The book I'm reading for you today is Weird Science. The title is not to say that science itself is weird, but to explain those weird questions from a scientific point of view, such as whether there are aliens who have come to Earth? Does Atlantis exist? Telepathy is all about and so on. These supernatural topics that seem to come from stall readings or niche forums actually have scientific explanations behind them. The author of this book is the British popular science writer Michael White, who served as the science editor of the British gq magazine and has written hundreds of popular science articles. In this book, White explores the hottest and most controversial paranormal phenomena, attempting to uncover the truth behind these bizarre events from a scientific perspective. After reading through the book, I may be more and more in agreement with the author's statement on the cover that reality is more magical than fiction, and often much more interesting.
There are as many as 24 topics covered in the book, and according to their origins, these topics can be divided into three categories: from the universe, from historical legends, and from human beings themselves. In this interpretation, we will first talk about the general content and antecedents and consequences of each type of topic, and then select the most representative topics from each category for detailed interpretation. To show the whole picture of the book, before the official start, you need to emphasize the following interpretation, just paraphrase the author of this book, if you have your own views on the topics in it, welcome to discuss in the message area. The first is that the core of such a topic from the universe is undoubtedly aliens. There is a great deal of space in this book about aliens, after all, the search for aliens may be a common interest of all mankind.
The content of the author's chat is also very wide, including whether there are aliens and what kind of planet life may appear. How aliens came to Earth, etc., for this kind of cosmic scale problem, the author's idea in the analysis is quantitative analysis and logical deduction. For example, when analyzing the question of whether there are aliens, the author uses a quantitative method called Drake's formula, which was proposed by the American astronomer Drake in 1961, and the possibility of higher extraterrestrial life in the formula is equal to the product of a series of parameters, including the rate of star formation, the probability of the existence of terrestrial planets, the conditions for the birth of life, the probability of existence, and so on. This formula is a very advantageous weapon for scientists, as long as these parameter values are calculated, they can quantitatively predict the existence of aliens. Of course, the scientific community has not yet reached a consensus on the value of these parameters, and the range of values is being narrowed under the joint efforts of astronomers, physicists, and biologists.
Some preliminary answers have been obtained, such as the first parameter in the formula, which indicates the rate of star formation, and according to astronomers' estimates, about 10 new stars can form each year in the Milky Way, which means that this parameter can be set to 10. For example, the second parameter is to indicate the proportion of stars with planetary systems, this parameter is more complex, both to estimate the age and size of the star, but also to consider the distance of the star from the planet and other factors, now the estimation of this parameter is 0.1, that is to say, every 10 stars have the possibility of generating and maintaining the surrounding planetary system. In short, after this series of calculations, we can form a quantitative analysis of the probability of extraterrestrial life.
Based on the data listed by the authors, it can be estimated that there are about 10,000 planets in the Milky Way that may have extraterrestrial civilizations. Of course, don't forget that this value is only the Milky Way, and the Milky Way accounts for only 1/100 billion of the entire universe, so the author is very optimistic about the existence of higher extraterrestrial life. Based on the premise of the existence of aliens, the author discusses many hot topics, such as how aliens will survive, how they will travel at the light-year level, and so on. The most eye-catching of these topics is the alien abduction case. In 1957, a small-town youth in Brazil claimed to have encountered a strange thing, he was caught in a glowing spaceship by a group of strange-looking creatures when he went out in the middle of the night, the unfortunate young man was locked in a house with walls like jelly, and a tube of blood was drawn, and even more strangely, a female alien had sex with him, this seemingly outrageous experience was the first widely circulated alien abduction in the world.
Subsequently, people around the world continued to claim to have been abducted by aliens. In the United States in particular, in 1991, the Americans conducted a survey of their own. Of the 6,000 visitors, 119 claimed to have experienced similar incidents. If magnified at this scale, 5 million Americans were abducted by aliens in the last decade of the 20th century, and the author simply calculated that if this number is true, and five or six aliens are required to participate in a kidnapping operation at a time. Then there will be more than 100,000 aliens every year, working day and night to complete this kidnapping target. Obviously, a simple quantitative analysis proves the absurdity of this matter. In several of the more famous alien abductions, the memories of the parties have some common features. Including seeing bright lights in the air, entering the interior of alien spacecraft, and many people also having sex with aliens. Their explanation is that aliens want to get biological information about Earthlings. The author raises several logical doubts about these events.
