Although linguistic sounds are themselves essentially arbitrary, in a small minority of cases, certain sounds do seem to have rather general semantic associations, either within a given language or even crosslinguistically. For instance, in English, many words including the sequence \fl\ (flee, flick, fly, etc.) refer to rapid movement, although it is difficult to argue that \fl\ is an English morpheme meaning “to move rapidly.” (One obvious objection to this analysis would be that if it is, we must treat, for example, \i:\ in flee as another morpheme, but what meaning could we ascribe to it?) Crosslinguistically, almost all listeners, whatever their first languages, agree that an object called eekeekee will be spiky, whereas one called oomoomoo will be rounded.

Belianine’s specific approach is based on the work of Charles Osgood (circa 1960). Belianine has applied this to Russian, and he now sees further (if arguably dubious) applications: “We may well hide our emotions, but still we can evaluate almost everything. What about the sounds of the English language? . . . This method may be helpful in finding a proper name for your company, and building your future.” One is invited to participate in an experiment using Likert-scale judgments, involving various phonemes and a range of opposed pairs of evaluative terms, starting with “good” and “bad.”

Unfortunately, there are several major problems with this project. First, some of the linguistic terminology used is informal and imprecise. In addition, certain phoneme clusters (such as \gz\ in exact) are included merely because they are typically spelled with a single letter. Judges are supposed to be reacting to sounds here; any effects relating to awareness of the spelling are surely at best a marginal issue.

More seriously, unannounced assumptions are made about the accent used by the (linguistically untrained) judge. Many nonlinguists who know a little linguistics might think that this would not be a major issue, because they would assume that inter-accent differences involve only phonetic realization, i.e., phonemic transcriptions are neutral between accents. In fact, this is often false. For example, London people on the one hand and most Liverpool people on the other have different phonemes in words such as bath (roughly \bäth\ versus \bath\). But even where it is true in a particular case, this is not enough for Belianine. Even naïve judges are reacting here to sounds rather than to phonemes, and hence to specific realizations (of which they are typically well aware in cases like this, because the realizations are not in complementary distribution). Thus, even if differences are only of this structurally trivial type, they will render responses from judges with noticeably different accents totally incommensurable.

For instance, in words such as the name Bob, there is no issue of phoneme selection; but in realizational phonetic terms, most Americans and Canadians nevertheless have a mid-length, unrounded, low central-back vowel, whereas most English and Australian people have a short, half-rounded, mid low-back vowel. If sounds and especially vowels are the things that matter here, people on either side of the pond are not even reacting to the same type of thing (vowel)! (English people hear Americans’ Bob as Barb, as is famously illustrated in Powell and Pressburger’s World War II movie, A Canterbury Tale.)

There is also a major methodological issue here. Apparently people’s answers are completely different if they are in different “moods,” but this is not factored into the analysis.

Some of these problems may reflect a lack of expertise and some may involve deliberate popularization. But one wonders where the project will go—other than commercially, that is!

I posted critical comments to the Web site. At first, there were some arguments from one site visitor who supported probabilistic treatment of accent differences. The specific method proposed would not be satisfactory, as it involves the often false assumption that there will be one dominant phonemic and phonetic form in each key word, with other forms constituting a small peripheral minority. For instance, for the name Bob, one would have to select as “basic” either the typical American/Canadian vowel or the typical English/Australian vowel, treating the other variant (and all further variants) as peripheral exceptions. This makes no dialectological or sociolinguistic sense, and how far either choice actually reflected the true patterning even for a given unsystematic sample of judges would obviously depend entirely on where and how the sample was drawn.

My offer to assist with dialectological information was ignored. After this, things went quiet.

I gave one striking example in my Skeptical Briefs column of June, 1999 (available here) that bears repeating.

