Category: other

I recently read in a sales brochure for a major international energy services company that the speed of light had been exceeded in 1995. Is this true? If so, could you explain how this was accomplished? — TS

For very fundamental reasons, the speed of light in vacuum cannot be exceeded. Calling it the “speed of light” is something of a misnomer—it is the fundamental speed at which all massless particles travel. Since light was the first massless particle to be studied in detail, it was the first particle seen to travel at this special speed.

While nothing can travel faster than this special speed, it’s easy to go slower. In fact, light itself travels more slowly than this when it passes through a material. Whenever light encounters matter, its interactions with the charged particles in that matter delay its movement. For example, light travels only about 2/3 of its vacuum speed while traveling in glass. Because of this slowing of light, it is possible for massive objects to exceed the speed at which light travels through a material. For example, if you send very, very energetic charged particles (such as those from a research accelerator) into matter, those particles may move faster than light can move in that matter. When this happens, the charged particles emit electromagnetic shock waves known as Cherenkov radiation—there is light emitted from each particle as it moves.

I suppose that the brochure could have been talking about this light/matter interaction. But since that effect has been observed for decades, there is nothing special about 1995. More likely, the brochure is talking about nonsense.

I would like to get your opinion of the general subject of “healing science.” This has come up as a topic of conversation in our family. I’ve seen many articles on this subject which often contain references to physics terms, such as vibrational healing” and “energy medicine.” They sometimes claim the existence of a human energy field, or aura, which “penetrates and surrounds the physical body, and contains the template for the body, the thoughts, the emotions and the spirituality.” Imbalances, blockages and distortions in the flow of the energy field have a direct correlation to physical, emotional, mental and spiritual “dis-ease” and problems, it is claimed. Furthermore, it is claimed that one can learn how to sense and correct an energy imbalance before it expresses itself as physical illness, as well as recover emotionally and physically from an illness you may already have. Some even claim that long-distance healing works. “Based on Einstein’s theory that time and space are relative,” they say, “not only can the energy field be worked on by directly placing hands on the body or a few inches above the body, but also from across the room, or across the continent. Long-distance clientele experience the healing work as if they were in the office.” While these claims would seem to have no foundation in scientific fact, I pause when I see endorsements by supposedly educated people such as Richard Gerber, M.D., author of Vibrational Medicine, and Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit (who has her B.A. in Journalism, her M.A. in Theology, and her Ph.D. in Energy Medicine). Reportedly, “Harvard-trained neurosurgeon C. Norman Shealy estimates Myss’ ‘medical intuitive readings’ to be 93% accurate.” This reminds me of something I recently saw about Albert Abrams, M.D.—a reputedly brilliant and well-respected American diagnostician. In the early 1930s, in an apparent effort to clone his talents so he could handle his patient overload, he invented two machines based on his theory of radionic diagnosis. One was the “Dynamizer” that could diagnose any illness and the other was the “Oscilloclast” which could cure any illness by restoring the person’s harmony. Through a series of double-blind tests conducted by Scientific American, these devices were conclusively shown to be sheer quackery. Amazingly, Abrams is still held as a “true genius” in some circles, e.g., http://www.healing.org/only-contents.html (See chapter 1 — Albert Abrams and Radionics Diagnosis) What do you tell your college students — and other people who may be naive to science — about this stuff (without being disrespectful)? — JB

You have every reason to be skeptical about this sort of activity. Despite its length, I have included your entire question here because it gives me an opportunity to point out some of the differences between science and pseudo-science. You have written a wonderful survey of some of the quackery that exists in our society and have illustrated beautifully the widespread view that science is fundamentally nothing more than gibberish. I cringe as I read your review of “healing science” because in that description I see science, a field that has been developed with care by people I respect and admire, tossed cavalierly into the gutter by self-important know-nothings who aren’t worth a moments notice. That these miserable individuals draw such attention, often at the expense of far more deserving real scientists—or worse, by “standing on the shoulders” of those real scientists—is a tragedy of modern society. It’s just dreadful.

