Favorite Scientist. Rupert Sheldrake.

[Dave]

This is a little taste of Rupert Sheldrake, my favorite scientist, because he gives me hope again.
It would be a very boring world if everything had already been explained.
I love people who push boundaries.

[video=youtube;JKHUaNAxsTg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg[/video]

 

[mrcharly]

A few of his 'dogmas' aren't so; he over-simplifies things.

In my second year of study at uni my physics professor took great delight in showing to our class that if light travelled in curves (when not under influence of gravity etc) then the universe was a hollow sphere with everything we can see (ie the sky) in the centre of the sphere and all our observations remain true. Ditto our equations still work.

 

[Toddy]

Morphic resonance ……Take Hart, for Morph's funny and squishable and easily moulded to suit, but he's still just plasticine, like his pal, Chas.

M

 

[mrcharly]

Cats are really just furry bags of morphic resonance.

 

[Toddy]

Hah! brilliant

M

 

[Dave]

Rotters!

Come on he cant be that crazy. I love it that he is high up in the establishment, and considered a rebel. His qualifications seem impeccable.

It sees a perfectly legitimate argument he's putting forward. Im going to read his book anyway, and then I might post a few questions for the scientists among you. [Which Im betting you cant answer.]

DR RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D. (born 28 June 1942) is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots.

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College , in Dartington, Devon, a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.

He lives in London with his wife Jill Purce http://www.healingvoice.com and two sons.

He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout the US. He has often taken part in BBC and other radio programmes. He has written for newspapers such as the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and Times Literary Supplement, and has contributed to a variety of magazines, including New Scientist, Resurgence, the Ecologist and the Spectator.

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:
A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)
The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)
The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)
Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions)
Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)
The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:
Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)
The Evolutionary Mind (1998)

With Matthew Fox:
Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)
The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996)

http://www.sheldrake.org/

 

[Corso]

Cats are really just furry bags of morphic resonance.

but what if you put them in a box?

 

[Toddy]

but what if you put them in a box?

Oh complex theories there



On that note, Dave, he's taken a hypothesis and he can't prove it.
If in real life the hypothesis holds true, then it can be advanced to a theory….at that stage it succeeds or fails.
His failed, but he can't let go of his hypothesis so he keeps tweaking and trying to make it fit.

That's why Science looks at him with a disbelieving eye. He knows better; but he's pushing his hypothesis and trying to make folks believe he's right, despite the evidence showing otherwise, on the balance of his previous work.

Funny old world, isn't it ?


M

 

[mrcharly]

Nothing wrong with coming up with wacky theories. That's great!

The next step is to make a prediction and devise an experiment to test the prediction. Every time he's tried doing that the results have either been negative or inconclusive and he's refused to accept that.

I don't have the brain to understand advanced astrophysics and cosmology but I'm deeply suspicious of the current state of theory, simply because someone has come up with a gigantic fudge to explain something that can't be explained by the equations. Now lots of people are looking for proof of existence of the gigantic fudge (dark matter) and failing.
Maybe within my lifetime there will be a breakthrough where somebody resolves the problem. I strongly suspect it will be so subtle and sophisticated that I won't be able to fully understand it.

Oh, and when you put a cat in a box, its morphic resonance field expands beyond the box. That is why:
A) it can be both alive and dead
B) when you open the lid of the box by 1cm halfway to the vets (to check the cat is ok) you find that the cat is inexplicably most of the way out of the box, despite being considerably bigger than 1cm in any dimension.

 

[Dave]

Oh complex theories there



On that note, Dave, he's taken a hypothesis and he can't prove it.
If in real life the hypothesis holds true, then it can be advanced to a theory….at that stage it succeeds or fails.
His failed, but he can't let go of his hypothesis so he keeps tweaking and trying to make it fit.

That's why Science looks at him with a disbelieving eye. He knows better; but he's pushing his hypothesis and trying to make folks believe he's right, despite the evidence showing otherwise, on the balance of his previous work.

Funny old world, isn't it ?


M

Oh. So you already knew about him? Well, Im not ready to write him off just yet, but we'll see....I really liked what he was saying as well....

 

[mrcharly]

I'd forgotten about him until you posted up the vid. I watched most of it then looked him up because it was interesting, wanted to know how much real scientific work he'd done on his theories.

In some parts of my life I've seen stuff I could not easily explain away so I have an open (but sceptical) mind.
I did a 'sports teacher' training that was a tad hippy-fringe.


On one day of the course we spent a whole day practising focusing on a target and throwing to the target. Just underarm lobbing a hackysack at another hackysack on the floor.
Then we did it blindfolded, with someone telling us how far from the target we were with each throw. Not the direction and distance, just the distance. Some people were better blindfolded than not.


