Vic Stenger
For "Reality Check" in Skeptical Briefs, December 2005.
One sure way to unmask pseudoscientific arguments is to check the numbers. Pseudoscientists attempt to exploit the general science illiteracy of the public, making what sounds on the surface as plausible arguments ostensibly based on established scientific principles. But they often sweep the quantitative implications of their claims under the rug and when you put in the numbers, you can quickly prove many such claims to be bogus.
I
gave one striking example in my Briefs
column of June, 1999 (available at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Briefs/phantom.html)
that bears repeating. Physicist Harold Puthoff and other have argued that an
inexhaustible supply of "free energy" might someday be extracted from
the vacuum, given a sufficient investment in their research, of course. I took
the equation for the stored energy between two plates, which appears in
Puthoff's papers and has been verified empirically, and put in some numbers. I
calculated that two highly
polished metal plates 200 kilometers by 200 kilometers on a side separated by
one micron (a millionth of a meter) have enough potential energy to light a
100-Watt light bulb for a second. If we were to stumble upon 30 million or so
of these structures out in space, we could hook them up to our light bulb and
keep it lit for a year. Unfortunately, astronomers have not yet observed such
structures in the space near Earth where they might be utilized.
In another
example, I was recently contacted by The History Channel to possibly appear in
a program they planned on The Philadelphia Experiment (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Experiment). This urban legend has
appeared in several books. As the story goes, in 1943 the U.S. Navy was
conducting experiments in the Philadelphia Naval Yards on making ships
invisible when a destroyer was accidentally teleported to Norfolk, Virginia and
back.
The
destroyer, USS Eldridge,
was supposedly fitted with an electromagnetic generator designed to bend light
around the ship. Now light is made of electrically neutral photons, which are
not deflected by electromagnetic fields. However, Einstein's "unified
field theory," was supposedly applied, with Uncle Al himself said to be a
participant. As near as I can tell, the generator was to produce a
gravitational field great enough to bend the light.
Of course,
the bending of light by gravity was one of the triumphant predictions of
Einstein's earlier general theory of relativity that has been successfully
tested during total solar eclipses. (Einstein never succeeded in developing his
unified theory.) General relativity is perfectly quantitative, so let's put in
the numbers. The angular deflection is proportional to the mass of the
gravitating body and inversely proportion to the impact parameter (distance to center
at closest approach) and amounts to 1.75 second for arc for the sun for a light
ray just grazing the surface. The gravitational deflection of a light ray
around an object the mass of the Eldridge (1240 tons) with an impact parameter of, say, 100 meters would be
3x10-16 arc seconds, hardly enough to make it invisible. If the role
of the electromagnetic generator were to somehow produce the equivalence of a
large gravitating mass, then for a one-degree deflection that mass would have
to be over a trillion-trillion tons.
This,
however, is not the end of the story. According to reports, on October 28, 1943
the Eldridge vanished from
Philadelphia and simultaneously appeared 600 km away at the U.S. Naval base at
Norfolk. After a few minutes it vanished again and reappeared in Philadelphia.
The Navy
and ship crew denied the whole story, but that is, of course, a "cover
up" according to proponents, who claim the event was an accidental case of
"teleportation," so familiar to us all from Star Trek.
Here again we
can make a quantitative estimate of what would be involved. This year is the
hundredth anniversary of what every science writer calls "Einstein's
famous equation," E=mc2
(they all have a macro for this in their word processors). The famous equation
presumably makes it physically possible to convert mass into energy, propagate
the energy through space, and then, convert it back to mass some distance away.
Well, if you set m equal to
the mass of the Eldridge
and multiply it by c2,
after putting in some conversion factors you obtain the energy equivalent of 20
million one-megaton hydrogen bombs. I think this might have been noticed.
I invite
the reader to make another calculation: What is the total number of bits of
information that would have to be transmitted in order to exactly reconstruct
the Eldridge in Norfolk,
and again back in Philadelphia?
Now, as is
always the case with pseudoscientific cons, the various terms and concepts that
are being exploited can be found in legitimate scientific literature. In this
case, we can read about "quantum teleportation," experiments in which
an unknown quantum state is destroyed at one point in space and recreated at
another distant point using a quantum effect known as "entanglement."
Here
information is transmitted, not matterÑjust as in any ordinary electromagnetic
communication. The fact that it is quantum information, measured in
"qubits" rather than bits holds the promise of future higher information
communication. But that technology is still well in the future and hardly
conceivable in 1943.
Information
cannot be sent by quantum teleportation to some arbitrary location, but to a
prepared receiver. Basically you start with two particles, such as photons, in
an entangled state. You send one photon to the sender and the other to the
receiver. The sender then combines her photon with another in an unknown
quantum state and performs a measurement on the resulting state. Since
measurements "collapse" quantum states, the result is a classical,
disentangled, state. The sender then transmits a classical signal in that state
to the receiver. The receiver combines that signal with his entangled photon to
reconstruct the original, unknown quantum state.
Note
that the signal is not transmitted faster than the speed of light. This is not
a case of so-called "nonlocal" communication via the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, which is provably impossible.
Somehow it seems rather unlikely that the accidental quantum teleportation of a ship and crew took place in Philadelphia back in 1943.
Vic Stenger's next book, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do The Laws Of Physics Come From? is scheduled to appear in 2006. His website is http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/.