[Susan Dunn]

Susan Dunn  asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Hi - I saw a few of your articles and thought, there's the group to go to :-)! 

My daughter is trying to come up with some tests around the concepts of the quantum physics ideas discussed in show 'What the Bleep Do We Know' and generally, the impact of a persons thoughts/energy on their surroundings.  She has a few ideas but I was hoping there might be some that real scientists could suggest.  We were interested in the effects on water by Masau(?)  but sounds like that may be a rather questionable and less than credibly conducted research (i.e. results aren't really scientifical proven).
 
Thank you in advance for any any ideas or direction!

What do you think?

[JP]

Susan Dunn  asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Hi - I saw a few of your articles and thought, there's the group to go to :-)! 

My daughter is trying to come up with some tests around the concepts of the quantum physics ideas discussed in show 'What the Bleep Do We Know' and generally, the impact of a persons thoughts/energy on their surroundings. 

Hi Susan,

Unfortunately that movie has more in common with Star Trek than with actual science.  They took a few basic ideas from science and invented a lot of science fiction.  The experiments on water have also been debunked by the scientific community.  No one's been able to reproduce them in a scientific manner. 

The problem is there's something scientists call decoherence: even if your brain effects something, so does everything else in the world.  The effects of your brain are going to be so tiny that to measure them you'd have to somehow control the rest of the world so that things like tiny temperature variations, air currents, sounds, radio waves, etc. don't effect the experiment. 

By the way, what the movie doesn't go into is that it's producers and directors are associated with "Ramtha's School of Enlightenment."  Ramtha is supposedly a 35,000 year old disembodied entity that teaches them science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramtha%27s_School_of_Enlightenment   

[Geezer]

Very interesting! I never heard of them before, and just down the road a bit too. A quote from the Wiki page -

"The American Chemical Society's review criticizes the film as a "pseudoscientific docudrama", saying "Among the more outlandish assertions are that people can travel backward in time, and that matter is actually thought"

Actually, if it was one of my children, I would be monitoring any involvement with these people very carefully.