Help Me Locate Kooks

The final chapter of Bunnies Made of Cheese: The Book is currently envisioned as a look at the misuse of quantum mechanics by evil squirrels: qucks and hucksters of various sorts. As a result, I spent a good chunk of yesterday wading through the sewers of alternative medicine books on Amazon, using the “Search Inside This Book” feature to locate good manglings of quantum theory in the service of quackery. I feel vaguely dirty.

I also spent some time on the web page of Bob Park’s favorite shills, BlackLight Power, which provides another example of the appropriation of quantum concepts for nefarious purposes (I need to hedge this a little, though, because their incorrect findings are evidently based on the “Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics,” which doesn’t bear explaining).

I would like to find a good example of someone citing a misunderstanding of QED as the basis for “free energy,” though. It would balance things out pretty nicely if I had a concrete example of a perpetual motion scheme claiming to be based on vacuum fluctuations or the Casimir force, or some such.

I know I’ve seen such things, but my Google-fu is weak (possibly because Google tracks my search preferences, and sends me to real physics sites first), and I couldn’t find anything specific enough to cite. I know I’ve heard of such schemes, though.

Can anybody provide a reference to a good one? If you provide a pointer to a useful sort of kook, you’ll get an acknowledgment in the published book, and I’ll give you an advance look at the relevant chapter when I finish re-writing it.

(One additional note on the Amazon-based quote mining: Given that Amazon limits your look inside a given book to something like five or six pages, it might seem hard to justify this practice. I’ve looked at enough of these books to feel ok with it, though, because the general pattern is always the same: there are five or six pages in an early chapter presenting a warped version of modern physics and claiming that as a basis for their mystical claptrap, followed by a couple hundred pages of meditation techniques and mystical puffery unburdened by even a hint of science. You really can find essentially every mention of modern science just by searching for the right keywords.

(Also, I will be damned if I’m going to let one nickel of my money find its way into the grasping hands of a charlatan like Deepak Chopra, so there’s no chance that I’m going to buy any of these books. The college’s library is not in the habit of purchasing or promoting woo, and there are limits to the amount of time I’m willing to spend copying things down in bookstores, so Amazon is a convenient alternative.)

39 comments

  2. I can’t find the site, maybe its gone. But it was for audio cables that were “almost superconducting”, i.e. resistive. Web site is all cooper pairs and crap, and it was $10,000 for a 3 foot section or something. Room temperature to boot!

  5. This guy seems pretty legitimate. He doesn’t say what universities he got his degrees from, and the places he has worked are all impossible-to-search-for three letter acronyms, and everyone who can verify his work is mysteriously dead. But other than that he seems completely on the level.

    http://www.chukanovenergy.com/

  6. I think that in googling it helps to know some of the buzzwords — “zero point” is one of the key ones, and at least half of the top 20 google hits are on the kooky side. “Over Unity” is another popular buzzword.

  10. HK Moffat, Six lectures on general fluid dynamics and two on hydromagnetic dynamo theory, pp. 175-6 in R Balian & J-L Peube (eds), Fluid Dynamics (Gordon and Breach, 1977)
    http://www.igf.fuw.edu.pl/KB/HKM/PDF/HKM_027_s.pdf
    3.5 megabytes; pdf pp. 25-27, “calculation of the chiral case”

    Craft two solid spheres of cultured single crystal quartz, one each in enantiomorphic space groups P3(2)21 (right-handed) and P2(2)21 (left-handed). Niobium plate their surfaces. Cool to superconductivity (below 9.3 K), Meissner levitate in hard vacuum, and look. If they start spinning in opposite directions you have vacuum propellers. Theorists can sweat the rest.

    If a Type II supercon is satisfactory, niobium stannide Tg = 18.3 K and you can levitate much larger radius, heavier balls given the much larger upper critical field of 25 tesla. If you are feeling studly, sputtered niobium germanide with 23.2 K and 29 tesla (at 4.2 K).

  11. Vasant Corporation makes “flying resonance cavities” based on spin waves and the Casimir effect.

    Book here.

