SGU Episode 103
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| SGU Episode 103 |
|---|
| 11th July 2007 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
SL: Scott Lilienfield |
| Quote of the Week |
There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| SGU Podcast archive |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 11th 2007 and this is your host Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella -
B: Hey everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson.
R: Hello everyone.
S: Jay Novella.
J: Hey guys.
S: And Evan Bernstein.
This Day in Skepticism (0.33)
E: Hi everyone. Couple of things to note in history on this day, July 11th: in 1979, space station Skylab returns to earth, I'm sure we all remember that.
B: Yeah.
E: In 1991, a total solar eclipse occurred over Hawaii and Mexico.
R: And… come on - also 7-Eleven!
E: Yes, it's 7-11 day here in the wonderful United States and supposedly you can go into any 7-Eleven in the country and ask for a free slurpee.
S: Free slurpee. It doesn't get better than that.
R: No it doesn't.
E: Assuming they understand what you're saying, they should give it to you.
S: Also in 1937, 1937, you guys know what happened then? July 11th 1937?
Various: Ummmmmmmm
S: Our mother was born. It's our mother's birthday.
J: Oh that's right.
R: Oh my god you guys are terrible.
B: Geez.
R: I can't believe you didn't know that. I mean I didn't know that because I'm not related to you.
S: Well, we did just come from her birthday party. We celebrated the whole day with her, so don't worry, we took care of it.
R: Ok.
E: Steve, that's not in wikipedia, so I'm not sure that that's really true.
R: You guys are sad.
S: Now, Perry's not with us this evening. He is feeling under the weather. He's not feeling well. But hopefully he'll be back with us next week.
R: Feel better Perry.
S: Yep, so get better Perry.
E: See you next week.
News Items
Most Distant Galaxy (1.47)
S: A few news items this week. The first one is an astronomy news item. "Scientists find the most distant galaxy yet observed." [1]
R: Very cool.
B: This was kinda interesting. Astronomers using giant telescopes said they found a glimpse of the most distant and oldest galaxies ever seen. The light the researchers viewed originated when the universe was only 500 million years old. The implication according to Richard Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, is these are the early generation of stars switched on when the universe was in its infancy. Previously the most distant galaxy known had been found at a red shift of 7, which apparently corresponds to a time when the universe was 750 million years old. This time they found galaxies at a red shift of about 9, which corresponds to a time 500 million years ago. What really fascinated me, I mean that was interesting, but what really fascinated me about this discovery is that they were able to look deep in space not because of any novel hardware or software, but because of the gravitational lensing effect first predicted by Einstein. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object is bent by the gravitational field of a closer object. Ellis said that we found areas of space which act as powerful magnifying glasses. Some of these places magnified the skies as much as 20 times. I thought that was very interesting.
S: So these galaxies about the 13 billion light years away, the estimated age of the universe being 13.5 billion years. Right. So these are among the first stars to turn in the universe, to come into existence as we're seeing them. Yeah.
B: It kinda reminded me of discovering when life originated on earth, it seems that it's getting discovered further and further back in time. It's very close to the time, say, when earth started cooling down cos you're not going to have much life when the earth is a glowing cinder! So soon after that, it seems life just kinda arose very fast and this way they're finding stars older and older, stars that happened relatively soon after the Big Bang.
S: I remember about 10 years ago, do you remember this Bob? When there was a time when the oldest stars were older than the estimated age of the universe.
B: That was a period of extreme frustration for astronomers, because that does not make sense.
S: Yeah, but of course we knew that the error bars were overlapping, but it obviously couldn't be the case.
B: Right, right.
S: I also remember arguing with some creationist who was trying to use that to basically say that we didn't know anything, right, that we don't know what we're talking about because there's this conflict that can't be resolved. But they all resolve, the error bars will shrink, I'm sure the universe will be older than the oldest stars, that's of course what happened.
B: Right.
R: Sadly, I think that that's still something that some creationists try to claim as a fact.
B: Yeah.
S: They're not going to let go of a good argument just because the facts don't support it. Come on.
