Forum:The Spirit Science

Hello RationalWiki folks, anonymous reader here wondering if you guys have heard about this little thing on youtube called Spirit Science. I'm not sure if it's really worth the time and effort to write actual wiki pages on it, but as rational folks with an interest in pseudoscience and crank, I figured you lot would at least like to take a look at it.

Channel page is http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSpiritScience, and here is a page to video #1. Of particular interest, however, is their uh...creation myth. Fair warning, that one is an hour long, and the series itself is also pretty lengthy. But for the truly dedicated, or the truly masochistic, these videos and especially the creation myth video, are so chock-full of nonsense that it'll make your head spin.

I'm truly sorry that I can't offer you more information without telling you to just follow the links, because I'm having a great deal of trouble trying to summarize it. It's truly a motherload of crazy, and not for the faint of heart, but here are a few tid-bits from the creation myth: long, long ago, Atlantis was inhabited by enlightened, higher-dimensional beings before it sank. Then the Hebrews arrived in a time-traveling star of David. Then some time later, the Martians conducted an experiment that transformed their entire race into one with completely masculine brains, and oh, their planet was also dying as a result or something, so they made a star of David and teleported to Atlantis, where they started to take over and...

Oh. Oh dear. My head's starting to hurt again, so I think I'm gonna stop here. Follow the links at your own risk, I'm going to lie down for a while now.

Newton's Scam Spectrum
Isaac Newton’s Scam Spectrum – Several ways to make it observable and how they disprove his colour theory R.S.W.Bobbette        2018

Physicists, without question, believe Isaac Newton’s claim that the production of a rainbow spectrum from a narrow light beam through a prism is a spontaneous event and proves that the light splits into colours due to the individual colours reacting differently to the resistance to transmission shown by the bending of the light (differential refraction). But, the repeatedly observable fact is that colours generated in and through prisms never spontaneously originate from a “rainbow spectrum”, but always from pairs of variably separated bands of three colours adjacent to relative dark-light contrasts. These bands, called here the ‘red band’ and ‘blue band’, are about equal in overall width, with the central colour stripe of each less distinct than the outer two. To begin with, no green colour occurs nor any spectrum. The appearance of a “rainbow spectrum” is a secondary effect, a parlour trick that can be accomplished in several instructive ways.

The first method is the one used by Newton to put over his scientifically incompetent, but mathematically convenient, idea of colour production. Of course, the method of the scam in this case is to reduce the body of white light to where the otherwise and actually separate colour bands slightly overlap or intersect. This is the basic principle of all forms of the scam. This first method allows a portable result, the narrow beam of light, to avoid the embarrassing drawing together of the two pre-existing colour bands, where the colours spontaneously originate. The fact that these colour bands arise and maintain their form separated by variable distances (i.e. differing refractive angles) means that the blue colour is not the “other half” of the same light that is behind the red band. This is only incompetently claimed as proven by the artificially formed scam spectrum. The scam spectrum also hides, or makes hard to discriminate, the fact that the indigo (or ‘purple’) and violet stripes of the blue colour band are actually projected or illuminated in front of relative darkness, from the side; a third fact is that the complete red colour band is clearly seen to be shone through from behind. These three facts do not readily suggest a uniform explanation along lines put forward by Newton, or any other refraction theory. The “rainbow spectrum” is not created by one unified beam of light being split into colours, but from two diametrically opposite, separate beams of already coloured light being brought together by reducing what separates them to where they combine to create the otherwise non-existent green colour. An equally applied “differential refraction” to explain these colours is not an option.

This first example has the light going through the prism and the colours being observed on a surface. It is also possible to create the scam “rainbow spectrum” by observing the colour bands directly through the prism. If you look at a bright window, through a prism, you will notice the colour bands on either side of the window, along the line of refraction. Now we can see the reason for a concept like refraction, when we twist the prism back and forth and see the dramatic narrowing and broadening of the light image of the window. This measurable phenomenon is the basis of refraction, and therefore of differential refraction, and it is this that allows us to produce a second version of Newton’s Scam Spectrum. If you twist the prism far enough, you reduce the light of the window to where the red band and blue band meet and - voila! - you have the “rainbow spectrum”, down the line of refraction.