  12. D-Wave Systems always seemed like a quack outfit, to me– long on claims (a working 16 q-bit quantum computer? 1024 q-bits by the end of 2008?) and short on actual proof.

    Scott Aaronson can (very obviously) say more, and with some actual authority.

  13. @12, John Novak: It’s kind of funny, but Geordie Rose of D-Wave is a frequent commenter on Dr. Aaronson’s blog. Speaking of Dr. Aaronson, he should probably be commenting on this one. He does deal with quantum cranks a fair amount.

  14. Chad:

    Julia Sweeney, in her CD Letting Go of God, cites Deepak Chopra as being guilty of mis-using quantum mechanics as proof of something to do with souls or other such goofiness; I’m not familiar enough with what he peddles to say with confidence, and it’s been a while since I listened to her CD.

    She actually took an undergraduate (I believe) course in the subject so that she could understand what he was talking about. That was all she needed to know how completely and utterly bunko it was, so it may be too basic for your book. But maybe not.

  15. Kimbrough’s Law: To convert search results from real physics to crank physics, simply add “Tesla” to the search words.

    Seriously. Google “quantum mechanics”. Then Google “quantum mechanics Tesla.” See what happens?

  18. Two words: Lionel Milgrom. I’ve never seen anyone who can abuse quantum theory in the service of the quackery known as homeopathy (or any other quackery, for that matter), the way he can. I present to you two pieces of evidence:

    It’s not just homeopathy, it’s quantum homeopathy!
    The quantum homeopathic gyroscopic circle is complete

    Milgrom’s favorite ploy is to apply quantum terminology to macroscopic events and postulate a “quantum entanglement” between homepath and patient that allows healing to occur. I kid you not. Reading his stuff makes my head hurt from the abuse of physics, and I’m not even a physicist.

  20. Two words: Lionel Milgrom. I’ve never seen anyone who can abuse quantum theory in the service of the quackery known as homeopathy (or any other quackery, for that matter), the way he can.

    Oh, yes. I just finished quoting from one of his papers (from 2006, the only thing I could find free on the web, as Union doesn’t subscribe to quack journals)) and mocking him. It may be the best example I’ve ever seen of cargo-cult physics– if he just sprinkles in a little of the Dirac bra-ket notation, then suddenly, he’s immune to double-blind trials. It’s quantum, you know.

    I need a shower after reading this shit.

    Hilariously misguided as Milgrom is, he’s not what I’m after. I’m looking for energy-generating systems invoking the idea of “virtual particles” as a “get out of thermodynamics free” card.

  23. You may want to check crank.net. The physics section is conveniently sorted from antigravity to time travel and individual sites are ranked from cranky to illucid.

  24. This is probably also not what you’re looking for, but Alan Sokal’s web page has quite a few links to articles about scientific nonsense (mostly perpetrated by postmodernist humanities professors). It includes his infamous parody article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” as well as the must-read “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies” (in the latter article he revealed that the former was a parody).

    Sokal’s website: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/

  25. IIRC, there was something along these lines in the news last year. Someone claimed they had such a perpetual motion machine, and were going to set it up in some gallery in the UK with a web-cam pointing at it… They couldn’t get it to work, though, and blamed the hot gallery lighting with interfering with the device’s sensitive machinery. Can’t think of the link off-hand right at the moment.

  26. Don’t know if you’re also looking for instances in popular culture, but in the Pixar movie The Incredibles, the villain uses a zero point energy weapon.

  28. In 2000 – 2001 I was involved in a sustainable energy working group that looked at a number of these things (along with the more prosaic and Newtonian, and some then-new conventional stuff such as flexible photovoltaic materials). As might be expected, not a one of them produced demonstrable results.

    One of the guys in the group, who had a decent grasp of physics and a tendency to believe where he should have been predisposed to disbelieve, had to go through the exercise of patiently debunking a guy who claimed to invent an over-unity motor. He was able to demonstrate to the inventor that he (the inventor) had made a simple measurement error.