R: Exactly.
Steorn Perpetual Motion Device (4.50)
S: The next news item is the follow-up from a story that was going around earlier. A company based in Dublin, Ireland, called Steorn made some news several months ago when they had claims that they had developed a perpetual motion device, a device that could generate energy.
R: It's actually last year that they announced it.
S: That long ago?
R: Yeah, I think it was August 2006 when they placed an ad in the Economist asking for scientists to step forward to be on their panel of experts to examine the machine.
S: That's right, yeah, that was last summer. Their device is called the Orbo. Now, they were promising, basically, a demonstration of their promised new Orbo perpetual device.
E: How'd it go?
S: Well, they were all set up to give a demonstration, I think initially on July 4th, and a museum and
R: Live on webcam.
S: Live on webcam.
E: Very cool.
S: Everyone to tune in, tuning in at a certain time on July 4th when they would demonstrate their machine, and then, you know, they ran into some technical difficulties. So they -
R: Not just technical difficulties.
S: Well they had to delay it.
R: The lights were too warm.
E: The delaying of a perpetual motion machine? That's never happened before.
R: Right, the perpetual motion machine, this thing that is supposed to generate the same amount of energy that it uses, was destroyed by heat.
S: Right, from the camera lights.
R: Yeah. Good design.
S: That was their excuse. At first they said it was just delayed until the 5th, and then basically said "uhhhh" they had to cancel the demonstration, it's just not going to work. Sean McCarthy, the CEO stated "technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case" and the problems were primarily due to "excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area." So that is a pretty delicate piece of technology they're dealing with.
E: Funny all of their tests of testable pieces of technology seemed to work just fine.
R: Presumably they actually made this work before their big public demonstration.
E: Why else would you have a public demonstration, if you didn't have it working?
R: Exactly. They didn't think to maybe put a light on it before?
J: Yeah, I guess they were testing it in the dark before this?
R: That would actually make sense, that might we why they thought they'd discovered perpetual motion, because all the lights were turned off.
J: Yeah, there's a perpetual motion machine in that pitch black room there, you see it?
(laughter)
E: Next, the invisible dragon!
(laughter)
S: There's been a lot of speculation about what their game is. Of course, just for a little background, perpetual motion machines don't exist, they violate the laws of thermodynamics. There's actually different types of perpetual motion machines: those that violate the first law of thermodynamics and those that violate the second law of thermodynamics.
R: You can pick which you prefer.
S: You can pick and chose which fundamental law of physics you want to violate.
(laughter)
B: You might want to quickly state, Steve, the first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The second law states that putting energy into a system will always result in a loss in potential output.
S: That's right. So you can't, machines can't make energy from nothing, nor can you get the same amount of energy out of, any time energy's transferred from one state to another, one thing to another, there's gotta be at least a little bit of a loss of energy. You can't maintain the exact same amount of energy.
E: That's a creationist argument.
B: And if those, one or both of those are wrong, we have trouble.
S: Yes. It's not just a good idea: it is the law. It is one of the most, if not the most (collectively the laws of thermodynamics,) validated laws in science. If anything deserves the title of a law of nature these do. To the point that anyone claiming to have evidence that violates either of these laws, has an enormous burden of proof to meet before they should reasonably make such claims. Now sometimes, we always speculate what's the game, what's going on in these guys' minds. Sometimes they are self-deluded cranks. And it's actually quite easy to make the mistake of thinking you have a perpetual motion machine when you don't, because you have to be actually quite careful to make sure that you're excluding all potential sources of external energy. The one that I saw that was the most subtle, and I'm like "gee I'm not sure I would have picked up on that" was a perpetual clock, a clock that never, didn't need any apparent energy source, didn't need to be wound or whatever, and actually it was being powered by -
R: A hamster running in a wheel.
(laughter)
S: Now, we missed the hamster.
J?: Powered by stupidity.
S: It was temperature differences causing flexing of metal.
B: Wow. That's clever. That's cool.
