The Force IS REAL

So my son told me about this ongoing project at Princeton, and I was both thrilled and a little creeped out by it. Have you guys seen this before? What do you think it means? The graphs right after the Paris attacks were striking, if not statistically significant. Of course, this does fit with certain concepts of quantum physics and various philosophies and religions. Sure does make one wonder.

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/homepage.html

When I read this, I immediately thought of Obi Wan- "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."

 

While I'm only familiar with about half of that list, the fact there there are so many such theories and beliefs by itself means there just might be something going on in a phase or plane that we haven't been quite able to examine with the scientific method. Perhaps that will change as science improves, but perhaps it never will get to that point.

But that's what is so interesting about this ongoing experiment- it uses fairly conventional science. And yet gets results that do not make any sense at all within the current scientific world view. What's also interesting to me is that I read a fair amount of general science literature all the time, and never once heard of this experiment. It's like establishment science and the bigger media outlets don't quite know what to do with it because it doesn't fit neatly in their concept of how the world works.

Certainly, there are many scientific observations that don't make sense with our current knowledge (the quantum entanglements mentioned in that list, but also relatively "simple" things like gravity). People just assume someday we'll figure those things out. I'm not sure why that same assumption doesn't apply to many of the other concepts mentioned above. I personally have always though that just dismissing these things as "hokey religions and ancient weapons" is a little arrogant, but then again, part of Han Solo's purpose was to represent the audience, i.e. modern Western people who are highly skeptical. As he learned, so perhaps we will, too.

 

I wonder how much of that is sort of due to the rumor mill and other bits of info floating around that people don't really remember? It sounds like a fun project for someone's Phd thesis to write a program to retroactively analyze trade magazines, blogs & social media to see if there's an uptick in mentions before that kind of thing really pops to the surface.

Like what public health people are trying to do in generally locating the IP addresses for google searches of "What are Flu Symptoms" in order to get the flu vaccine and antivirals to the outbreak even before people start showing up at the clinics. Stuff starts to percolate out there before it really becomes evident.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 9, 2016, Original Post Date: Feb 9, 2016 ---

I agree, but don't you think some people would benefit from some of these things if the ideas didn't get shot down as ridiculous so quickly, without even an attempt at sustained analysis? It's easy to laugh at strange theories, not so easy to dig in and see if there's merit.

I've had at least two times in my life I would swear were guardian angel interventions, or the Force, or Fate, or whatever you want to call it that completely changed my life for the better. Things that have no rational explanation that never should have happened, and did.

But once, it was a totally trivial thing that stood out- when I was a little kid (oh, I'm going to really give away my age on this!) my older sis and I would listen to the Top 40 countdown on the radio. We got one station out of LA, only at night, that had it only on Saturdays. She was listening to it when I walked in and told her the top 10 in order. When she asked how I knew, I said I'd heard it on the radio, but there's no way I could have. I didn't think anything of it, but to this day she things either I or Casey Kasem bent space time just to annoy her.

 

Love that! (That thought originated with Tyson's predecessor, the great Carl Sagan who wrote and filmed the first Cosmos decades ago, and was a major inspiration for me as a little kid)

And, here is the thing-
The more we understand physics, the more spiritual things sound less loopy, and more like phenomenon we don't understand.
Certainly, to discard all of them as figments of the imagination is to lack imagination oneself.

 

Don't know if it's coincidence about Alec Guinness, but it's not surprising. There is a recognized strain of mysticism that runs through Catholicism. But there's no reason why Guinness couldn't believe it was a physical force like dark matter- lots of the best Catholic minds have been scientists AND theologians- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Roger Bacon, etc. Every now and then, some of them get knocked around by the Church as an institution, but eventually it comes around because there is no inherent conflict between science and the spiritual side of things. Like evolution. Many people don't know the Catholic Church is fine with that concept, it had better be since it was a friar, Gregor Mendel with his famous sweet peas, who first developed the idea of genetics.


I agree that dark matter is a great example of this kind of concept of the Force. Slowly it has become apparent that there is a great deal more out there than we can see, or measure, and yet we believe it's there anyway because it makes sense mathematically and physically. It is, however, a little amusing that the same benefit of the doubt is not given to things that have a more mental or spiritual side. Why is that?

I think that is because these "believable" Force-type entities are just matter. They're not harnessed through the mind, or interact with the mind, like the Force. And I think that's where people stop giving far-fetched theories the benefit of the doubt. We're not used to thinking about the mind, much less the spirit or the soul. At least not as being more than a collection of atoms. But that just doesn't answer either the practical questions of what the mind is or does, nor does it have that satisfying feel of a theory that just makes sense.

I do think that most of us (like @Trevor ) feel, if not outright believe, that there's something missing in our physical, reductionist thinking. That's why we're drawn to all of these other, almost supernatural things. But maybe they're not supernatural, maybe they're unexplained nature, or nature that is ultimately not explainable by the scientific method which at this point seems to limit it us almost as much as it helps us. I have several degrees, one of which is in philosophy (duh) and one of which is in biology. I never saw any conflict but I can't really tell where they meet, either.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 13, 2016, Original Post Date: Feb 13, 2016 ---

What I kind of think is that in the end there will be no difference between religion and quantum physics. It will all be the manifestations of the same exact thing. Right now, we're just the blind men and the elephant.

 

Lol, yep. Plus, there are those on the quantum physics end of things who posit there perhaps needs to be a consciousness to perceive the entire universe and pin it down in a certain state- until then we are all just Schrodinger's cats. So if that's not a description of God, I'm not sure how else to think of it.

Yes. That's Einstein and his embarrassment of a cosmological constant. We still don't know what that is, but it has to be there. Right?

So why are Hawking and Einstein at least given the benefit of the doubt (although they themselves are a bit shy about it) when someone pushing, say, intelligent design or the existence of chakra is sneered at? I don't have the answers to any of this, I just think it's curious. Concepts of the mind and spirit are given no credence. But all of the history of humankind pulls us toward those kinds of concepts- and yet modern people are supposed to disregard all of it as primitive or superstitious because now we're so much more sophisticated and knowledgable. Well, maybe not knowledgable enough.

Ah well, now the value of a college degree is measured in median earnings mid-career. However, I'd bet quite a few Phil majors do pretty well, but not in philosophy. They do well in law, policy, and medicine. I frequently am asked to participate in endeavors that are not really my thing, so to speak, but for some reason people like the way I think. So my education must have had some lasting impact.

I tried just doing biology as a major, but was bored to tears. So I added philosophy to make it interesting and that has served me very well as a medical doctor, I think. When someone comes into the ER claiming to be Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, I might at least listen to see if they really are before I decide they're actually schizophrenic.

I mean, you never know....