Then they added a new bit. After they put the blind on, they moved the target. Not by a lot, up to a half-metre. A few people were just as accurate. As in they still hit it every time.


It was freaking spooky. One person on the course got very upset, walked off and quit there and then. The instructor said those results were normal (this was the 3rd time he'd taught this course). He was anything but hippy-dippy, being ex-military.


Maybe the throwers heard the tiny sounds of the target hackysack being moved? I don't know. It was quite incredible to see - and this wasn't just a once or twice occurrence, people were able to repeat this multiple times. Took us maybe 5 hours of preparation to get that focus.

That kind of thing is hard to test. It would have been interesting to take it further and try it with sound-blocking headphones on as well as microphones, and have videos set up to film it.

 

[mousey]

I haven't got anything to add really, I'll just post a link to a series of lectures I found incredibly interesting:-

[video=youtube;W6_3ABPd0SA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6_3ABPd0SA[/video]

Ramachandran, emerging mind. I was a Art college and went a little more technical with my thesis than most, inspired by the Reith lectures by Ramachandran.

 

[Old Bones]

I'd never actually heard of him, but 'morphic fields', and being mentioned alongside Grahame Hancock are big warning signs for me. Once eminent scientists in their fields going of the reservation is pretty common - its bit like the flipside to Clarke's First Law - when a distinguished in his own field but elderly scientist states something that nobody has any evidence for in a different field, than he's probably get himself in a bit of a state. Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science (still a classic) has a number of them.

They generally should know better, but tend to think that because they know about stuff in one field, they are clever enough to figure out something else which has popped into their head from another, and self rationalise.

 

[Toddy]

Oh. So you already knew about him? Well, Im not ready to write him off just yet, but we'll see....I really liked what he was saying as well....

That's probably why he's still around, and still successfully writing books. It has an appeal. It just needs to be approached with a questioning mind

Look, if it makes folks think, and rationalise and try to work out why, then that's a good thing.
If it makes folks question and consider and widen their view, consider other opinions, then that's a good thing too.



M

 

[Corso]

View attachment 43245

smartest guy I know....

 

[Macaroon]

I haven't got anything to add really, I'll just post a link to a series of lectures I found incredibly interesting:-

[video=youtube;W6_3ABPd0SA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6_3ABPd0SA[/video]

Ramachandran, emerging mind. I was a Art college and went a little more technical with my thesis than most, inspired by the Reith lectures by Ramachandran.

Plus one; this guy is one seriously smart mind indeed. Worth looking up, a good introduction to his thinking are his notions of 'Blindsight'.

 

[Adze]

If we're trading TED talks... this one takes some beating (and is one of my favourite scientists to boot - hairstyle much like his mind I suspect )

https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything

 

[Dave]

Woooh Tough Crowd!!!! [I'll check that one out Mousey, thanks for posting.]

You'll love this guy then....... Again, though maybe Im too trusting, but he seems very believable.
And plausable, didnt you lot watch the first series of 'Stranger Things'

[video=youtube;hBl0cwyn5GY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBl0cwyn5GY[/video]

 

[Old Bones]

Adze - I first read Stoll's 'The Cuckoo's Eggs at least 20 years ago, and its still a great read. And parts of his Silicon Snake Oil still hold up fine, although you can now read a boom with a computer, etc. Lots of people take the mickey out of his 1995 Newsweek article (which got put into Snake Oil), but he actually got some things right (most about false information and social interaction).

Kudo's for the Dara O'Brien quote - the clip from his standup about science is still a classic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDYba0m6ztE A lot of people need to go in that sack...

I'm getting the impression that TED is starting to get more interested in controversy than science, looking at some of them (lets just say that anything on psychics wont get into Skeptic Magazine http://www.skeptic.com/), but there are still some good ones out there. Anything by Neil DeGrasse Tyson is great (although I can't find any actual TED talks by him), as was Steven Jay Gould and Carl Sagan (his 'Candle in a Demon Haunted World' is still a must read, and his adage 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' needs constantly repeating).

Brene Brown's TED talk on shame is very powerful, Laurie Garrett did a great one years back on the 1918 flu https://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_garrett_on_lessons_from_the_1918_flu , and if anyone has ever read Stephen Baxter's fantastic Voyage (or listened to the radio version) will be aware of Project Orion, and there is a talk all about it here https://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion . And Jared Diamond is always interesting https://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse

If anyone is interested in science, the Martin Gardners Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science is still a classic, and Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is an excellent read.

 

[Dave]

I wish I had had teachers like that clifford guy when i was a kid. I went a to a 'bear comprehensive' luckily I had good parents.
I now know how to measure the speed of sound wit clunky material! Lucky kids to have him as a teacher. He's very engaging.