    Our guy’s “bedside manner” was sufficiently good, and the inventor in this case an honest but misinformed garage tinkerer, that the inventor took this as a useful lesson without a whole lot of embarrassment or ego reactions. And interestingly enough, the invention in question turned out to be viable as a fairly efficient and quiet motor for use in applications such as computer cooling fans.

    Other instances however, tended more to fit the model, “if it ducks like a quack, it’s probably a quack.” Darn if I can’t remember their names, but most of them have probably gone away or been hired by the Bush Administration to “manage” NASA climatologists or science education policies.

    More recently, look up a company called Steorn, in Ireland, that was making all manner of wild claims and even took out ads in _The Economist_ promising a product demonstration that would be subject to examination by Real Scientists and would be broadcast over the internet as realtime video. Last I checked, that one was going nowhere forever at FTL speeds.

    There is an internet search utility called The Wayback Machine, that stores archives of sites including those that have been taken down. That may help you look for some of the sites that no longer exist.

    Oh, and as for our energy research group, it ended up participating in a wind site startup: a fully legitimate project that should be going into the build phase in the next couple of years.

    One last comment: Please don’t misuse the word “mysticism” when you mean “mystification.” Strictly speaking, mysticism is a branch of religion that has to do with direct individual experience of fundamental or existential mystery, unmediated by scripture or authority systems such as priesthoods. Mystification refers to deliberate obfuscation, the creation of mysteries where none exist.

    For those of us who have studied philosophy and comparative religion, the confusion of the two terms produces a painful impression of obvious error, that tends to undermine credibility in a manner analogous to that which you yourself may feel when viewing enthusiastic diagrams of “magnetic motors” that ignore the third law of thermodynamics.

    The activity you’re legitimately objecting to is “mystification.” I can’t think of a related noun from the same root, for referring to a person who engages in that activity “Mystic” is definitely not the word you’re looking for there, as it refers to a person who is engaged with mysticism (e.g. the Sufi poet Hafiz). Perhaps “obscurantist” is a useful person-noun for your intended purpose.

  32. I noticed one of the links above mentioned Deepak Chopra. I heard a funny Chopra story back in March. At the APS March Meeting I had dinner with some folks including John Preskill (CalTech). Preskill was invited to speak once at Brown U. and the university lodged him in some home they owned. He went out shopping and deposited his wares in this house’s kitchen before going out again. When he returned he discovered that he was sharing the house with Chopra (who had also been invited to speak at Brown) and that Chopra had drunk all his milk without asking.

  33. This guy seems pretty legitimate. He doesn’t say what universities he got his degrees from, and the places he has worked are all impossible-to-search-for three letter acronyms, and everyone who can verify his work is mysteriously dead. But other than that he seems completely on the level.

    http://www.chukanovenergy.com/

    Did anyone who looked at this guy’s site notice that in the summer of 2007 he promised his device would hit world markets “[w]ithin two-three months”? Hmmm…

  34. I believe Dr. Preskill on this Quantum Irony.

    “Chopra had drunk all his milk without asking.”

    Researching an unimpeachable source:

    “Milk of human kindness” means

    “Care and compassion for others.”

    Cf. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, 1623:

    “Yet doe I feare thy Nature, It is too full o’ th’ Milke of humane kindnesse.”

  35. My undergraduate university would get sent books by various fringe-physics crackpots and somehow they always migrated to the physics student lounge. I think I kept a few of them. They’re mostly the basic “relativity is wrong” or “quantum mechanics is wrong” type stuff, ranging in coherence from occasionally lucid to Time Cube level lunacy. If you’re interested I can try to find them and mail them to you.

  36. I’m reminded of physicist (and paranormal wackaloon) Hal Puthoff, whose work was somewhat notorious on Usenet once upon a time.

    Puthoff doesn’t go so far as to claim that you can produce perpetual motion from the vacuum energy, but he does think you can extract it to do useful work. See his company, EarthTech. He has a paper in Phys. Rev.

    See also this PBS Q&A session on zero point energy involving Steven Weinberg and Hal Puthoff.

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