Let me begin to pick up the pieces by pointing out that terms like “human energy field”, “vibrational medicine”, and “energy imbalance” are simply meaningless and that the use of “Einstein’s Theory” to justify healing-at-a-distance is typical of people who don’t have a clue about what science actually is. The meaningless misuse of scientific terms and the uninformed and careless misapplication of scientific techniques is an activity called pseudo-science. Pseudo-science may sound and look like science, but the two have almost nothing else in common. Among the benefits of a good college education is learning how vast is the world of human knowledge, recognizing how little you know of that world, discovering how much others have already thought about everything you can imagine, and finding out how dangerous it is to venture unprepared into any area you do not know well. Most of these pseudo-scientific quacks are either oblivious of their own ignorance or so arrogant that they dismiss the work of others as not worthy of their attention. Either way, they make terrible students and, consequently, useless teachers. You’ll do best to leave their books on the shelves.

Because real science is not buzzwords, simply stringing together the words of science does not make one a scientist. Science is an intense, self-reflective, skeptical, objective investigative process in which we try to form conceptual models for the universe and its contents, and try to test those models against the universe itself. We do this modeling and testing over and over again, improving and perfecting the models and discarding or modifying models that do not appear consistent with actual observations. Accurate models are valuable because they have predictive power—you can tell in advance how something will behave if you have modeled it correctly.

In the course of these scientific investigations, concepts arise which deserve names and so we assign names to them. In that manner, words such as “energy” and “vibration” have entered our language. Each such word has a very specific meaning and applies only in a specific context. Thus the word “force” was assigned to the concept we commonly refer to as a “push” or a “pull” and applies in the context of interactions between objects. The expression “the force be with you” has nothing to do with physics—the word “force” in that phrase doesn’t mean a push or a pull and has nothing to do with the interactions between objects. As you can see, taken out of its applicable context and used carelessly in another usually renders a scientific word completely meaningless.

Alas, the average person doesn’t understand science, doesn’t speak its language, and cannot distinguish the correct use of the language of science from the meaningless gibberish of pseudo-science. As anyone who has spent time exploring the web ought to have discovered, highly polished prose and graphics is no guarantee of intelligent content. That’s certainly true of what appears to be scientific material. I am further saddened to see that even the titles of academia are deemed fair game by the quacks. While the physics term “energy” and the biological word “medicine” can appear together in a sentence about cancer treatment or medical imaging, that’s not what the person claiming to have a Ph.D. in “Energy Medicine” has in mind. That degree was probably granted by a group that understands neither physics nor medicine. There may be a place for non-traditional medicine because medicine is not an exact science—there is often more than one correct answer in medicine and there are poorly understood issues in medicine even at fairly basic levels.

However, physics is an exact science, with mechanical predictability (within the limitations of quantum mechanics) and only one truly correct answer to each question. Its self-consistent and quantitative nature leaves physics with no room for conflicting explanations. Like most academic physicists, I occasionally receive self-published books and manuscripts from people claiming to have discovered an entirely new physics that is far superior to the current one. And like most academic physicists, I flip briefly through these unreviewed documents and then, with a moment’s sadness that the authors have wasted so much time, effort, and money, I toss them into the recycling bin. It’s not that we scientists are close minded medieval keepers of the dogma, it’s that these “new physics” offerings are the works of ignorant people who don’t know what they don’t know. Unlike real scientific revolutionaries like Galileo and Einstein, these people don’t understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current scientific models. Their new offerings are usually inconsistent, fail to correctly model the real universe, add unnecessary complexity to simple phenomena, or all three. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will ever successfully overthrow the basic laws of physics, not because no one will accept a new physics if it’s actually correct but because the current physics already explains things with such incredible accuracy and predictive power. Developments in physics come almost exclusively at its frontier, where the current understanding of physics is known to be imperfect or incomplete, and that is probably where those developments will probably always occur.

So to return to your question, I would tell my students that I think that the “healing sciences” as you have identified them are neither.

When I buy a role of undeveloped film, it has a particular weight. After I have taken a picture but before I develop the film, does it weigh more or less? Does it matter what I take a picture of? — CV, Warrenville, IL

I think that a small number of atoms leave the film when it’s exposed to light, so your exposed film probably weighs less than it did when you bought it. That’s because light causes charge transfers within the grains of silver salts, changing silver-halide molecules into silver atoms and halogen atoms, and the halogen atoms probably leave the film or allow other atoms to leave instead. The silver atoms remain in the film, where clusters of three or four of them form the latent image—a cluster triggers the complete conversion of a silver-halide grain into silver during the development process. But the halogen atoms don’t remain in the silver-halide grains. While it’s possible that these halogen atoms are stabilized in the emulsion, so that the emulsion’s weight remains constant, my guess is that they either diffuse out of the film or displace other atoms in the emulsion. Those displaced atoms would then leave the emulsion. Overall, I suspect that atoms leave the film when it’s exposed and that the film becomes ever-so-slightly lighter.