But there are some problems here for the mechanical materialists and their mathematics. No matter how you broaden or shrink the window image, the colour bands remain unaltered to any visible extent. This at least suggests that they originate after the light is bent. They merely move and follow the light-dark contrast line. When brought together, both bands move towards the narrow angle of the prism, but the red one moves much more quickly and “catches up” with the blue. They remain unaltered until reaching the scam spectrum, when they begin to overlap or intersect, with the yellow and blue stripes changing to green, until they merge and are replaced by one green stripe. Only now do the colour bands begin to shrink, but not equally. Orange and indigo stripes disappear first, with red, green and violet disappearing together as the light is choked off. Furthermore, the colour bands have the ability to move in two different directions, or at different speeds, within themselves. Let me explain. There is a small shelf edge projecting into the window view on the red band side, and this shows the identical red band as the side of the window, but much shorter and projected about one and a half band widths into the window. Now as you tilt the prism to shrink the window, this shelf projection shrinks in accord with refraction, until about three colour band widths from the blue band, it disappears into the overall edge. But throughout this entire span, the small red band has been following the shrinking shelf, moving backwards into the main edge red band while the whole moves forward. The mathematics of “differential refraction” cannot accommodate these colour appearances, disappearances and movements.

Prisms certainly should be accorded much more honest, interested study. Another way of producing Newton’s Scam Spectrum requires a bit of set-up but is, I think, worth the interesting results.

Take flat black and flat white paint, mix equally to paint grey a pole 2 inches wide and 5 feet high. Paint a piece of cardboard 2x5 feet flat black and a piece 2x3 feet flat white (it’s relative dimensions and not actual measurements that matter). Stand the grey pole in front of the black board in bright light, and look at it through the prism. You will see the clearest “rainbow spectrum” down the line of the pole. There are two ways of showing this to be a version of Newton’s Scam Spectrum. To do the first you put the white board over the lower half of the black, and look through the prism; suddenly at the white border the blue band turns to red and the red band to blue, continuing down the line of refraction. So we have the remarkable anachronism of Newton’s Scam Spectrum cheek to jowl with a “complete” inverted spectrum, with red meeting violet in the middle! Placing the white just to the right or the left of the pole produces a “complete spectrum” of either two red bands or two blue bands… The spontaneous creation of colour in a prism is repeatedly seen to be more closely related to relative dark-light contrasts than to either refraction or any necessary red – blue continuum. This change of colour from blue to red down the line of refraction, merely because the background changes from relatively dark to relatively light, shows up as lies all the mathematically convenient concepts of prismatic colour production put forward by Newton and his idolizers. The fact that the blue band abuts the red one on the same line of refraction is also absolute proof that, far from being parts of a rightfully belonging together “rainbow spectrum”, the colour bands are indirectly related to each other at best. This shows (if previous evidence didn’t) the absurdity of there being any possibility of refraction, differential or otherwise, in the production of these phenomena of colour. The only certain relationship to refraction is the left-right orientation of the colour bands (red-relatively thicker part of prism; blue-relatively thinner), and probably their width. The trick to Newton’s Scam Spectrum in this case is the narrowness of the pole. Staple a sheet of writing paper to the pole and you will see the colour bands separated.

Finally, and less explicitly, by twisting around a prism in sizeable bright light, the “rainbow spectrum” can be artificially produced and projected onto surfaces, represented by at least three examples. One duplicates the window method, with the colour bands separated by a bright spot that is reduced by twisting the prism until the bands produce the made up “spectrum”. Another has the bright spot visible on a card near the prism, but reducing in size until 8-10 feet away (in this example) the colour bands intersect or overlap and a “spectrum” appears. The third projected scam spectrum traces back to the ninety degree angle of the prism, but shows no bright spot. The colour bands are aligned on either side of the right angle and this is certainly a projective version of the narrow pole effect. These are the few methods I have been able to attempt; these could be structured with more precise measurements, and I’m sure there are other ways to artificially produce the row of colours. Again, every “rainbow colour spectrum” seen associated with a prism can be resolved into the actually existing, separately and spontaneously arising, red band and blue band. These arise at opposite sides of bigger or smaller bodies of light, adjacent to relative darkness. The light involved in the red side of Newton’s Scam Spectrum is not involved in the creation of the blue side, and green is only produced through prisms by combining the pre-existing coloured light bands. PostScript… It should be noted that the “inverted spectrum” compresses to produce a magenta (or ‘red-purple’) stripe that replaces the red and violet stripes, as the otherwise non-existent green replaces the blue and yellow stripes. Any physics of prismatic colour relationships, that is not fantasy, will have to address four spontaneously occurring colours, plus four derived from their combining. The prismatic “seven colours of the rainbow spectrum”, with everything derived from it, have been subjectively made up for mathematical convenience and easy salesmanship, and do not represent honest observation, let alone soundly reported investigative science.