First of all, from a physical point of view, it can take thousands of years to fly to other stars before solving the problem of flying at the speed of light. From this point one can deduce an obvious fact that aliens can come to Earth, whose technology is thousands of years ahead of us. In that case, will they spend decades kidnapping millions of people on Earth, just to be able to study our species? They should have had a more ingenious way of extracting biological information without having to do so by primitive means such as kidnapping, let alone having sex directly. In addition, in many cases, the abductees described the interior of the alien spacecraft, and these descriptions were almost copied from the science fiction or movies of the time.
The flight control consoles designed by alien creatures that are nearly thousands of years ahead of us in their narratives are still lined with switching joystick wires and steering wheels. Imagine if an ordinary person in the Middle Ages were suddenly put into the home of a modern man, could he recognize the computer in the bedroom, the TV in the living room, and the microwave in the kitchen? Of course, the author's statements are based on some basic common sense judgment and logical analysis. Certainly can't shake those who are convinced of alien abduction, but the author is more concerned about the negative effects of this kind of topic. This kind of mysterious depiction of aliens can indeed attract the attention of the public, but in the long run, this kind of joke-style story will make people feel that aliens are similar to those urban legends. Once this ethos has formed a social consensus, it is likely to affect the investment of policymakers in the direction of scientific research, thus hindering those who are truly serious in the exploration of extraterrestrial life.
After talking about the alien visitors, let's talk about historical legends, such as whether there really were vampires in medieval Europe? What is the mysterious phenomenon of huge geometric patterns in crop fields known as crop circles? Can alchemy turn stones into gold? Such topics are often born for a long time, and have become more and more mysterious through word of mouth in the era of information blockage, but with the development of the times and the progress of science and technology, if we look back at these ancient legends with modern eyes, we will find that they are actually not so magical. The author believes that the best way to analyze such problems is to collect enough evidence and clues to reinterpret historical legends with modern knowledge.
Following this method of analysis, you will find that the legendary vampire may have been a disease called porphyria that was popular in the Middle Ages. The patient's symptoms are extreme anemia, pallor, protruding teeth, and a particular fear of light. The early crop circles were caused by a natural phenomenon called the vortex effect. This vortex can be seen as a small tornado in which dust rubs violently against the air to create an electric charge, and this charged traversal can overwhelm plants in pieces. In the later stage, those particularly complex and huge strange circles appeared, which were artificial magic. Historically, alchemists who hoped to turn stones into gold were doomed to empty bamboo baskets, because changing the types of elements would require nuclear reactors. Among the many historical legends, Atlantis's most representative story about this mysterious continent has been talked about, appearing frequently in novels, movies and comics.
The earliest record of Atlantis comes from the "Republic" written by the ancient Greek scholar Plato, in which Plato records that about 10,000 years before him, there was a huge land called Atlantis, and the people on it had advanced technology and brilliant civilization. Later the Atlanteans began to invade and enslave the surrounding neighbors. This greedy act angered the gods, and the gods flooded the continent with a huge tsunami, leaving Atlantis to rest on the bottom of the sea. Plato's book is the only surviving source of legends about Atlantis, and according to Plato himself, he heard about it from his great-grandfather Cridia. His great-grandfather heard about it from his grandfather, Cridia Sr. And the old Cridia heard about it from his father, and the old father heard it from the Athenian philosopher Solon, who learned about it from a temple priest during a visit to Egypt.
The priest had at hand some broken ancient texts containing atlantis. This gossip, which had changed hands many times, made the whole thing seem unreliable, and Plato's description of Atlantis was probably only used as a fable to promote his doctrine. However, many explorers and occult scholars of later generations were still obsessed with the search for Atlantis. The reason for the strong interest in this lost civilization is that the legendary Atlantis had an advanced culture and highly developed technology. They also spread their knowledge to ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks, many believing that there would be no Western civilization without Atlantis.
