Thursday, July 16, 2009

Project LUCAS

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General Information

Please note that only papers published in applicable academic journals may be used as references to support claims like this.
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Original Post:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2272752

Sniped from Borderland Sciences Research Foundation:


L. George Lawrence, a Silesian-born electronics specialist, began his studies into plant biodynamics in 1962 while employed as a instrumentation engineer for a Los Angeles space-science corporation. He was actually engaged in a project to develop jam-proof missile components, and believed that using plant tissue as a type of transducer would produce the desired results. He summarized that living plant tissues or leaves were capable of simultaneously sensing temperature change, gravitational variation, electromagnetic fields, and a host of other environmental effects — an ability no known mechanical sensor possessed.

These initial investigations led him to the works of Alexander Gurwitsch, a Russian histologist, whose experiments in the 1920s proved that all living cells produce invisible radiations of a biodynamic character.

Owing to the fact that these rays from the onion "ray gun" demonstrated increased cell division or mitosis in the target, Gurwitsch called them "mitogenetic rays." Many other laboratories would confirm his findings. Researchers in Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and Frankfort all corroborated Gurwitsch’s results. Only the U.S. Academy of Sciences reported that Gurwitsch’s discovery was not replicable, and suggested it was merely his fertile imagination.

This system of being able to manage and direct the vital force in living plant tissue sparked Lawrence into action. Equipped with the knowledge of Cleve Backster’s recent experiments with plants and a polygraph instrument, Lawrence began building several psycho-galvanic analyzers to detect responses in plants. He quickly corroborated the results that Backster had obtained from his plant experiments — these results indicating that plants displayed a unique cellular consciousness.

Source: http://www.borderlands.com/archives/arch/detectin.htm

There is quite a bit of material that supports the research into the perceptions of plants available from Borderland Sciences including the work of L. George Lawrence, Galactic Life Unveiled. The Nervous Mechanism of Plants by Sir J.C. Bose is a good study of plant response and associated theories from the turn of the 20th century.


Project LUCAS was initiated by BSRF in 1996 and is one of the best attempts to date to explore the ideas of L. George Lawrence. Details can be found at the link below:

http://www.borderlands.com/newstuff/research/remote.htm

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Kooks vs. Kreeps? Krackpottery?

Dear AltScience,

You have received a warning at Physics Forums.

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You are strongly advised to re-read the PF Guidelines that you had agreed to. Links to unpublished, and unverified sources are NOT allowed. Pay particular attention to our policy on speculative theory. PF has a very strong and CLEAR policy against crackpottery.
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Original Post:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2244086

Originally Posted by Integral
Could you provide a link to peer reviewed journel which backs up this claim? To the best of my knowledge Tesla did nothing that cannot be explained by Maxwells Equations.


As a kook science publisher who does not speak math very well I can honestly tell you that it is fairly difficult to find an academic peer reviewed journal that will back up this claim. The Journal of Borderland Research is/was reviewed by peers...but mostly kooks...haha...

And yes perhaps I need to take a Universtiy course in E&M. The kooks often claim that academic education will too deeply bias your mind. I am the first to admit that I am a poor do-gooder with a crummy educational background. I will attempt to muddle through this despite my obvious limitations...bear with me.

My first source is from the kook community. Ken Adachi has written the following paragraph without providing sources. Let's just agree to call this a very popular source for the myth of Tesla and Hertz.


http://educate-yourself.org/fe/radiantenergystory.shtml

Tesla discovered a fundamental flaw in Hertz’s experiment: Hertz had failed to take into account he presence of air in his experiments. Hertz had mistakenly identified electrostatic inductions or electrified shockwaves as true electromagnetic waves. Tesla was saddened to bring this news to the distinguished academician, but felt scientific honesty was paramount if progress was to be achieved. Tesla visited Hertz in Germany and personally demonstrated the experimental error to him. Hertz agreed with Tesla and had planned to withdraw his claim, but reputations, political agendas, national pride, and above all, powerful financial interests, intervened in that decision and set the stage for a major rift in the ‘accepted’ theories that soon became transformed into the fundamental “laws” of the electric sciences that have held sway in industry and the halls of academia to the present day.

My second source is a bit better but far from adequate. While it is from NASA it is more of an overview of the better results from the alternative science kook community.

(Vol.1)
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030033916_2003038530.pdf

(Vol.2)
http://mirror.unej.ac.id/onnowpurbo/orari-diklat/teknik/antenna/eh-antenna/20050170447_2005172301.pdf

3.4.3.3 Longitudinal Electric Waves
In the late 19th century, scientists were trying to understand the electric wave phenomena discovered by Dr. Heinrich Hertz. The properties of electric wave phenomena claimed by Dr. Nikola Tesla were totally different than the properties of the electric wave phenomena claimed by Dr. Hertz, and this lead to contention between the competing viewpoints (Ref. 33, p. 191).

Because of the controversy, the eminent scientist, Professor William Thomson of Glasgow University, Scotland (also known as Lord Kelvin) traveled to New York in 1897 to see Tesla's experiments and, as a result, he concluded that both Tesla and Hertz were correct. The explanation is that Hertz experimented with transverse waves, whereas Tesla's waves were longitudinal.

Hertz claimed that the transverse electric waves he discovered could be calculated with Dr. ames Clerk Maxwell's electrodynamic equations, and scientists of that time accepted the experimental agreement with mathematical calculations as proof Hertz was correct.

However, as explained in a recent NASA CR, almost no scientists or engineers today have even seen (much less understood) Dr. James Clerk Maxwell's original electrodynamic equations, published in 1865, which did predict longitudinal waves, transverse waves, and much more (Ref. 1, p. 81). What scientists and engineers today refer to as "Maxwell's Equations" is an extremely simplified set of electrodynamic equations that is quite different than what Maxwell published. A more correct name for what is taught today would be Maxwell-Heaviside equations, as Oliver Heaviside was the major adversary of Maxwell who removed the capability to calculate longitudinal electric waves and electric potentials from Maxwell's original equations.

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