I understand why you want to include all of the ancillary paraphernalia
about ufology under the umbrella of ufology: because the field of ufology isn’t really even a field yet. So 99% of what we have is the pop culture rubbish that has flooded in to fill the void. But the word “ufology” simply means “the study of ufos,” because that’s what a “-logy” is, a field of study, like biology or archaeology or psychology.
-logy,
1. a combining form used in the names of sciences or bodies of knowledge:
paleontology; theology.
logy - WordReference.com Dictionary of English
So including stuff like the film
Men In Black under “ufology” is just as crazy as including J
urassic Park under “biology.” The cultural stuff that’s
about a field of study, isn’t the field of study itself.
But since we have basically no way to study ufos properly, your David Wilcock’s and your Bob Lazar’s and your “Dr. Jonathan Reed’s” and the whole rotten bestiary of self-made celebrities have carved out a niche where an actual science should be taking place. The way forward isn’t to embrace those people. The way forward is to create an actual scientific discipline that places them in the category of “irrelevant opportunistic distractions” where they belong.
Anyone. Well, anyone who isn’t a witness, or among the handful of non-witnesses who actually believe them. Academics of any flavor aren’t going to take ufology seriously until it involves real data being analyzed by professionals.
Simply because a minority of the population composed of "nasty noisy negativists" ( as Friedman calls them ) in the Science Faculty don't take ufology seriously doesn't mean it can't be treated academically in other faculties.
You’re mistaken to cast the science community in the role of an adversary. Because 1.) an actual data-driven scientific approach to ufology is the only sensible path forward, and 2.) no other academic discipline is any more favorable to the idea of ufology (and for the exact same reason that scientists aren’t favorable to it – there’s insufficient objective precision data to properly analyze and debate). Look at the trouble John Mack got into at Harvard - psychologists are just as hostile to ufology as your average physicist (although, interestingly, a high percentage of the best physicists and aerospace engineers find the subject fascinating - though of course they won't talk about it publicly because that would be career suicide).
The nuts and bolts aspect of ufology is totally cool. I get that. It's what makes the rest so interesting. At the heart of it all is a real world mystery and not simply myth. But at the same time, the field has expanded beyond the nuts and bolts investigation
No, it hasn’t “expanded beyond the nuts and bolts investigation,” because a proper scientific investigation has never taken place. So all of the bogus sensationalistic swill has flooded in to fill the void. We're still at square one because we have insufficient data to begin the analytical process. People have simply branched out because there's no way to proceed in the right direction at present.
So let's be fair about this. I give you credit where credit is due, and we agree pretty much completely with respect to the part of the field that is your main interest. I just take a more holistic approach, but I'm getting the feeling that you think that is a total waste of time. Have I got that right? How can we fix that?
Before we understood meteors, people in the Dark Ages would see them, and in lieu of an actual scientific discipline to investigate them and explain them, all kinds of pop culture dreck swirled around the subject: some people told stories about devils coming to the Earth, in order to explain meteors. Others told stories about angels falling from Heaven. Others still promoted stories about the fairie folk.
Were stories about devils and angels and fairies therefore legitimate aspects of the study of meteors? Of course not – all that rubbish was just the culture of the time filling the void where an actual scientific study needed to be taking place. And that’s where we are with ufology right now – in the Dark Ages, because the data required for a proper scientific study has been withheld from the public for the last 70+ years, and we've never stepped up to solve that problem for ourselves.
I wouldn't worry about that unless you're concerned about someone stealing your idea and beating you to doing it first. Personally I don't really care about that. If I have an idea I just launch it out there and if the universe decides it's going to land on someone else who will do it, perfect! It saves me the time and money and effort, and I can still go back and point to where I thought of it first ... lol.
It’s one thing when you just have an idea; it’s another thing entirely once you’ve invested thousands of hours and dollars into finding an idea worth testing, and then designed and built an experiment. At that point the last thing you want is somebody with greater resources to beat you to it because you foolishly broadcast it over the internet for anyone to find. And there are usually at least 9 good reasons to think that it won’t work, and maybe 1 good reason to think that it will, so talking about it before you run an exploratory experiment only gives your critics a heap of ammunition to bust your chops about it. The only thing that counts in the end anyway is solid empirical data.
There are days I really wish I had my own single photon double slit lab to play with though.
You could do that; it’s not that difficult or expensive:
I just don’t know why you
would – so many people have already performed that experiment. So I would think it would only be worth doing if you had a new twist to try out.
There You've probably already seen me mention that way back in the early 90s I went onto a discussion board at MIT and suggested they run experiments with superconducting magnets and weigh scales. Then someone in Russia actually did the experiments. Maybe there's no connection, but I wish I'd known then how to make screen grabs! I find the whole antigravity quest fascinating as well. I know those first experiments have been highly criticized by the scientific community, but I still think that the key is in something to do with rotating EM fields and superconductors. So here's my latest thinking on that ( I came up with it about 5 years ago ).
You must be referring to
Podkletnov’s experiments at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland. It’s been twenty years and that guy still hasn’t reproduced the results of his experiment and nobody else has either, so I see no reason to accept his claims.
But I strongly suspect that Ning Li has made real progress. Her work is classified though. And it's a different sort of beast than what Podkletnov was trying to do (in fact I don't recall that he even had a theory to work from - it looks to me like he was throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if something would stick, and then he probably just misinterpreted his results, which is very easy to do if you're not extremely careful and objective).
There So my suggestion is that instead of rotating the magnet, rotate the fields instead. Read this PDF:
https://www.celeroton.com/fileadmin...e/publications/IEEE_Publication_Megaspeed.pdf With a stable field rotating at GHz speeds something is going to happen ( get your radiation suits on ... lol ) and who knows, maybe then the effect claimed might manifest in a way that is undeniable. See. It's not so hard to just put whacky crazy ideas out there. Feel free to build one and let me know how it goes. In the meantime good luck with your effort!
Thanks man. Mostly I’m just happy when I can get a good signal-to-noise ratio so I don’t have to run an experiment a thousand times for a definitive statistical result. But it would be pretty sweet if I found a new effect someday. All one can do is to keep looking in weird little areas that others haven’t already tried out a thousand times before, and see if you stumble upon something useful in the process.
High-frequency rotating magnetic fields have been studied pretty exhaustively at this point, and I don’t see any reason to think that we’ll find any surprises at higher energies. Life is short and experiments are long and expensive, so I only get busy on a new project when I have some reason to think that I might find something interesting. I recently had another idea that I want to experiment with when this one’s finished, but I’m dreading the cost of it. But I actually have a clear theoretical model to start with so it’s definitely something I’ll have to try. I think you'd be surprised at how difficult it is to come up with an interesting new idea - it can take years, even decades of intensive study and theorizing to come up with a single novel idea that's worth trying out. In fact most people never come up with a single one - the internet is littered with the bones of people who tried and failed to come up with one good new idea in their lifetimes.
It is frustrating to not be able to discuss interesting prospective experiments, because that's the most exciting aspect of all this, for me anyway. But when you've invested roughly 40 years of your time and energy and money into an effort to solve an extremely challenging puzzle in an innovative way, then actually come up with a promising idea that you can test out yourself and plan do so, it would be incredibly stupid to talk about it. And ultimately pointless, because the only thing that matters is the result.