This book, however, criticizes this view by arguing that our ancestors were intelligent enough to develop civilizations on their own and did not need some kind of higher civilization to teach. Mystics try to deny the achievements of their ancestors, which is an insult to all human civilization. Of course, as far as the digression of civilization developed, let's look at what the explorers made in search of Atlantis, according to Plato' account that Atlantis was opposite the Pillar of Hercules, and the so-called Pillar of Hercules is today's Strait of Gibraltar, the gateway of the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. So it is natural to think that Atlantis is right in the Middle of the Atlantic. When Columbus discovered the Americas, some people mistakenly regarded native Americans as descendants of the Atlanteans. It has also been suggested that the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic May be the part of Atlantis that emerges from the sea. Of course, this hypothesis was quickly overturned. Geologists have proved that the existence of the Azores is only the result of plate movement.
The closest place to Atlantis is now another part of the waters off the Bahamas. In 1968, a suspected man-made structure was found beneath this area, a road to be precise, located about 6 meters underwater, consisting of dozens of large stones, each weighing more than a ton. The stones are arranged in neat straight lines, about 500 meters in length, and very flat. At first glance, it seems that this is most likely a human hand, and there are many stones or some standard rectangular shapes. However, the latest geological research has found that these stones are composed of limestone, which is itself part of the seabed, and the reason why the pavement is like a smooth road is caused by the erosion of ocean currents and seawater erosion. Today, the exploration of Atlantis continues, some said to be off the coast near Britain, and even in Antarctica, but the author, combined with the latest historical analysis, has come to such a conclusion. That is, Atlantis may well have been a misunderstanding from Plato.
If we read Plato's description carefully, we will find that there are many anomalies in it. First of all, it seems to exaggerate all measures by a factor of 10. In his description of the walls of the capital of Atlantis, the length of the walls exceeded 1,800 kilometers, and even Plato himself questioned the veracity of this figure, because such a long wall is absurd even in modern times. It was enough to encircle London today more than 20 times. If this number is divided by 10 then the size of the city seems to be within a reasonable range. In addition, Plato said that Atlantis existed about 10,000 years before him. But at that time, the world was still in the Paleolithic Age, and the ancient Egyptian civilization would not appear until at least another 6,000 years, and if this time span is divided by 10, the time of atlantis civilization is roughly equivalent to the embryonic period of ancient Greek civilization.
Some historians have pointed out that the key to this order of magnitude of doubt lies in the problems of Plato's sources, that is, the ancient Egyptian documents at the source. It is likely that a scribe copied the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs incorrectly, and the symbol that represents 100 in this script is a circling snake, which can easily be mistaken for a flower representing 1000. Another misunderstanding may have come from the question of dialects, plato had heard that Atlantis was larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined, while in Greek the words were nearly identical between what and what was larger than what and what was located. So the correct claim is likely to be that Atlantis is located between Libya and Asia Minor, and if these assumptions are true, then the mystery of Atlantis will be lifted.
Because there is indeed such a civilization in time and space, it is the Minoan civilization of Crete. The Minoan civilization is located in the South Aegean region. The main age of activity is around 1500 BC, that is, 1000 years before Plato. The famous Palace of Knossos is a remnant of the Minoan civilization, but then a local volcano called Clarkto erupted, releasing the energy equivalent to 1 million Hiroshima atomic bombs, and at one point setting off a huge wave of 33 meters to submerge the civilization in the region. This alludes to the passage where the Atlanteans were punished by the gods, and as archaeologists gradually excavated, people found more and more similarities between the Minoan civilization and Atlantis, such as a huge circular ditch around the Minoan city-state, which corresponds to the ditch of the capital of Atlantis written by Plato. In addition, Plato's Atlanteans worshipped bulls, and a large number of evidences of bull worship were found in the ruins of the Palace of Knossos in the Minoan civilization.