I should point out, however, that the energy absorbed by the film does have a weight and that if the only effect of exposing film to light were that the film absorbed this additional energy, then the film’s weight would increase by a fantastically small amount. But the chemistry that results from this energy absorption certainly swamps the weight of the light energy.

I think that the speed of light could be broken by turning a very long lever. If the lever is long enough and you have enough power to turn it, the end of the lever will travel faster than the speed of light. Is this so? — NL, Hong Kong

I’m afraid that this technique won’t work—the torque you would have to exert on the lever to make its end approach the speed of light would become infinite and the energy you would have to transfer to the lever would also become infinite. The Newtonian laws of motion aren’t accurate at such high speeds and the full relativistic laws are required. With this shift to relativistic motion come changes in the relationship between force and acceleration, and between torque and angular acceleration. The faster the end of the lever moves, the harder it is to increase its speed any further. As the lever tip approaches the speed of light, it becomes essentially impossible to make it move faster.

As if this problem weren’t enough, there is another problem: if you aren’t extremely patient, the lever will bend as you turn it, forming a spiral rather than a long arm that sweeps through space. That’s because the lever is kept straight by internal forces. While you are twisting the lever to make it turn faster, you are unbalancing these internal forces and causing the lever to bend. The long lever you describe will actually curl into a spiral and its end speed will never come close to the speed of light.

How does gravity bend visible light? — AHM, Pasadena, California

According to the concept of inertia, established by Galileo and Newton several hundred years ago, an object that’s not experiencing any pushes or pulls will continue to move in a straight line at a steady pace—in short, it travels at a constant velocity. This observation can also be stated simply as an object in motion continues in motion and an object at rest remains at rest.

When Newton formulated his theory of gravity, he viewed gravity as exerting forces on objects—it pulled them toward one another so that they no longer followed their straight inertial paths. That’s why a ball arcs through the air, gradually turning toward the ground as the earth’s gravity pulls it downward. This interpretation of gravity was very successful and remains extremely useful to this day.

However, there is a second interpretation of gravity: the one offered by Einstein in the general theory of relativity. According to this interpretation, concentrations of mass/energy warp space-time so that objects that are following inertial paths—called geodesics—no longer travel in simple straight lines. In effect, a ball arcs through the air because it is following a curved geodesic path and not because it is experiencing a force. While this exotic interpretation for gravity isn’t all that useful for slow moving objects like balls—Newtonian gravity is much more practical in that case—it’s important when dealing with fast moving objects like light. Light also follows geodesics, but because it travels so quickly its geodesics tend to be rather straight. Even light passing just above the surface of the sun bends only just enough to measure. Still, one of the most important confirmations of general relativity came during a total solar eclipse when light from a star was found to bend slightly as it passed by the sun’s obscured surface.

Finally, I should say that you can also interpret the bending of light in terms of Newtonian gravity—that because light contains energy, it acquires a weight when gravity is present and this weight causes its path to bend. However, this Newtonian observation omits so much of the intrigue and beauty that comes with the bending of space-time that I prefer the more modern interpretation.

We know that high speeds cause time to distort. We also have found wormholes in space that connect two distant points. Therefore, by entering a wormhole we can travel through time. How can we create a wormhole and control its destination point? — JB, Union, New Hampshire

Near some large concentration of mass/energy, the equations of general relativity do admit solutions that have two open ends and that could be interpreted as being wormholes. However, there is no widely accepted interpretation of these solutions and no evidence that such solutions are actually realized in our universe. While there are some physicists and astrophysicists who remain hopeful that wormholes will ultimately be found, the only ones I’ve ever heard about are in science fiction stories.

