David Sereda:
UFOs, quantum, new-age …
Let’s see what’s out there.
The purpose of this episode is to move on from the background I gave in Part 1 to a very clip-y show with lots of different claims to explore. It’s an interesting episode, I think. Not only for style, but for content. Let me know what you think.
Exposing PseudoAstronomy 
That was a very interesting episode. Several of Seridas ideas were familiar to me from other contexts, the “Solar Flares Causes Earthquakes” claim you didn’t discuss dates back to the ‘Jupiter Effect’ (Planetary alignment causes solar flares, which cause earthquakes.) story that culminated in 1982 with claims that California was going to drop into the sea.
The whole thing with ‘charged rocks’ sounds like what some New Agers call ‘grounding’ or ‘earthing’ in which standing on bare earth in bare feet (Or lying on an earth-filled pad connected to an electrical socket.) is supposed to cure all manner of ills. Out of curiosity, does Serida sell his “quantum pendants” for a price between $555 and $777?
As for the “…and we’re only using 5% of our brain’s capacity.” line, the myth is that we only use 10% of our brains total capacity, so shouldn’t we be seeing 10% of the Universe…
See Snopes: ( http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp )
And finally, while I would not normally link to a UFO believers website, this page by Kevin Randle (A big promoter of Roswell) in which he looked into UFO related claims by another ex-military man (Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. French) and concluded French is making making stuff up makes for another (Though not perfect) line of evidence against Seridas arguement from authority (http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/bloggers-note-this-was.html)
Comment by Graham — August 23, 2013 @ 8:49 pm |
I think I may have found where Serida’s strange ideas about the cosmic microwave background may have originated. There is a diagram that was published by NASA that depicts the history of the Universe as flat bottomed slightly conical cylinder with the Big Bang as the bottom of the cylinder.
( http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/060915/060915_CMB_Timeline300.jpg )
Comment by Graham — August 27, 2013 @ 7:17 pm |
I’ve seen that timeline, too. I like it. It takes a profound willful ignorance to misunderstand what it’s saying, especially if you have been at the forefront of nuclear fusion research (not to mention anti-gravity and free-energy!) for decades.
Comment by Stuart Robbins — August 27, 2013 @ 8:46 pm
There is an article on Universe today that David will probably be all over like a rash soon, since it seems to be the sort of thing he could twist into support of his claims:
http://www.universetoday.com/110978/could-this-be-the-signal-of-dark-matter-unsure-scientists-checking-this-out/
Comment by Graham — April 4, 2014 @ 1:02 pm |
Sigh.
Comment by Stuart Robbins — April 5, 2014 @ 10:13 am |
For anyone who is interested in finding out just what lay behind Serieda’s claims about the haze of gamma rays in the Galactic Core, here is a link a paper on Arxiv.org by Finkbeiner, Slayter and Meng covering the current state of the research.
“Giant Gamma-ray Bubbles from Fermi-LAT: AGN Activity or Bipolar Galactic Wind?”
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.5480v3
The authors have been awarded the 2014 Rossi Prize for their research.
Comment by Graham — June 3, 2014 @ 7:19 pm |