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IP: ALTERNATIVE PHYSICS: HAS AAAS GONE NEW-AGE ON US?: What's New for Dec 15, 2000
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 14:06:26 -0500
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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