What the Bleep Do We Know! - Part 1
After some traveling around the globe I am back to my blogging. Instead of continuing with "What is time?" theme - which does not really deserve any more ridicule than it was already assigned to, I thought it is worthwhile to spend some time/energy on commenting upon the famous documentary "What The Bleep Do We Know?" The Website says:
What the Bleep Do We Know!? gives voice to the modern day radical souls of science, bringing their genius to millions. These maverick heroes at the cutting edge of their fields are at the forefront of a Paradigm shift even greater than those of the geniuses who preceded them. And this shift involves the greatest uncharted territory yet -
Human Consciousness itself.
Who are these "radical souls of science?" These geniuses? Dr. John Hagelin, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, Dr. William Tiller, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf. ? Let’s start from the end. What about Fred Alan Wolf? We go to the web page "Dr. Fred Alan Wolf THE YOGA OF TIME TRAVEL: A Bleeping Physicist’s Prospective" and we read there:
Dr. Wolf’s Santa Monica Bleep presentation is entitled THE YOGA OF TIME TRAVEL: A Bleeping Physicist’s Prospective. He will be showing us how quantum physics shows that time travel is inevitable and how the mind plays a key role in its achievement.
# Participants will be able to comprehend how the concepts of time and mind are reconcilable—and can, in fact, have the same meaning.
# Participants will recognize that the mind works by a process of defocusing and focusing, which means learning how to let go of memories and learning how to focus in on possibilities.
# Participants will see that the practice of focusing and defocusing creates subjective time and makes time travel a necessary part of the way that mind functions and the way time works.
Are you having fun already? Not too fast! Physicist Fred Alan Wolf is not publishing in physics journals. Go to the page "Here are my articles and reprints that you can download for free!" and you will find that the publications of FAW are not targeting scientists, and they are not written in a scientific language. Therefore analyzing them, taking them part, making fun of them, etc. would be all too easy. We need to start with something more ambitious, something at least as ambitious as "What is time?" by Connes and Rovelli. Looking for "scientific" papers that are being quoted by FAW as a basis for his speculations, we find Cramer’s "Transactional Interpretation" papers quoted in particular in Wolf’s "The Timing of Conscious Experience: A Causality-Violating, Two …" The abstract of the paper can be found in Krasnov Institute Seminars Abstracts. So we have something to start with. Cramer’s papers are available online from his website. We will start wit An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", International Journal of Theoretical Physics 27, 227 (1988); Of course an "overview" is not the same as the "full presentation", yet it has been published independently, so it should make sense (or no) when read independently - otherwise what would be the point of publishing it?
To be continued…