Physicist Harold Puthoff and others have argued that an inexhaustible supply of “free energy” might someday be extracted from the vacuum—given a sufficient investment in their research, of course. I took the equation for the stored energy between two plates, which appears in Puthoff’s papers and has been verified empirically, and put in some numbers. I calculated that two highly polished metal plates 200 kilometers by 200 kilometers on a side separated by one micron (a millionth of a meter) have enough potential energy to light a 100-Watt light bulb for one second. If we were to stumble upon 30 million or so of these structures out in space, we could hook them up to our light bulb and keep it lit for a year. Unfortunately, astronomers have not yet observed such structures in the space near Earth where they might be utilized.

In another example, I was recently contacted by The History Channel to possibly appear in a program they planned on The Philadelphia Experiment (see here). This legend has appeared in several books. As the story goes, in 1943 the U.S. Navy was conducting experiments in the Philadelphia Naval Yards on making ships invisible when a destroyer was accidentally teleported to Norfolk, Virginia and back.

The destroyer, USS Eldridge, was supposedly fitted with an electromagnetic generator designed to bend light around the ship. Now, light is made of electrically neutral photons, which are not deflected by electromagnetic fields. However, Einstein’s “unified field theory,” was supposedly applied, with Uncle Al himself said to be a participant. As near as I can tell, the generator was to produce a gravitational field great enough to bend the light.

Of course, the bending of light by gravity was one of the triumphant predictions of Einstein’s earlier general theory of relativity that has been successfully tested during total solar eclipses. (Einstein never succeeded in developing his unified theory.) General relativity is perfectly quantitative, so let’s put in the numbers. The angular deflection is proportional to the mass of the gravitating body and inversely proportion to the impact parameter (distance to center at closest approach) and amounts to 1.75 seconds of arc for a light ray just grazing the surface. The gravitational deflection of a light ray around an object with the mass of the Eldridge (1,240 tons) with an impact parameter of, say, 100 meters would be 3x10-16 arc seconds, hardly enough to make it invisible. If the role of the electromagnetic generator were to somehow produce the equivalence of a large gravitating mass, then for a one-degree deflection that mass would have to be over a trillion-trillion tons.

This, however, is not the end of the story. According to reports, on October 28, 1943 the Eldridge vanished from Philadelphia and simultaneously appeared 600 km away at the U.S. Naval base at Norfolk. After a few minutes it vanished again and reappeared in Philadelphia.

The Navy and ship crew denied the whole story, but that is, of course, a cover up according to proponents, who claim the event was an accidental case of “teleportation,” so familiar to us all from Star Trek.

Here again we can make a quantitative estimate of what would be involved. This year is the hundredth anniversary of what science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc2 (they all have a macro for this in their word processors). The famous equation presumably makes it physically possible to convert mass into energy, propagate the energy through space, and then convert it back to mass some distance away. Well, if you set m equal to the mass of the Eldridge and multiply it by c2, after putting in some conversion factors you obtain the energy equivalent of 20 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs. I think this effect might have been noticed.

I invite the reader to make another calculation: What is the total number of bits of information that would have to be transmitted in order to exactly reconstruct the Eldridge in Norfolk, and again back in Philadelphia?

As is always the case with pseudoscientific cons, the various terms and concepts that are being exploited can be found in legitimate scientific literature. In this case, we can read about “quantum teleportation,” experiments in which an unknown quantum state is destroyed at one point in space and recreated at another distant point using a quantum effect known as “entanglement.”

Here information is transmitted, not matter—just as in any ordinary electromagnetic communication. The fact that it is quantum information, measured in “qubits” rather than bits holds the promise of future higher information communication. But that technology is still well in the future and hardly conceivable in 1943.

Information cannot be sent by quantum teleportation to some arbitrary location, but to a prepared receiver. Basically you start with two particles, such as photons, in an entangled state. You send one photon to the sender and the other to the receiver. The sender then combines her photon with another in an unknown quantum state and performs a measurement on the resulting state. Since measurements “collapse” quantum states, the result is a classical, disentangled state. The sender then transmits a classical signal in that state to the receiver. The receiver combines that signal with his entangled photon to reconstruct the original, unknown quantum state.