S: And that was -
J: And wait, was it clever, or did the guy build it and didn't even know what he'd built.
S: The one I was looking at was designed to function that way.
B: Yeah.
S: I defy you to figure out where the energy's coming from in this device, it was that subtle. But people can make those kind of honest mistakes, they don't realize that external heat is playing a role or even humidity or light energy, whatever. The other thing is with, the other way you can make a "honest mistake" is if you have a process that requires some activation energy. And then you get energy at the back end. And it's a matter of adding up all the energy going in, adding up all the energy coming out, and making a comparison, and they basically just do the addition wrong. They're missing some sources of input, of energy or they're overestimating the output, -
E: Forgot to carry the two
S: They did the mat wrong.
R: And there are the conmen.
S: And then there are conmen, right, there are those who, they have no delusion about what's going on, they know it's a total farce, and they're doing it to lure investors, usually.
E?: They lie about it?
R: And you've got to wonder with a company like Steorn, because they did pursue investors before. Looking on their website's kinda difficult to piece together what they used to do before and what they do now. They had investors but then they stopped taking on new investors until they perfected their model, is that right?
B: Initially, Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of these people would initially they would try to sell the machine, "here's my perpetual motion machine" and try to make money out of it.
S: Right.
B: And of course they ran into lots of problems with that because it doesn't work, so now, as this guy was doing, they sell, you know, the potential, like "look it we're so close, help us go these last few yards. And we'll have it and you'll be piping energy back into the grid and they'll be paying you for it." And that's much harder to catch it with that.
S: Yeah, because not demonstrably fraud that your research program just didn't pan out as expected - "well, it's research, it never pans out exactly as you'd expect." So it's harder to demonstrate equivocally that it was fraudulent.
R: According to Steorn's website, they say "due to the contentious nature of our technology claim, the company made a decision that during the process of validation, we would seek no further funding."
S: Right.
E: Did Ireland issue them a patent for this? Because that's a big part of the whole perpetual motion problem, is that it gets legitimized by governments because they, to some degree, because they issue patents for these things that blatantly don't work. Of course Randi has gone to great lengths in writing about it and talking about it.
R: Steorn had claimed that they were going to give away the instructions for making it. According to Steorn's website they say "our free energy technology will be made widely available to the development community immediately after the independent scientific validation process. Under the terms of a modified general public license and for a nominal fee, Steorn's intellectual property will be made available concurrently to all interested parties, from individual enthusiasts to larger research organizations."
J: So these are scam artists?
R: Well, that's what so difficult to determine is because if they aren't taking money from investors, and if they aren't claiming to have any interest in selling the machines, then are they scam artists? Or are they a company that actually thought that they had this great idea, which turned out not to work?
S: And here's the great idea, they say "Orbo is based upon the principle of time-variant magnetic-mechanical interactions" which basically means it's magnets. It's frequently at the core of perpetual motion machines because the attractive energy or whatever of magnets can fool people into thinking that they're creating some kind of perpetual motion. But the bottom line is you can never use magnets to generate energy or to generate work.
R: And why is that?
S: The reason you can't extract energy from a magnet is because if you extract energy from it, the magnetic field must get weaker. So then it will, you know, go away eventually. You can't extract energy from it while maintaining the field at the exact same strength, that's the bottom line.
B: Yeah, so in other words you can think of the magnet as a battery.
S: Right, it has a little bit of energy stored in its magnetic field and if you really did extract that energy, the field would have to go away.
R: So there are actually other options, we've got the fact that, the possibility that they are scam artists, or the possibility that they were just mistaken. But I have seen some other theories floating around like -
S: Yeah.
R: - maybe they are actually just trying to prove something about viral marketing, maybe they're a -
J: Yes, I heard that as well
R: - marketing company.
E: Ah.
R: Though if they are, I don't think they're a very good one because, I think if you asked anyone in, like a random person on the street, they would have no idea who Steorn is.
S: Yeah
E: Right
S: We pay attention to this kind of thing but I don't know how much it's out there.
