IP: ALTERNATIVE PHYSICS: HAS AAAS GONE NEW-AGE ON US?: What's New for Dec 15, 2000

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>   On Tuesday,
>AAAS hosted a seminar by "Friends of Health," a fringe group put
>together by Rustum Roy of Penn State, whom you may remember for
>his virulently anti-establishment views.  Roy insisted that
>Qigong, (Chinese psychic-energy medicine) can increase the pH of
>water and shift its Raman spectrum.  It can also switch the plane
>of polarization of lithium niobate.  The next morning, things got
>worse; some of the Friends of Health, boasting that they were all
>physicists, held a press conference at which Hans-Peter Duerr of
>the Max Planck Institute said Qigong must be explained by quantum
>mechanics.  Joie Jones of UC Irvine, William Tiller of Stanford
>and George Sudarshan of UT Austin chimed in, claiming that all
>biology and medicine should be based on non-deterministic quantum
>interconnectedness. Can it get worse than that?  Yes.  Gary
>Swarz, U. Of Arizona, went on ABC Good Morning America with a PhD
>physicist-science correspondent to talk about detecting Qi, the
>body's energy field or aura.  More about ABC and the strange
>history of Kirlian photography of human auras next week.



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