These archaeological discoveries and speculations gradually converged into the conclusion that if Atlantis had really existed, its most likely prototype would have been the Minoan civilization. The truth of the whole story is likely that the Minoan civilization was destroyed by natural disasters, and the story of this civilization spread to ancient Egypt and was recorded. These records have been copied by generations of errors, but the relevant records have been handed down by word of mouth and finally heard by Plato and written into his writings. It is precisely because plato's legend of atlantis did not stop there, and over the centuries, he was constantly recited, and finally formed the current version. This is often the case in mysterious topics of history and legend. It is the first piece of information, after countless channels of propagation and speed gradually appear deviations, these deviations accumulate larger and larger, and eventually become a myth.
For such problems, we need to find evidence that has been dusted by history, and constantly correct those errors in order to restore the original truth. Compared with the historical legends of cosmic exploration, we humans themselves are also full of unknowns and puzzles, and although some of the topics about human beings themselves sound divine, because they can happen to people, they will stimulate our great curiosity, and even we ourselves may have experienced once or twice the common sense and inexplicable magical human body phenomenon. But with the advancement of modern medicine and biology, many mysteries about human beings have gradually been answered.
For example, in urban legends, there is a famous phenomenon called near-death experience, which means that due to traffic accidents and major diseases, people experience moments of dying life every day, and some of them will survive and eventually survive. And when these survivors tell their own experience of nearing death, there are many similar descriptions, such as suddenly feeling particularly quiet around them, and their own peace. Or a white light appears in front of the eyes, which someone described in the early years as some kind of ritual leading to death, but later physiological interpretations make this experience sound less mysterious. The first sudden calm is because the pain of the body makes the brain secrete a lot of endorphins and other substances, and the main function of these substances is to shock people. When the brain is traumatized or severely hypoxic, it is impossible to effectively process the signals from the retina, which means that the brain is too late to color you, so you have to appear white. So the essence of near-death experiences is actually a manifestation of the loss of brain function.
In other magical stories about the human body, some self-proclaimed people with special abilities are said to be able to walk through a burning flame or nail board, and in addition to using some physics knowledge, the main factor is that the human body can be trained to temporarily reduce its sensitivity to pain. In addition to this physiological or physical legend or miracle, some mysteries from the spiritual or spiritual world still attract people's interest. One of the most widely discussed is probably telepathy, and there are many kinds of stories related to telepathy or telepathy, such as relatives who can feel each other's emotional fluctuations when they get together for thousands of miles, and some people claim to be able to read the inner thoughts of others. Even we occasionally encounter some strange experiences similar to telepathy.
Over the past hundred years, humans have conducted countless experiments to study the phenomenon of telepathy to explain its principles. However, although the experimental design has become more and more rigorous, the related exploration has been almost unsuccessful. The reasons for the failure of these experiments are generally similar, that is, whenever there are researchers to test or have sophisticated instruments to test, those who claim to be able to transmit the mind can not use their skills. Most of the reasons they explained were that researchers could not be sincere, or that the presence of instruments interfered with the signals of the mind. Believing is spirit, unbelief is not working, so telepathic experiments become typical non-falsifiable hypotheses. The so-called unfalsifiability means that there is no way to find evidence to prove him, nor can it find evidence to overturn it.
For example, if I can say that my cat created the whole universe two years ago, the universe didn't exist before that, so you're not right. I have decades of memories, and I'll go on to say that these memories were implanted in your head by my cat two years ago. All non-falsifiable theories are broadly analogous to this self-talk. In the modern scientific system, all theories are falsifiable, such as when Einstein first proposed the general theory of relativity, because of the lack of direct evidence, he was greatly questioned. It wasn't until multiple expeditions filmed solar eclipses around the world and analyzed the sun's mass as a bend in light. This is consistent with the derivation of the theory of relativity, which ultimately proved Einstein's correctness. Another problem with telepathic research is that someone has indeed come up with some results, but such experiments are not reproducible.