Note that the signal is not transmitted faster than the speed of light. This is not a case of so-called “nonlocal” communication via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, which is provably impossible. Somehow it seems rather unlikely that the accidental quantum teleportation of a ship and crew took place in Philadelphia back in 1943

Phactum (The Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking) Sept./Oct. 2005, William A. Wisdom:

Wisdom took the Evolution/ID battle into his own hands and addressed the Haverford Township School Board at their Spring Meeting.

He writes, “For years I had been distressed by the efforts of Fundamentalist Christians to dilute or remove instruction in the Theory of Evolution from the public schools. But, like so many people, I figured: It can’t happen here. Then the events in Dover, Pennsylvania, made me realize that the barbarians are at our gates—that the attack on science could happen anywhere.”

No doubt this is a sentiment many of us share today. Wisdom goes on to share the text of his speech: “If the bill passes [House Bill 1007] a new section entitled ‘Teaching Theories on the Origin of Man and the Earth’ would be added to the Public School Code of 1949. Wherever evolution is taught, the bill would encourage School Boards to include instruction in the so-called ‘theory of intelligent design.’” He continued by describing the historic debates of Huxley/Wilberforce, Darrow, and Jennings Bryan, adding, “The debates are going on today not because the evidence on each side is about-equally balanced. . . .The arguments continue, rather, because science is opposed by antagonists of various stripes for a number of different reasons.”

“The issue is no longer about whether or not God exists . . . the issue is rather about the nature of responsible reasoning about our world.” Wisdom carefully showed how a scientific theory explains a large body of facts from which the theory draws its support. “This power of the theory of evolution to explain facts in biology, geology, paleontology, and other fields is the evidence required by scientists; and such evidence is wholly absent from the so-called ‘theory’ of intelligent design.”

He finished his remarks to applause from the 50 members of the audience and strong supporting statements from the Superintendent and the President of the Board expressing their own determination never to allow creationism to be taught in any form in a science class.

We know education is the solution, not the problem, so we must take our message to the local decision-makers. A small local act within a large national debate, the initiative of Wisdom to stand before the Board is a perfect example of what we as individuals can do to protect the method of scientific inquiry within our schools.

NMSR Reports (New Mexicans for Science and Reason) October, 2005, Dave Thomas:

On August 22, the Rio Rancho (New Mexico) Public School Board voted 3—2 to approve Policy 401 which states, “. . . discussions about issues that are of interest to both science and individual religious and philosophical beliefs will acknowledge that reasonable people may disagree about the meaning and interpretation of data.”

As many have feared all along, such nebulous wording opens the classroom door to theological disputes that distract from the teaching of science.

For example, in an October 1, 2005, Albuquerque Journal op-ed piece, former state senator Pauline Eisenstadt and former state board of education member Marshall Berman wrote, “On the day after the policy was passed, a student brought a Bible into a chemistry class and wanted to discuss intelligent design. On the same day, in a different class on anatomy and physiology, a student questioned the teacher and said that brain-neuron-muscle connections were so complex that they had to be intelligently designed. Another student argued that this system evolved. The two students continued to take up class time on other topics that the teacher tried to present. Later in the week, another student brought the Book of Mormon to class and wanted to discuss it. . . . The use of the phrase ‘reasonable people’ opens the door to introducing nonscientific material, confusing our students and demoralizing our teachers. . . . This school board policy will have profoundly negative impacts on student learning in science and critical thinking. . . .”

At the board meeting the following month, five residents chose to address the policy again, despite its absence on the agenda. Dave Thomas, President-elect of the New Mexico Academy of Sciences, spoke to the Rio Rancho Public School Board of Education saying, “The science establishment of New Mexico [has] reacted to and responded to (Policy 401). Science classrooms are no place to debate the finer points of religion. . . . Please rescind this policy.”

It is worth emphasizing that Policy 401 and its consequences came from the opinions of just three people. Two of the three school board members supporting Policy 401 are pastors at Rio West Community Church whose Web site proclaims their goals of “gospel saturation and city transformation.”

Skeptics, scientists, and secularists are confident in the integrity of evolutionary theory, but in reality this is not a battle of ideas. It is a battle of attendance. The victory goes to those who show up. Education issues are decided at the local level. To win the debate over past origins, skeptics must be present.