April 2, 2012
to be posted on empty nursery.com and nobabies.net
Brian Josephson
Department of Physics
Cavendish Laboratory
J. J. Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0HE
UK
Bdj10@cam.ac.uk
deanradin.blogspot.com
Dear Professor Josephson:
I confess I am a skeptic. Unlike some others of my ilk I have no financial interest, no deep emotional commitment and no great confidence that it represents ultimate wisdom. On the other hand I have what is effectively privileged evidence, to which I shall return later.
I am a semi retired diagnostic radiologist. By now I should have thought we would be reading squid scans. I see (Fedor Gömöry et al. Experimental Realization of a Magnetic Cloak SCIENCE vol. 335 no.6075 March 23, 2012 page 1455) that an effective shield against magnetism is now available. Put a little hole in the cloak and maybe imaging is on the way. Somehow it strikes me as odd that a magnetic field cannot be seen through another magnetic field nor an electrical field detected through another although electromagnetic radiation passes through its like without murmur. That’s a pity. Otherwise perhaps we could make a squid CT scanner. Do you suppose jiggling a static field with a radio pulse would let you see into it?
I recently read The Essentail Turing edited by Jack Copeland and a nice review (Barry Cooper The Incomputable Reality NATURE vol. 482 no. 7386 February 23 2012 page 465). There was a puzzle: can a computation be done that increases the information in a system? I think perhaps so. I have posted my notion: (http://nobabies.net/Open%20letter%20to%20Barry%20Cooper%20about%20incomputable%20insight.html)
And then had further thoughts, which I shall attach along with a copy of this letter in hopes the pictures come through. I shall post it in a couple of days. This line of inquiry led me into puzzling about how the brain might be different from a computer and how this difference might allow it, but not a Turing type computer, to access information from a cosmic source.
So I was thrilled to read in Forbidden Science (ed. Douglas Kenyon Bear and Company, Rochester, Vermont 2008) that my longstanding hero had taken an interest in the mind and physics. Having seen your home page
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/ and looked at one of your lectures, http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/871489 I hoped you would not be displeased with me for sending along what I have.
As for pan-skepticism, this is my observation.
In bygone times we all married cousins and there were lots of babies. Now we never marry cousins and there are not enough babies. Follow this logic and eventually the entirety of civilization will disintegrate. If you want to see the evidence and logic behind it, you can get it off nobabies.net from the Orlando posting last November. If you have an objection to my evidence there, by all means challenge me. For now we will assume a, “Yup. That’s right. Extraordinary claim, but ample evidence. Probably true.”
We are toast. So where is the hysteria? When you describe being attacked for considering a non-standard idea, I am envious. I just get ignored. Big time. I see a sort of mental nictitating membrane draw over the eyes. The subject gets changed. Mail goes unanswered.
If my brain conjecture is true (and I do not set great store by it) and I drew the idea from the empyrean, many others should have received it as well. If the mind can not only receive but transmit information by some invisible means, then the ghosts of a hundred civilizations, the atavistic energy of a billion unborn, the tears of a million women who will cry themselves to sleep tonight because they cannot get pregnant, this psychic nova should enhance my words until no one alive would remain ignorant.
But no soap. Nobody cares. That is my evidence that the only route to the mind is through ordinary channels, and that route itself is choked with the prejudices you know only too well.
I’m sorry. It’s only an opinion. Would that it were otherwise. It is not that I have no patience with paranormal ideas. I find them intriguing. But at this point my own evidence compels me. (Yes, there is a way to resolve the contradiction, but it’s so depressing I hate to think about it.)
Let me know how you feel about it.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
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