B: But not just from marketing. The take I heard was that one possibility is that they were trying to show just how gullible the media is and how easily they get sucked in -
S: Yeah.
B: - to nonsense like this.
S: Is it a Randi Carlos hoax, in other words?
B: Right.
S: We'll see eventually, you know, either they'll.. if they are con artists, then they'll continue to try to extract investor's money and they'll just vanish somewhere. If they are deluded cranks, they'll never give up their claims but they'll sort of face into obscurity and they'll say "well we have to work on this." And if it's a hoax then that's only viable if they at some point reveal and go "aha, we were kidding all along."
R: And if they're legitimate company that made a mistake, they'll move on to other ventures, so time will tell.
E: They should go with option number three, that's their best bet at this point.
S: Yeah.
E: We were just kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. What a good joke.
B: And one option we're not considering -
S: What's that?
B: One option
S: That it works!
B: It really works. And they turn all of physics -
R: That's true, let 's not be -
E: That's a good option.
S: We'll include that for thoroughness. We tell patients, you know, "I'll include that diagnosis for thoroughness but it's so unlikely, it's a distant last on the list."
E: Alright Steve, I say that that one is the fiction. Oh wait, sorry, wrong…
S: Oh please.
B: If you think about it, any of the engineers and scientists that they have working on this, they have to know it's bullshit, you know what I mean? I mean come on.
S: You would think. It's so obvious. I mean, you really, it's hard to imagine they've any sense, that they've any consultants that they don't know that it's just impossible what they're claiming.
B: I saw an exploded view of the device and it's fairly simple -
S: Just a bunch of magnets.
B: You don't need extreme engineering skills to put this together, I suspect they don't have any real engineers on their payroll, I don't think, I haven't specifically looked for it,
S: That's because all the engineers are paid off by the big oil companies, Bob, come on.
B: Oh, I forgot about that.
E: No, big pharma, big pharma.
S: And all this, big pharma is like medicine, psychiatry; perpetual motion's big oil, Evan, get it straight.
E: Whatever.
S: Alright
R: Go on their forums, you can see all the people whining about big oil.
S: Yeah.
J: Maybe they just paid these engineers and scientists a ton of money and they're just "whatever I'll do it."
E: Woo hoo!
S: They got some whores or shills or whatever you want to call them.
R: Whores?
S: If you compromise your scientific integrity for money, we call those people whores.
R: Oh, I thought you meant you got the scientists whores so they did it.
(laughter)
S: No.
E?: That would have worked too.
S: I can see where your mind is, Rebecca. Alright.
Salt Water as Fuel (17.30)
S: There's another news item although this isn't that new but a lot of people, that's been in the news recently, and a lot of people did send this to us and also it plays off of the previous news item so I thought I would include it here. There's been a lot going around about the claims of a Florida resident called John Kanzius who is promoting the notion that he has discovered how to use salt water as fuel. [2]
B: Oh yeah.
S: This is again a free energy type of claim, and the same principles apply. This guy is an interesting character. This guy clearly has some engineering skills. He's able to build stuff that works; at least it does what it's built to do. The implications may not be what he seems. He set out initially to cure cancer, you know, it's kind a low goal for himself, and he came up with the idea, actually he didn't come up with this idea but he's been researching the technology of, and Bob, you actually mentioned this recently on one of our shows -
B: Yeah.
S: Of injecting nano-particles into people that are coated with gold and then using the radio-frequencies to heat the particles. You tag the particles in some way that they selectively go to cancer cells. Then you use radio-frequency heat-induction to heat the nano-particles and kill the cancer cells.
J: So he came up with this process as well?
S: No.
(laughter)
S: He did not come up with it but -
B: He's trying to implement it.
S: He's trying to implement it but he kinda gives the impression that it was his idea, some people have been critical of him for being an attention-hound. But he did build the device to do it, the radio-frequency device. He was experimenting on salt water to see if he could use this as a desalination technique, (you know, turning salt water into fresh water,) and he discovered by accident that the salt water under this radio-frequency induction, you can ignite and burn it, you can have a little test tube of salt water with this yellow flame coming off the top of it. And -
E: Burning water.