For example, in the early 20th century, someone invented a kind of China card to test the telepathy, which has 5 suits. The researchers asked the subjects to look at a random sheet and then passed on the color to another person next door. It is reasonable to say that the accuracy of this test is about 20%, but someone said it right 588 times out of 1800 responses, which is obviously beyond the normal standard. Of course, this experiment is facing the problem of repeatability, and no one can reproduce similar results in the future, compared with modern science, if a scholar says that he has found a new phenomenon, it is necessary to ensure that other scientists can repeat similar effects under the same conditions, otherwise the new discovery will be abandoned. Although the research lacks scientific falsifiability and reproducibility, there are still many people who believe in telepathy. This is because they may encounter some magical phenomena in their lives, and nothing is more convincing than personal experience, but those telepathic phenomena are likely to be just some psychological effect.
For example, when you are lined up in front of a milk tea shop and do nothing, you suddenly think of an old friend, only to look back a moment later and find that friend is in front of another store not far away. We've all had more or less similar experiences, and there are many explanations for this phenomenon, such as having been here with friends before, or just pure coincidence. In psychology, there is a phenomenon called the masking effect. It is also very likely that one of the reasons is the cover of the cover of the cover. The masking effect is about sound or image information that is too strong, and people often overlook the weaker information. The truth is that we have inadvertently caught a glimpse of this friend, but there are too many other interfering signals in the surrounding environment. You don't realize that you see it, and the existence of this friend has been known to your brain, so you start to recall the conversation with him, so the memory dialogue is actually the result rather than the cause.
Others are mistaken for telepathy from our unconscious processing of sensory signals. Science fiction writer Asimov conceived of a group in his book Base trilogy in which members trained the human senses to the extreme, where they could see every tiny muscle activity, discern every change in tone, and discern the nuances of smell. As a result, they can analyze the mood swings and thoughts of those around them. In the eyes of others, this group has the superpower of spiritual perception. In fact, we use similar abilities every day, and nowadays we basically rely on language to communicate with each other, but human language appeared about 50,000 years ago.
Our ancestors communicated through the signals of body odors, such as the Kuma Indians on a small island in Panama who were particularly good at distinguishing smells. When they meet, they will touch each other's armpits and judge each other's mood from the smell. Of course, there are subtle expressions on the face, posture and eyes on the head, and so on. These are all sending us signals at any time, and most of the time we just unconsciously accept these signals, and unconsciously implant the results of the analysis of the signals into the brain. So we mistakenly think that this is a kind of telepathy, this unconscious processing of signals, so that the instincts of millions of years of human evolution can make us respond to change more quickly.
Hearing this, you may be pessimistic about the progress of telepathic research, but to read the human mind, we are not helpless, there are tens of billions of neurons in the human brain, each of which may be connected with tens of millions of other neurons, and these neurons are signaling between each other. A weak pulse voltage is generated during transmission. If we can capture this electrical signal and interpret it rationally, we have the hope of deciphering what humans think. For example, brain-computer interface technology uses machines to capture the tiny currents generated in the cerebral cortex when human thinking. Today's most advanced brain-computer interfaces are the implantation of extremely precise electrodes in the brain, which can even accurately monitor the firing activity of individual neurons. Using this technique, people can control a robotic arm or operate a computer with their minds, or they can transmit signals from external sensors back to the brain to help visually impaired patients regain their sense of the world.
It is reported that a team is studying the use of brain-computer interfaces to allow two people to communicate directly, is this not a kind of telepathy? Look back at the exploration of human telepathy over the past hundred years, which is still full of mysteries and unknowns. However, as a scientific version of the telepathic brain-computer interface, it is developing rapidly. This is because its technology comes from falsified and reproducible scientific theories and experiments, there are still countless puzzles waiting to be revealed, and scientific exploration continues. Even the interpretation of these topics listed in the book is only the author's summary of the current research data for collation and analysis, and new interpretations will continue to appear with the development of science and technology. But there is no doubt that these new explanations must come from more scientific theoretical derivations and more rigorous experimental verification. In the face of complex stories and sensational news, we need to uphold the spirit of reason in order to use scientific methods to discern and analyze from multiple angles to discover the truth of the world.
The book "Good Weird Science" has been interpreted, thank you for reading.