Over my years in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge, I’ve been to some very New Age celebrations and weddings, replete with drumming, chanting, acknowledgements of the power of the four winds and other mystic forces. All in good fun, but occasionally people who took themselves too seriously made me feel that science was perhaps unwelcome at the feast. Several times I was prodded gently about my relationship with science: how did I manage the limitations of ‘knowing’ if I relied simply on science, or similar implications that psychic and spiritual awareness opened up wider vistas. I usually tried to be polite and mumbled about Carl Popper and his famed 1934 work on the concept of falsifiability to differentiate the scientific from the non- scientific question.(oversimplified: Popper said that a scientific theory must be provable wrong by a single experiment, so unless you can think of a single experiment that disproves their existence; the presence of angels is not a scientific question).
Several years ago, at one of these gatherings, I succumbed to science’s dark side. Perhaps it was the presence of a fellow sufferer, Béla, from Lawrence (deleted) Lab (L_L) who, like me, had been dragged to the event by his partner. When one prodder sidled up to us and said, “You know, scientists have proved that astrology is valid,” the frustrations of continued politeness clicked into place. I replied: “Yes, but research has gone much further. Have you read about Fridgerology?” I got a quizzical look. “That concern about planetary convergence when all the planets align? It seems the fields produced by the inrush currents on your refrigerator motor are many orders of magnitude more powerful. Scientists have found ways to measure these fields. If you know the brand and model of refrigerator in the home where you were conceived, the field effects can be used predictively far more precisely than astrology.” Our astrology proponent looked skeptical but stuck around as other people wandered over.
At that point, Béla asked me if I had read all the papers on planetary harmonics and how they related to Fridgerology? The whole discussion just took off. For instance, a resonance in the earth’s ‘harmonic’ field at 7.83 Hz. (cycles per second), called the Schumann Resonance, is a standing wave in the earth-ionosphere cavity driven by lightning. This is an extremely low frequency (ELF). A new listener said that they had seen research showing ELF waves “cause all sorts of things from upsetting whales to being the frequency at which psychics detect auras.” We didn’t ask which scientific journal had published this data. Schumann Resonance is caused by lightning, and it’s ninth harmonic is in synchronism with the frequency of the US national electric power grid and thus the interest of psychic researchers upset by the hum of fluorescent tubes and other ‘psycho-neurobiological resonances.’
Schumann Resonance, according to NASA studies, is influenced by atmospheric temperature. The primary frequency is within the range of sensitivity of psychic aura detection, raising the fascinating possibility that properly trained psychics could detect global-warming effects,which were then starting to be a public worry. As we explained to our growing audience, the science of Fridgerology considered these things which could actually be measured by Gauss/Tesla meter readings that would guide the follower to a fulfilling, spiritually and resonantly aware future. Just as some listeners seemed to be giving us that round-eyed, worshipful look usually reserved only for true spiritual gurus, Béla and I were dragged off by our partners to other parts of the gathering. Probably not a moment too soon.
Béla wondered if we could start rival Fridgerology newspaper columns, perhaps by denouncing each other as false Fridgerologists (editors love controversy). Nothing came of it. Béla has since returned to Budakalasz in his native Hungary and what he claims is a successful career as an artist, creating complex three-dimensional visualizations of waveforms that he started sculpting when working at L_L. I don’t read Hungarian but I wonder if he’s not on his way to becoming central Europe’s premier Fridgerologists. If you are, Béla, relax, all is forgiven. If anything, America is even less scientific than when you left, and I’m sure we can work something out with Rupert Murdoch or some other big publisher. After all, when you’re born under the sign of the Frigidaire, anything is possible.
The image shows how Schumann resonance circles the globe, driven by lightning. Turns out that all planets have Schumann resonance which has lead to a lot of fascinating results. You can read more about how NASA and others have been using it for all sorts of discoveries, such as the Hyugens probe landing on Titan,by going to: http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/ and searching with the keywords Schumann Resonance Titan
Google “Schumann resonance” to see what the other side are up to.