"I've been to places where you could literally walk up the side of a wall due to unexplained differences in gravity and the Earth's electromagnetic field. Watching a ball roll up hill is an interesting experience to get the mind working "out of the box", though being in such an area can disturb the body to the point of developing an upset stomach similiar to being sea sick!"
I recall seeing, many years ago, a TV special on the weird and wonderful that featured an odd house called "the spot" or "the place" where just such apparent phenomena were recorded on camera. Turned out though it was all careful illusion - the house was built with oddly sloping walls, floor and ceiling that tricked the senses. "It is obvious that these associations indicate that the entire process of the electrochemical production of colloidal silver is ruled by lunar influence. For that matter, all chemical processes are inextricably directed by celestial authority. It is essential to understand then, when the most propitious times occur to conceive these suspensions. With respect to the production of colloidal silver, lunar influence tables must be consulted. We know that tides are a direct manifestation of lunar forces, but there are also atmospheric tides which play an important role in the understanding of how the moon affects chemical reactions." Witches and those of a similar ilk may well concur with that, but thankfully today chemistry has supplanted alchemy. It is the extreme reproducibility of chemical and more generally physical process and law that enables scientists to verify and exchange results to great accuracy on a worldwide basis; quite regardless of moon phases or other astrological signs. Or do we conclude that those tables of constants running to 6, 8, 10, even to 20 or more significant figures are a massive fraud - a pretense at accuracies rendered impossible because "For that matter, all chemical processes are inextricably directed by celestial authority"? Not likely, I would suggest. "Plutarch instructed that the full moon caused such an increase in moisture that it made timber, wheat, and other grains which were cut at this time more likely to become decayed and rotten. If cut at the new moon, they would be dry and brittle. The medieval medical practise of bleeding was to be governed according to lunar phases and their attendant proportions of moisture...... Dr. E. J. Andrews, in 1960, confirmed that bleeding is worse around full moons than at any other time. Thousands of post-op records were compared to the dates of lunar phases showing a remarkable 82 percent of post-op bleeding episodes occurred on or around the full moon. Several other researchers and doctors would confirm his findings." Here, in the realm of subtle biochemical and physiological/phsychological phenomena, there is indeed plenty of evidence for some kind of lunar phase association, but little if any in the way of a credible mechanism for lunar causation. "Since it has been demonstrated that mental activity can influence matter perhaps the mental state of the experimenter may influence the production of CS." "Considering there are people like Uri Geller in this wondrous universe, you may have a point" "Uri Geller has nothing top do with it. Quantum physicists are learning that the observer influences the observed. The utcome is different for different observers. This has nothing to do with bending spoons, whether truly done with the mind, or slight of hand." Uri Geller was long ago exposed by Randi as a fraud. The quantum mechanical conundrum of interlinked observer and observed plays out on an extremely delicate level, in accordance with strict probabilistic rules that have nothing to do with mental attitude affecting chemical reactions, and most certainly not on a macroscopic scale. "I have proven using a scanning spectorphotometer that one's thoughts can easily and consistently change the structure of water...... Procedures required that anything we ship meet quality assurance, but the IBM personal computer was so poorly designed an built that QC would not approve it. The president forced them to ship them anyway, but I had the very strong opinion that they were all unreliable pieces of junk. Well, we all got IBM computers to work with in engineering, and mine would constantly bomb and lock up. I could not do anything for more than a few minutes without it crashing. They would ship it back and get another one and it would do the same. I would go to the other engineers offices and see if they were having the same problem, but they would all report that theirs never crashed, except when I would go in and ask, then they would crash. It got where I was not allowed in the other engineers' offices when they were working on their computers because they claimed I crashed their system. Anyway, they finally allowed me to build a clone computer for about 1/4th the cost of an IBM, and it never crashed. Finally all the computers in engineering were swapped out to cheap clones, and none of the ever crashed like they did before. It was many years before I realized that the expectation of them being unreliable was what was causing the crashes. There are many example of this, such as the cold fusion experimentation where those that expect it almost always get positive results and those who don't think it is possible usually get negative results. (that is why this is called a consensus reality, what is real is what the majority thinks is real!)" Possibly the individual concerned has some special gift or a familiar spirit or whatever - I have heard several "friend of a friend" accounts where street lamps would die when a certain individual walked near them, only to revive again later when out of range. This kind of thing however belongs not in the chemistry, phsics, or even metaphysics of CS production, but in the supernatural realm, IMHO. "The Borderlands article is interesting, but is only one data point. What is needed are more carefully conducted experiments, as Marshall indicates, to determine that the phenomena is repeatable, and isolating the variation to just one cause such as lunar position. Until that is done, the one experiment is statistically insignificant." Quite so. And in the mean time, it would be a good idea to assume the painstakingly verified normal laws of chemistry and physics work consistently well. Kevin Nolan