S: - the salt water is burning. And just to prove that this can be harnessed to generate energy, he put's a little engine on top of it, and uses the heat from the flame to run a little motor. This is the kind of problem that I spoke about before, where you're putting energy into this process, there's a certain amount of wattage associated with running the radio-frequency machine.
J: Well Steve, what's it burning? Hydrogen?
S: Yes, what it's doing is separating the hydrogen and the oxygen and then burning it so that it goes back together as water and creates energy.
R: So why salt water?
S: Well, that's a very good question, and there's a few possibilities that I've read, and I'm not sure which is the correct one. The speculation has been that the salt is some way acting as a catalyst, because actually this does not work on fresh water, it only works on salt water, but you could just take fresh water and put salt in it. The speculations I've heard is that the so-called flame is really more of a spark and that the salt is necessary to make the water more conductive. Another one is that it weakens the bond between the hydrogen and the oxygen, so that it makes it split apart more. And also others have speculated that it's actually more the sodium that's actually burning, and the sodium definitely has to be involved with the flame because a hydrogen/oxygen flame should be basically colorless. This flame was clearly yellow, which is what the color of a sodium flame would be. So, the salt is definitely playing a role in this.
B: Plus it's pretty.
S: Plus it makes it pretty, it makes it so you can see it.
E: A pretty color.
B: Prettier than an invisible flame.
S: He thinks that this is going to be like, solve the world's energy problems and make us free of fossil-fuels. And, you know, did you do a basic calculation to see how much energy's going in and how much energy's going out? Because I guarantee you there's less energy coming out that going in. And again, ask The Basic Question: where is the energy coming from? You're putting energy in to separate hydrogen and oxygen, and then you're getting energy back as you burn it back together, and according to the second law of thermodynamics that energy that comes out has to be less than the energy you put in. That's it.
B: That's the bottom line to this whole thing.
R: It's not even like he's close to perpetual energy here - this is an amazingly inefficient way to get energy.
S: Right.
J: He's like "this machine's plugged in, it's ripping the hydrogen and oxygen molecules apart", he's burning it. And then he's not counting the electricity it takes to run the machine.
S: Yes. Right. Exactly. It's kind of basic.
J: So this guy needs a smack to the mouth.
(laughter)
R: Yeah, Jay, that's …
J: Send him home. Well come on, someone has to tell this guy, "hey Charlie, it's not working, jacko."
R: with the physics
S: That's Jay's approach: smack the guy in the mouth. But, we'll do that metaphorically.
R: Way to make up for Perry's absence.
S: So it brings up a couple of other points I want to point out. One is the notion that something that's burning is therefore fuel. And in fact fuel implies that there is energy already stored in the medium, whatever it is, and that you're getting that energy out of it. And therefore it's a source of energy. Petroleum is a source of energy, because the energy's already in there, and it's in there in chemical bonds and then you're getting that chemical energy out by burning it. There are other "fuels" that are not sources of energy, but they are carriers, or storage devices for energy. There's been a lot of talk about the hydrogen economy and using hydrogen fuel cells; well, because hydrogen does not exist in free form on the earth in any significant amounts, we have to make hydrogen, and again you get less energy out burning the hydrogen than it puts in to make it, so it's not a source of energy, but it can be used as a pretty efficient, potentially, storage medium of energy. This method is really neither; you're not really storing the energy and it certainly isn't a source of energy - it's just really a conduit for energy. You're putting energy in and getting it right back out, and you're just changing the form of energy and losing a little bit along the way, and that's it, really. Although this could turn out to be, through dumb luck, maybe this might be an efficient way of creating hydrogen from water.
J: So I don't slap him?
S: Well the guy's not claiming "isn't this an interesting phenomenon, maybe we can exploit this as an efficient way of making hydrogen. He's saying "this is going to replace gasoline," so he still needs the smack.