Even if such exotic structures do exist, there is also no evidence that people could traverse the severely distorted space-time between the two open ends without being destroyed and without having an infinite amount of time pass in the rest of the universe while they were en route. If all of these issues aren’t enough to discourage you, let me add that the possibility of engineering wormholes to connect specific regions of space-time is extraordinarily remote. Working with a wormhole would be at least as difficult as working with a black hole and I, for one, hope never to encounter such a destructive and dangerous object.

How does cathodic protection work? — MM, Dominican Republic

The rusting of damp steel is an electrochemical reaction in which iron atoms in the steel are converted into positively charged iron ions (Fe²⁺) in the water. However, each iron atom that becomes an ion releases two negatively charged electrons and rusting can only continue if there is a suitable destination for these electrons. Normally, the electrons pass through the steel metal and are used together with oxygen molecules to form negatively charged hydroxide ions (OH^–) in the water. Overall, the rate at which the steel rusts is limited by how quickly hydroxide ions can be formed to use up the electrons.

Cathodic protection is a scheme in which a piece of reactive metal, typically magnesium, is connected to the steel to form an electrochemical cell. Magnesium ions (Mg²⁺) form more easily than iron ions and enough electrons are given up by the magnesium atoms as they become positive ions to completely dominate the hydroxide ion formation process. With nowhere for their electrons to go, the iron atoms can’t become iron ions and rusting can’t proceed. As long as the magnesium metal, often called the “sacrificial anode”, remains intact and connected to the steel, the steel won’t rust significantly.

As an alternative to this approach, some companies use a power supply to pump negative charges onto the steel to prevent it from rusting. Pipeline companies often do this and that action has led to some interesting complications: metal objects that are brought into contact with such a pipeline can be protected against rusting as well. For example, when people chained their bicycles to protected pipelines, the bicycles became part of the protected materials. This may have been good for the bicycles, but it confused the pipeline companies who found that they needed to pump extra charge onto the pipelines to handle the increased load. It was particularly bad when the bicycles accidentally grounded the pipelines and allowed the negative charges to escape.

What is the chemistry involved with natural dyes adhering to surfaces? — AG, Aloha, OR

Unless a chemical reaction binds them permanently in place, dye molecules that are soluble enough to wash into fabrics are equally likely to wash back out of the fabrics later on. To remain in place, the dyes must undergo chemical reactions that attach them to the fibers of the fabric. Some dyes react spontaneously to the fabric molecules but many others need help. The traditional scheme for binding dyes to fabrics involves mordents—relatively colorless chemicals that bind to both fabric and dye, and that hold the two together. Tannic acid and various metal salts have been used as mordents for centuries. They form insoluble compounds that wedge themselves into hollow spaces in the fibers and then bind chemically to the dye molecules. These mordents hold the dye molecules in place in much the same way that technical climbing gear holds rock climbers to the face of a cliff.

How does the telephone work? — JB, Sydney, Nova Scotia

A telephone uses an electric current to convey sound information from your home to that of a friend. When the two of you are talking on the telephone, the telephone company is sending a steady electric current through your telephones. The two telephones, yours and that of your friend, are sharing this steady current. But as you talk into your telephone’s microphone, the current that your telephone draws from the telephone company fluctuates up and down. These fluctuations are directly related to the air pressure fluctuations that are the sound of your voice at the microphone.

Because the telephones are sharing the total current, any change in the current through your telephone causes a change in the current through your friend’s telephone. Thus as you talk, the current through your friend’s telephone fluctuates. A speaker in that telephone responds to these current fluctuations by compressing and rarefying the air. The resulting air pressure fluctuations reproduce the sound of your voice. Although the nature of telephones and the circuits connecting them have changed radically in the past few decades, the telephone system still functions in a manner that at least simulates this behavior.

What is the relationship between gravitational force and electromagnetic force? — TPC, Foster, OK

As yet, there is no direct relationship between those two forces. Our best current understanding of gravitational forces is as disturbances in the structure of space itself while our best current understanding of electromagnetic forces involves the exchanges of particles known as virtual photons. However, physicists are trying to develop a quantum theory of gravity that would identify gravitational forces with the exchange of particles known as gravitons. How closely such a quantum theory of gravity would resemble the current quantum theory of electromagnetic forces (a theory called quantum electrodynamics) is uncertain. It’s also uncertain whether those two quantum theories will be able to merge together into a single more complete theory. Only time will tell.