From: Chris Owen Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology,sci.physics Subject: Amazing scientific discovery by L. Ron Hubbard Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 20:41:44 +0100 Message-ID: <8kZVZTA4rQ44Ew9Z@lutefisk.demon.co.uk> For your amusement, another example of L. Ron Hubbard's startling scientific knowledge... "The entirety of physics and the natural sciences pursues from a degradation of the mind. Awfully broad statement, but a very true one ... Just how does light or a photon get from the Sun to Earth? At what speed does it arrive? Well, everybody has decided that it takes it the same speed as 186,000-some-odd miles per second. They've decided this is the speed of light and that it goes through space at this speed. Well, I don't know anything about its going through space at this speed, but I know that it travels at that speed on Earth, because they've set up some mirrors and things and tested it on Earth, and have gotten more or less that speed -- they keep correcting it. But space is at zero temperature, and we get this complete puzzle: Things don't travel that way in an area of zero resistance. How fast does light travel or does light travel through -273 degrees space? Does it travel through space? See, we don't know that. Actually, we don't know that light travels at all. All you know, really, when you look at that light, is that the wall over there reacts and is lit. You don't know that anything goes from there to there. "Oh," you say, "but look, look, look, look now," you say, "if you put up a board between that light there and that wall, then the board will light and that wall over there will appear dark at that spot." You say, "Well, why not, the board relieves the wall of the necessity to react directly, and the board itself knows how to react." I told the key theoretical philosopher that's hired by the U.S. Air Forces, one time (came around to see me) that I was working on -- because I had to have something to talk about -- the reactive-mass theory of light. He got very fascinated with this - - something that you could fool around with. How do we know, you see, that anything flows through that space? Well, we say, "But streams of water flow, and you can see them." We don't know that has anything to do with light. We say you put your hand out here and it gets warm. How do we know that the hand just isn't trained to be warm when it reacts to light? You get the idea? We don't know that there is such a thing as an invisible particle to this degree: it is probably completely true that there is no such thing as an invisible particle. See, there probably isn't such a thing as an invisible particle, because every nuclear physicist today is searching for it and doesn't find it and is going mad in the process ... We don't know that that light is sending any particles over to that wall, because we can enter a substitute explanation anyplace along the line that explains it beautifully. We could probably chip in here and get a dozen explanations of how the wall lights up because this tungsten filament lights up, see? We can get all kinds of explanations as to why the tungsten filament lights up when something happens up at the light plant. We can do all sorts of things -- get very, very interested in doing these things -- but it's all fruitless. The flow of the particle and the theory of the particle and the theory of invisibility and the theory of a molecule and the theory of an atom are each and every one of them proceeded from degraded postulates. They're on-the-way-out postulates. You get the idea? They're broken down -- exit." ["Auditing Techniques: Action and Reaction", lecture of 29 Jan 1957] So much for the world of physics, then! :-) -- | Chris Owen - chriso@OISPAMNOlutefisk.demon.co.uk | |---------------------------------------------------------------|