The other thing that struck me was in watching multiple local news reports about this topic, is how terrible a job the mainstream media did reporting this story. They all basically followed the same exact formula. Here we have this lone genius, working away to cure cancer and while he's at it he finds out how to burn water for fuel and will save us from our energy crisis. They were absolutely credulous; none of them even mentioned the whole scientific theoretical problems with the process; none of them obviously spoke to a scientist or engineer or physicist about it.
B: What does he do in his spare time, save babies?
J: But Steve, Steve, that segment on their shows kept the viewers there long enough for the next round of commercials.
S: Yeah, right, it was clearly like a human interest story, almost, they didn't feel that they needed to interject any actual science in their science reporting. It was terrible. Terrible.
J: Pesky science would kill the story.
E: Science is boring.
S: I also did a google search just to see what the print media was saying about this and it was basically the same thing. It was just the same story. I found one mainstream print article that even mentioned the scientific criticism or the skepticism about these claims. And I think, Bob, you found the same one doing the same kind -
B: Yeah.
S: This was published by World News Daily and by coincidence was written by an old friend of ours, Joe Kovaks.
J: Hey Joe!
S: He included what we just said - this kinda violates the second law of thermodynamics, they're not counting the energy going into the process, et cetera. However, I also noticed that he included that at the end of his article, basically copying it from science bloggers - that's where he got his information from. So the one sort of side point that I want to make about this, and this is something that we talk about on this show occasionally: this case, in my opinion, the old-school traditional media utterly failed the public in dealing with this story. They were credulous, they didn't do the proper investigation, they did not give the public the information they need to actually judge the story or to understand it. The new internet-based science blogging media did a wonderful job of dealing with this story - gave complete information, gave all the background scientific information. If you read a science blogger's take on this, you got the story; if you read traditional print or TV media, you got a credulous childish story.
J: And there it lies. There's a microcosm of what's happening today.
S: Exactly. That's why that struck me. Right there, leads me to believe that the new media is going to kill to a large degree the old media, and good riddance because it's better.
J: A good question to be asked now would be, the people that they send to do these interviews with the number of people that are burning salt water, did they know the difference or did they buy it hook-line-and-sinker, or was it a conscious decision: "we're going to show this in a particular way regardless of what I know better. I know that this is bullshit but we're going to do it because my manager, my boss needs me" -
R: I'm sure they bought it.
B: Yeah, I don't think they had any clue what was really going on.
R: Yeah, the guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about and he demonstrates what he's done. When you know nothing about physics and energy loss you'll bite that and you're done for. So I don't think that there's some conspiracy where they're all, that mainstream media knows that this guy's a quack, but still put him on. I think they've -
B: Their fault was that they don't go to some people with some serious credentials and discuss this with chemists and engineers and say "hey, what are some alternative explanations," that's where they really fell down. They just bought it and reported it without digging any deeper.
S: This is my personal experience, not with this particular story but with stories like this: that the journalists have a pretty good sense that this is BS, they don't really buy it, they know that something is probably wrong with this, they have enough sense to know that but they don't care and they don't care to investigate that. So it's a combination.
R: And obviously it depends, it depends on the journalist, depends on the..
S: Yeah, right. But that's the mainstream model.
Questions and Emails (28.47)
S: Let's move on to your questions and emails. The first email comes from Rachael, from Australia, Sydney, Australia, and she writes:
FYI. You may have got this story in the States, but just in case it didn't reach you. Unfortunately these loonies exist in Australia too! Unbelievable. Love the podcast. Regards, Rachael.
And then she gives us a link to a story. [3]
This was sent to us by about five or six of our loyal listeners in Australia, so obviously this is big news in Australia. And this has to deal with a young woman who tragically murdered most of her entire family.
R: It was her parents and her sister, right?
