equation: Sheer speculation 73 Electromagnetic fields and health: Power line paranoia and mobile phone mania 76 Energy from antimatter: Propelling fictional starships 79 Evolutionary psychology: Can evolution explain how we think and behave? 82 Extrasensory perception: Perception beyond belief 84 Face on Mars: Unmasked! 86 Flat Earth: No one has ever fallen off the edge 88 Four elements: Aristotle’s gift 90 Geocentricity: Neither science nor religion 92 Graphology: Handwriting as character 95 Great Wall of China: The moon myth 97 Hollow Earth: Aliens in the deep 99 Homeopathy: A medical breakthrough or a major blunder? 101 Intelligent aliens: Why aren’t they here? 103 Intelligent design: Science or nonsense? 105 Intercessory prayer: The power of distant prayer 108 Killer asteroids: Should we lose sleep over asteroid threat? 110 Kirlian photography: Images of fringes, not haloes 112 Litre: It’s time you met Monsieur Litre and Mademoiselle Millie 114 Loch Ness monster: We see what we want to see 116 Magnetic therapy: Attractive claims, sham benefits 119 Martian life: Smart Martians and silly scientists 121 Mayan calendar: The end of a cycle 124 Memes: Evolution by imitation 126 Mesmerism: ‘The art of increasing the imagination by degrees’ 128 Mirror matter: Looking glass worlds 130 Moon hoax: Americans didn’t land on the moon, bat-men did 132 Nanobots: The day of the self-replicating nanobots 134 Near-death experiences: Near death, not near God 136 Nocebo effect: The evil side of placebos 138 N-rays: Delusion, blunder or hoax? 140 Numerology: Superstition by numbers 142 Orion mystery: The Egyptian ‘heaven on earth’ 144 Out-of-body experiences: Out of body or out of mind? 146 Palmistry: Your future world in the palm of your hand 148 Panspermia: Life from outer space 150 Paradigm: A hopelessly overused and abused word 153 Parallel universes: They have found gazillion copies of you 155 Perpetual motion machines: Running forever without energy 157 Phrenology: Divining character from bumps on the head 159 Piltdown man: A synonym for phoney science 161 Placebo effect: Is belief one of the most powerful medicines? 163 Planet Nibiru: A fictional planet to end the world 165 Planet X: The saga of an unknown planet 167 Pole reversal and pole shift: Not the end of the world 169 Polywater: Contaminated with silica and silliness 171 Psychoanalysis: Still on the therapist’s couch 173 Psychokinesis: Mind over matter 175 Pyramid power: A free way to sharpen your razor blades (if you use them) 177 Quantum healing: The non-physics of holistic healing 179 Quantum mysticism: Can quantum mechanics save your soul? 182 Rorschach inkblot test: Invisible and imprecise ink 185 Shroud of Turin: Unshrouding a mystery 188 Singularity: When humans will merge with machines 190 Sirius mystery: Fish gods of the star Sirius 192 Spontaneous human combustion: Can heavy drinking turn you into a ‘crumbled black thing’? 195 Squaring the circle: It’s impossible, indeed 197 Star of bethlehem: The mystery of a supernatural star 199 Synchronicity: Coincidences: remarkable or random? 202 Tachyons: Faster than fact 204 Teleportation: Beam me up, Scotty! 205 Ten per cent brain myth: Untapped resources of the brain 208 Tesla’s death rays: Powerful enough to destroy 10,000 aeroplanes 210 Time reversal: Can time go backwards? 213 Time travel: Travelling back and forth in time 215 Trepanation: You need it like a hole in the head 217 Tunguska event: The riddle of a fireball 219 UFOs: Do they exist? Try the Santa Claus hypothesis 222 Vitamin C: Cold comfort 225 Wormholes: A tunnel from here to eternity 227 ‘Wow’ signal: A missed phone call from ET 229 Zero-point energy: Not for harnessing, either by scientists or ‘energy healers’ 232 Zoo hypothesis: Alien Big Brother is watching us all 234 Appendix: Science and pseudoscience: Separating the wheat from the chaff 237 Index 240 Introduction reate a belief in the theory and the facts will create themselves,’ the American psychologist, Joseph Jastrow, writes in his book, Wish and ‘CWisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief (1935). If you believe, say, in the ‘flat-earth theory’, search the Internet and you would have a vast collection of ‘facts’ to support the theory. You would even find ‘historical facts’ to show that your theory is credible because it has endured for centuries. You would also learn to argue that that Apollo moon landings and the photos of the spherical Earth from space were faked: a big conspiracy to keep us all in the dark. Mark Twain’s warning that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on so aptly applies to the Internet. This little book is not about the vagaries of belief and why we believe in weird things; it outlines 100 intriguing proposition, theories and other things from the borderlands of science. Not all concepts presented here could be dismissed as crackpot ideas; some have been proposed by respectable scientists and one day may even become mainstream scientific theories. The appendix on page 237, ‘Separating the wheat from the chaff’, presents the difference between methods of credible scientists and crank pseudoscientists. Happy reading (with a touch of scepticism)! ABIOGENIC PETROLEUM ORIGIN Petroleum paradise n Thomas Gold, the brilliant but maverick Austrian-American scientist who died in 2004, is remembered for his unconventional theories. ‘Gold’s theories are always a virtually inexhaustible supply of original, always brilliant, usually petroleum and natural gas. controversial—and usually right,’ The conventional theory, on the writes the renowned physicist Freeman other hand, holds that fossil fuels are Dyson in the foreword to Gold’s last residues of dead creatures who were book, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth buried in the sediments of inland seas of Fossil Fuels (2001). In this book, or coastal marine basins. As this organic Gold states the case for his most matter sank deeper into the earth controversial theory—he calls it his under accumulated sediments it was ‘heretical views’—that contradicts subjected to increasing temperatures the conventional wisdom that coal, and pressures and underwent crude oil and natural gas are fossil chemical reactions that distilled it fuels, the fossilised remains of plants into hydrocarbons. As the process and animals that died millions years takes millions of years, supplies of of ago. On the contrary, says Gold, fossil fuels are not inexhaustible. Gold these resources are constantly being believes none of this. He says that so- manufactured deep in the earth by called fossil fuels were not produced natural processes from the initial from the decomposition of fossils, materials that formed our planet. His but by bacteria that are widespread abiogenic (not biological in origin) deep in the crust of Earth. This deep theory of petroleum origin ensures hot biosphere covers the entire crust 11 down to a depth of several kilometres crust than previously believed support or miles. Unlike surface life, which is Gold’s theory. fed by photosynthesis (the process Most geologists reject Gold’s ideas by which plants, algae and certain on the grounds that the presence bacteria convert sunlight to chemical of biological markers in petroleum energy), the deep life is fed directly by supports the conventional theory. The chemical energy. This biosphere—a discovery of extremophiles supports bacterial biosphere greater in mass Gold’s theory by showing that than all life forms on the surface—has biological matter in petroleum is the been flourishing on these resources for result of bacterial action on abiogenic billions of years. methane. Does Gold’s theory promise Extremophiles are bacteria that a fuel paradise or a fool’s paradise? thrive under conditions that would In 1960 Gold suggested another kill other creatures—in deep-sea interesting idea: that life on Earth hydrothermal vents, rock chimneys began when it was infected by micro- that grow above volcanic vents in organisms in the garbage left over by the sea floor, through which erupt extraterrestrial visitors. He imagined hot, mineral-rich fluids; inside rocks that interstellar visitors forgot to clean buried kilometres below the earth’s up after having a picnic on our planet. surface where there is no oxygen and Do piles of garbage left in picnic spots no organic food; in frozen Antarctic sea around the world hint that we have water; or in acidic, alkaline or saline inherited this bad habit from our environments.
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