S: Her father and her sister and severely wounded her mother, but I think the mother survived the attack. What makes this not just a tragic story but something that we're talking about is the claim that the alleged murderer was under psychiatric care, had been previously diagnosed with a psychotic illness and had been treated, but prior to the attack had been encouraged by her parents who were scientologists to not take any treatment, not see psychiatrists, because of their scientology beliefs. If that story is true, (and this is based upon the testimony that was given at trial,) then this story is someone who is very mentally ill, very sick, who needs treatment, refused that treatment for scientology religious beliefs, and it led to a very tragic homicide that occurred, taking the story at face value, occurred in a clear psychotic state. She was not acting on any plan or anger or whatnot, just sort of delusional psychotic state at the time of the murders.
R: And in case you didn't know, this is a long-standing thing with scientology. They have viciously fought against psychiatry as a whole. There's not a single aspect of psychiatry they agree with. And in fact one of our listeners - and I don't want to say the name of the listener because scientologists are crazy and will track people down and stalk them - but someone sent me a package of a magazine-style brochure and a dvd, both titled Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. And it is chock-full of the stupidest lies and it's really depressing how much work has gone into these. These are really nicely produced items that they're handing out for free to people on the street.
S: Yeah.
R: They're spreading these vicious lies and they're convincing people who need real help, like this woman in Australia, to try to go it alone with their crazy scientology cures that don't work and have been proven again and again not to work. Look at Tom Cruise! Hello - crazy.
S: It's terrible, and again we don't care what people believe in terms of their faith, but here we have a belief system that's making a scientific claim, and is specifically really viciously attacking a perfectly legitimate system of healthcare. And traditionally mental health has a lot of hurdles to get over, a lot of barriers to good mental health care. It carries a stigma that other medicine doesn't have, for example. So it's an easy target. It really is very painful to watch this kind of vicious attack for these kind of bizarre beliefs that they have. The other thing is that my sense is that what we're witnessing is the creation of a very sophisticated collection of nonsense - the anti-psychiatry propaganda that's being created by the scientologists. That could get to a very, as you say, people spend a lot of time on this. They can get to a very sophisticated detailed level. Kind of like creationism. It really is now just like creationism.
R: It is, yeah.
S: Creationists deny evolution and they have books written about it, very sophisticated, very developed body of nonsense and misdirection and distortion and lies. Scientology is doing the same thing now with mental health and it's painful to watch.
R: Right, imagine, I'm talking about a magazine that looks better than say Newsweek, it has these timelines of the cruel history of psychiatry, big long articles all about electro-shock, I mean it's kind of depressing because it's so full of misinterpretations. You don't even know where to begin.
S: To be complete, the Church of Scientology denies that there's a connection, specifically the Australian Church of Scientology vice-president is quoted, this is Cyrus Brooks, quoted as saying that the "scientology link is a bit of a red herring" so they're saying that they have no records that this family was members of the Church of Scientology.
R: Yeah, they don't have any records any more.
(laughter)
S: Yeah, right. This is what came out of testimony, so it's not just hearsay, it's actually what's on the record. So tragic story but it does again highlight the dangers of believing in nonsense and pseudoscience.
J: I hate them so much I can't even comment on this.
(laughter)
R: You have been strangely quiet over there.
E: You're paralyzed with rage.
S: You're quiet…
J: Because what can I say other than I'm just speechless, I'm literally speechless. I'm waiting for the fight, I want scientology to call me up and start messing with me and then I'll lose my mind on them.
S: Well we do have an excellent interview coming up so let's go on to that interview now.
Interview with "Scott Lilienfield" (34.33)
Science or Fiction (1.05.20)
Question #1 Boiled hair taken from the mane of a lion.
Question #2 Coffee made from coffee beans taken from the feces of a civet - a small cat-like mammal.
Question #3 Goat cheese deliberately infested with maggots
Skeptical Puzzle (11.46)
This Week's Puzzle:
A dog in Romania
A vulture in Chile
A fox in China
A bear in Iceland
A boar in Greece
A buffalo in America
Identify the psuedoscientific pattern.
Last Week's puzzle:
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1.14.00)
"There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings." Friedrich Nietzsche
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.
References
- ↑ Reuters: Most Distant Galaxy Discovered
- ↑ World News Daily: Salt Water Fuel
- ↑ Sydney Morning Herald: Scientologists Flat Earthers
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